This is my love affair in photography mixed with how photographers becoming video cameramen can help get your writings produced. It not be a feature film but a photographic essay instead, but it beats your work living on a computer.
So April 2011 will go down in my books as photography month for me. It started with having to head to Minneapolis early in the month to check out and buy the Panasonic AF100 video camera. While there I saw where Scott Kelby was doing a one day workshop at the Minneapolis convention center so I attended that.
Part of the deal was a 24 hour pass to Kelby Training which is actually a great compliment to lynda.com for online training in photography and programs like Photoshop. (You can do them on a month by month basis so it’s not too expensive.) With my 24-hour pass I watched several programs including one where Jeremy Cowart takes Kelby on a photo shoot in Venice, California.
Then after four days of shooting in Chicago I stopped in Madison, Wisconsin to pick-up a one-day workshop with photographers Joe McNally and David Hobby. This week I watched a video on You Tube where Chase Jarvis interview Vincent Laforet. Then I finished the month yesterday watching most of Zack Arias on creativeLive.
That’s a month of visual sensory overload, but it was a welcome shift after finishing writing a new script. The frustrating thing about writing screenplays is you can spend a year or two (or more) on a script and then you just have to hope and pray that it has a life after that.
With photography its instant satisfaction. (At least it can be instant satisfaction.) It doesn’t even have to be taken with the most expensive camera or be technically perfect—it just has to capture the magic.
My love affair with photography goes back to at least fifth grade when I shot five rolls of film on a class trip to St. Augustine, Florida, Not that anything I took was even that good but it was a magical day of discovery. I don’t recall ever shooting a roll of film in my life before that. (To this day, St. Augustine is one of my favorite cities.) But I wouldn’t get my first 35mm camera until my senior year of high school. A Konica TC with a 50mm lens. And with that I was off to the races. I really didn’t care for the tedious darkroom work, but I loved just roaming around and shooting.
Within a couple months I bought a 135mm lens and was making money selling photos to mother’s of Little League baseball players, and a couple of months later those pictures opened the door to be photojournalist at the Sanford Herald shooting mostly sports. And though most of my work was shooting high school and college events, I did get to take photos of Doug Williams (future Super Bowl MVP quarterback) Jack Billingham (World Series pitcher for the Cincinnati Reds) and Tim Raines (who would later earn a World Series ring playing for the New York Yankees).
Heady stuff for a 19-year-old, but I couldn’t see myself being 30-years old and still shooting people sliding into home plate. Though I did walk away with a great amount of respect for Water Iooss and other sports photographers. In fact, I’m sure a good deal of my foundational understand of composition came from looking at thousands of Sports Illustrated all through middle school and high school.
(Plus I was learning that journalist drank more than college students and had a pretty shoddy track record on the home front. Portrait photographer Zack Arias has said that he wanted a career as a photojournalist until he learned, “You can either have a career, or you can have a family,” and he was already married with a kid at that point.)
I shot a couple of weddings in college, but then crossed that off my list of career aspirations. My father had a small three-person advertising agency in Tampa and invited me over to a product photo shoot. After watching one product basically taking several hours to light and photograph I crossed product photography off my list as well. A photographer who took senior pictures warned me about heading in the direction even if to make a little money because I’d hate the work and end up hating my camera.
I did a couple of slide shows for classes, did some freelance shooting at fraternity and society parties, lugged around a heavy MamiyaRZ 67 for a couple of years. I studied the work of Ansel Adams, Gordon Parks, Pete Turner. I once went to a workshop and sat at a dinner table with photography legends Mary Ellen Mark and Arnold Newman which was inspiring, but I increasingly became frustrated with the limitations of photography (lack of physically moving images), and couldn’t see a satisfactory career path.
The theater and movies began to captivate me. So it was off to film school after a year at a community college taking every creative class I could take. First to Miami and then Los Angeles. Of course, I learned that there wasn’t much job security in the film business and took a job after graduation doing photography. Though most of my work over the years has been in video production. But all along the way, year in and year out, photography to one degree or another has been a part of the productions I’ve worked on. Most productions these days clients also want photography as well.
About five or six years ago I started shooting stills digitally and in that time I have watched the field explode in creativity, technology, and training. Many who’ve embraced the digital changes have flourished quickly. Unfortunately, some talented film photographers still haven’t touched Photoshop and haven’t even found a copy of the book,”Who Moved My Cheese?”
And now with the DSLRs shooting video there is a whole new revolution happening. More and more still photographers are becoming cameramen and even producers, directors, and/or editors. And more cameramen are doing photography. It’s a two way street making for a crowded road that resembles the streets of Bangkok. Various people are bidding on jobs that they wouldn’t have been considered on just two years ago. There are L.A. directors of photography coming to Iowa with their 5Ds to work on commercials in Des Moines.
I’m not sure where all this leads but if you’re a pure screenwriter you should be encouraged. Because the chances are good that wherever you are in the United States and Canada, and probably around the world, that there are some really talented people with cameras who are looking for opportunities to stretch themselves whether it be on a short film, a video essay, a documentary, a webisode, or a feature film.
In the online workshop I saw today at creativeLive, photographer Zack Arias showed a work in progress of a personal project that is this modern day take on Don Quixote where a hip hop artist is stuck in a corporate job. Zack is a gifted storyteller and I wouldn’t be surprised to see him come out with his own version of the feature Hustle & Flow.
[…] This is my love affair in photography mixed with how photographers becoming video cameramen can help get your writings produced. It not be a feature film but a photographic essay instead, but it beats your work living on a computer. So April 2011 will go down in my books as photography month for me. It […] Original Source… […]
It is a fine line when you have to start mixing your passion with trying to make money. On one hand you want to “do what you love.” When you can’t get that perfect job in the field, you end up using your skill in an entirely different way than you ever imagined. You almost have to do those product shoots and still stay the course on your other dream. In fact, in your journey as a “product photog” you never know whose path you might cross. you could possibly open a door and make so money in the mean time.
The path you take to get to the finish line is unknown. I think you should make a little money, but stay focused as to what you really want to do. The worst thing is that you end up taking pictures for a living. There are worse things