pictureLOVE, picture LOVE

Let's get cynical, cynical...

2012-02-14T08:46:00.016-07:00

If you NEED a camera upgrade (read: buying a new camera before the old one is dead) to take your business to the next level, I have some cooking pots to make you a better cook and a special hammer that makes great houses as well. Before continuing, let's note that we all get pissed when someone says, "Wow! Your camera takes really nice pictures!" but for some reason we don't recognize that we are being told by the industry (and believing enough to spend money!) that we can't take nice pictures without a new camera. Listen up.

A brief history of the camera can be found at Wikipedia. It's a pretty good read - you should check it out. I'll sum it up: we've come a long way, baby. The biggest challenges faced by photographers - understanding the mechanisms, developing the chemistry, figuring out how to add light (magnesium powder in a trough - BRILLIANT!) and to make permanent prints and how to make moving pictures and... that's pretty much all ancient history. When affordable DSLR cameras first started hitting the shelves a little over a decade ago, they were a whopping 4MP. Nikon's top of the line DSLR with a $5000 price tag stayed there right up until 2007, and those 4MP images were used to print in fashion magazines and on giant billboards and canvases and even 4x6's for scrapbooking. It's interesting to note that by that time, Canon had already made the jump to 16MP. 2009 and 2010 saw the introduction of HD video being added to DSLR cameras, with even entry-level DSLRs at 14MP or more, and it's safe to say that we had already far surpassed what was ever available in the days of film both in terms of ease of use (using a knob to change ISO instead of having to use a knob to reel in half a roll of ISO100, mark the canister with how many frames were used so you could reload it later, then pop in and reel out the half-used roll of ISO400 was a HUGE breakthrough) AND quality/resolution (from what I've read, I believe a film image shot in large format on ISO50 would be a lower resolution than a digital image shot at ISO50 on a 22MP 1.5x crop sensor camera.)

When industry forerunner Canon (the company who pushed hardest to saturate the market when they introduced the first DSLR for under $1000 with their "now everyone can shoot like a pro" campaign) I'm sure they hoped for but couldn't have imagined the sheer quantity of fledgling photographers who would embrace this philosophy, heading out in droves to pick up their entry-level DSLR and shoot, shoot, shoot! But of course, with all these newbs around they had to keep upping the ante and creating bigger and better and more technologically advanced (and expensive) cameras for the eternal pissing contest that often reduces industry insiders to labelling people as "pro" or "not pro" based on their equipment.

I have to - I must - reiterate for the thousandth time that it is NOT about the camera, it never has been, and never will be. Now. I would be a liar if I said I didn't drool over some of the new features that have come out since I bought a second camera and my older one became a back-up (I'm not up to filmmaking technology on either of my ancient beasts yet) but I can't justify spending right now, not when the equipment I have has served me so well and is not falling apart or malfunctioning or carrying a weird odour that makes it repulsive to hold up to my face and use. I refuse to fall victim to the marketing machines behind the new camera culture who every year come up with some new fandangled thing that really doesn't add anything to my craft, but certainly adds to their profit margin.

What does this have to do with pots and hammers? Here's what:

Logically, if you can't take your photography to the next level with the camera you have, you are not ready for an upgrade because an upgraded camera isn't going to make you a better photographer anymore than buying a new pot will make you a better cook or getting a state of the art hammer will make you capable of building a house. Your crappy images will just be high-resolution debt-bearing crappy images. And if you are the type who is susceptible to the BS that some so-called "pros" are throwing around when they look down their nose and say, "THAT's what you're shooting with?" the only advice I have is for you to learn this phrase: "Yeah, and...?" The FUN part will be listening to them spew off the marketing spiel posted on the manufacturer's website making it the best and only choice for real pros. ~insert eye rolling and gagging noises here~ They will ice the cake by letting you know it's what you need to remain competitive in the industry (one that the manufacturers incidentally themselves set the standards for) so we always have a reason to feel insecure because we are judged for our proverbial cooking pot instead of the food we created. ~insert heavy sigh here~

The real question isn't if new equipment has benefits - sure it does, of course it does - but what is the motivation behind developing all this new technology? So the camera manufacturers can make money. First they sell you a camera that is good for several hundred thousand shutter clicks (I am personally over 200,000 on both of my fully functioning and problem-free cameras) but of course if the camera isn't breaking (that would hurt business, selling cameras that die too fast) and you've already bought all the lenses you want and/or need, HOW on EARTH can they get you to spend again? Well, by changing the rules of the game so you have to upgrade, change platforms, and spend more money, of course. They sell the idea that a bigger better camera with ~insert features here~ will propel you to the next level of photography and earn you not only more money but the respect, perhaps even the envy of your peers. Using megapixels and programmable whatchamacallits and the addition of an X and a new number to the previous model they will distract you from the fact that unless your camera is busted you probably don't need a new camera. And then they will do it to you all over again the next year so that you're always left wanting, waiting, watching for what you don't have. I believe this process diminishes our value as talented photographers, making our credibility dependent on the equipment we own and turning our cameras into accessories that go out of style like last year's shoes.

What you NEED is a camera body that works. Invest in good glass, buy glass that you LOVE. Learn, learn, learn, then learn some more. Network. Hang out with fellow enthusiasts and artists and hobbyists. Play. Explore. Become a master at your craft so that any camera you get handed is one you can work like a true blue die hard camera-totin' rock star. A camera is just a tool, and while nice tools are nice to have, they don't (and shouldn't) define me as a professional much less as an artist. In my view, a photographer will be able to create beautiful images with whatever camera they happen to have in hand. When a camera wears out or breaks or dies, there is a NEED to buy a new one, so have fun shopping (I'm hoping mine doesn't die for a bit as Pentax hasn't announced its next model yet!) but if your camera ain't done for, you might want to consider if you've simply fallen victim to keeping up with the Joneses mentality by overlooking that whole, "My camera doesn't take nice pictures, I do!" thing.

Here's something to consider, too, if you've upgraded in the past and felt like you had a quantum leap in your career because of it. Over time, your skills are bound to improve. With experience and education, regardless of what camera you're using, you're going to grow as an artist. As you gain more confidence and develop a style, your pictures get better and better. As a direct result of your hard work, learning, and diligence, you have become a better photographer, but if you upgrade your camera once a year, it's entirely possible that you are attributing this improvement to the camera instead of yourself. Because we all know that a nice camera doesn't take nice pictures, right? We expect our clients to respect that, so it's high time we learn to embrace it too and stop allowing ourselves to be made to feel inadequate by both the industry and our peers.

Of course getting a new camera is exciting. New toys are always fun. Our desire to scroll in closer and closer with computers, closer than we could ever have magnified a standard negative or print, is addictive and a little unhealthy. When designers and magazine editors who print magazines to a standard 8.5 x 11 format, who might print a billboard or large ad on the side of a bus where we will never be inspecting with a magnifying glass for clarity, who might post a couple of low- to medium-resolution images on the web start dictating that RAW files must be sized 12MB or greater, it means that the industry standard for a "professional" photographer has been set by whichever company is making the cameras with the biggest sensors. While on one hand this might eliminate a few hacks who seriously don't know how to use their camera yet, I can name at least 5 people who shoot on 16MP or smaller cameras who would automatically be out of a job because unless they are taking a picture of something with a lot of information to be recorded, there is no way digitally possible to provide a RAW headshot of one guy on a white backdrop that meets that criteria without buying what we've been sold. I, for one, am not buying it.

Maybe I'm just being cynical, but I think if you owned the coolest most expensive hammer on the planet, I would personally be more impressed if you still managed to hammer together a mansion when you got handed a last season's peep-toe high heel to use.

the winter of our wedding discontent

2012-01-26T21:01:00.012-07:00

It's been a while since I opened up a can of worms here, and I figure I'm long overdue. So here it is, and here we go. Pardon me for being so honest and blunt - it's something that seems to have gone out of style.

For many years now there has been an ongoing battle between brides and photographers. Disgruntled, stressed, upset, and feeling misunderstood, both have, over the years, taken to blogs, forums, and craiglist to voice their frustration. Why can't we all just get along?

On the one hand we see photographers writing posts explaining their prices by making detailed accounts of all the equipment they own, in some cases equipment that they don't even own or use anymore. They cite things like business licenses and give laundry lists of all the things they spend time and money on like gas, packaging, internet, and conference fees. They talk about paying taxes. They call this disclosure of expenditures "educating brides" which is really a fancy way of saying, "I feel like I have to justify my price!"

Some prefer using something that I can only liken to bullying. They alternate between bullying other photographers and bullying brides. If they are trying to squeeze out the competition they might do so by promoting their particular style of shooting and photography as being the right or correct quality a bride should look for - two or three ~insert brand name and model~ camera bodies, a throng of staff to carry and set up lighting equipment, particular types of posing and post-processing that of course highlights how the pictures will look if they shoot your wedding; at the other end of the spectrum, some promote a more organic hippy stance by stating that a true, passionate photographer needs little and actually shoots with their heart and shows up alone with their trusty camera in hand, thereby offering intimacy and consistency that could not otherwise be obtained by the intrusion of multiple shooters and eliminating the wasted time required to set up portable lighting systems. Horse crap, all of it.

When educating brides, some photographers will suggest things like cherished memories being put at risk and generations of children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren being denied the pleasure of enjoying photographs. They tell you that you get what you pay for, implying that paying less than (approximately what they charge) is irresponsible. They frighten stressed out brides into worrying that someone under qualified will not take a picture of the unique handmade Etsy pen with humanely acquired flamingo feathers that coordinates perfectly with their bridesmaids' earrings and the groom's shoelaces and their precious pen (that they actually keep in the same box as the guestbook right beside the wedding album you created) will be forever forgotten if they don't hire the right photographer. Yes, a person dropping the price of a car on a wedding wants a detailed pictorial spread of their wedding, but that doesn't mean they should be scared of failing to provide adequate images for their offspring.

In response to hearing that they are being irresponsible, uneducated cheapskates, brides get angry, and rightfully so. Yes, some might not understand why wedding photography is so expensive, and others might genuinely not care. Some might only take into consideration hard costs plus one day of work and add that up in their head to way less than what most photographers, even newbs on their first wedding, can afford to work for without actually losing money. They feel like (or have been told by planners/friends/family) they should haggle for a discount like they did with the linen company and the bartenders. Wedding sites feature has-been brides giving will-be brides tips based on their limited experience (really, most of us plan one, maybe two weddings if we screw one up if we're not on the Liz Taylor wedding plan) within their limited circle, which leads above all to some pretty serious misunderstandings and unrealistic expectations. Try and remember that when brides start looking at the bill for even a simple wedding for under 100 people, their heads are spinning and their bank account is taking as much of a hit as yours is when you upgrade your camera body.

It longs to be stated that brides and photographers need to be aware of the economic environment they are in. If you live in a time or place that is financially stable chances are good you will be charging/paying higher prices than living in a time and place where unemployment rates are high and the real estate market has bottomed out. Understanding this basic principle might allow both sides to understand how photographers in one area seem pretty affordable while others seem to be able to make money hand over fist, and why it might flip flop the next year.

A photographer who wants to target high-end clients isn't likely to recruit them by placing free ads in Kijiji any more than a bride on a shoestring budget is likely to be able afford someone who is so renowned they have an entire line of camera doodads named after them. Competition gets more and more fierce the higher up the totem pole you want to go - you are vying for more dollars from fewer clients - and the lower-priced photographers might not charge as much as you but are making as much or more money because they have their pricing in the right range to attract clients. There' a fine balance we must each find along that spectrum where we feel we are being paid "enough" with a clear understanding that "enough" is relative and therefore not the same for everyone. ***This of course excludes people who conscientiously underprice themselves in an attempt to undercut the competition, which does as much damage to that photographer's future success as it does to other photographers' immediate success.***

The outcome of all this is that brides accuse wedding photographers of being crooks and wedding photographers accuse brides of being stupid, neither of which is representative of anything more than sheer frustration and stress.

Let's take a step back and look at this from both sides so we can seek first to understand.

First, photographers, let's remember that your bride has to pay for her venue, her dress, her favours, her bridesmaid gifts, her wedding commissioner, her food, and her flowers. She doesn't care what you spent on your primes, your taxes, or your annual camera cleaning fees any more than you care about how much her napkin rental and pedicure cost. In whole or in parts, it costs a lot of time and money to put on a wedding just like it costs a lot of time and money to build up your business. So quit bringing that up - it's an ineffectual argument which sounds more like a pissing contest than a practical argument.

Second, nobody has the same taste in photography. I like Ansel Adams images but would not want him shooting my wedding. I love the style of images created by Lisette Model and Dorothea Lange but I'm pretty sure their stark approach appeals to few. (Yes, I picked non-wedding photographers on purpose.) The point is, there's no accounting for taste, so putting it out there that checking to see if post-processed images feature creamy, flawless skin or implying that people who choose to shoot natural and available light over strobes are "unprofessional" is attacking your couples' personal taste as much as other photographers' styles. There's no need to go there.

Third, trying to guilt potential clients into thinking their entire day will be ruined if they don't spend enough on their photographer is just plain mean. Brides are stressed enough as it is. Casually tossing out things like how much they will regret not spending more on their photographer causes unnecessary panic. For starters, not everyone gives a damn about their pictures - as much as we like to tell ourselves that we are the bomb, entrusted documentarians of history and chosen recorders of fleeting moments (and yes, I tell myself this all the time) really, some people are totally not. into. pictures. Hard to believe, but it's true. On the wedding day, some people are much more concerned with making sure they can afford to serve an amazing meal and have an open bar than have artsy pictures of them and their new spouse necking under a bridge that their grandkids will probably point at and laugh saying, "What was with your tacky dresses back then and what's with the bridge - wasn't there a nice flower garden nearby?"

I think it's absolutely reasonable and necessary when promoting the value of our skilled services on the wedding day to point out that hiring a photographer who specializes in documenting the day and all its details is a sound investment, but saying that not spending top dollar on a photographer will damage their own and their family's ability for possibly generations to come to properly commemorate one single day in what is ideally a decades-long relationship filled with love, laughter, births, graduations, travel, and an entire mosaic of other shared experiences that normal couples might encounter in addition to (or in spite of) the wedding itself is... ridiculous. It's a high-pressure sales tactic that (yes) works, and if you wan't to use it, go for it, but don't get mad at brides who choose to go elsewhere and claim they are stupid or uneducated - accept that you aren't the right photographer for everyone and move on.

At the end of the day, I feel like this subtle (and not so subtle) kind of bullying and fear-mongering are inconsiderate of both your peers and a brides' aesthetic or personal preferences and financial considerations. They are marketing tactics that will work sometimes, but not always. It's not the most dramatic or flashy thing, but if we stick with stating facts like, "This is my style and I am like this and my prices are as follows," brides will make their decisions accordingly. Putting it in expert *I* context like, "I would look for this and that and if you don't hire me you're great grandchildren will need therapy," still doesn't change the fact that you're putting yourself in the spotlight by making sure you cast a shadow of fear, doubt or disrespect elsewhere. In short, it should be more than enough to toot your own horn and highlight what's great about you and your style and your services, and leave comparisons to the rest of the industry out of it.

Brides, when it comes to hiring a wedding photographer, there are (really) only 4 things to consider. This should translate not just to your wedding photographer but your planner, caterer, and florist, too. If you want the most from your wedding vendors, making your first question if we offer discounts, telling us why you refuse to pay more than $X, or publicly bashing our profession on our Facebook Fan page is probably a sure way to ensure that when you come a-calling, we will all find ourselves suddenly busy on your wedding date. Whining about how much your wedding already cost and asking us to cut you a deal will be met with us rolling our eyes - we are businesses and have no more sympathy for you based on how expensive your hair piece was any more than you care about how much our last professional development workshop cost. Here's how it should go down for you so you aren't bankrupt, disappointed, expecting miracles, or getting unnecessarily angry:

What kind of pictures do you WANT and NEED? While most of us photographer types like to try and shoot something a little different every now and again, if you need professional headshots for your real estate company, asking someone who specializes in risqué stripper posters might not get you very far. Therefore, taking the time to find someone who actually does wedding photography regularly as part of their services is a huge step in the right direction. If someone with a solid portfolio of nothing but peacefully sleeping newborns and cute kittens with lolz captions wants to break into the wedding photography biz or your sweet but slightly unreliable Cousin Sue offers to do it for free with the brand new camera she has asked for her birthday and will receive the week before your wedding, be aware of the potential risk you are taking towards not getting the pictures you want OR need.

What kind of pictures do you WANT? Photographers have very different styles not only of shooting but of post-processing (Photoshopping.) Your number one defence against getting pictures you don't like is to look at the photographer's portfolio - the whole thing, from babies and models to grasshoppers and flowers. Whether you prefer casual, romantic, natural light pictures or glossy, posed, polished glam shots, weird angles and funky lenses with heavy textures and trendy colourations or simple, classic portraiture, there is a photographer out there who does that. Find one whose style you like and you are much more likely to be pleased with the results than if you send us the portfolios of 5 other photographers you admire and ask us to shoot like them. (That actually makes us feel bad and unhappy, by the way - please don't do that...) If a person has only strobe-lit in-studio shots of babies or images of gerbera daisies on their table which sits beside a north-facing window in their portfolio, it's prudent to assume they might not have much if any experience shooting high-glitz weddings in full sunlight or pulling off usable images in a dimly-lit church. And. If their entire portfolio is full of jaw-dropping wedding images, you should expect to pay a price that reflects that, which leads us to:

How much are you WILLING to afford and how much CAN you afford? If you love the style and talent of a top photographer, then you must be ready, willing, and able to spend top dollar for the years of training, skill development, and experience that have gotten them where they are - don't haggle them on their price or badmouth them as crooks or whack jobs. They've built up to their price by providing superior products and services and shouldn't have to justify or explain to you why they charge so much. Be happy for their success and don't take it like a personal insult or intentional gouging. If you only have $1000 to spend, chances are good that someone who has a minimum investment of $5000 for their starter package will not be willing or able to accommodate your budget. If you REALLY want them, you *might* ask them if they will shoot just your formals for that price, and if the answer is no, don't get mad... keep looking.

Now. If you are looking for savings and choose to give a newcomer a chance, that's awesome - we all start somewhere and are truly grateful for those opportunities. But in that same token, you need to be aware that you may or may not get consistent or professional results and products. Someone might cut corners by using discount vendors or provide inferior products to pad their profit margin if they are undercharging and/or may not have all their business licences and insurance in place if they are just starting out. This might be why you are getting such a great deal but as more and more venues both in North America and abroad require proof of both it's something you need to at least be aware of, because it affects you even if it's just Cousin Sue or Uncle Bob doing you a favour.

Regardless of what your budget is though, the biggest thing is to make sure you check out your photographer's portfolio (refer to previous point) so you have a crystal clear idea of what you are signing up for and have realistic expectations. Some brides (1% of the population so I hear) have no ceiling as to what they can spend, but really, most do. If your pictures are really important to you or you want bragging rights to having a celeb shoot your big day, then you should probably reconsider your lobster. If you just want some pictures to scrapbook and prefer to be able to pay for your bridesmaids' dresses, then you can't expect to afford just any photographer. Simple as that. As a side note: Often you get what you pay for, but if you luck out and get a great deal AND get amazing pictures, chances are that your photographer won't stay at that price so be sure to tell your friends how awesome they were not how cheap they were ;)

Is your photographer someone you LIKE? If you call and they are rude on the phone, if their website reads like a telephone book, if they don't respond to your questions in a timely and efficient manner, or if they seem too eager to take you on as a client and BFF, then you may need to start back at Step 1. Whether your pictures are wonderful or horrible, a photographer will likely be with you for the entire day and you will always remember them and the experiences you shared with them as much as the day itself when you look at the pictures. If you sense a lack of professionalism, see a personality clash coming on, or feel uneasiness with them for any reason whatsoever, keep looking or your ability to enjoy your pictures will be tainted regardless of how much or how little you spend.

Check it out...

2012-01-01T08:58:00.001-07:00

www.ThePhotographerStudio.ca

Open house 10am - 7pm January 2, 2012

Exclusive Grand Opening Party January 7, 2012 8pm (by invitation only)

Tours by appointment.

Come in. We are open.

Happy New Year!!!

