Airports

I find that airports are gateways to adventure. I love to travel, this is good given my career path.

I have been pretty lo-key over the past two years as I am working on my Masters degree but every once in a while I get to sneak some travel.

I am currently on my way, with a group of 17 other like minded friends, to Kiev, Ukraine. We will be spending about 10 days meeting new friends, sharing with them some of the things I am passionate about, and ultimately, being a light to a world of darkness.

I am super excited about this adventure and can’t wait to see what is in store.

120 to 1: the evolution

With the advent of digital photography, the argument has often come up that a person tends to put less work into a single image because there is no relative cost factor every time you press the shutter. Maybe, but I would like to argue the other aspect of it and say that the advent of digital photography has allowed the craft to reach new levels of quality and creativity.

I recently was asked to take a few shots of a church building for a design piece. I needed only a handful of shots, they needed only one. I got up early to get the morning sunrise coming across the building. In the course of roughly 30-40 min I snapped off about 120 shots of the building. It may seem a bit excessive, but for me it was a constantly changing scene, and I was constantly seeing something different between where I was standing and where the light was shining. Because I was working with natural light I had an ever changing scene.

What did I get with my 120 images? Yes, a lot of work to dig through in post, but the reality was that I didn’t have to do that much, I either liked the shot or I didn’t. But what I noticed was that as the light changed and as I hit different angles and locations on the building, I liked my shots more. The first several shots I took weren’t that great, the lighting was a bit too muted and the building just didn’t pop like I needed it too. As the shots rolled on, I started to realize the angles I wanted, I got the light where I wanted it, and all things came together.

If I were shooting film and had 24 frames to shoot, it would have been much more difficult. I would not have realized I didn’t like the play between my angles and the light. I would have fired off my 24 or 48 frames, packed up and gone home. With digital, I can rattle off the shots and figure out what I need to do to get the shot I really want.

The argument always seems to go to someplace like Ansel Adams and the amazing things he did with film, but I would argue that the creativity of photography has come a long way since Adams was amazing the world. Please understand, I’m a fan of film work. I have two film cameras, one medium format and one 35mm. There is a certain aspect to film that isn’t the same as digital. I love the natural grain and imperfections of film, but digital photography has made the world of photography a better place and brought creativity to a whole new level, and I am excited to see where we will continue to progress.

The (Travel) Bug

I’m sick, I might even have a disease. The symptoms? If I stay in one place for too long I am prone to want to go on an adventure to some far off land. It really is bad. I mean I have heard people talk about wanderlust but really, this is serious.

The problem is, my wife and I have been living in the same small town in North Carolina for about a year and a half now and I’m craving adventure. We are here because I’m working on my masters degree, with the goal of moving back overseas (we both lived overseas for a bit of time a few years ago). In the time we have been living here we have gotten to do a little bit of traveling and have even had the opportunity to go on a photojournalism trip to the Czech Republic and Hungary. But despite what it sounds like, I think the urge for adventure hits me about every three months.

I’m coming up on my three month mark. I find myself looking at travel photojournalism websites, reading the blogs of photojournalists, and dreaming about being somewhere else. I don’t really understand all of this, I’m wired a bit differently (my wife can attest to that). I don’t know what to do with this urge except go with it!

This weekend we are taking a trip up to West Virginia to visit family and attend a family reunion. I guess this is going to have suffice to the bug for now. It is a road trip and since we don’t have any other trips planned till November, well I’ll take what I can get.

Life always seems interesting, the kind of interesting that is good, but leaves you looking forward and wondering what will tomorrow bring. When I lived in Russia and was traveling around the country to photograph different people groups, or just photographing around Moscow, I wondered what life would be like after I moved back to the United States, but now, I find myself daydreaming of life back overseas. What will it be like? Where will we live? What will the art culture be like there?

I love to learn about how different cultures interact with art. All embrace it in some fashion or another, but what are the intricacies of how they do it? That is what my travel bug is all about, capturing the way that a culture views and embraces art.

Cultivating a work culture

Have you ever woken up in the morning and thought, “I really don’t want to go to work today”? Who hasn’t, I mean really. It is such a common statement, but what if it didn’t have to be that way?

Recently I had the opportunity to shoot for the CEO of a company being profiled in a national publication. As I talked with him about the company, he explained that their top priority is to create a work culture that is focused on family and on people wanting to come to work. He explained how this is a non-negotiable,

“we are trying to create a work culture where the day that you retire you can look back and say your life was better off because they were a part of [the] family.”

This got me thinking, what would it be like to work for that kind of person?

As I sat in his office, going over the publication’s image brief, I realized that he was calling different stores in his company talking with the managers, encouraging them and listening to them as they shared about what is going on in their stores. He was involved and caring. It took me back, listening to how he was intentional with his employees. I couldn’t help but think of employers I have worked for who were far different from this.