So many things, so little time!

2011-12-09T02:34:00.004-07:00

I have to admit, I feel terrible for leaving this blog untouched for so long. I promise, I will have LOTS of exciting things to post in January, but for now, two pieces of news:

1.) We FINALLY have hard copy tickets. Please send a message via Facebook to Tammy Deren to pick up tickets in Spruce Grove/Stony Plain, Hope Walls to pick up tickets at the U of A campus, or Trina Lewis to pick up tickets in North Edmonton. Additional points of sale will be added soon, or you may reserve your tickets for pick-up at the door by email transferring $20/ticket to thephotographerstudio.ca@gmail.com. All proceeds are in support of www.littlewarriors.ca. Join the FB event herehttps://www.facebook.com/events/164931663602714/ for breaking news, announcements, and interesting local articles and visithttps://www.facebook.com/MissRepresentationCampaign to keep up to date on international news.

2.) We are IN the Studio renovating out little butts off!!! I am SO excited to share pictures... soon, very soon... in the meantime, visit www.ThePhotographerStudio.ca for rates, updates, and upcoming social events ;) And Mum's the word... but I'm leaking it here first that our official Open House is January 2nd, 2012, and our exclusive, invitation-only opening night bash will be on January 7th, 2012. Wanna know how to get in? visit www.ThePhotographerStudio.ca or send me an email to h dot walls at shaw dot ca!

2011-11-15T00:01:00.001-07:00

Edmonton Screening of Miss Representation

The Photographer Studio is pleased to be hosting the first Alberta Screening of Miss Representation on February 5th, 2012 at 2:00pm at the Princess Theatre on Whyte Ave. Tickets $20, all proceeds in support of charity, panel discussion to follow. Invited guests to be announced on December 1st, 2012.

View the Miss Representation trailer here

Join the FB event for news and details here

Fly the Coop at The Photographer Studio

2011-11-02T08:33:00.005-06:00

It's no secret I am on semi-permanent sabbatical/retirement/down-time/whatever you want to call it. And I'm not a superstitious person - I believe in serendipity, not fate - but of course as soon as you clear up your schedule, it makes space for other things to happen.

Many years ago, I started a "company" called TICdesign. It was a fictional company that was written up as a business that I could use for most of my college assignments back in 1995. As I wrote more and more assignments about TICdesign, the more I liked the theoretical company, and after finishing my program, went ahead and kind of half-heartedly started it up with a dream of one day having a home for my silly company. The "TIC" part was "The Independent Cooperative" and the mission statement was something like "Empowering visual artists to live and prosper via supported creativity."

It was, on the surface, a very utopian and romanticized starving artist colony for me and my painterly friends. But not too long after college, I picked up my first SLR camera, and the rest as they say is history. From time to time I would resurrect the company for the odd creative venture (like sewing kids' clothes or volunteering on boards or doing graphic design work) but TICdesign became a faded remnant of the past as I embraced the world of digital photography, falling victim to the same trappings that most of us will and forgetting, however briefly, what I wanted to be when I grow up: Creative.

When I hung up my camera, I finally had time to listen, and to participate in without actually experiencing what many of my peers - especially my females-with-families peers - continued to struggle with, day in and day out, posing that eternal question, "How do I find BALANCE?" The same issues came up, again and again, in photography forums, at network meetings, and on people's Facebook walls. The fact was, though, that I'd never been far enough removed to really hear what they were saying...

Enter my dear friend Tammy. Tammy is, by nature, one of the most infuriating people I know. She is funny, cheerful, and perpetually optimistic. Pair that with her indelible need to be loyal to a fault, and bull-headed to boot, and you have something like a whirling dervish you can't but don't really want to get away from anyways. When she first picked up a camera about half a decade or so ago and said, "I'm going to be a photographer! It's what I always wanted to be when I grew up!" we just kind of sat back and watched her go. There was no stopping Tammy from reaching her goals - her dedication, infectious enthusiasm, and talent paid off and she now boasts a successful wedding and portrait company from her home called "Smiley Eyes Photography."

So one late night while we were chatting a couple of months back, we returned to the same conversation we've had a few times about needing a space, a place away from our houses, a place we can share with our photographer friends, a space for shooting when the weather craps out, but knowing that neither of us, with our other commitments, could make use of the space enough to justify the expense. But she says she is officially ready to move on to bigger and better things, and I want a permanent home to teach from. Then all of the sudden, the ball was rolling and we're filling in business development permits and registering the partnership and buying domain names and...

And as we are going through this process, we are receiving affirmation from the photography community at large that we were on the right track.

"Does anyone know where there's a studio space for rent?"

"Is there a workshop being offered anywhere on ~insert topic here~?"

"I wish I had someplace to go to get away from my house and just work without interruptions..."

"I need to talk to real people."

And as of the official announcement yesterday, it became official. It is our pleasure to present to you our joint venture, The Photographer Studio: where local photographers click. It is a studio, learning, and networking centre whose focus is meeting the needs of photographers in our community. From a properly outfitted and fully functional studio to carefully selected guest speakers and custom-designed workshops, The Photographer Studio (when it grows up) will be a creative hub with flexible hours for photographers who don't necessarily want or need a full-time studio, and for those who generally can't attend many professional development classes or network meetings due to conflicts with family, work, and other commitments.

Fly the Coop is one of the major components of The Photographer Studio. Some of us are able to pursue our photography careers unencumbered by commitments that make full-time operation of a studio impractical, and while we can't alleviate your commitments, we can provide the flexibility and consistency needed to accommodate the hectic schedules of work-at-home photographers who feel that a studio/office space would benefit themselves and their businesses. Beyond a studio/office space, it is geared towards community involvement, both within the group as well as in the photographer community at large, to engender a solid support network within which we will push ourselves creatively, build up our own businesses, and then share that success and passion with those around us. Fly the Coop is, I think, what my silly old college project TICdesign wanted to be when it grew up.

Please, go check out Fly the Coop here and watch in the next few weeks for the official unveiling of The Photographer Studio's website here. Looking forward to seeing you at the Studio.

muchLOVE,

Hope

Big Fat News

2011-11-01T11:29:00.002-06:00

I have something to share with everyone. Watch around 8:00 p.m. for something wonderful :)

Call for Models

2011-07-04T09:04:00.000-06:00

Needed: models of all shapes, sizes, ages, colours, and quantities for special project. Serious inquiries only to h dot walls at shaw dot ca with "The White Underwear Project" in the subject line.

pictureLOVE: my inner magpie

2011-07-01T00:00:00.002-06:00

I'm taking my passion for photography in a whole new direction.

I remember the day I got my first camera. I was 8, and it was under the Christmas tree. I actually cried happy tears when I opened the box containing a used Kodak Instamatic, and I took to it like a fish to water, squirming with delight at all the pictures I could take... my family, the things I love, the places I visited... I longed for an SLR before I even knew what one was - my ultimate dream was to own one of those scary-looking cameras that would let me make things blurry in the background. I shot anything and everything that caught my eye - I was a magpie with a recording instrument.

I remember the day I got my got my first SLR. It was a Pentax K1000 I bought off an old guy at the flea market who gave me the best advice I ever got about operating a camera: learn to understand light. I lived with that thing, and learned every possible thing I could, mostly by trial and error, and within months had amassed a collection of lenses, filters, and other peripherals that put a serious dent in my pocketbook. But, I got pretty good - good enough to get asked to take pictures of other people - and so I started taking a few pictures here and there for other people, charging just enough to cover my expenses. It became the hobby that paid for itself.

I remember the day I got my first DSLR. It was a Pentax D*ist, and I took a picture of my Dad with it at sunset, a picture that would be used later that same year for his funeral. I was reluctant to make the shift from film - I was pretty hardcore about film being superior, which it still was back then. Within a year, though, the first DSLR cameras started appearing on the market that exceeded anything even a large format film camera would be capable of, surpassing in leaps and bounds the picture quality of scanned negatives, and sounding off the official end of the film industry. I had to take pictures for more and more people to support my habit and before I knew it, I was over my head.

~~~

Fast forward a few more years and I can tell you all about the beautiful bokeh my 200mm f2.8 makes and how it sucks they don't make a tilt-shift for the Pentax and there was a glitch that made the Nikon 50mm f1.8 not work on the D60, but I can't quite seem to remember what it was like to walk around with a camera and be a magpie with a recording instrument.

In the past 3 years I've hung up my camera twice, swearing it was becoming too much of a beast, and failing miserably both times - meeting new people plus reconnecting with families a few times a year as their families grew plus the earning potential plus the circle of fellow camera geeks plus the desire to complete my collection of lenses... far too enticing. And yet I always felt like there was something tugging me in another direction, because there are so many things about this industry that just don't sit right. I became more and more angry about the cattiness, the competitiveness, the greed, the inconsistencies... People complaining about the market being saturated, people charging obscene amounts of money, people trying to justify price fixing, people trying to scare people into thinking that social services was going to take their child away from them and their kids would get beat up in school if they didn't get "real" professional pictures done (read: not a department store, a peer, a colleague, or any other competitor who might actually be able to do the same job: take a picture. News Flash - I started taking pictures when I was 8, which is nothing compared to my daughter who's been shooting since she was 3 - who are YOU to say she's a bad risk?) I won't get deep into the administrative headaches - business licenses, taxes, external hard-drives, regularly upgraded software and hardware... it's all very time consuming.

~~~

On April 14th, 2011, a beautiful 16 year old young woman was killed in a car accident. This young woman was someone I had been very close to - her Mom and I went through our first pregnancies together and our children practically grew up as siblings until junior high hit. Now, I could blame the onset of adolescence for our families growing apart, but frankly, that isn't true. Around the same time our first-borns hit puberty, I dove into the photography thing, her Mom dove into her own business, and we just plain got ourselves too busy to have time together, usually relying on illness or tragedy as our only excuse to get together.

At her funeral there were stacks and stacks of pictures. We flipped through them and reminisced about all the times we had gotten together, which usually wasn't a good time until someone was injured - stitches, broken bones, bee stings, sunburns, rugburns, sprained backs, frostbite, and even a trip to emerg with a monkey bite... never a dull moment. And I wanted to ask, "What happened to us?" But the answer was pretty obvious - we got all busy being grown up and buying cars and running businesses and not remembering what it was like feeling connected to one another because we were too occupied...

~~~

It's no secret that I've been disenchanted for quite some time now. The lies I've told myself about this - they're all as plain to me now as the nose on my face. I have no regrets, but officially, as of today, I'm "retiring" so I can take my passion for photography in a whole new direction: backwards. To the time when my camera was an extension of my body and all I needed to do was wait for juicy moments to shoot one the many facets of my amazingly boring, completely perfect little life - my family, my friends, my dogs, my feet, my garden... Back to being a magpie. Back to being me: mom, wife, gardener, shoe fetishist, and sometimes photographer. I understand light: Light shone through those many amazingly boring, completely perfect facets makes my life sparkle. I. Am. Magpie. So, without further ado

~~~

I QUIT.

~~~

Join me right here over the coming months as I explore several different visual themes, as well as reclaim my love for writing, and indulge a few long-forgotten past-times. I have several commitments to fulfill, but even more fun and entertaining projects coming up that feed my soul and appease my magpie-ness. Thanks for the good times. See you on the flip side!

Why I Relay...

2011-06-07T01:55:00.004-06:00

I have so much to write. And so much to share. And I've been procrastinating because it's never easy to write the Relay for Life posts. ~sigh~

Once upon a time I met this crazy lady named Tammy, who introduced me to some of her amazing friends, and even though I was an idiot and tried to break up with her once she wouldn't let me and even though she probably regrets it sometimes, I am forever grateful for her friendship, support, and positive outlook on life - I think if you looked up "effervescent" in the dictionary her picture might be beside it. She's a photographer now, too. But anyways. One of the ladies in our group of friends received the news that her sister had cancer and within a few weeks she had passed away. There was a discussion about buying her flowers, but flowers die, too, and so we decided to start a team at the Relay for Life in honour of her sister. We Relayed for a couple of years, and of course, I took a crapload of pictures, which I started giving to the Relay people.

My Dad came out to the Relay to visit us. Every year for as long as I can remember, my Dad raised money and shaved his head in honour of my cousin John, who lost a foot to cancer when he was still a kid, and he was so proud of us for doing the Relay - it meant as much to him as it did us. He and my stepmom showed up at some obscene hour of the night with coffee and tunafish sandwiches with dill pickles and cheese cut up in them. My father died of a heart attack shortly after our second Relay, and I knew in my heart that I would be doing it for a very long time. My kids look forward to it every year, too - it's become a part of their lives as much as mine.

In the third year, my Auntie lost her battle with cancer and a friend of mine's 6 year old son was diagnosed with cancer. Stacie felt that the Ride to Conquer Cancer was more in the spirit of her sister, and she has since gone off to run a hugely successful team called the Melan Heads, and around the same time it was asked if I would be willing to formally organize a group of photographers to take team photos. I started bringing my workshoppers to the Relay with me, and that was the official birth of Team Clickin' Cancer's Butt.

In the 4th year, my best friend's Mom was diagnosed with breast cancer. In the 5th year, my Uncle was diagnosed with prostate cancer and my best friend's Mom was declared cancer free. They are both holding strong but I was reminded that life is fragile, and cancer is never far away, which was sent to me like a punch in the face this year several times over. In this, our 6th year, a different Uncle lost his lengthy battle with cancer. A very talented former member of Team Clickin' Cancer's Butt began slaying her own dragon: breast cancer. A very dear friend and colleague of mine's father was diagnosed with prostate cancer. And a workshopper of mine asked me to do some urgent family portraits, because this ugly beast has already stolen a member of their family and haunts them still.

While it would be nice to say we've eradicated cancer and are all retiring, that simply isn't the case. But I'm pleased, in a bittersweet sort of way, to say we've started a trend - photographers across Canada have started bringing their cameras with them and donating their images back to the Canadian Cancer Society. Former Team Clickin' Cancer's Butt members have even gone on to start their own teams in their own towns, and we're slowly pulling ourselves together as a network.

As a photographer, I feel that what I do is both priceless and invaluable. I am invited to some pretty pivotal moments in people's lives - births, weddings, graduations, and other important milestones - as well as asked to document an annual progression of families as they grow and change. The pictures we have after our loved ones leave, whether it's off to college, a new job in a different city, a military assignment overseas, or because they pass away, the value of the photographs that we have become magnified.

So for those of you who don't know much about it, there are several parts to the Relay for Life. It's more than just a bunch of crazy people who come out, rain, shine, or snow (and sometimes in ballet slippers) to walk a track for 12 hours...

The Celebrate ceremony is the first part of the event, during which people who are winning their battle with cancer have the opportunity to provide inspiration and hope.

The second part is the Remember ceremony, during which caregivers, family, and friends light luminaries lining the track in honour of those who have lost or continue to fight their battle with cancer.

The third part is the Fight Back ceremony, during which we acknowledge cancer still doesn't have a cure, and make a pledge to not give up hope.

Imagine, if you will, the following scenarios. A woman is declared cancer free after undergoing something called the Whipple procedure, followed by one kidney and two heart transplants to manage the damage the chemotherapy, meds, and subsequent immunodeficiency infections did to her system. After 3 years cancer free, the cancer returns and she now sits on death row, preparing to leave behind her husband, 7 children, and 3 stepchildren. A young family expecting their second child is robbed of a father because a backache that turns out to be cancer. A 25 year old woman goes to the doctor for what she thinks is a vicious case of bronchitis and goes home with only one lung. A grandfather of 6 dies just days before the birth of grandbaby number 7.

How much do you think a person's photographs together with their loved ones are worth to them?

Priceless. Invaluable.

These are not hypothetical stories. They are in fact stories of people I know. Real people who participate in the Relay for Life. There are so many more - each one as heartbreaking, inspiring, and bittersweet as the next - and during the Relay, THESE are the people we are photographing. Survivors, fighters, caregivers, children, parents, friends... each and every one of their lives irrevocably changed by cancer, which long after you've been declared cancer free or your loved one has died sticks to your shoe like the smell of dog shit long after the shit's been wiped off. It's so easy, when cancer is someone else's problem, to ignore the stench. And then it comes close, close, closer, and takes one of yours and it becomes personal. Very Personally. And those of us who now take it Very Personally convene at the Relay for Life, to Celebrate, Remember, and Fight Back.

We're not heroes - we're just photographers - but the stories we hear, the images of those moments that are so bittersweet, the experiences we share throughout the course of one evening a year knit the fabric of our lives together. Looking back, I doubt any one of us can imagine what a profound effect this event has, and continues to have, on our lives. And so year after year, we show up, cameras in hand, to record it, because it's what we do.

Above is my friend and esteemed colleague Christine Hopaluk at the 2011 Leduc Relay for Life. Some members of the Edmonton Team Clickin' Cancer's Butt totally crashed it, snow and all, to support her team. I'd like you all to check out her story here.

Sadly, it's a story you're entering in the middle - this family's fight is ongoing - but like the folks we meet on the track, the stories we swap connect us to one another.

Please visit the zoomphoto site to view and purchase images from the 2011 Edmonton Relay for Life (all proceeds to the Canadian Cancer Society) and consider registering your own team next year here.

All images in this post are copyrighted to the Canadian Cancer Society.

This year's photographers on Team Clickin' Cancer's Butt:

Ali & Sahar
Angie
Deanna
Hayley
Heather
Helena
Jennifer
Kaylee
Laura Jane
Me... you're already here :)
Tinsa
Trina & Sons

Hope is the thing with feathers

That perches in the soul,

And sings the tune--without the words,

And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;

And sore must be the storm

That could abash the little bird

That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chillest land,

And on the strangest sea;

Yet, never, in extremity,

It asked a crumb of me.

~Emily Dickinson

Can of Worms: putting the baby on the thistle

2011-03-23T10:07:00.019-06:00

I had a bad day yesterday. The worst in a long time, actually - emotionally and mentally exhausting to the point where all I could do was just hold on long enough to get through my evening, get the kids to bed, and get a good cry in. Ever have those days? Yeah - they suck, right? So that was my day.

Online communities are amazing places - they foster a sense of community on a global level that was unheard of until the advent of the internet. The down side of internet communication is that even with the assistance of emoticons, smileys, and lols, there is always a missing human element, that oh so important factor that allows people to get you because they can read your physical cues, the tone of your voice, and all that other non-verbal stuff that is impossible to parlay with any kind of consistency. The upshot of that is that social retards like me end up with their foot in their mouth, running around in circles aimlessly trying to point out subtle cues like the use of "I" statements when I state an opinion that someone reads with emotions instead of cold and detached debating skills. Without meaning to, I can singlehandedly alienate large groups of perfect strangers in seconds flat, because they don't "get" me.

~heavy sigh~

I was added to a photography group the other day, and within 48 hours I had managed to change a relatively harmless question into a raging debate where people got all up in knots because I used an analogy to describe how *I* felt about the issue that someone else read as a personal attack.

~sigh with an oh man headshake~

I know someone will ask, so I'll just go ahead and elaborate. The question was to CD or not to CD, which inevitably led to the conversation about banding together to make the competition about our skill and style as a photographer not our prices by not including the CD and standardizing prices and and and...

~double sigh~

We all complain that gas prices are fixed. Nobody likes price fixing. Yes, it's harsh to liken price-fixing in the photography community to the scene in Titanic where the passengers in steerage are locked below deck to prevent them from taking spots from the first-class passengers on the lifeboats, but this is really, truly, honestly how I feel about the issue. While I see the logic in many of the arguments people offer in support of standardizing photography prices (it levels the playing field, it makes it more profitable for photographers, etc. etc.) I also think that people who have to (or like to) shop at WalMart will be pantsless if the price for trousers was standardized by Prada, the same way some families and individuals already struggle to pay for pictures. The fact that upstart photographers are charging less while they build their portfolio is a threat to established photographers is as ridiculous as Prada feeling threatened by WalMart. The target market is different, plain and simple. When you have a few minutes, I strongly urge you to check out this TEDtalk by Johanna Blakely - it drives this point home hard and fast.

I am well aware of the fact that there is a desire within the photography industry to return to the good old days where you needed to be not only a lighting expert but a chemist and accountant to run a photography business and it was easy to justify extremely high prices because the cost of operating was HUGE and several manual skillsets were required. There weren't auto-mode cameras, free editing and accounting software, and professional labs to outsource these things to... and there are always going to be hacks, and there are always going to be people who can create stunning images with a cheap point and shoot, but the bottom line is this: the good old days are gone so you can either try and throw the industry back into the dark age, or shut up and shoot.

I teach photography (the boring stuff like the law of reciprocity and what the rule of thirds is and how to break it) and during one of this year's workshops we ended up having a discussion (briefly) about settting ourselves apart from "the competition." I don't know why my brain came up with the analogy of a baby on thistle - I guess I love picking on babies because they are small and defenseless - but there it was, and here it is. Currently, the trends in baby photography include composite digital renderings of babies hanging in knitted things from impossibly thin branches wearing funky hats while propped up on their elbows. It also involves removing unsightly bags and pimples and skin flakes from newborns to create a very particular aesthetic appeal. Now, regardless of my personal opinion on how this might be detrimental to the self-images of our children, I realize it's a matter of personal choice so I take no exception with photographers who specialize in creating digital art or parents who choose to commemorate the arrival of their child by having a beautiful piece of digital art created. It's a free world, right? But then you end up with people who view this as the industry "standard" and they aspire to mimic these trends. Pretty soon everyone is out buying knitted things to hang babies in and buying digital skin patches, the market gets saturated, people complain about being copied, blame the newbies who undercut their business for their drop in sales, enter price-fixing arguments... and we're back to square one. (Psst! If you didn't watch Johanna Blakely's TEDtalk, you REALLY need to go do that now.) So while the whiners whine, the tough innovate. We've all seen the smooth-skinned sleeping baby in the knitted thing wearing a long toque while propped on their elbows in a 3 foot tall fig tree. What we haven't seen is a screaming baby on a bed of thistle.

What it boils down to for me is quite frankly, I'm really tired of hearing the plight of the poor photographer, the wishy washy justifications that we (some photographers) are all supposed to adopt when they (some other photographers) feel they aren't making "enough" and need someone (newbies) or something (the wrong camera) to blame their complacency on (they all copy me) and start looking for ways to squeeze more money out of clients (let's get everyone to restrict the provision of CDs!) If "enough" for Person A is turning a profit of 150% and that conflicts with Person B whose "enough" is making a couple hundred bucks with the dSLR birthday gift they got that allows them the flexibility to be home during the day with their children, then so be it. If you are providing wall prints and albums and branded packaging, you have to charge more to cover the cost of operating your business and cater to the wishes of your clientele base so raise your prices; if you are burning a disc of unedited pictures and using a free blog service, you can pass those savings along to your clients. Beauty! So, people with large amounts of disposable income are free to spend their money on high priced photography with all the bells and whistles like fancy packaging and private galleries that reflects their desires, and people with small amounts of disposable income are fortunate enough to get amazing custom photographs of their children at a price that fits within their budget from the newbies. Whatever you're going to do, do it, don't talk about it. If you believe you are worth $600 a print, build it, and they will come, and if they don't, you're doing something wrong and perhaps you need to remember how and why people shop for photography. You need to figure out how to put your baby on thistle, and the only way to accomplish that is to just Shut up and shoot.

We're photographers, not doctors in the emergency room. What we do is both priceless and invaluable. While some people think that this is a socialist perspective, it is in all actuality the epitome of capitalism, where the economy is driven by competition in a free market. If we wanted to keep it "fair" we would have to address the larger social issue of elitism through consumerism and change the cultural perception that value is associated with a price tag. We would therefore need to focus on retaining control of our small home-based photography businesses so that we don't end up like the clothing industry where Prada and Gap are outsourcing the manufacture of their higher-priced goods to the same sweatshops in China as WalMart to maximize profits. (Like sending images off to third-party post-processors in India for pennies a picture to maintain a high volume of turnover. Yeah - I went there... remember that whole part about disenchantment a couple of weeks ago? I'm just getting started on sharing dirty little secrets that support the concept behind this cultural revolution... in the coming weeks expect: women as photographers, the dehumanization of business, and why most pricing strategies suck your will to live.)

Ignorance can certainly be bliss. And so I walked away from the debate yesterday. I was feeling defensive and reacted emotionally. I'm only human, and in a moment of self-preservation I chose to retreat so I could regroup and have this conversation with myself: Why am I outspoken? Because I feel passionately about what I do. Is it going to make me popular? No, probably not. Is it going to make people like me? Well, no, not really. Is it going to make people think? Yes. If I'm going to talk about a revolution, I need people to talk to, to hash out details, to hold honest and open discourse with, to explore the hidden crannies and shed light on the darkest corners. I want to shake people and when they feel as uncomfortably shaken (and disenchanted) as I do, not to blame me for pointing out the obvious but to take the opportunity to look inside and say, why did this touch a nerve?

I'm never comfortable walking into a room full of photographers - real or virtual - because it's hard to convey my often unpopular ideas without people get their hackles up and wanting to lynch or vilify or ostracize the person (me) who says all those things that it's easier to ignore or justify than admit or acknowledge. I don't LIKE offending people, but it happens and I don't believe I should have to apologize or feel guilty about not wanting to join the legions of self-pitying photographers sitting around patting one another on the bum, encouraging one another to find ways of driving prices up and using scapegoats for the floundering (or failure) of their businesses - I want to motivate, stimulate, innovate! Revolutionary ideas that challenge the status quo are never easily welcomed or adopted, especially when our attention is divided between retaining the respect, friendship, and loyalty of our peers and not selling out by being tongue-tied about that which we feel most passionate. Of course I want people to LIKE me, but more than being liked I NEED to be accepted and respected for who I am, including my social ineptitude, which a group of us have taken to referencing as being loved right down to the pores on our polyps.

Once upon a time, women had no right to vote because women weren't legally recognized as people. Once upon a time, it was legal to own human beings as slaves. Once upon a time, a dude named Jesus was hung on a cross because his idea of peace and love made people revolt against being raped and pillaged by their political leaders. And before anyone points out that women's suffrage was a long time ago or the fact that I'm not a descendent of black slaves or thinks I'm delusional because I just compared myself to Jesus - they are merely references to people who spread ideas that sparked monumental social change. What we see now as barbaric or narrow-minded or discriminatory was once the norm - what if they had kept their mouths shut and thrown in the towel?

So. I will pull my tail out from between my legs (and my head out of my ass) and return. I'm quite possibly (definitely) going to say things that will probably (hopefully) make people think (and re-evaluate) their perspective. If it makes people feel uncomfortable or offended, then it's likely not because of what I said but a reaction to something that is felt or understood deep within oneself, something that is in disagreement with what that which we've been told is the accepted cultural norm. Turning a blind eye is easy; the value of a good debate lies not within its ability to change minds or sway opinions, but to open our eyes, and in doing so broaden the scope of and clarify our understanding of why we think and feel what we think and feel. It's about putting the baby on the thistle so that people stop and say, Wow - I've never seen it that way before.

The Biggest Can of Worms Ever

2011-02-28T20:04:00.003-07:00

the necessity for disenchantment in our lives

Foreword

I've been threatening to write this for a long time. I've felt it for a long time. I didn't know how to frame it without offending people or discounting what I do, but if I were going to do my own TEDtalk, this would be the idea I think is worth spreading. Grab a coffee and make sure the kids are in bed - this is a long read but I hope you will find it enlightening, thought-provoking, and compelling enough to change your perception, and maybe your mind. I wish to communicate what I have to say with integrity, respect, and honesty. Please read with an open mind, open eyes, and an open heart. Click on the images to enlarge them; unless you like clicking back on your browser lots, links and pictures will open in the same window unless you hold alt (mac) or ctrl (pc) to open in a new tab or window.

dis·en·chant (dsn-chnt)

tr.v. dis·en·chant·ed, dis·en·chant·ing, dis·en·chants

To free from illusion or false belief; undeceive.

Excerpt:

"I salivate when I think about swallowing laxatives. Food is both my enemy and my best friend. Truth be told, when I am hungry I feel powerful, when I am satisfied I feel guilty, and when I am too-full I feel out of control which usually leads to me feeling sad and upset and over-eating to the point of pain as rebellion/punishment. Physically, since being in treatment 20 years ago, I have fallen off the wagon from time to time but have not had a prolonged relapse since having children. Mentally, though, I'm still there, 100%. I have bulimia/anorexia. It's like alcoholism - the craving never stops, you just try and not act on impulses.

I'm terrified of scales and I don't know what I see in the mirror - I don't trust my eyes even after all these years. My family both stabilizes and terrorizes me - I want to hug my husband but I am so concerned about him touching my fat that I recoil, and I fear what my children are learning from me and my abnormal eating habits, which have gone from starve-binge-purge to just starve-binge. I know that if I didn't have a family around I'd drop weight because I would have uninhibited private access to the bathroom and no family dinners to pretend I'm enjoying. In fact, I've actually fantasized about leaving for an extended holiday so I can go starve and purge myself. I avoid social gatherings because I am scared to eat in front of other people - I think they are all watching me - if I don't eat enough people will think I'm a flake and if I eat too much they will think I'm a disgusting pig. I hide to eat alone as much as possible.

Every day is a struggle to eat/not eat and I think about food/fat/how my pants feel around my waist almost constantly. I fight with being hungry and knowing I need to feed my body but preferring the endorphin rush that comes with realizing I have gone long enough without food to feel hungry. How's that for a fucked up relationship with food? Definitely the worst part is being fully aware of how messed up this is, and being powerless to stop the train wreck of thoughts that creep in my head without invitation.

I've come a long way through my body dysmorphia, though - at least I no longer tape popsicle sticks to my fingers at bedtime in the hopes they won't be so unattractively crooked..."

Photoshop in western culture

While I can't stop people from being offended and yup, I'm a photographer, so this might appear hypocritical, it is not my intention to point fingers or lay accusations, merely to increase awareness of a problem that I think needs to be addressed, which is digital art being promoted as photography. Further, I want to open some intelligent and passionate dialogue on the predictable long-term effects of passing off hyper-realistic (def'n: the simulation of something that never really existed...) digital art as photography on our children. Lastly, I am asking that we provide disambiguation between actual photographs and digitally reconstructed ones for our clients, especially the littlest ones.

(Wanna see some amazing digital art? TONNES of it - at deviantART)

There's this Robert Munsch book called Purple, Green and Yellow, which tells the story of a little girl named Brigid who pesters her Mom for felt markers that can make oranges that are oranger than oranges, roses that smell better than roses, and sunsets that are more real than sunsets. Eventually, she ends up colouring her father a whole mismatched crazy rainbow with super-indelible-never-come-off-until-you're-dead-and-maybe-even-later markers, then covering it up with better than flesh coloured marker... and he looks too good to be true. Until, of course, he walks out into the rain. I don't believe there is anything wrong or immoral with the creative processes that end up with "art featuring real families" nor am I trying to discredit the skills or talents required. What I feel is misleading is how it is generally not clearly and not obviously stated that extensive retouching is required to suspend disbelief.

While it would be nice to demand a disclaimer on pictures like they put on toys that say, "Contents may vary from item pictured," I don't think we can expect to see a warning that says "People in pictures may appear better than real people," anytime soon. However I do believe that a) we, as photographers, can and should give our clients actual photographs and b) we, as clients, can and should demand to have actual photographs. Just in case our kids happen to walk out into the proverbial rain and catch a glimpse of themselves in the mirror.

"Items exactly as shown in picture"

In the early days of film, photographers needed to know how to make prints in a darkroom. Eventually, photography evolved to include mastery of not just taking the photographs but developing new and creative darkroom techniques that would help photographers gain an edge and make their work stand apart. They would sandwich negatives, dodge, burn, mismatch chemical processes for effect, hand-paint, and eventually airbrush before the dawn of the computer era bumped the finishing process back to the darkroom ages with a revolutionary little program called Photoshop.

Knowing how to compose a picture, how to make light work for you, how to connect with the subject whether it's a person, place, or thing - as photographers, those are skills we must acquire because at the end of day there's only so much we can do to salvage a crappy picture using software. While it's true most of us like to tweak our pictures for contrast, saturation, cropping, etc. and others prefer to get really funky with weird colours and heavy textures and illustrations, Photoshop has essentially become more of a cosmetic tool than a creative one. We've inverted from a desire to have art reflect reality to the desire for reality to reflect art.

The future is closer than you think