Many times, employers seem to approach work from the view of tough love. There is little encouragement and most of the time the only communication you receive is about something you have done wrong. But listening to this man talk to his employees made me realize that it doesn’t have to be that way. Going back to his statement about their work culture, I can see how this is a tangible reality in this company. They not only speak these words, but they make them happen.

“What if…” is a powerful statement. What if we changed our environment to be encouraging while challenging? What if we lifted each other up, challenging each other to higher things? What if we put ourselves in the background and others in the foreground?

What if…

The Human Element

What makes a good snapshot? Is it the candid nature of it? Is it the unplanned capturing of a moment in time that nobody else will be able to capture again? Or is it simply capturing a slice of life to have forever frozen on a digital canvas? I have been thinking through this a lot lately as I have been working on developing this in my own photography.

You may already know, but Chase Jarvis is currently curating a gallery at the Ace Hotel in NYC called Dasein-An invitation to Hang. The beauty of this is that it’s a gallery celebrating the snapshot and the photos are not just his, but are his mixed with ones from photographers around the world. Anyone is able and encouraged to contribute to this project.

As I have been challenging myself in this to create captivating snapshots, it has forced me to think about the elements that go into such a photograph. As much as I hate arguing about semantics, I do feel there is a difference between a snapshot and a composed photograph. A composed photograph (not talking about composition of a photograph) is a shot where you have an idea in mind that you would like to capture, you set out with that vision and you aim to capture it. A snapshot is where you may or may not have an idea, and you capture the things taking place in front of you. They may be seemingly random, or they may have a theme. You could take 20 pictures and possibly have nothing in common between each of them.

So as I have been working on getting snapshots, I have enjoyed the creative challenge. I have been forced to look at the world around me not for the familiar, but for the things that I have been staring at and missing. I have been forced to really think about what I am putting into the frame as I am pressing the shutter. One of those elements is the human element.

This is a topic that receives much discussion, and for a good reason. I find that pictures with a human element have a different feel and connectivity than those without. I think that when we see a person in the photograph, we have the opportunity to connect in one way or another with that picture. The picture has a tangible element because we can feel, in some ways, the emotions of the subject. What are they doing? What emotions are they experiencing? What story are they telling? Capturing the human element allows for the photographer to capture a piece of who we all are in a frame to later connect with others who were not there to experience the moment.

What makes a good snapshot? Anything really, but I know for me, I am working hard to create pictures that connect with others, tell a story, and evoke a response of sorts, and as I work toward this the human element is a crucial aspect of my photography.

Unexpected adventures

Why is it that whenever things are really falling in line something always goes awry? Yesterday was a day for that big hiccup. Every trip seems to have one and they aren’t always that big of a deal. This one was threatening to put a big dent in my work flow for production.

I spent the morning yesterday walking all around Prague, Cz. getting some b-roll for a video I’m working on for this project. I came home and started to edit, with the plans of going back out in the afternoon to capture some stills. When I started to dump the files, I was shooting on a JVC xdcam and having the ease to just dump the files (this eliminates the “capture” time because you are just transfering the .mov files to your scratch disc=much faster work flow) is great, except that the software I was using didn’t want to recognize the footage.

This led to an afternoon sitting in front of my computer rather than out shooting. I called a friend on a media team here in Prague and he came over and we both spent the afternoon working on this glitch. After a few hours we had worked out a patch and it was time to head out and get stills while there was still daylight. Instead of capturing stills though, we sat in Wenceslas Square as I processed everything to Natalie and tried to come up with a way to make all of this work. A quick side note, my wife is a great listener and she is also a great sounding board for ideas.

After dinner with some friends, we got back late and I put a few things together to test everything and make sure we were on track for starting (the rest of the team gets here today and the project gets started). Everything worked and I was able to get to bed about 1am. Hiccups happen, but God provides through them.

Looking forward to meeting up with the rest of the team today and getting started with everything.

Work

The weather is beautiful here in Ostrava, Cz. I’m sitting in the sunshine and enjoying a nice peaceful afternoon. We got to the Czech Republic a few days earlier than the rest of the team coming in for the JetSet trip, and we have been able to meet up with some old friends in Prague as well as visiting a friend in Ostrava along the Czech-Poland boarder.

I have been working through Adobe Premiere CS5 and learning as much of its tricks and features as I can before starting our project on Tuesday. It’s going to be an exciting and eventful next two weeks and I can’t wait. There will be a lot of filming as well as capturing stills; editing all of this together and getting it on the web as needed. I look forward to sharing as much as possible with you all over the course of this project.