In a culture where our children feel incredible pressure to conform to whatever the current societal norm is, we are just beginning to collect solid, measurable evidence in support of how Photoshopped perfection of people in the media has affected our self-perception in the past 30 years. However, up until recently when inexpensive fully automatic dSLR cameras and home computers with the popular downsized and affordable prosumer version of Photoshop ("Elements") made it possible for the average joe to "shoot like a pro", these altered images were merely pictures of other people. Not ourselves, and certainly not our children. When you compound these external influences with the number of times we casually make statements like, "I'm so flabby," or, "I look so old," or, "I hate the way I look," in front of our children, with our perfectly Photoshopped portraits hanging on the walls behind our heads, it isn't so difficult to see what happens next. My prediction is that it is about to get much worse, because while it has been one thing to live up to other people, I don't think it's a stretch to imagine how much greater the potential impact on a child's self-esteem it will be for children who grow up looking in the mirror and not being able to live up to the images their parents have chosen to hang on the wall.

Exposing the Lie

Most people acknowledge being aware that advertising is at the very least dishonest if not an outright lie - Dove's incredibly successful viral "Evolution" video (below, link here if it isn't working) showed most people for the first time a step-by-step process of falsifying a standard of beauty, followed up with several other videos encouraging women to embrace their natural beauty - perhaps ironically promoting their own brand of beauty products which includes promises to make skin more beautiful and features a special line for older people called "pro-aging" instead of "anti-aging." Nevertheless, that first video confirmed what most people suspected: that we have been lied to for years. Brand X youth-intensifying spackle cream has never made our wrinkles and pores disappear, Brand Q tooth whitening strips are only effective at making our teeth hurt and gums bleed, and buying Brand X diet protein shakes didn't magically give any man or woman a narrow waist and a 6-pack. We know that top health and beauty magazines continue to lie to us, and perpetuate business for their interested parties. If we don't have a fantasy kept fresh in our minds of how make-up, whitening strips, and protein shakes will give us that perfection we seek, why would we keep spending money?

The western health and beauty industry has effectively homogenized our collective perception of "beauty" for both men and women, by both men and women. Retouched photographs were first employed extensively by the advertising industry to sell their health and beauty products by presenting images of people we should strive to emulate by investing in their products and services - lotions, make-up, pills, diets, you name it. They are selling the idea that you, too, can look perfect. If you buy their stuff. They want to make money, from you, but it's not rocket science to know that all the money you spend making your outside look beautiful won't make you feel beautiful inside.

For decades, companies have been promoting a level of perfection that quite frankly is humanly impossible - we are inundated with images everywhere of people with glowing white teeth, wrinkle- and crease-free faces, invisible pores, large yet firm and perky breasts or pecs, flat bellies, chiseled arms and stomachs, and thighs so smooth Barbie would be jealous. Just for fun, though, look here to see botched Photoshop jobs which in many cases merely illustrates the extremes that the fashion, entertainment, and advertising industries go to make us believe an alternate reality. While the botched photos are humourous, the ones we actually need to be afraid of look like this expert photoshopping, where we are quite successfully tricked into seeing something unreal, as real.

And don't even get me started on the irony of magazines intended to promote healthy lifestyles that feature photoshopped perfection on the cover.... ~sigh~

Dying to be perfect

Above is unacceptable, but below more unacceptable; both are deadly conditions. For whatever it's worth, once upon a time pasty women with a little meat on their bones were seen as desirable because the skinny tanned ones were of the poor working class variety. I know there's at least person who reads this who just said, "I wish I was that skinny," and at least one person who is perfectly healthy who looks in the mirror and sees themselves like the images below.

The image below is an example of how Photoshop has been used to alter a skeletal appearance and give us an unrealistic expectation of what being exceptionally thin (meaning, the exception, not the norm) looks like in reality.

Isabelle Caro (below) was part of a controversial ad campaign in 2007 which prompted the French government to bring in an anti-anorexia law and CNN to try and ban anorexic models from the catwalk. She died of complications from anorexia on November 17, 2010. She was 28 years old, and frequently stated in interviews that a designer told her she needed to lose weight if she wanted to be a model. She also blamed a difficult childhood for her disease. Her own mother committed suicide on January 20, 2011. I'm sure we will never know the full depth of this family's tragedy.

Side note: While there are "manorexics" out there, men with body issues more typically inject steroids that will turn dozens of raw eggs into muscle instead of take laxatives that turn food into, well - liquefied poop. Both gender extremes have internet support sites which encourage continued or worse disordered thinking, supporting people in their unhealthy journeys. Examples here for ladies, here for gentlemen.

Since we can't photoshop our real selves

Men and women are generally conscious of facts like our boobs are only going to be as big as they are, our butts may be forever flat, our noses won't be button-like and straight no matter how much we will them to be, and our teeth are naturally putty coloured. Skinny bitches have cellulite, healthy young men have love handles, brown people are brown, and white people are, well - white. Here is an ad from the developer of bodybuilding website blatantly asking for "edits" on 6 images. Rather disturbing.

In our never-ending search for this computer-generated perfection we have sought more invasive help from plastic surgeons, cosmetic dentistry, tanning salons... if you weren't born with it, and can't fix it with creams and lotions and magic powders, off you go to get bleached, suctioned, rhinoplastied, injected with toxins, implanted, veneered, and more.

Older men don't get to be distinguished.

And Asian women don't even have to have Asian eyes anymore:

Jocelyn Wildenstein was a gorgeous, wealthy, well-travelled and educated woman whose obsession with plastic surgery reportedly developed after her first husband left her for another woman. There are various stories floating around about whether she started off wanting to look feline, or went feline after too may surgeries started giving her a feline appearance. Either way, this is a result of severe body dysmorphia.

Heidi Montag, at the age of 23, has undergone such extensive surgery that I imagine people who grew up with her would have a hard time recognizing her on the street. There is not enough history for so many surgeries at such a young age to say exactly how this severe body modification will affect her appearance later in life, but I think we have enough evidence built by those starting later in life to suggest the future looks pretty grim.

I was going to throw a picture of Michael Jackson on here to prove it affects men, too, but I think the point has been hammered home sufficiently. Look here if you want to see more celebrity surgeries. Most experts agree that plastic surgery is a case of putting a Band Aid on a bullet wound by treating the symptom, not curing the disease.

The perceived benefits of plastic surgery is something people are willing to risk a lot for. Look what happened when an obsession to create perfection through plastic surgery went horribly wrong for Korean celebrity Han Mi Ok (above). She's not an anomoly - 1 in 298 patients will develop serious complications, and while the rate of death is comparable with other surgeries, considering they are elective and not live-saving procedures, that says something right there.

For those of you who have never worked in Photoshop, there's a feature known as "marching ants" that comes up when you have selectively chosen a part of the image to work on. I think it looks a lot like plastic surgeon's marks, yes?

Reality Check, Please!

I doubt many people would dispute the obsession we have with "perfection." The explosion of "reality shows" (which is a misnomer as there is nothing real about them) has brought a new means of marketing perfection to us via shows that exacerbate and capitalize on our feelings of inferiority. Biggest Loser, a show which generally promotes an ideal of healthier eating habits, pushing yourself harder, and generally being inspirational as a lifestyle transformation, has on its staff trainer Jillian Michaels, who is famously quoted from an interview in Women's Health saying she will adopt a child to avoid "ruining" her body. Perhaps ironically, she has had a nose job done, and describes herself in the before picture (below) as having "struggled with obesity in her teens."

I'm not really sure if this picture just doesn't do her giant disfiguring nose and enormous elephantine figure justice, or if I'm just not brainwashed enough to see the problem with the before - what do you think?

While Biggest Loser (in the big picture) promotes healthier living, it does so with extreme dieting and exercise routines which come with a number of health risks. Additionally, most people would stand a better chance of success if they had a dietician, trainer, and personal coach on staff like in the show. As inspiring as it may be to some (how many of us have had "Biggest Loser" contests informally announced in our workplace or circle of friends?) the entire concept of making it a competition rather than a personal journey to better health isn't the right mindset for making a permanent and lasting lifestyle transition.

More disturbing, however, are shows like Extreme Makeover, where women who deem themselves outside the realm of "beautiful" undergo massive amounts of cosmetic surgery to completely reform their looks. Oddly enough, most people find the after results only moderately better than the before, and in some cases say they are as bad, awkward, or occasionally worse.

Extreme Makeover Before and After

It would be very interesting to see how the Extreme Makeover contestants would have looked in before and after pictures if they had opted for a more traditional "makeover" that involved a new haircut and colour, professionally applied make-up, and a couple of great new pieces added to their wardrobe on "What Not To Wear."

What Not to Wear Before and After

One of the issues brides often face after getting engaged is insecurity about how they will look on their wedding day. Aside of eloping alone, even small weddings take an incredible amount of time and are very stressful for usually the bride who tends to be the one doing most of the planning and organizing. It's very hard not to get wrapped up in how she is going to look standing up in front of everyone for an entire day and how she will look in her pictures. Often, they buy their wedding dress in the size they want to be as "motivation" to lose weight - it's not uncommon, then, for brides to purchase a second (larger) wedding dress weeks before the ceremony because they set unrealistic goals for themselves.

Business is capitalizing on some pretty deep-seated expectations women have about looking perfect on their wedding day, feeding off this insecurity to hook women in for things like pre-wedding weight-loss specials and group deals on cosmetic procedures for the bridal party like tanning, Botox, dermabrasion, or collagen lip plumpers.

Bridalplasty "before" group shot

Bridalplasty is the lastest rendition of the reality TV makeover mania. Sadly, since reality TV is not real and most women won't ever have the opportunity to complete in this twisted competition, I often get asked by brides during consultations if I'm going to make sure they look "good" in all their pictures, implying they are hoping I will perform the minor procedures they can't afford to go under the knife for - tooth whitening, removal of pocks, pits, wrinkles, and fissures, breast enhancements, etc. When I say that I am a photographer and not a plastic surgeon, they usually choose another photographer who is willing to cross that line.

Bridalplasty before and after

Bridalplasty winner Alyson Donovan declined over half the surgeries she originally listed after winning, with the most dramatic change in her appearance coming from self-directed diet and exercise that resulted in a 35lb weight loss. Critics are still debating if this bait-and-switch was staged or not to lessen the criticism the show received, but from what I saw of the show most of those women needed therapy, not surgery.

Making important distinctions about relativity

Everything is relative. For example:

Some people are naturally thin:

And some have pot bellies:

Sometimes people are "ugly" after cosmetic surgery

While it's generally understood that everything is 'relative' ie) suffering is measured intangibly by its relative impact on an individual's life BY that individual, the images here make a pretty good argument for the disparity between "relative" (perceived) and "real" suffering, and yet most of us would look away if not turn a cheek because they do not fit within our ideals of beauty even with the transformative reconstruction that has been performed correcting damage from birth defects, disease, and serious accidents.

Two-Face baby and Lakshmi Tatma (pictured below) had disfiguring birth defects that were seen as reincarnations of goddesses worthy of song, dance, and praise not ridicule and disgust. While the Two Face baby's parents have opted to not have corrective surgery done, Lakshmi (below, with her godly likeness)underwent surgery as her parents felt that she might have difficulties later in life.

In some cases, surgery is not an option for medical reasons, and sometimes for personal or even religious reasons as is the case for Jose Mestre (below) who is a Jehovah's Witness and refuses to receive the necessary blood transfusions he would require to have his face restored. (Jehovah's Witnesses refuse blood and blood products as sacred and not to be ingested - non-compliance would result in disfellowship (shunning) of the individual.)

Beauty is definitely a social/cultural thing, though - in many cultures tattoos and piercing are seen as beauty enhancements while in western society we are only just beginning to see these practices as not being deviant. There is no denying that the difference between weird and wonderful as opposed to scary and ugly is exactly like beauty: in the eye of the beholder.

Beautiful Photography vs. Beautiful Photoshopping

The issue I have with Photoshop is that people are not just unable, but unwilling, to separate fantasy from reality, largely because people are guarded about having un-retouched photos of themselves released. In the case of photographers, we are culpable for perpetuating the lie under the guise of retaining creative license, protecting industry secrets, etc. and maintaining the illusion that professional photographers are more talented with a camera than your average joe because the people look better than real people. I can guarantee you that the pictures you take on your camera aren't as bad as this industry would like you to believe. I'm pretty handy with a camera and this is what mine look like:

A Google search of Photoshop art brings up these images, most of which are clearly fantastical. Most people can pretty safely agree that no one believes these images are real. They are simply digital art made from photographs. This is what a Google search brings back for newborn photography but this is what a search for newborn babies brings up. Unless you can convince me that the second group of photos are just exceptionally ugly and imperfect children, then I would argue that we have now come to a point where we have acquired a homogenized taste for what beauty means not just for adults, but as early in life as children fresh out of the womb. While I'm not intending to attacking newborn or baby photographers in particular, I'm going to focus there because it seems somehow wrong that it starts so early. And so cheap - $5.95 each pose? Damn - that's WAY less than you'd have to pay for surgery!

(I wish I could remember where I found the above photograph on the internet, but it came with a caption written by the new parent, "In case your child isn't born with a body issue," and a wish from the parent to not actually see a company representative for fear of wanting to smack them with their own camera.)

In a style that was hugely popularized by Anne Geddes, words like 'organic' and 'natural' are being used by photographers to describe sometimes surreal but mostly hyper-real (better than real) images of babies and children that look like glass-eyed plastic baby dolls that came off a shelf in the toy aisle. They tout themselves as capturing a moment in time, but when we transform these images, are we not effectively erasing if not altering it? If you're into chaos theory (or just a bit geeky) it might be interesting to consider the butterfly effect that this alteration of "captured moments" would have over time.

Photographers who specialize in what is popularly called "baby art" (please see note on TM at end of article) will defend what they do. The fact remains that a large part of the final product is in fact not what real babies look like, and I have to admit a lot of what I see out there is only marginally different to me than pageant retouching. I am not trying to make anyone who specializes in this feel guilty - the images are beautiful, but they do not depict reality. At least most pageant retouching is so over the top and often so poorly done that it looks fake, instead of better than reality. The intent of digital art is to present a hyper-realistic fantasy, whereas most photographers are essentially selling parents an alternate reality with threats like, "Why entrust your newborn photography to someone who gives you real pictures?" The producers of digital art using real babies do not promote themselves as digital artists, but refer to themselves ambiguously as "baby art photographers" or just plain old "photographers."

To see what photographers go through to make newborn infants "perfect" please go visit this site then watch this tutorial (to see results only go to 12:38) by two very talented photographers (their original images are beautifully lit and composed) who specialize in extensive Photoshopping on portraits of infants. In addition to removing blemishes, it involves removing under-eye shadows, skin smoothing and retexturing, sharpening, and of course desaturation of the too-pink to be pretty hands and feet of typical newborn babies. You can watch tutorials on everything from photoshopping children and teens to recreating skin to removing wrinkles, bulges, fat, and scars and adding boobs or whiter teeth - youTube is your friend. If you just want to see Photoshop before and afters, Google is your friend. Have fun. Below is the result of me following the aforementioned tutorial at 100% opacity to exaggerate the effects, with the exception of using actions and fake skin which I did manually. I also went for a slightly faded vintage tone instead of the popular yellow-peach hue that seems to be all the rage these days, and forgot to remove the red from the little boys' eyes:

In case you forget, here is the original:

(Click to see images larger)

Viewing people that look better than people has been so effectively ingrained in our collective psyche by the media that we often have a difficult time making distinctions between what's real and what's not. Long before Photoshop was around (~380BC) philosopher Plato noted in "Republic" that, "Children cannot distinguish between what is allegory and what isn't, and opinions formed at that age are usually difficult to eradicate or change; it is therefore of the utmost importance that the first stories they learn shall aim at producing the correct moral effect." When they are young, Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy are as real to children as Mommy and Daddy. They eventually outgrow these myths because they are relatively easy to eradicate but as a society - as parents, caregivers, and educators - we are doing very little to dispel the visual myth of perfection rammed down our children's throats at every turn.

The mentality of parents who invest in "art photography" seems to be somewhat conflicted. They want to capture priceless images of their family... and have them digitally altered to look like plastic replicas of themselves. They go get annual portraits done, each and every time with equal amounts of Photoshop editing, which equates to children from birth on seeing these perfected images hung on the wall, shared online, and distributed to friends and family, often in larger-than-life proportions. Not the snapshots from family vacation or the self-portraits that make Mom look fat or show Sonny's pimples - those aren't worthy of being displayed or shared. Only the ones that say, "If we were better than ourselves, this is what we would actually look like." Now yours, right from birth, right in the hospital, for just $5.95 each pose!!!

Mass media: breeding grounds for sexual abuse

The primary causes of body dysmorphic disorder, bulimia, and anorexia are a) parents who are themselves obsessed with appearance, b) parents with unrealistic expectations of their children, and c) sexual abuse or trauma. It's easy to understand the possibility that hanging photoshop-perfected images of children in the home might be an obsession with appearance a parent inadvertently passes down to a child, translating to unrealistic parental expectations in a child's mind especially against the backdrop of perfect people on TV and in magazines and movies, but how does sexualization of women and girls in the media contribute?

Let's start with the controversial image of waifish 15-year old Miley Cyrus, hugely popular with kids between the ages of 4 and 12, sitting in a disheveled post-coital pose, half naked, smudged lipstick and all. It was even more disturbing that in the same spread she was photographed draped across her father's lap in what many would call not a natural father-daughter type interaction. If you did not know they were father and daughter you would think they were a couple that included a stereo-type of male sexual prowess illustrated by a middle-aged man and his young virginal partner.

Calvin Klein has made use of racy, hyper-sexualized ads for decades. In fact, the picture below of 15-year old Brooke Shields sparked a similar controversy in 1980 that still gets debated 30 years after the fact, and enjoyed a revisitation when Annie Leibowitz's pictures of Miley hit the stands. It's almost laughable now that this was met with public outcry.

Amidst CK's orgiastic B&W ads that looked like this...

...they released these images advertising children's underwear, which were pulled after only a day in circulation because of public outrage. While the images below are not blatantly sexual, the style of photography was too blatantly reminiscent of the signature style associated with Klein's sexually charged ad campaigns.

While Barbie has historically taken a lot of flack for being too unrealistic and perfect, at least she's had an illustrious career track that has included (a very fashionable and glamourous) nurse, paediatrician, business person, veterinarian, firefighter, RCMP officer, and teacher of various things including ballet and sign language. Even after her body remodelling, Barbie's been freakishly out of proportion for years and is kind of flaky in her movies as a sparkle-fart fairy or some sort of princess, but at least she hasn't been consistently portrayed as a boy-crazy twit. We won't discuss the fact her boyfriend Ken was modelled after her brother in real life... but I digress.

One of Barbie's prime competitors a couple of years back were the Bratz line, often referred to by both conservative and cynical parents as "Prostitotz" or "Slutz." Bratz Dollz are an example of how sexualized airhead females were ruthlessly promoted to young girls. The images on the packaging showed these often scantily-clad bedroom-eyed dolls striking stripper poses, while the cartoon featured clips of them self-obsessing over how they looked so boys would notice them. Bratz executives tried to argue that these dolls were being purchased by the 11-18 year old crowd (?), but The American Psychological Association's Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls stated that since the identified target market for these dolls was 4-8 year olds, something was very very wrong.

The Bratz cartoon series inspired little girl to dress-up and play make-believe modelling themselves in similar poses, talking with "brattitude" and wearing adult-oriented clothing like micro-mini skirts, fishnet stockings, and feather boas. What we have then is a clear example of how little girls are socialized to be sexual beings at a very young age, long before they even understand what it means. While a woman should never blamed for being sexually abused or assaulted because of the way she dresses or acts, when we consider the point of females dressing and acting provocatively is in fact to attract the attention of the opposite sex, it's not a big leap to assume that lacking the maturity to understand the behaviours they are mimicking, they are going to suffer uninvited or unwanted sexual comments, advances, and possibly assault. If we don't want our children at risk of acting and being treated as sexual beings at an early age, we need to be aware of how and where and by whom or what they are being influenced. Ignorance is not always bliss.

Everything old is new

Before you get all up in arms about body dysmorphia and eating disorders not being new, yes, I am aware. I'd like to point out that too-high parental expectations, obsession with appearances and sexual assault have always been an issue, and still go under-reported today especially within the male population. Social norms also morph from decade to decade and century to century. Just in case you didn't know, not so long ago it was the fat rich ladies in robes and gowns who were desirable, not skinny tanned girls in low-rider jeans or high-rise skirts. (paintings by Peter Paul Rubens, c. ~1618)

What's different in this day and age is that we live in an age were it's not just those with the capacity for conspicuous consumption who have access to images touting the glories of high fashion and technology, but virtually anyone with access to TV or the internet, which is pretty much everyone. I'm also going to take it a step further and point out that women have been intentionally toeing the line of sexual provocativeness for centuries. For example, in the Victorian era it was inappropriate for a woman to show her ankles; this was circumnavigated by manufacturing boots that featured contrasting colours or textures that mimicked "showing a little leg."

We, as women, have for years both sent and received some very mixed messages - we want to be sexually liberated but don't want to be treated like sex objects, we want to dress provocatively but think men are pigs when they notice our boobs might fall out of our shirt, we want our little girls to be sweet innocent little girls then dress them up like miniature adults... While women's sexual liberation is a whole other argument, the point is that our children are being socialized to be very confused about their own sexuality, whether that's being too promiscuous or not promiscuous enough. You can try and blame the guys for being independently barbaric but really, our own indecisiveness lends itself nicely to girls experiencing real or perceived sexual trauma, which as I mentioned earlier is in the Big Three for common factors in eating disorders.

One of the reasons male rape/assault goes largely unreported is an interesting point to ponder. Women don't report it because of fear of being labelled a slut or having to admit they have lost their virginity amoung other stigma. Men, when faced with the prospect of sexual stimulation, regardless of gender, will often have an erection despite their unwillingness to participate. Because of this biological response, men are afraid to admit they have been assaulted by a man because they will be stigmatized as gay when they are heterosexual. Likewise, if they have been assaulted by a woman who society would deem as unattractive, they are afraid of being stigmatized and often turn the tale into one of sexual exploitation. "I wanted to know what it was like to f*ck a fat/ugly/old/drunk chick."

Marilyn Monroe was a size 12, not a size 2 - a real heifer by today's standards. Women: despite males having this bizarre need to act all machismo, the flip side of this biological response works in our benefit because when a man genuinely finds you interesting and stimulating, I assure you the last thing on his mind when you are naked, ready, willing, and able to be sexually intimate with each other is whether you have too much flesh on the inside of your thighs or if your nipples are the wrong shade of erect. Besides the Kinsey Reports, there are countless studies to support this, but here I am way off topic again...

Our legacy is oh, so very broken

There are women who brag about how little they have gained during their pregnancy on social networking sites, others - particularly young first-time mothers - who are genuinely horrified at how "ugly" newborn babies are, and still other who try to control the weight of their babies because they think they are fat. They are often under-educated and/or suffering from mild to severe depression, an eating disorder, or body dysmorphia which they then project into their babies.

I would like to present the case of Brittainy Labberton (above) who was not only underfeeding her children but giving her 2-month old laxatives because she was afraid the baby was overweight and would grow up to be fat. It is generally acknowledged that she had poor parenting models herself, but the details of exactly what this means are not public knowledge. We can probably imagine. In the image above, she is pregnant with her third child; the courts were able to put into place an order to remove the baby from the parents' custody at birth as she was not eating enough during her pregnancy to nourish the unborn child.

With the exception of cases like Ms. Labberton and serious birth defects that limit a person'a ability to experience even a modest quality of life, we generally agree our children are perfect when they are born. Bruises, fat, scrapes, pimples... warts, and all. It's our bias, and we are entitled to it. Unfortunately, a study from Harvard actually showed that women shown pictures of ugly babies (ones with facial irregularities or skin conditions) were two and a half times faster flipping past the "ugly" as the pretty babies. Faster than what? Men, actually. Seems that women are the ones programmed to be preoccupied with appearances more than men, which isn't surprising. Actually.

The purpose of personal photographs

As a parent, I've always been relentless (read annoying) in my pursuit of taking pictures of my kids, in whatever state they are in. And I tell the stories that the pictures remind me of. As adults, though, we avoid getting our pictures taken. We're afraid we are too out of shape or old or wrinkly to be photographed. We deny our children and grand-children and great-grandchildren the same visual history of us that we expect to have of them despite the fact they will have a lot more years of wanting to look at pictures of us when we are dead and gone than we will of them while we are still living.

We are not advertisers who need to trick people into thinking that they can buy our product and be closer to perfection - we're people with families who want pictures to commemorate our time as a family. Yet we've allowed ourselves to be socially conditioned into a pattern of thinking where if our child gets a zit, scratches their knee, or has a birth mark, it diminishes their beauty and our willingness to have them photographed, for fear of... what, people seeing what we look like in real life? When we look back at pictures of our children, we remember how sweet and cuddly they were. As we look at pictures of our parents or grandparents, especially those of us with parents and grandparents who are dead, we don't see them as people with excess fat or weird noses or wrinkles, but recall the way they smelled or their laugh or how loved we felt. But if we are looking at pictures of ourselves, we seem to pine for our youthful appearance or beat ourselves up for how unattractive we looked. This flies in the face of common sense, really - isn't the point of having pictures to have a visual trail of where we came from?

The pairing below shows a beautiful edit of a beautiful belly that I personally can't understand why we're programmed to think is "ruined." We take for granted our stretchy scarred bellies - but a belly that has housed babies is a special thing, something women and men who can't have their own children might envy. Please look here and here for some beautiful real photographs of some beautiful real women, who view their bodies as a road map of where they have been and remark on the real joy that accompanies living in a real body.

As a photographer, it's interesting (and ironic) that when most parents arrive for a session, they have a story about how their child got the big scrape on their knee or where they were when all the mosquito bites happened. Even at a wedding, there's a story behind why the best man had a black eye. It's not just a part of the story, it IS the story, the one that people will reminisce about for years. Yet we as photographers are often asked (or expected) to erase these parts - starting from the puffy eyes babies have when they are born to removing the stretch marks from pregnancy and the crow's feet we earn as we age from... smiling too much? Do you believe the picture below, knowing what you know now? (Source is here.)

Which side of the fence?

The obvious question right now might be, well, how much do YOU edit, Mrs. Walls? Yes, I edit my photographs. First and foremost, I am a sucker for high-contrast - I like my whites super-white and my blacks super-black, probably a big part of the reason I am always partial to B&W photographs. I don't care about colour casts but do prefer an image that is pale and cool rather than astro-bright. I like soft focus, but I don't have a lens or filter I'm willing to put vaseline on so I do it in Photoshop. I like the unpredictability and challenge of natural and available light, and consider using flash as a last resort. I like wrinkles, scars, bruises, and puffy eyes because they tell the whole story instead of the story we wish we could tell.

The perfect(ed) picture

original

a typical edit for me now

which I admit I prefer in B&W anyways

But, I am going to be brave enough to admit that I have operated on both sides of the proverbial Photoshop coin. When I first started out as a photographer, back in the days of film, it was my goal, my mission, to be a "perfect" photographer. At one point, I even had something written into my bio like everyone deserved to have a picture of themselves that looked like a tear-sheet from a magazine. When I kept getting prints back from the lab, people still looked like real people, and I started asking for digital scans so I could touch them up, then spent a few years dabbling in altered realities. The funny thing is, I go back and see the edits v. the real pictures and I always spend way more time looking at the original pictures.

I am not a technically perfect photographer. The image below was one I lamented over for months, possibly years, because it was not perfectly in focus. I love this picture. I love everything about it. I was so swept up in the moment that I was photographing that I wasn't paying attention, and in later years this has affected the way I do business: I make a disclaimer to clients that I don't guarantee clear pictures during emotionally charged moments because I am probably crying and physically incapable of taking a decent picture. Below is now just as much a portrait of me as a photographer as it is of this amazing couple. And they love it as much as I do.

Sadly, it wasn't until I gave birth to my own daughter that I really began questioning what I was trying to accomplish as a photographer. I know it was wrong to not see it because I had sons, but I had the pleasure of talking to a gentleman just the other evening who pointed out that I might not have known in large part because I wasn't a guy... and that guys face other "macho" standards that often contradict their own morals and feed into the female view of the world. Even with this information, I have encountered clients (always the women) who have asked me to remove everything from pimples, scrapes, bruises, and mosquito bites (which I often oblige in at least a few pictures) to scars and birthmarks (which I usually talk people out of) to doing full-on surgical procedures like evening out the size of their breasts and replacing the missing teeth on their children (which I outright refuse.) I was even once asked to remove the "brown" tint in a woman's nipples and make them more pink... (?)

On a personal note

You may be wondering why this is such a big deal to me, and why I, as a photographer, am seemingly undermining the very industry I work within. Watch the intro to this bulimia episode of Intervention. (You can watch the whole episode on youTube or on Netflix if you have it.) The first minute and 45 seconds hits me really hard every time because the quote at the beginning of this article was in fact written by me, excerpted from a series of emails that were exchanged just a few days ago (yes, days) while I was waffling with whether or not to hit "post." Initially I was going to "Photoshop" my story but decided that it was better to present the raw data and let you see what disordered thinking actually looks like. I have a history of sexual trauma, bulimia, body dysmorphia, battered wife syndrome, unrealistic expectations of myself, and lingering issues of clinical perfectionism manifesting in insomnia and OCD-type behaviours. Is this a legacy I wish to pass along to your children? No. I am working diligently to NOT reveal my disordered thoughts to my own children, directly or indirectly - so far, I hide it as best as I can. But I'm only human, and they aren't stupid - I'm bound to slip up from time to time.

I was not held up to standards of perfection nor abused in any way by my parents but rather adopted intense amounts of guilt and shame via indoctrination to Catholicism while attending Catholic School. While we weren't Catholics, it was generally held that as children of divorced parents, my older sister and I would fare a better chance of growing up "right" and "good" if we had the influence of God to replace the father we only saw on alternating weekends and holidays. In class I had to learn the rules, but was not able to partake of the rewards for obeying them like being forgiven or going to heaven because I was not a card-carrying member. We didn't attend a Catholic church, I could not go to confession, I could not receive the sacraments, and in my mind was therefore destined to an eternity in purgatory until and unless I could prove I was worthy.

Oddly enough, a lot of ascetics (persons who deprive themselves of worldly pleasures in the name of spiritual enlightenment such as nuns and monks) see starving their bodies as yet another way to show their absolute devotion. It is believed that the first recorded case of anorexia nervosa was St. Catherine of Siena in about 1363 (she died at the age of 33 like Jesus) and Martin Luther, founder of the Lutheran church, wrote about his starvation habits in his journals as he struggled to live up to the impossible expectations of Catholic purity he put upon himself while becoming a Catholic Monk.

I transferred to the public school system in an affluent area in 6th grade. In our secularized world where people are more prone to visit the homes of the stars than the resting places of the saints, I found solace in obsessing with fashion magazines and ballerina culture. I read every issue of Cosmopolitan and Harper's Bazaar, designed clothing, and created paintings and drawings of delicately posed skeletal figures for years. Because I was short, I knew I had to be skinnier to look taller; the towering runway models were never bigger than a size 6, so I knew I needed to be smaller than that. You can understand how between my religious aspirations and my desire for physical perfection that would hide my spiritual inadequacy, the framework I had built for my self-perception and self-worth was a recipe for disaster. I was, frankly, deluded. And very very sick. As I withdrew more and more into my pattern of self-abuse, greater and greater demands were put on me to conform, and with the need to keep my private life private I chose to move out and live on my own when I was 15.

My commitment to disenchantment

My amazing friend Christine Hopaluk took this picture of me at our annual photography retreat in October of 2010. I am wearing black. My skin is pasty white. I am holding my silly pink heart guitar. My hair is in a pony bun. I am sporting heavy black-rimmed glasses. I am 40lbs overweight. I am smiling my crooked smile. After years of not letting people take pictures of me, or flipping the bird when they had me cornered, I am trying to be more gracious on what I call the "wrong" side of the camera. Even 5 years ago I would have been horrified to see much less share this picture. But, after much reflection, yup - this is me.

This was towards the end of the emails a few days ago:

"On the surface I think I'm afraid people will think I'm really screwed up in the head, but honestly, I have a feeling I'm pretty normal and average in terms of the number of skeletons in my closet, even if they are different from other people's skeletons. I know I don't want to be "thin" anymore - I just want to be healthy so my kids don't have to watch me kill myself or heaven forbid repeat my mistakes. Really, I don't know what healthy looks like but I vaguely recall what it feels like being 10 years old and on top of the world. I want that."

I am self-aware and self-accepting enough to continue managing my bulimia. My husband and I have chosen to make some long-overdue critical lifestyle changes in the direction of better health, too - it's always better doing things with support. But there it is, and there you have it. I'm not a freak, and I'm not stupid. I'm disenchanted.

What YOU can do to facilitate disenchantment

So now's the part where I potentially make a lot of enemies in the industry because we all know there's a very fine line between enhancing a photo and making a person look better than a real person. I'm going to come right out and call bullshit on every single professional photographer who says that every baby they have photographed is exceptionally perfect and that they seem to just attract beautiful flawless clients to photograph with their fancy expensive cameras. I've birthed 3 babies, been in the room while several more were born, and have photographed scores of them from mere minutes to several months old. I've also photographed enough people in enough shapes and sizes to know that even the most perfect light and make-up shot on any camera will not eliminate pores from a 40 year old woman, wrinkles from 90 year old man, or chicken pox scars and pimples off a kid. I also know that many photographers practice "selective publishing" of client photos to their websites and blogs meaning if you or your family are flawed or fat, you won't make it to the blog or website. In many cases, professional portrait photographers are just as culpable as the media for only putting images out there that display our current socially accepted standards of beauty. Considering that the currently accepted "beauty norm" of being tall, thin, and flawless only applies to a marginal percentage of the population, it needs to STOP.

My challenge to my fellow photographers, the ones who do extensive digital enhancements (we, your fellow photographers, all know who you are - we know what pictures look like SOOC) is simply to provide an invaluable service to your clients: the truth. Along with every photoshop-perfected image that you sell your clients I suggest that you provide an original 4x6 print or include a web-sized digital proof of one image used, one that is straight from the camera that you will be editing for their collection, but with not a single edit done - one that simply shows how perfectly human and perfectly flawed the people you are photographing are. Don't worry - your clients aren't going to lose faith in your ability as a photographer or spread nasty rumours - unless you've somehow managed to undo 30 years of media brainwashing I can promise they will love you all the same for both your honesty and your mad PS skillz. You could even provide a pamphlet, write a note on your website's homepage, or include a clause in your model release explicitly stating that Photoshopped images are hyper-realistic and advising parents to take the time necessary to educate their children, because knowledge is power.

Clients - ASK for an UNedited versions of yourself. Ask for one 4x6 digital file or print (you can pay the quarter for printing if the photographer is a schmuck) of your unedited photo. Think of it as a compass point for our youth, your own children, YOU... one that demonstrates honesty, integrity, and reality, so that there is evidence that you invested in a digital art piece "based" on a photograph you had taken of them. So they know you do not have an unrealistic expectation of how physically perfect they should be. Explain to them how perfect and beautiful they were, and how much you loved them from the moment they were conceived. SHOW them the photograph and explain you wanted art, and tell them that it wouldn't have mattered if the photographer didn't edit a single hair on their head.

If you are not willing as a photographer to offer or as a client to request this service, I have two questions for you: who would care if the pictures weren't retouched, and if they did, would you actually value their opinion? I'm pretty sure most people, in this sense, are like me: I love my kids, husband, family, friends, AND clients, warts and all. But, I also know there are people who don't; I urge you to succumb to that suspicious feeling that you might be preoccupied with a superficial and unrealistic view of beauty and reality and change your mind. Lately, there have been a rash of songs attempting to encourage us to be ourselves, warts and all. While Katy Perry and Lady Gaga have put in admirable efforts, and Bruno Mars did a solid in the face of crappy male music like this, I think P!nk's "Perfect" deserves a nod, since her and I have been in the same shoes for a while now working in industries where being vocal about the industry itself always borders on professional suicide.

I realize that this is a lot to digest in one sitting. Maybe take it in two or three so that it really hits home. If this strikes a chord with you, I ask you to educate those around you about the need for disenchantment, especially with our youth, who are sure to continue in the direction of self-destruction if we do not provide them with a compass point now.

I welcome your feedback and thoughts via email or comments, and hope that you, too, think this is an idea worth spreading. I also have two exciting new projects on the horizon, that are a little bit fun, a little bit odd, a little bit transformative - just like me. Anyone interested in participating should shoot me an email ;)

~muchLOVE,

Hope

P.S. A HUGE thank you goes out to the parents of the beautiful babies featured in the before and after edits of the suitcase shots - your willingness to let me do horrible digital things to your perfectly normal and beautiful children for the purpose of this article is appreciated in ways that words cannot encompass. Love love love A & D to bits and pieces, exactly the way they are, warts, pimples, pee squirts and all...

Note: "Baby Art" is a phrase which has been both officially and unofficially "trademarked" by a number of agencies in both Canada and the US. Anyone can put "TM" behind something but until you see the ® symbol it isn't registered - which reminds me I need to update pictureLOVE™ to ® before the end of March...

Every effort was made to avoid copyright infringement by using images that are available via Google as part of the public domain with consideration given to leaving watermarks, photo credits, and other pertinent information intact when available. Any person wishing to have references to their material removed is invited to contact me with specific details on how I have infringed on their copyright and I will immediately remove images from this post and replace them with links to the original source. For information on current and reform laws regarding Canadian Copyright please visit this site.

Can of Worms: sloppy marketing

2011-02-09T22:17:00.019-07:00

I came across a link today asking me to go vote for someone who could win something if they got enough votes. Sounded easy enough. I'm happy to see people win things they want, though I pride myself on being as objective as possible when voting. I like to take things under consideration. For example, if the prize is a necessity for one person and a luxury for another, I tend to vote for the person who would otherwise be without. If it's say a photography contest for "best picture" where the client is the winner, I like to vote based on the merits of the images as opposed to whomever sent me there to vote. That sort of thing.

The link I stumbled across today via a friend of a friend was for someone to win online mentoring. Great! I'm all about mentoring! Since this was a contest for photographers, I was pretty excited, hoping to give an upstart a fair shake at getting ahead. Off to the site I go to vote, hoping to read some sort of little bios or surf the websites of the entrants and consider who might benefit from such an opportunity, when what do I find but some 200 "contestants" with the instructions to TELL ALL YOUR FRIENDS TO COME AND VOTE! Huh!? How was that fair to the people who had entered? It wasn't being a) voted on merits or b) drawn as a random prize but was built as a popularity contest with the goal of increasing traffic to that website. Scam marketing. Sorry, all you loser entrants who don't have enough friends to bring me exposure... Booooo!!!!

BUT WAIT! Isn't free marketing, free marketing? Well, OK - sure, but free marketing isn't synonymous with "clever" or "targeted." I can go spray paint the address of my website on the shopping carts of homeless people downtown, or write it in bathroom stalls for free, too... This is unlike a photographer posting, for example, a favourite themed wedding photo competition wherein the bride and groom will win a prize if their photo wins a popularity contest because the people voting are actually friends and family who were probably at the wedding and want them to get free stuff.

BUT WAIT! Aren't these both examples of word of mouth? In order to be effective, when efficacy in this case would ultimately be measured in terms of future investments from the increased traffic to this website, word of mouth generally requires some sort of testimonial or endorsement from a close personal friend or a satisfied client. A happy client directing their friends and family to vote for them is a bang-on example of targeted marketing because the client already endorses the photographer and are bringing people who have probably already met the photographer to a place where they are going to see more samples of work that showcase the photographer's talent, and that will likely strengthen loyalty and build relationships that ultimately translate into future clients.

BUT WAIT! If enough people see it, then someone *might* sign up. I have to pause for a minute to point out that "viral" does not equate to money, but it *can* lead to fame, popularity, and social rank, something that we as a culture have come to think of as a currency. For those of you who doubt me, I would question then why we seem to be so obsessed with the mundane activities of so many "reality" stars or internet phenoms who are nothing more than a flash in the pan, whose fame (and fortune) lasts for mere days unless they are able to make big enough spectacles of themselves to remain in the public eye. Usually, this is as a result of them engaging in stupidity or crime, but I digress....

Let's put this into a different context. Let's assume this is your child entering a colouring contest run by a local chain restaurant that you really hold no opinion of. If you entered them thinking that they stood a "fair" chance of winning, whether by random draw or by judging based on merits like staying within the lines and following the colour-by-numbers, but found out after the fact that your child could only win if they were able to win the popularity vote after enough of your friends made a minimum purchase at the restaurant in order to be eligible to vote, chances are you'd be irritated if not outright irate. Think about it.

I propose that, "Hey, someone might get free stuff," isn't "word of mouth" so much as a hook... for a scam. When the person running the rigged fake contest opened the votes, it sounded something like a practice acceptance speech for the Oscars. "I can't believe how many people have been to my blog..." Yeah. Whatever. You lost me at hello. I don't care if you want to be rich or famous... just don't lie to me or try and trick me into playing along. I have some wonderful and amazing friends who I think are nuts for swimming with the piranhas on their mission to be the Next Top Paid Famous Photographer. But at least they are honest about their motives. This? It was dishonest and left a bad taste in my mouth, like those scratch and win mail promotions where the only way you *might* win a prize is if you're willing to listen to a sales pitch for vacuum cleaners or a time share in Mexico. (P.S. You never win unless you invest...)

Historically, successful (note I say successful) marketing campaigns are very well thought out and take into consideration the input of people clever enough to know not only WHO but HOW and WHY people will invest time or money or support. They either a) identify their market and design their goods and products to meet consumer wants/needs or b) find the market who will want/need the product or service they are selling and promote it to them through appropriate channels. I'm pretty confident that "someone else might win a prize if they are popular enough" won't make any top ten successful campaign lists, though I could see it winning a spam award. You don't need a degree to know that. As one of the kids who never could (or really wanted to) win the popularity contests and on a philosophical level strictly opposes the sort of social elitist mentality that precipitates in things like kids being marginalized or ostracized (or beat up) on the playground for wearing the wrong clothes or having parents in the wrong profession, I won't be promoting this rigged contest much less passing the name of the person offering a prize of mentorship along.

I voted for the friend of the friend (she obviously wanted to win) and left - but I felt no more desire to go explore the site. Marketing FAIL. With a background in arts marketing (oh, goodness, yes yes, for real - it's what I went to post-secondary for, not photography or writing nasty blog posts and pissing people off, so no no, I'm not just making stuff up...) in my unabashedly educated guess, at best it's misleading, sloppy and presumptuous (read: lazy) to drag me over to your site and assume I'm that easily taken in. Marketing FAIL.

OK, so someone pointed out to me that maybe this person just didn't know any better. Well, they had a motive (self-promotion) and did it at the expense of their supposed contestants (friends with friends) with no benefit to the unsuspecting people (spammers) who ended up there under the pretense of helping a fellow photographer or acquaintance win a prize. If this was done intentionally, it would be dirty, but if it wasn't... OK - either way it's lazy. If *I* am personally not eligible to gain any benefit, and there's not a fair chance of the people entered in the contest winning unless they have everyone from their gramma to their dog-poop scooper on their FB friends list, what's my motive for giving a damn about raising the profile of an industry competitor under the guise of a popularity contest that flies in the face of common sense and decency?

So after all is said and done, I'd say I have been insulted, save for the fact that the prize is for mentoring in... marketing. Oh, sweet irony...

SO, if you want to enter a contest where everyone has a fair shot at winning, check out my beloved friend Tammy's contest here or, if you want to vote for some great photography where the clients win, try out my other amazing friend Trina's top ten contests here.

And, just to up the ante, I'm going to give you some FREE marketing advice, right here, right now, and you don't have to pretend to win a popularity contest or tell a single person if you don't want. The best thing you can do to ensure happiness and fulfillment in any business venture is to operate with integrity, honesty, and fairness. A win-win attitude will prevent you from getting trapped in the idea of your success being measured by your notoriety or bank account, and will allow you the pleasure of enjoying the inherent value your clients get by simply having you on their team. If you want to be rich and famous, then this is the wrong blog to be reading. If you think it'd be pretty cool to have your brides include you in the first people they call when they find out they are expecting and to have 5 year olds who camp out on their stairs waiting for you to arrive, you've come to the right place.

HONK IF YOU BELIEVE IN FAIR AND HONEST MARKETING!

Can of Worms: Anything you can do, I can do better...

2011-02-02T01:44:00.004-07:00

If you're a new photographer, here are some tips on professional courtesy and free advice about starting up. If you decide to read the rest of this post, don't lose heart - that photographer friend you've been harassing doesn't hate you, they just need some space...

Your friends and family have been nothing but supportive of you since you decided to pick up a camera and pursue your dream and turn your hobby into a source of income that doesn't make you cringe when you think about going to "work." They've watched your budding passion blossom into a thriving business and seen how genuinely happy you are doing it. Then one day, about a year after you've finally got it almost mostly figured out, one of them comes to you and says, "I'm going to be a photographer now, too!" They proudly describe their new equipment to you, which can cause either fits of laughter or fits of envy depending on what gear they've purchased. They begin picking your brain and at first you kind of appreciate being the "expert" but then it starts wearing on your nerves. Soon they start taking on "clients" (usually people you are both friends with or related to - maybe both) and before you know it they own all the same props, are complaining about the things you've known for ages and boasting about how much business they're generating, bragging about their first magazine or CD cover and how many destination weddings they've booked for the coming year... Their website is almost identical to yours - same kind of music, same template (maybe in a different shade of blue), same packages and pricing, same promotions...

On one hand, you should happy this person shares your passion. I mean really, why wouldn't you be excited that your bestie can talk shop with you now, too? And why wouldn't we all love to have a family member to refer clients to when we're too busy to take them on - nothing wrong with a little nepotism, right? It should be perfect! But in reality, you are hurt and angry. You feel betrayed and frustrated. Photography used to be YOUR thing. How can you be genuinely happy for the person who stole your great idea and probably some of your clients, too? What if they are better than you? More successful? You're shaken to the core and don't know what to do about it... how could someone you know and love destroy you like this?

Well, the bad news is, it happens to most of us. The good news is, there are things you can do to stop it, things you can do along the way to keep it to a dull roar, and things you can do to redefine the relationship if it's already gone too far. I can't address every possible situation, but they're not entirely unique. So, I'll give you a few tips based on my own experiences and a few twists shared with me by others. The best news of all is that it all usually comes out in the wash. Let's break it down.

First off, when this person buys their camera, avoid being jealous or busting out laughing. Any wise photographer knows it's not about the camera - you're as likely to get your butt whipped by some talented wingnut shooting with a free camera out of a Cheerios box as to see someone with $10,000 slung around their neck who can't take a picture unless it's bright and sunny outside. A camera is only ever as good as its operator. Don't sweat it either way.

Now that this person is armed with some sort of instrument, the questions come rolling in. Emails, phonecalls, messages on your Facebook page.... My favourite has always been, "How do you make the stuff in the background blurry?" I teach, so it's pretty easy for me to tell people they should sign up for tutoring or classes and I'm happy to share that information. If you don't teach, and don't want to have your will to live sucked by this person, delegate the teaching to someone who does. There are several avenues for photographer education - from workshops and private lessons to accredited programs through colleges and universities. If you start handing out too many nuggets, when you finally tire of it you will have a hard time saying no without a) hurting this person or b) feeling like a big old meanie. Save yourself the hassle and nip it in the bud early. If you are already past the point of no return and have shared every tidbit you know, then chances are good you feel drained and used, and guilty for feeling drained and used. Don't beat yourself up - you'll know better for next time. Keep a list of local colleges and workshops handy as well as a list of books and websites you've found helpful, and pass the info along. You'd be surprised how many people end up with a really expensive camera that collects a lot of dust when they figure out it's not the camera that's taking pictures.

If they make it past this point, it's wise of you to keep a list of business references handy, too, because as soon as they start (or while) they are figuring out their equipment, the next thing that usually happens is this person starts taking clients. While they are "building their portfolio" they will continue picking your brain about locations and poses and add to that questions about business practices, insurance, and pricing. Whether they decide to start off doing freebies, charging peanuts, at your price level, or at some outrageous amount that people in the industry for 40 years with entire housefuls of awards are charging doesn't change the fact that they will, at some point, end up shooting mutual friends and/or family whether they make a conscious effort to steal them away or the "clients" decide to try them out of their own volition. Sure, you ought to be happy they are getting off the ground, but you also feel betrayed.

One thing you must learn to do in this industry is be very objective about this, because for as long as you are selling your services as a photographer, you will be in competition with other photographers. You must make a very conscious effort to remove the 'friend' or 'family' label and call them "clientele," period or you will take every person who passes you up personally. This only purpose this will serve is whittling away your confidence and affecting your self-esteem. Remember that people hire photographers for any number of different reasons, for a variety of purposes, taking into consideration any number of factors. There are some articles about shopping for photographers here and here and here, but to sum up, they look at a photographer's pricing, packages, experience, availability, style, and affiliations. Often, your "clientele" will give the newcomer a bit of business NOT to turn their back on or snub you but to spread around opportunity, of course making the assumption you're OK with it. Maybe your prices have doubled or tripled and you no longer fit in the budgets of some "clientele." Perhaps you're not available on a date they need and they figure they are doing YOU a favour by choosing to hire your friend or family member instead of an outsider. Sometimes this person has a new or unique style that your former "clientele" likes equally or (gasp!) prefers. Try and remember when you first started out whose clients you took, whether by actively promoting yourself, being available when someone else was not, or having a better price. It makes it an easier pill to swallow - remember that when the honeymoon phase is over and this person has blasted through your entire collection of mutual friends and family, they will have to go out and develop their own clientele. If they do a crappy job and have horrible customer service, they will fail. If they are any good, they will branch out and hopefully be referring their new clients back to you when THEY are too busy.

I know this sounds weird, but being a little impersonal is sometimes the only way you can eventually find a way to be genuinely supportive of and happy for this person's continued success. It will allow you to view reframe what sounds like them "bragging"or "showboating" to what is usually just them sharing their own excitement over new opportunities with you, their photographer friend, who must understand how very wonderful it is because you live it, too! Watch their journey from a distance if you can, and try not to gloat when they make mistakes or pout when they win. Have a little confidence in yourself - if all it takes is one person to shut your business down, then you probably were facing inevitable failure anyways. But assuming you have made it past all the nonsense, you will find that within a few months this person has defined their own style, revamped their website and pricing to reflect their own agenda, and you are both established with your own clientele. You feel as confident referring this person out as they do passing their people along to you. You have lots of shop to talk about, and will sit and reminisce when this person inevitably gets a stalker of their own, at which point you'll both laugh and have another glass of wine. Which you'll take a self-portrait of and write about on your blog. (My amazing friend Christine wrote a great blog about moving forward called "The Road from Envy to Acceptance" that will put this into perspective even more. And make you dance, too.)

Now, there is, every once in a while, a Nasty McNastypants who comes along, who actively undermines your best efforts to be supportive and civil by being, well - just plain nasty. These people go above and beyond annoying vampires. Often, these people tend to be casual acquaintances - friends of friends - who have seen you around local gatherings enough to know your name and a handful of personal details like how many kids you have, when you fought with your spouse last, and what your favourite TV shows are, but don't really know you well enough to care. From the fringe of your inner circle, they rape you for every bit of information you have under the pretence of getting to know you better and unapologetically ride your coattails until they can swoop in beside you to steal clients, hand out flyers to your brothers and sisters, offer to beat or match your pricing, spread rumours (or make up lies) about your personal life, and basically stab you in the back 16 ways from Sunday. I have experienced this only once, but have heard some horror stories about this sort of thing happening repeatedly in smaller communities and rural areas where there are only a handful of clients to go around and everybody seems to knows everybody.

If you are like this person, shame on you - a business built on using others and resorting to deceit and trickery makes you a talented manipulator, not a talented photographer. It'll all come back to bite you in the ass one day and while the nasty in you makes me hope the person whose life you made a living hell is there to catch it on camera, I actually just hope you learn how to be a decent person and make amends. But the sad fact is, some people are just selfish and ruthless and have no scruples or decency: they can and will do everything in their power to elevate themselves, including destroying whatever relationship they shared with you. Things like this break my heart and make me sick at the same time. It's counter-productive to make enemies in this industry - I've learned over the years just how important it is to have a solid support network of colleagues: to vent with, to celebrate successes, to bounce ideas off, to hang out with, and above all, to trust with a valued client referral and take over in case of emergency. Sure, you can reschedule some things, but imagine the damage to your professional reputation not having anyone willing to step in if you had a family emergency or severe illness on someone's wedding day or for the birth of their child? There's that saying, be careful whose toes you step on today because they might be attaches to the ass you have to kiss tomorrow. If these are your true colours, go be a black sooty rainbow on someone else's planet.

If you, beloved reader, are suffering with a person like this, my heart sincerely goes out to you. It's a horrible feeling to be stalked, copied, used, abused, discarded, and eventually badmouthed for no apparent reason. There is a point, once you've exhausted your ability to be impartial, that you simply need to cut your losses. Defend yourself and your integrity without lowering yourself to their level by engaging in the same types of behaviours, and avoid giving your frenemy ammunition to use against you at all costs. If the situation warrants it, cut this person off completely. Delete them from your fan page and mail list, block them on Facebook, delete their emails, and avoid saying anything to or about them in social circles. Be as bored and detached as you can with everything about them, and when you hear they falter or piss new people off, nod and smile politely and say, "That's a shame..." and move on. If you need to vent, vent carefully - pick someone in your very innermost inner circle who you know will not think you are being petty or jealous. someone who will validate your feelings and level you off instead of whipping you into a vindictive frenzy. Meet toxicity with magnanimity and you'll always come out on top.

So, hopefully this gives you a bit of insight and something of a roadmap to follow if your emotions are running so high you can't think clearly. Breathe, and carry on. I promise that this, too, shall pass. If you have a horror or success story to share, feel free to post it in the comments - no names please! - or drop me an email h dot walls at shaw dot ca. If you want to share this article, please link back to this, the original :)

muchLOVE,

Hope

Can of Worms: Insecurity vs. Healthy Competition

2011-02-01T15:07:00.003-07:00

In the month of January I had 3 unrelated incidents where fellow photographers (who don't know each other, oddly) shared disturbing tales of run-ins with other 'togs. Generally speaking, there is always going to be competition in the marketplace. This is to be expected. It is therefore expected that we will all build our clientele, set our prices, advertise, etc. in the same pool as other photographers, where there is no standardization of any kind, from pricing, to services, to packages. Each of us makes these aspects of our businesses work for us in any number of ways, for any number of reasons. I've always said there is no right or wrong answer, but I think there actually is ONE wrong answer: letting your insecurity about your success as business turn healthy competition into backstabbing, snubbing, and badmouthing.

Let me be the first to say, there's enough business to go around so before you start on a smear campaign or actively stealing clients or whatever else leads to making enemies in this profession, here are some basic courtesies that I choose to extend to my fellow photographers, both newcomers and old hands like, which you may want to take into consideration. If you are looking for guidance on what to do when your best friend/in-law/cousin etc. decides they want to be a photographer and starts raining on your parade and stealing your thunder, here is a post that addresses that separately.

1) Always be civil, courteous, and genuine. Even if you dislike another photographer's style or think their business practices are shady, there are ways of expressing this honestly and diplomatically. Saying, "I don't really care for his work," or, "I'm not sure I agree with her marketing tactics," is much better than blurting out, "That amateur crook SUCKS!" Also, if you've had a run-in with a nasty photographer, magnanimity will serve you well... so when you're out on the circuit and meet a senior or junior colleague, friend or enemy, be classy and smile even if it tastes bad. Whether you are old or young, pro or newbie, full-time or weekend warrior, being polite never goes out of style.

2) Maybe you think (or even know) that the new momtographer up the street is charging next to nothing, and a hack who probably shoots in auto, to boot. Fine. We all started somewhere, and I can guarantee that there were those established in the biz already who scowled at us when we burst onto the scene, full of vim and vigour and a desire to revolutionize the world of photography. Remember that if a photographer's prices are set low or at introductory pricing, they are going to attract the clients who would would probably need to haggle you on your prices because you are outside their budget to begin with - therefore, the momtographer isn't really stealing "your" clients, is she? As with any job, salary is commensurate with experience and skills.

3) If you are that new kid on the block, show some respect to those who have put in their time. You may be providing a valuable service at an affordable price which is a great place to be, but that doesn't give you any right or reason to badmouth, disrespect, or discount the work of your forebears. It's also not for you to decide what another photographer's services are worth and tell the clients you're stealing that they are overcharging. We have valuable stories to share and I can personally guarantee that after you've been doing this long enough, you'll have a much better perspective on the whole thing - but you won't have much support (read: referrals, advice, and social invitations) if you've alienated the very people you should be networking with. Watch your mouth now so you don't come back to bite yourself in the ass later.

4) Did you know that the practice of bartering was intended for vendors in the marketplace to exact a higher price from the well-heeled, not so that buyers could get a lower price? Generally, community members sold goods and services to each other at decent prices and inflated them when they saw money walk by. It was the Quakers who introduced fixed pricing, bringing in a sense a certain kind of "honesty" to the marketplace - anyone who went to buy eggs from them paid the exact same price. I think it was Andy Warhol who said that the best thing about Coke was that the president couldn't buy a better bottle than a bum on the street. Generally, if you make a practice of adjusting your price up or down, you may not only put yourself in a position to always get bartered, but may get a reputation for being a bit shady. If you are adjusting your pricing specifically to undercut your competition ie) asking what quote a potential client got from another photographer then deliberately coming in lower, you can be sure there are going to be some apple carts to set right later. Ditto if you are providing crappy customer service to the people who you've accepted less money from and better to those who paid more. Now, I'm not going to tell you what to do with your pricing or customer service - you can be as rubbery or underhanded or flexible or fair as you like. Just be warned that the bed you're making now is the one you're going to have to lay in later.

5) Learning to appreciate the skills and styles of other photographers is in my opinion extremely important. Recognizing the contributions of both peer- and industry-acknowledged experts is a necessary part of developing as a photographer, as is respecting each others' right to creative license. There are photographers out there whose work is technically amazing, and those who are free and airy and spiritual in their approach, and yet others who create a mash-up of digital and photographic images... and none of these styles is right or wrong. It's not your or my place to judge, even if we personally don't *like* the images. We can be honest when expressing whether we like someone's work, but being hurtful, crude, or ignorant when another photographer is hired or wins an award or gets published is tacky and immature. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and there's no accounting for taste.

6) When we are just new or if we are stuck in a creative rut, it's easy to be jealous of someone's skill or style, especially if that person is experiencing a high degree of success. While sometimes we just find these people inspiring, there are those of us who are tempted by the dark side. One way is by ripping off large recognizable elements of that photographer's style. Let me be the first to say that seeing an exact duplicate of one of your "signature" shots/your monthly special/your new price list/the catchy slogan you just made up in a close colleague's portfolio really hurts. And while it's one thing to recognize trends that have become popular some would argue to the point of overkill (selective colouring on B&W images, boudoir, cross-processing), if we lack the technical skill or ability to capitalize on these trends, it can lead those of us feeling particularly insecure to actively knock that particular trend. This wouldn't be a problem save for the fact there are quite a few photographers out there who would take it personally if those trends made up a substantial part of their portfolio. Don't let your own shortcomings turn you into a thief or an insensitive ass.

7) Now, there's a HUGE difference between expressing dislike for another photographer's work and just plain making up outright lies and malicious claims intended to interrupt business or damage the professional reputation of the competition. For this point I would like to present a case study. With pin-up clothes making their comeback and boudoir photography being such a boom for the past 3 years, while there are people who specialize in this genre, there has been a huge scramble for photographers to incorporate this style of session into the services they provide. One (established family but expanding to include private individual boudoir) photographer implying that another (rising with a focus in wedding and boudoir) photographer's sell-out boudoir marathons were "unhygienic" which is clearly ridiculous, while in a different town, another (new and desperate to squeeze out the competition at any cost) photographer reported an (established but in the same small community) photographer to a popular networking site for displaying "pornographic" images, which took several weeks to sort out. If you're bored and feel like reading a novella's worth of blog posts, I dispelled a few myths about boudoir here. Sticks and stones may break bones and words can hurt someone's business.

8) Whether we like it or not, there are always going to be cliques in this industry like any other - groups of people who take a workshop or attend a conference together often develop genuine friendships and reciprocal partnerships. Of course it's hard when you feel like an outsider - everyone wants to be accepted - but don't expect this to happen if you a) don't show up and b) be polite (see point No. 1) Being a loner is tough. And lonely. While yes there are some very junior-high-esque people in this industry like any other, for the most part we're a wonderful, friendly, supportive bunch with very diverse and interesting perspectives and backgrounds. We're tall, short, fat, skinny, old, young, rich, poor, timid, outspoken, rebellious, conformist, comical, serious, chic, geek, and everything in between. Set your judgments aside so you can embrace and be embraced. Strive to be inclusive instead of exclusive.

This is a random smattering of points, in no particular order. If anyone out there has a tip or a story they'd like to add, I encourage you to post it in the comments or send me an email - no names please! If you think I'm off my rocker, I'm open to debate. If you want to share this article, please link back to this, the original.

muchLOVE,

Hoperoo

Can of Worms: instilling confidence and common sense instead of fear in the affianced

2010-02-17T10:04:00.035-07:00

Dear Brides,

OK – let’s be honest here. Most brides? They have a budget. Even if the $5000 photographers make you hysterical over resorting to risking your eternal happiness on a newbie and promise that your bouquet will look better than a bouquet, if your budget is strict you are going to have to hire someone who fits within your budget, or have NO photographs of your wedding. While none of us as a photographer wants to get hired on price alone (honestly, brides - it hurts our little egos to be the cheapest of your preferred photographers) the bottom line is, even HIGH priced photographers get price shopped.

While some people can’t spend too much, there are those who wouldn’t dream about spending less than $5000 on their photographer. They actually seek out photographers with higher prices for whatever personal reasons they may have. In different social circles, there are unwritten rules about these sorts of things, so before you go beakin' off about how ridiculous it is to spend tens of thousands of dollars on your wedding photographer, keep in mind that you don't walk in their Louboutins. To them, how much they spent is as much of a topic as other social circles discussing how little they spent. There are no judgments here.

The rule of thumb is simply this: brides, use common sense. Regardless of your budget, do your research and ask to see the portfolios and complete package details of your potential $500 or $5000 photographer. If they won't give you a price over the phone but you're being invited to the photographer's home theatre for a private screening, it's safe to assume they are high-end, high-cost photographers. If they seem grateful (if not desperate) to sell you wedding package, don't have a link to some online images to review, and keep dropping their price and offering you extras, it's safe to assume they are relatively new and need to get some experience under their belt. Then there's everything in between - the "Let's meet at Tim Horton's" vs. the "Let me buy you a coffee at Starbuck's" vs. the "Let me buy you lunch" vs. the "Let's go out for steak dinner and toast ourselves with Cristal." How you like to be romanced by your photographer is up to you, and there's no right or wrong answer in terms of what you want.

Make sure you meet them in person at least once, and preferably have an e-session or pre-wedding shoot before deciding. This IS, after all, one of the most important and special days of your life. If you hire based on price and portfolio alone, you may or may not get what you pay for, especially if you skip that important part of meeting your photographer and reviewing their preliminary pictures of you. Can you imagine showing up on your wedding day to discover you hate your photographer? I think THAT would be even worse than hating the photos.

Brides, show some respect – while you may have a budget, so does your photographer. Your photographer isn’t a beach vendor you can haggle down on the price. How would you like it if your employer negotiated your wage every payday? "Well, your previous employer was paying you less. And my cousin said she'd take your job for half your salary. Plus, I met your family at the mall that one time, so we kind of know each other now... how about I take 25% off your salary and you throw in 2 hours for free each week?" Now, making your best offer is different than haggling. If you can only afford $2500 and want the $25,000 photographer, you may want to decide what's most important to you (the formals, the ceremony, whatever) and see if they offer an hourly rate. Lay your offer on the table (make it a reasonable offer) and see what comes back. Maybe you can't afford full-day coverage, but you can afford to have the formals shot by your preferred photographer, and leave the ceremony and the reception to the cousin with the camera. If they don't have anything to offer, you have two options: serve your guests chicken on paper plates instead of lobster on china to make room in your budget, or keep looking.

Whether they are charging $500 or $5000 or $50,000 doesn’t matter. Assume that the price you are given is firm, and if it doesn’t suit your budget – keep looking, because the GOOD NEWS is there are so many photographers out there (some would say the market is saturated) that if you look long and hard enough, you WILL find someone who a) you like, b) whose work you like, c) whose packages you like and can d) afford.

Another thing to keep in mind: if the photographer looks too good to be true, read the fine print - "Weddings Starting at $500" might mean the photographer charges an hourly rate of $500. Or, you might be hiring someone for their first ever wedding. Yes, every now and again you will luck out with a phenom-in-the-making newbie ‘tog whose skills blow everyone away for just $500. Chances are good that they won’t stay at that price (so don’t tell all your friends how cheap they were, just how great they were). In the same token, an experienced (and usually higher priced) photographer is invaluable because they know their camera like the back of their hand and also where they need to stand to get a great shot, so if you find one with a higher but reasonable price tag whose portfolio doesn't show this, keep looking...

I advise you to keep your expectations realistic – that way you set yourself up to be wowed instead of disappointed. What about your photographers abilities? What about their style? You've reviewed portfolios. You've contacted them. You've given your potential photographer the impression that you like their work and are hiring them based on the style of photographs they take. Right? Because if you've seen their work, then you know what you're signing up for, and would never dream of asking them to take pictures like ~>insert name of some other photographer here<~ then complaining afterwards because your $500 steal of a deal photographer couldn't deliver, right? Because that would just be silly.

This isn’t directed just at $500 wedding coverage – it’s for ANY wedding, because after it's all said and done, regardless of whether your pictures come on a CD with handwriting on it, or laid out in a glossy-paged platinum-coated book, you're still just buying photographs, period. You may want to assume you’re automatically going to have an amazing experience with your wedding photographer because you paid more, but price does not dictate and certainly doesn’t guarantee pictures that you’ll cherish for a lifetime. The pictures will evoke a memory, and if your memory of the photographer is amazing, the picture will bring back a positive memory instead of reminding you of your lackluster day with a cranky photographer.

Price also doesn't denote professionalism. While some of us may not personally know a time when $500 was a huge investment, for many people it’s difficult to afford what is considered a modest wedding photographer. EVERYONE is worthy of respect, and professionalism is a behaviour, not something you demand with a fancy lens. If a photographer doesn't even reply to your, "What can we get for $2500?" email inquiry, you didn't want them anyways - they could at least refer you out. If your photographer sends you an email that looks like texting or shows up at Tim Horton's complaining of a hangover and dropping the f-bomb, there's a problem, no matter what the price tag is. If your photographer is complaining about stupid brides on their blog or in their Facebook status updates, it's all bad. Walking into any photographer interview with an open mind will allow you to see the subtle nuances that are clues to how professional your photographer is, and I assure you that from $500 and $50,000, photographers run the full spectrum.

I suppose it would make sense to explain how photographers price themselves. Essentially, they start off at whatever price they wish, which may be free, may be $500, or may be $5000. There are two schools of thought – start low and build rapidly, and start high and wait for them to come to you slowly, both of which work, both with their own set of pros and cons, and both are completely valid. Then there’s an adjustment period, where their price is adjusted to strike a balance between a) how much they need (or want) to make and b) what people are willing to pay for them. They often don’t stop increasing their price until people stop calling - this is called 'what the market will bear.' And before you start thinking we are all money-grubbing greedy-meisters, the truth is that any commodity available for purchase is handled the same way. It’s called maximizing profits, and it’s what businesses do. Your photographer isn’t your best friend – they are their company, which was set up to make money. It just so happens our job includes, you know, the best gigs ever...

There are both a hard and soft costs associated with investing in equipment and editing software and having the skills required to use them. Most photographers, over time, accumulate and use multiple lenses, cameras, and high-end editing software. To give you an idea of hard costs, if you want your photographer to have access to a fisheye lens for your wedding because you love the look, they cost upwards of ~$600. If you booked your wedding in a church where no flash photography is allowed, your photographer is likely going to whip out their f2.8 with a focal length anywhere from 70mm to 300mm. "Cheap" versions of these lenses start at over $1000. The most inexpensive entry-level DSLR camera body w/ kit lens out there is about $600. We also like to insure our equipment - which isn't cheap... So, if you expect your photographer to have multiple camera bodies, several specialized lenses, and is crazy-talented in Photoshop, then you will need to look at spending more than $500. Also, a legal license for Adobe Photoshop CS4 retails for about $250, with the CS4 suite topping out over $1500. Photoshop training at most educational institutions runs from $250 to $500 for each of three levels. So. If all you need are a few pictures to scrapbook and you already know how to use Photoshop yourself, that $500 photographer may be perfect for you, but if you need an expert to remove the black eye your groom got at his stag party...

The more bells and whistles that are included with your photographer, the higher the price is going to be. If all you want is access to a disc so you can scrapbook your own wedding, don’t be dazzled by the organic leather bound flush mount album that will bathe your cat, conserve energy, and make waffles on Sundays all while impressing the neighbours with its stylish good looks and ensuring a happy marriage by showcasing the day that kicked off your wedded bliss. If you EXPECT and WANT to be taken out for filet mignon while viewing a private screening of your custom wedding package which includes the aforementioned organic leather bound flush mount album instead of having a disc of watermarked low-res files, it’s safe to assume that you will be paying more because it requires skill and involves hard costs - even at 'photographer's pricing' a good quality leather bound album is $500 without shipping and without factoring in the soft cost of the amount of time it takes to design, proof, modify, upload, and deliver the album.

Anytime you see a photographer include a product or service, their overhead goes up, so your price goes up, with a mark-up. This includes everything right down to the fancy packaging that your photos come in. Photographer uploads the images and you can order them online? Price increase – someone has to sit and upload all those files. Photographer has a booth at the wedding fair? Price goes up – those booths are thousands of dollars to run. Fancy custom-made website with nice branding instead of a template? You’re going to pay for that. And, I suppose this is the right place to mention that having an award-winning member of ~>insert acronym for some hoity toity photography organization or other<~ is costly. Attendance at conferences, memberships and competition printing, mounting, and entry fees add up to thousands per annum – the more award winning/networked/famous/renowned/well-known your photographer is, the higher your price is going to be. If this is a deciding factor for you, be prepared to pay.

At the opposite end of that spectrum, there are lots of photographers who really don't care about competitions and conferences. They just want to shoot, and often aren't considered "professionals." Sometimes they are called Momtographers, GWC (Guy or Girl With Camera), or Weekend Warriors. While there are hacks out there, to be certain, if you aren't sure about hiring someone who isn't a card-carrying member of either a national or international organization, use due diligence when investigating them - does their portfolio shine? Do they have great references? Can they produce a valid business license? Then chances are they are totally legit, just not into the photographer social scene. *Note - Federal Tax Laws (Canadian) state that GST must be collected and remitted once you reach an annual income of $30,000 from your business. If you can see that your photographer is clearly doing more business than that but isn't charging GST, be cautious, but if it looks like they only take on a few clients a year, don't worry about it - they are still operating legally.

While some established photographers may try and scare the bejeebers out of you, the truth is they are preying on your emotions and hoping to scare you into spending more money. Chances are good they are sincere in their belief that you don't want to risk losing memories on your special day, but they don't even realize that they are essentially using emotional blackmail on potential clients. Brides - have a little faith in yourself – you aren’t stupid, you know what your budget is, and you know what you like. If you can afford $2500, go and find the BEST $2500 photographer you can. If you want to spend $5000 or even $25,000, somewhere out there is a photographer who will make it worth your investment. If you are only able to spend $500, don’t lose faith – there are always new photographers in the ranks looking to get a couple of weddings under their belt to build a portfolio. As long as you go in with reasonable expectations you’ll be just fine.

To sum up, I'm not telling you to go out and find the cheapest photographer you can. I'm telling you to find someone whose portfolio and personality fits YOUR budget, whether that's $500, $5000, or $50,000. Keep your expectations realistic so you don't set yourself up for disappointment. Hire (and later refer your photographer to others) because they did a good job, not because they were the cheapest. Despite what you may have heard, there is no wrong photographer out there. Because it’s such a broad and diverse industry ranging from self-taught to university educated, film to digital, modern to formal style, and because everyone has different artistic tastes, pretty much anyone can find a photographer that fits. Regardless of what your budget and lifestyle are like, with a little legwork you will find the right photographer for YOU.

Whether that means you choose to give a new photographer the opportunity to get their business rolling or have a world-renowned photographer document your day, the only thing that matters is that you love your photographer.

Can of Worms: quantity v. quality - a challenge

2010-01-18T23:14:00.005-07:00

So, while we're talking about price fixing and other such nonsense, I thought it might be interesting to put forth an inquiry into how many of us are doing quantity v. quality shots.

I'm old-school, going on just over 3 years as a digital photographer, and I'm still stingy because developing film was damn expensive and I'm horrible at deleting images even if I think I won't use them lol. So I used to shoot once, carefully and cautiously, but nowadays I often shoot twice, and I might even review to make SURE if it's an important shot since I'm digital, but usually 3 is the max I grab. I'm patient. I like to wait for the shot instead of shooting non-stop and consecutively. Again, this is deeply ingrained - I shot film for so many years that the idea of doing what some call 'blast & hope' is beyond my comprehension, but I am sure is the saving grace of many a photographer just starting out.

That being said, there's that theory that if you put enough monkeys in a room with typewriters, one of them will eventually write Shakespeare. It has its basis in mathematical probability, and it quite smoothly translates to photographers. From talking to a lot of people, I've learned that the average number of images shot at a full-day wedding is between 2500 and 3000-ish. While I know some go as high as 5000, other are as low as 1000, which still seems soooooo excessive to me as we would shoot maybe 250 or 275 images (10 or 12 rolls of film) and anyone using 20 rolls of film was classified as the proverbial monkey in the days of film - and that was with two cameras - one loaded with B&W and the other with colour!

I think (for me personally) a lot of it is just getting lazy, but in talking to several other togs I've learned that there is a lot of 'blast and hope', not just from the newbies who are praying they don't screw up their first wedding, but from those who have always shot digital and have become accustomed to having that cushion for... lapses in technical proficiency? Boredom? Laziness? All of the above?

So, the question is, do you consider yourself the monkey, or Shakespeare? If you're the monkey, do you feel justified in charging people for your luck within the parameters of the law of averages? How often do you rely on the fact that if you take 500 pictures in an hour you'r sure to get at least 20 you can deliver to the client? And where do newbies fit, if we're all delivering say 500 images from a wedding, but even the old hats are relying on the same philosophy that if you take enough pictures you're going to get something worth using? Do you think you could shoot an entire 14-hour day with just 250 exposures, 200 of which you must deliver to the bride?

If you want a challenge, ask a friend to be your model and see if you can get 20 decent images out of a portrait session in 27 exposures or less, WITHOUT reviewing or deleting a single image...

Can of Worms: facebook photography price fixing groups FAIL

2010-01-12T10:55:00.010-07:00

In the past 5 days I've seen a rash of photography support groups pop up on Facebook. I don't know if it's because they know lots of folks got that DSLR on their Christmas Wish List or just coincidence, but I'm finding it pretty funny. Because I have no intention of supporting the groups, I'll make up pseudonyms for them. There's one called "Tell all new photographers they have to charge the same as established photographers because we don't like any competition" and another one called "I'm terrified I'm about to lose all my clients because I charge a high price for my services and some of these newcomers who charge less are actually better than me." There was also this little Craiglist advert that has been circulating for a wedding photographer, which while humourous, also seems a little bitter and cranky.

Photographers: It's no wonder the general public is so disenchanted with so-called professional photographers. It's one of the only professions besides being a painter or an actor that really (seriously) has absolutely no rules, guidelines, or standards. You can charge whatever you want for your services, shoot however you want, be educated or not... and the toughest part of our job is figuring out how much people are actually willing to pay us. So what are you complaining about?

The only way you build a business is by attracting and retaining clients, and when you have no portfolio, you're going to be giving it away for free or cheap, at least for a little while. Consider that as you raise your prices and become an established photographer, you are going to have clients who quite simply cannot afford you anymore. But theoretically, if you won your clients who can afford to move up with you, and you have some decent skills, you will be working less, and making as much or more money, so it shouldn't really affect your income if you're really that awesome, right?

Snobbery abounds. When you enter higher levels of photography you run into all sorts of people who have become a brand instead of a human being and spend as much time promoting themselves as they do shooting. While I see nothing wrong with this, it's not something I personally aim for. They whine and snivel and complain about the new photographers and how everyone and their dog has a camera without considering geez - some of these people are going to be good, and one day, they might be the ones deciding if *I* win an award.

A word on memberships to the umpteen professional organizations that are out there. If you pay, you can say you are a member. Being an 'accredited' or 'famous' or 'award winning' photographer means you have spent enough money promoting yourself to enough people within the organisation that have bestowed upon you some kind of peer recognition, usually represented by a piece of paper. This has not got a damn thing to do with my clients. While it's nice to have a fun group of people with similar interests to hang out with, bounce ideas off, and learn a few marketing tips, mostly what happens is everyone sits around oohing and ahhing about who got famous that year and was able to enter the echelons of the togs who charge more than brain surgeons.

The only way you get true respect is to earn it, and being well-known (even if you have amassed 2000 fans on Facebook) doesn't mean you are respected. Even if you get paid substantial sums of money it doesn't mean anyone respects you (think reality TV stars.) In exchange for accolades and fame amoungst my peers, I prefer to be valued for who I am, not what I've accomplished. Some call me a rogue, others call me a hack, and I am probably referred to as completely unprofessional by a few, but when it comes right down to it I would rather have a 4 year old I've known since they were in their Mom's tummy sitting by the doorway waiting for me to arrive than have peer recognition from people I barely know. That validates me more than any piece of paper ever could.

Here's what happens when lots of togs hit a certain point in their career. They call each other down based on what camera they use or how much they know their way around photoshop. They are cheerful and loving while they attend conferences and enter competitions, then bash their colleagues behind their backs. They equate what you charge with your level of professionalism and for many, it becomes the primary measure of success. They look down their noses at those who charge less for their services and, on occasion, look down on the clients who are unable afford them. They don't see the value of upstarts taking on the task of providing something other than department store photos for the biggest demographic in existence.

Listen up, and listen close. There is always going to be someone coming up behind you. When they're first starting out, they are probably going to be cheaper than you. Whether they are going to be (or already are) better than you is a matter of personal taste that the open market will dictate. You can either help them to raise you up or try and beat them down so they can't step on you as they climb past. The choice is yours whether you want to live in fear or celebrate the fact that photography is accessible to everyone, not just the elite. When a computer replaces human interaction, that's about the time to really poop your pants.

Last thing - but it's a biggie - before you start joining PUBLIC groups and whining about your poor underpaid photographer self all over Facebook and blogs, maybe stop for a second to remember that some of your past and/or potential future clients and colleagues are on your friend list, followers, or fan page, and it's likely that the vast majority don't feel sorry for you or your poor underpaid photographer friends (who are, by the way, usually the ones agreeing or suggesting that you need to raise your prices...) When it comes right down to it, a photographer has the ability to make more than a brain surgeon. No one feels sorry for you. No one should. I sure as hell don't. Quit whining and go take pictures.

lifeLOVE: Clickin' Cancer's Butt, antonym style...

2009-05-29T23:53:00.003-06:00

I've had an emotional few weeks - lessons learned time and time again about appreciating what you have because there always comes an occasion when it's threatened to be, or just is, no longer there: job security, parents and children and spouses and siblings, friends, homes, health...

The Month of May, 2009, will go down in my personal history as a month of extremes ranging from exhilarating joy to excruciating pain, massive highs to debilitating lows, complete celebration to complete shut-down, huge successes to ultimate failures. I'm exhausted and overwhelmed. I made up a new saying about it. Maybe someone else already made it up, but I'm laying claims to it until otherwise corrected. It goes like this: Don't count your chicks before they're hatched because you never know when you're looking at a basket of goose eggs.

I think for all of us it is really easy to breeze through the joy, the highs, the celebration, the successes without experiencing the magnification of how much sweeter they are when set against the backdrop of the pain, the lows, the shut-downs, and the failures. But then again, who in their right mind would willingly dredge up the bad to make the good so much more meaningful?

Well, whether I wanted the lesson or not, I have learned it 10 times over this month, and as I was sitting down to write this post and feeling more than a little sorry for myself, I realized that the very answer I was looking for was reflected in the images of the incredible people who participate in the Relay for Life every year, who turn stories of hopelessness into efforts steeped in optimism, who turn the loss of loved ones into powerful crusades, who dig deep into their pain not to relive it but to revitalize it - to turn the proverbial sow's ear into a silk purse.

Here are my picks to share from the multitude of images captured at this year's Relay for Life. I have two other stories to share, but want to leave you with this prod: Life's what you make it, so love your babies harder, give your spouse a kiss goodnight even if you're mad, phone your parents or your children and tell them you love them, wash the dishes before you go to bed and replace the toilet paper roll if you empty it, be grateful for your job, take a picture of the flowers in bloom, and make sure you wear clean underwear - the grass is always greener somewhere else until you realize that you're still on the other side of the fence with yourself.

I asked who in their right mind would dredge up the bad to make the good so much more meaningful, and the answer is, these incredible, courageous, beautiful survivors, caregivers, friends, spouses, children, parents, aunties and uncles, grandparents, co-workers, and dearly departed, whose incredible spirit and ability to turn despair into HOPE makes me quake in my boots at the power of the human spirit:

And for whatever it's worth, don't worry too much about the goose eggs - sometimes serendipity kicks in and you realize they're just ugly ducklings... c

festiveLOVE: make love not cancer

2009-05-21T22:27:00.007-06:00

OK, so not everyone thinks of a fundraiser in support of cancer research as a festive event, but the Canadian Cancer Society's Relay for Life in Edmonton is definitely something to celebrate! Cancer isn't prejudiced - it strikes adults and children or any colour at any time. Statistically, 1450 Canadians die of cancer every week. So each year, hundreds of volunteers and as many teams raise money, don costumes, erect campsites, and spend the night hoofing it around the track at Foote Field to Celebrate, Remember, and Fight Back. Last year, Alberta/NWT events raised $5.5 million for the cause. With honour, Team Clickin' Cancer's Butt has been invited back for Year Two getting team photos and whatever else we can shoot! We had the official pre-planning meeting tonight... lemme tell ya, we are all have itchy trigger fingers to get to the Relay and click some SERIOUS cancer butt.

Relay for Life is still short a few event volunteers - organizer extraordinaire Christine McCourt sent out a plea this morning for anyone looking for a great way to pull and all-niter this Saturday night to contact Novalee Toronchuk for more info on what help is still needed: 780.437.8418. If you can make it, stop on by the Team Clickin' Cancer's Butt site and say hello!

Are you a survivor, or has someone close to you passed away from cancer? Want to get involved? Please, share your story in the comments to raise awareness, or go to the CCS website and purchase a luminary or donate to any one of the worthy and dedicated teams, or at the very least bring us Tim Horton's coffee at about 3 a.m. - we'll be the ones wearing capes and cameras...

2008 RFL, episode 3: the heart of the matter

2008-06-10T00:14:00.002-06:00

As the person paid to be the wedding photographer, it's my job to go and stand in front of everyone and get the best shot, but as a mere guest at that same wedding, I must stand back. At previous years' RFL, I took lots of pictures, but refrained from being invasive. Just like being hired to get the money shots, being given 'permission' opens those same doors. With this year's RFL, knowing the point of my presence was to document through photographs the unfolding of events gave me a sense of freedom and responsibility. I felt duty-bound to do the best damned job i could, the only way I know how - by connecting with the event.

Relay for Life happens for one reason only: because cancer has not been eradicated. Cancer was, for me, a distant far-off thing, nothing that ever even came remotely close to me. For whatever reason my friends Stacie's situation (her sister had been diagnosed with an aggressive liver cancer and died withoun 3 weeks of diganosis) pushed a button in me, and I became part of the club that says, "Cancer got too close to me for comfort." I thought, Oh, God, if that was MY sister I would be devastated and so we were connected.

However, making connections didn't happen for me in the thick of things. Although I arrived by 3:00 p.m. on the day of the Relay, most of my shooting in fact occured after all the other Butt Clickin' girls had left. Being the one to organize things, I spent as much time in the first 5 or so hours delegating as I did shooting, right up until after the sun had set, after the awards and prizes had been doled out, after the scheduled on-site events had completed, after all the vendor and awareness tents except for the lonely Volunteer Info booth had been closed up for the night. And shortly after Cam Tait had arrived. Wanting pictures for the live blog he was doing. At 1:00 in the morning.

I've met Cam a couple of times now, once when I was in college, and again when I was co-hosting a media club field trip for inner-city teens. Cam might not have remembered me, but he remembered the field trip - one of the students had been making fun of Cam, and Cam stopped the program to a) give him a verbal lashing and b) punt him from the presentation. Cam, for those who don't know, has been a writer for the Edmonton Journal since 1979. Cam, for what it's worth, has cerebral palsy (hence punting the kid who was making fun of him) and one quickly learns patience when speaking with him. (The hardest part is remembering not to finish his sentences - it's cute when I do that with my husband but not so much with Cam...) Anyhow. Cam and I chatted a bit while we worked, our macs glowing side by side, in our makeshift office.

I asked: "So, Cam, how did you end up deciding to show up at Foote Field at this indecent hour of the night?" We swapped "Why do I Relay" stories. Whenever you ask that question, you are immediately taken on an emotional roller coaster beside the person telling you their story of how they got involved. Turns out, Cam is like the rest of us - regardless of how many times you've heard of the Relay for Life, regardless of how many people we hear about in the news, at work, wherever, it doesn't become *real* until cancer comes close enough to you feel it's icy fingers grappling for someone close enough to you that it's palpable; and you find yourself wandering in circles (well, ovals, technically - it is a track, after all) with hundreds of other people who have felt cancer close enough for it to be *real* and not something that only happens to someone else.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Once I'd gotten a few pictures over to Cam, he sent me off in search of the luminary he and his wife had set out on the track, with a request for a photo if I happened to see it. No Relay for Life (in Edmonton, anyways) would be complete without periods of rain, and so, umbrella in hand and with that false sense of security having 'official' photographer status, I wandered right onto the track and honed in on a woman walking by herself. "Hi! I'm Hope - I'm one of the photographers here - we did your team picture over by the HOPE sign, remember?" She did remember. She had asked me how much it cost to get my name put up in lights... ~groan~ I mustered up all the courage I could and dove right in. "So, well - since I, uh - toook so many pictures I figured - er... maybe I... I'm always curious: why do you Relay?"

T. had a rare tumour in the middle of her chest, between her lungs and close to her heart. Her symptoms were: coughing. "That was it. I coughed." Initial diagnosis was suspected pneumonia. Three years later, she is still mad at her Dr. for not examining her xray before going on vacation, and grateful for the nurse who pulled her file when the meds she'd been prescribed weren't working, showed it to the Dr on call, and got her an immediate appointment. T. still remembers asking the nurse, "Well, what is it?" and the nurse kept telling her she should just come in. For a very long time, she kept it to herself, until the biopsy came back positive, and then having to tell everyone: her best friend, her children and worst, her husband - from whom she kept this information until he returned from a stint working out of town. "I kept it to myself, because I didn't want to burden anyone until I knew for sure; I didn't want to tell him ~this~ in a phone call." According to T., when they diagnosed her, the Cross Cancer Institute said that in Alberta this year, there will be 4 cases of T.'s kind of cancer, and of those 4, only 2 will beat it. 50/50 sounds good for a lot of things, "...but not on your life." T. takes nothing for granted and couldn't be more proud of her daughter who, at a whopping 11 years old, is the brains behind their Relay Team. "She's 11, and she's the team captain. For a bunch of kids, they managed to raise over $3000 selling their own stuff, doing back sales, asking friends and family again and again and again to donate..."

T., now cancer free for 3 years, was cold and wanted to go get a hot drink, and so we hugged and parted ways. I meandered my way about in the coalbin-dust drizzle, the rain coming down harder now and making its way earthwards at dangerous slants, exteniguishing all but a few lucky luminaries who miraculously managed to stay lit. Aside from a few die-hards in the dining hall and a handful of folkks in varying states of consciousness seeking chelter and warmth in Saville, with the sky still a couple of hours from lightening up I decided to go another round looking for the Luminary Cam had told me was out there somewhere. As I strolled past yet another section unsuccessfully I was swept into the fold of a large relay group (by 3 am people are usually walking in partners not as a unit).

"Why do you Relay?" I asked the two people standing closest to me. My Dad had cancer, "The young woman beside me says chipperly. Her Dad just smiles a huge smile - one of those combination pride and embarrassment smiles - and keeps walking. "So who's on your team?" Turns out the daughter is a year off from becoming a nurse. She tells me of finding out her Dad had cancer, and the effect it had on her family, and then says, "And now, I'm a nurse... well, we're all going to be nurses..." she says as she waves her arm around to rest of her team. A couple of the other girls hustle in closer while Dad drops back a bit to rest, and we chat about nursing - they are all 2nd or 3rd year in the nursing program, and they've all had some experience working in the field. One girl pipes in, "You know what the worst thing is? When people ask, 'How bad is it?' and you can't tell them... I mean, we see lab results and xrays and we're not stupid, but we cannot say anything - that's the doctors' job."

Several of the girls express that they often questions the doctors' decisions. Sometimes they are frustrated with the inefficacy of our health care system, the backlogs and under-staffing that frequently end up with beds closing and the quality of health care avilable in Alberta to be compromised. At this point, I have to wonder what went through the head of the nurse who had to call T. in for her x-ray results, the one who worked for the Dr. who went on holidays for 3 weeks without bothering to tell a woman she had a grapefruit-sized mass growing between her lungs - did the Dr. overlook it accidentally or purposely, and which is (theoretically) worse?

Whatever the case may be, walking in (ovals) provides plenty of time for reflection, and plenty of time for making connections with some fairly amazing people who have truly adopted the mantra to Celebrate! Remember! and Fight Back! There is an abundance of stories just waiting to be heard, heartbreaking stories about battles fought and lost, battles fought and won only to be lost later, battles in progress, and battles that have been won and are still victorious. Each year I have returned to RFL, I have met amazing new people who each and every one have a story about why they Relay, as unique as our fingerprints and yet not unique at all. I will continue to ask, "Why do you Relay?" And if anyone ever thinks to ask me, I will say, "At the heart of the matter, the reason I Relay is that the matter has become close to my heart."

Thanks to you all for listening to me blather on and on and on about the Relay. Be sure and watch in a few weeks for our official team slideshow, highlighting the best of the best of our team's efforts to Click some Cancer Butt...

2008 RFL, episode 2: the girls clickin' some cancer butt

2008-06-09T19:21:00.002-06:00

When I started the DLS Workshops, I really had no idea the direction they would take. Mostly, I just wanted to share what I knew, and introduce people with a passion for photography to a) the technical side and more importantly b) the philosophical side of why I do what I do. When the act of taking a photograph transcends beyond technique to become art and documentation all rolled into one, it's the greatest feeling in the world. At the heart of my Photographilosophy is the belief that the stronger your connection to whatever or whoever you're photographing, the stronger the finished product will be. Not only have I been consistently amazed by the natural talent these women have, but their desire to evolve and really make their photography meaningful, to go beyond simply taking a photograph to capturing an image full of raw emotion with as much impact as beauty is admirable and inspiring.

I call giving back to my community through pictures Photographilanthropy, mostly because I'm a geek. But I digress... When it was initially discussed with Christine McCourt how the Relay for Life team photographs would be done, I knew two things right away. Number one was that I couldn't do it alone - to cover an event that size would require far more manpower than I could provide alone. Number two was that beyond needing help, I wanted to share the experience of this emotional and powerful event, and since I happened to have a large pool of eager photographers at my disposal, it was an easy decision to ask them to join ticdesign in the form of "Team Clickin' Cancer's Butt."

Sometimes there are simply greater forces at work than I have the power to recognize except for in hindsight. I call this 'found treasure' serendipity, and it was truly serendipitous that the group of women who had participated in the workshops were in fact willing to help me out with such an immense and important task. They brought with them an intense dedication and a wide range of skills and styles that brought life to a concept, and turned a dream into reality. For me, it was really the pinnacle of success to be surrounded by fellow shooters who became as passionate about the reasons for the pictures as the pictures themselves.

None of us went into it seeking fame or fortune, merely the opportunity to provide a meaningful service while having a meaningful experience. This is, of course, the crux of what I had hoped to impart through the DLS Workshops all along, and I think I speak for every one of us when I say it was nothing shy of phenomenal to be a part of this event as the Official Team Photographers. It was my both my pleasure and honour to work with this talented bunch of ladies (in alphabetical order) and commend them:

for braving giant wildlife,

Amy Alexander of Photos by Amy

for combining work with strollercize,

Lareina Dibben of Lareina’s Photography

for having the guts to get up on stage,

Heather Duperron of PixelPie: the substance of life

for quietly orchestrating the largest team photos,

Lisa Holmes of L. Holmes Photography

for surviving a hectic grad shoot and still showing up after,

Christine Hopaluk of Christine Hopaluk Photography & Design

for taking the leap and proving me right,

Amanda Kerr of Lifeprints by Amanda Kerr

for staying to the bitter end,

Amanda McCrea of Images by Amanda

for enduring swollen maternity ankles,

Rebecca Manchul of Twinkle Pix

for braving the survivor banquet solo,

Laura Jane Penner of a la mode - slices of life by laura jane

Again, words cannot express my gratitude to you all. We laughed, we cried, we played, we walked (a lot), and I HOPE we can do it all over again next year...

*These images copyright Canadian Cancer Society

2008 Relay for Life, episode 1: a big deal

2008-06-07T02:08:00.002-06:00

At Relay for Life 2007, there was a team called Jimmy Coole. As our team, the Mommas and Poppas lamented that we missed the $5000 goal by just over $100, we were all awestruck by some new bunch, some Team Jimmy Coole, who had managed to raise over $40,000. During the luminary ceremony, no one could miss the almost quarter-track of lanterns bearing Jon McCourt's name. While on the track, we discovered that a number of mutual friends were on the team, and a couple of days after the Relay, I found Christine on Facebook and sent her a message that said something to the effect of, "You guys rock!"

(photocred this image only: Christine Hopaluk)

When you meet Christine McCourt in person, her petite frame, maternal charm, and sweet voice don't exactly match with the formidable pain and healing she has endured since 2005 when her husband and father of their two daughters was ripped from them by cancer. You can read the whole story here. Keep your Kleenex handy - it's not an easy one to read.

Amoung veteran Relayers, she's a bit of a legend, complete with myths about her prowess as a fundraiser, how she came to be, and what she plans to do. The brief truth of it is, she impressed the folks at the CCS so much they wanted to keep her. She is, in short, larger than life.

Christine and I chatted intermittently through the fall and winter, and in early spring we brainstormed the plan to have photographers on site dedicated to capturing team photos, and whatever else we could muster, an opportunity that still boggles my mind.

Not only has she brought a fresh new energy to the Relay which she helped coordinate and organize as a planner, but she participated in her team's regular fundraising and track walking, AND ran in the First Annual Jon McCourt Memorial Run. And her team broke the $50,000 mark this year.

Every once in a while you meet someone who fills you with awe, someone you just know is a bit of a Big Deal. It's my honour to know Christine. She's definitely a Big Deal.

In her closing comments at the indecent hour of 6:45 a.m., Christine was barely able to contain her emotion after an exhausting night. The pain of losing someone to cancer, though at a safe distance behind her, is still evident, and drives her to continue being a force to be reckoned with. Finding better treatments and a cure, finding ways to Celebrate, Remember, and Fight Back are at the core of everything she does. Thank you, Christine, for the amazing opportunity to participate in such a unique capacity, for your incredible dedication and inspiration, and for being a Big Deal.

*These images copyright Canadian Cancer Society

2008 Relay for Life a Huge Disappointment

2008-05-25T10:59:00.002-06:00

Over $490,000 was raised by some 1200 people. Over 150 Survivors released balloons to celebrate beating the odds. Edmonton boasts one of the largest and most successful Relays anywhere in the world. And, despite the coldest wettest year in a while, there were more people still walking the track at 7 a.m. this year than I can remember since I discovered Relay, wearing smiles that made their bleary eyes pierce through the grey morning-after with palpable HOPE.

What's so disappointing about that? Look at this flag. Each flag like this handed out to the remaining relayers represents a person in Alberta who will be diagnosed with cancer this year.

See this crowd? Most of these people were carrying 3 or 4 flags each.

And everyone, present company included, was discussing plans for next year. What that represents to me is twofold. First is the disappointment in feeling the need to keep returning year after year because we don't have a cure yet. Second, is HOPE. HOPE to find better treatments, HOPE to find cure, HOPE to end the Relay for Life because cancer is history.

Christy Parker and Christine McCourt, organizers of the Edmonton Relay for Life, expressed their own HOPE: to still break the half-million fundraising mark year. Online pledges are open for another week. Please, if you haven't donated, if you have more to donate, please visit their site and pledge now.

I have SO MANY stories to tell. First, I need to help my son celebrate his 11th birthday this afternoon. Please visit the blog soon to hear the tale of 10 photographers who endeavored to Click Cancer's Butt.

can of worms: protection or promotion?

2008-04-22T16:02:00.002-06:00

I have had several interesting conversations regarding the issue of watermarking images in the past few days with my husband, a client, a fellow shooter, and a third party. One participant felt watermarks were completely ineffective. Two persons felt that services rendered implied the client had ownership of the pictures to post and do whatever they pleased, and all queried whose benefit the watermark was for, since many people feel that a watermark ruins or takes away from the picture. There was an accusatory tone to some of the comments. Or maybe there wasn't. But I felt immediately defensive about my decision to start watermarking. So why the red flags?

~It was about grade four. For some bible story, in art we had to cut out a pair of large fish shapes from Kraft paper, then paint them and sew them together with yarn so they could be stuffed with crumpled wads of tissue paper. There had been a thunder storm that had blown a transformer up the street and we were all sitting there listening to the rain in the dark. While all the teachers congregated in the hallway, smoking and discussing whether we should all be sent home or not, to pass the time until they figured out what to do we were given the opportunity to work on our fish.

I finished my fish before the electricity was restored (bummer but probably fortunate since the Orange Fairy was on the bus and unable to collect us anyways) and had forgotten to put my name on my stuffed painted fish, and when it came time to claim them, someone else took mine. He didn't even DO his because after failing to entice me, I distinctly remember him spending most of the power outage trying to get one of the other girls in the class to go in the boot room and look at his penis. The boy had red hair and freckles, he was my nemesis all through elementary, and I remember crying bitterly when the teacher, who I KNOW knew damn well it was mine said, "Well, let this be a lesson that next time you remember to put your name on it." The other boy took my stuffed painted fish (and my A+ grade) home, sneering as he walked away.~

There are people who watermark their images for self-promotion so that people will know who to congratulate on the fantastic picture. There are people who watermark their images as a means of preventing theft. (Bill says that watermarking is like putting a bike lock on - at least if someone tries to steal it they have to work a bit... lol) There are people who watermark their images as a means of obscuring the image and making reproduction difficult if not impossible so that they retain the ability to charge for prints. There are people who watermark their images as a means of advertising. Some may claim one reason above the other, but they are all legitimate reasons, and all go hand in hand.

I could give a rat's patootie about promoting myself. If I seriously wanted to put on some kind of advertising campaign I would - I went to school for arts management and so I suppose I could muster some kind of marketing strategy that involved something a little more aggressive than a couple of unlisted blogs and a DIY website... And I take pictures of other people for very selfish reasons, and that other people like them is merely a pleasant side effect of me doing what I happen to genuinely enjoy, and if not a single person liked my pictures I'm pretty sure I'd still be out there shooting at will anyways - for me, a day without pictures is like a day without oxygen. So though it's always nice to hear a compliment, watermarking definitely isn't about kudos. And although I take pains to make sure the watermark is sort of attractive without completely obscuring the image, if it's going to be even remotely effective as deterring theft or wrongful use, it's SUPPOSED to detract from the image...

The digital age has changed the face of photography in ways we never could have imagined, some good, others not so good. The best way to keep your images from being stolen up until the last decade or so was to hang on to your film negatives, but when scanners got good enough for people to make their own scans at home of the prints, we lost the ability to control how and where our images were being distributed. Having had an image attached to some media I didn't like, having been plagiarized, having had credit taken a few times, having had countless images posted despite copyright restrictions, having stumbled across post-designers and printers who feel no moral or legal responsibility to treat copyright of the images they are reproducing like anything more than an idle threat and empty words, maybe I'm a little bitter, and maybe that makes me a bit defensive. I can deal with that.

I started watermarking in January of this year under the premise if you can't beat them, join them. By providing a watermarked low-res set that people were licensed to share online, I have received nothing but positive feedback. It has allowed people the freedom they wanted to share the pictures they love, while giving me at least some small sense of security that my images aren't being thrown about carelessly in cyberspace for anyone to snag and abuse without having to pick the proverbial bike lock. People have been very understanding and supportive of this policy, and some people have even asked for watermarks on their full-resolution sets, kind of like a signature. (I don't do that - the watermark *does* detract from the picture and frankly I'd be a little embarrassed having my name slathered on an 8x10 the way I place them lol.)

At the end of the day, after it's all said and done, those are MY pictures, and I want my name written on them. I made them. They are my art, no different than a painter's painting or a sculptor's sculpture, and no one should feel they are entitled to alter them. They are special to me, and I do not want them to be cropped or tweaked or made into cheesy photocards or edited to look like a charcoal drawing on Facebook. I watermark my images because they are like the shirts I send to camp with my kids. They are like my painted stuffed fish. If they get 'lost' (like if someone posted them in a child porn site) I would want to know, I would want them returned. If someone likes them and wants to steal them, it's always my hope someone else will notice the name and alert the rightful owner.

Until and unless I decide to make my pictures completely unavailable to my clients, my only defense is to write my name on my damned pictures, and for that I make no apologies.

can of worms: you're special just like everybody else

2008-04-22T15:23:00.002-06:00

These excerpted words aren't mine, but the sentiment echoes what I've been saying my entire adult life. I especially love the bluntness of the whole, "You're ALL special, EACH and EVERY one of you," part. Brilliant. The dude's a songwriter, not an essayist, so I'll try and not be too harsh about the whirlpool style (going around in circles for quite a long time before finally getting to the proverbial flush) of writing...

"...This is about us all. This is about a level of self consciousness so high in my generation, that it's actually toxic. This is about the girl in her bedroom who poses in front of the camera she's awkwardly holding in her outstretched hand. She'll take a hundred photos until coming up with one she's happy with, which inevitably looks nothing like her, and after she's done poring over images of herself, will post one on her myspace page and then write something like " I don't give a f*ck what you think about me."

This is about the person trying out for American Idol, who while going off about how confident they are that they were born ready to sing in front of the world, are trembling so badly they can hardly breathe.

This is about me, the guy who walks through a throng of photographers into a restaurant like he's Paul Newman, but who leaves a "reject" pile of clothes in his closet so high that his cleaning lady can't figure out how one man can step into so many pairs of pants in a week.

This is about us all. Every one of us. Who all seem to know deep down that it's incredibly hard to be alive and interact with the world around us but will try and cover it up at any cost. For as badass and unaffected as we try to come off, we're all just one sentence away from being brought to the edge of tears, if only it was worded right. And I don't want to act immune to that anymore. I took the biggest detour from myself over the past year, since I decided that I wasn't going to care about what people thought about me. I got to the point where I had so much padding on that, sure, I couldn't feel the negativity, but that's because I couldn't feel much of anything. And I think I'm done with that.

I'm not the first person to admit we're all self conscious, Kanye was. But what I want to do is to shed a little light on why we're all in the same boat, no matter the shape of the life we lead: because every one of us were told since birth that we were special. We were spoken to by name through a television. We were promised we could be anything that we wanted to be, if only we believed it and then, faster than we saw coming, we were set loose into the world to shake hands with the millions of other people who were told the exact same thing.

And really? Really? It turns out we're just not all that special, when you break it down. Beautifully unspectacular, actually. And that truth is going to catch up with us whether we want to run from it or not. The paparazzo following me to the gym ain't gonna be Herb Ritts and the guy he's following ain't gonna be Bob Dylan. It's just a matter of how old you are once you embrace that fact.

And for me, 30 sounds about right. What now, then? I can only really say for myself: Enjoy who I am, the talents and the liabilities. Stop acting careless. In fact, care more. Be vulnerable but stay away from where it hurts. Read. See more shows. Of any kind. Rock shows, art shows, boat shows. Create more art. Wear hoodies to dinner. Carry a notebook and hand it to people when they passionately recommend something and ask them to write it down for me. Root for others. Give more and expect the same in return, but over time.

Act nervous when I'm nervous, puzzled when I don't know what the hell to do, and smile when it all goes my way. And never in any other order than that. And when it's all over, whether at the end of this fabulous career or of this life, which I hope takes place at the same time, I should look back and say that I had it good and I made the most of it while I was able. And so should you.

I'm going quiet now.

John"

And yet, as a parent, wouldn't I be remiss if I were to deny my children all the unconditional bum pats and ego fluffing I can muster? What of it as an adult, then? Am I not still special? Don't I deserve unconditional bum pats and ego fluffing every now and again? Or shouold I develop humility in my children, so that they may have humility as adults?

If you research this particular blog entry, you'll find a number of individuals have felt personally attacked by it. They've completely missed the point. I'm just hoping that the people who do 'get' the message find it encouraging (and humbling) - it's a blessing that someone more special than me has finally pointed these things out... ~smirk~

Relay for Life

2007-06-07T19:11:00.002-06:00

I've been so busy micromanaging my life, I completely forgot to tie up some loose ends regarding the Relay for Life!

#1 - Mother's Day photos will be ready on or before June 15th; winner of the glam makeover will be announced on Father's Day when my bestest friend in the whole wide world is available to do the draw!!!

#2 - Our team raised a whopping $4435.05 ~ double last year's total!!!

#3 - I did NOT take pictures all night long, but I did take a few. Here they are!

Cut-a-Thon 2007!!!

2007-05-06T21:23:00.002-06:00

I'm happy to report that this year's Cut-a-Thon was a HUGE success!!! A special thank you to all the people who donated time and money to this event - the team members, bakers, card-makers, and haircutters alike!

Christine - thank you for getting the sidewalk chalk and bubbles for the kids, and thanks to Rosanna, my 10:00 a.m. client today, who let me take the remainder of the flower petals from her maternity session with me - they were a big hit!

I'd like to acknowledge the generous contributions of the Spruce Grove Safeway and the Cooperators for the use of the parking lot and tent respectively!

And congratulations to Stacie (above) our new team captain, for devising and organizing this incredible event, which netted the team over $1100 AND a braid long enough to send off to the wigmakers!!!

You can view the complete album here, and Tammy's album here, but I have to share about one very special young man who was the highlight of the day for a whole lot of us. His Mom drove by asking what was going on, and very excitedly said, "Oh! My son's been growing his hair and collecting money for a year!!!" and about 2 hours later she returned, her shaggy-headed boy in tow.
(I was operating Tammy's camera for most of this part of things, so you can see the rest of the head shaving here.)

His Grandma had cancer, and so he has decided that he's only going to cut his hair once a year from now on. Tammy had the pleasure of giving him his first-ever annual haircut for Cancer research. We were all touched by this young man's generosity and spirit, and we're grateful for the $150 he contributed.

With his very special and big-hearted donation, let me tell ya, he had half of us in tears when he left...

You're an awesome little man! A HUGE thank you for making our special day that much more special!
We finally shut it down about 7:00 p.m., tired, dirty, hungry, and greatly satisfied with a job well done.