One of the classes I attended today at Photoshop World Orlando was given by New York model turned photographer Peter Hurley who specializes in headshots.
Here are a couple of his YouTube videos with over six millions of views just on two basic techniques that will help with your headshots—no matter what side of the camera you’re on.
“Train your mind to see ordinary things is a unique way.”
Lindsay Adler
Gone with the Wind
I went to several workshops today at Photoshop World Orlando 2019 including an inspirational talk by New York fashion photographer Lindsay Adler. Here are two online videos she mentioned that show how some of her work was influenced by Hollywood. One being the movie Gone with the Wind, and the other being the TV show Westworld. (And why not toss nod to the classic old Hollywood glamour photographer George Hurrell.)
And if you’re interested in pursing a career in photographer her’s a talk Adler gave last year that unpacks the road she took in developing her style and building her career.
Today was my first day attending Photoshop World Orlando 2019 and I took a four hour workshop with Adobe Evangelist Terry White. If you’re a content creator looking for some free tutorials on Photoshop, Lightroom, InDesign, etc. check out Terry’s YouTube channel (and join his 464,000+ subscribers).
Author Neil Gaiman was asked on his blog what words or quote would he inscribe “on the wall of a public library children’s area” and this is the core of his answer from his essay Just Four Words (found in his book Stories: All-New Tales) mixed with his Masterclass on storytelling:
I’m not sure I’d put a quote up, if it was me, and I had a library wall to deface. I think I’d just remind people of the power of stories, of why they exist in the first place. I’d put up the four words that anyone telling a story wants to hear. The ones that show that it’s working, and that pages will be turned:
‘. . .and then what happened?’
The four words that children ask when you pause telling them a story. The four words that you hear at the end of a chapter. The four words, spoken or unspoken, that show you, as a storyteller, that people care. And then what happened? And those words, I think, are the most important words there are for a storyteller.” Neil Gaiman (The Sandman, Good Omen)
“The thing that I tell young writers—and by young writers, a young writer can be any age you just have to be starting out—which is anything you can do can be fixed. What you cannot fix is the perfection of a blank page. What you cannot fix is that pristine, unsullied whiteness of a screen or a page with nothing on it—because there’s nothing there to fix.”
Author & showrunner Neil Gaiman
Podcast interview on The Tim Ferriss Show
“Why do farmers farm, given their economic adversities on top of the many frustrations and difficulties normal to farming? And always the answer is: ‘Love. They must do it for love.’” Wendell Berry Bringing it to the Table: On Farming and Food
The Biggest Little Farm is an extraordinary film. The documentary directed by John Chester works on many levels but I encourage you to see it a movie theater for cinematography alone.
The photo I’ve had at the top of this blog for the past 11 years is a farm I shot in Iowa while in route to a short film where I was the director of photography. It’s an old barn and silo and one I’ve thought about replacing often, but for some reason I never have.
From 2003 to 2013 I lived in Cedar Falls, Iowa which is surrounded by farms. Soon after I arrived there I had the opportunity to see pigs being born while working on a production at a farm. Farms are just flat out fascinating to me.
And Chester has tapped into something that will take me a while to process. Perhaps I write about it in more detail after I see it again and learn more about the production. For today, I’ll just relay that it’s an extraordinary film that you should see.
“Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust”
From the funeral service in the Book of Common Prayer
The memorial service for my mother was held Saturday in the historic chapel part of the Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd in Maitland, Florida. It was led by The Rev. Cameron MacMillian and was a beautiful and sacred time. I’ll just leave a few photos I took after the service to tell part of the story.
Peter Hedges once met an actress on a subway in New York City who eventually told him the story about how some friends went to cook a Thanksgiving dinner but their oven didn’t work so they had to go around the building to get other people to let them cook their meal. Hedges thought, “That is a great idea,” and made a bunch of notes and then forgot about it until a couple of years later when he found out his mom had cancer. (A woman that informed everything he did
“As [my mom] was dying—or fighting to live at that time—she would always ask me what I was working on. And I was always working on getting her better doctors and trying to get her better treatments that would save her life. But she said let’s talk about what you’re working on and I said, Mom I can’t write anything, there’s no point in writing. And she said, well, there’s no point in anything if you’re not making something—so what are you making? And I opened up files and I found this file about the girl cooking the turkey and I asked that question that you ask as you’re writing your scripts or you’re making your films, Why is she cooking the turkey? And I said, because it’s Thanksgiving, that’s why you cook the turkey. But so what? And my notes said the reason she’s cooking the turkey is because she’s estranged from her mother and her mother’s dying of cancer. And I gasped. I couldn’t believe it, and I called my mom and said listen to these notes. And she said, Oh Peter, this sounds like a story you’re supposed to tell.” Writer/ Director Peter Hedges Podcast interview The Q&A with Jeff Goldsmith
Hedges did tell that story—the classic indie filmPieces of April (2003). One of the early films shot on digital tape it was made for under $300K with a stellar cast. It’s a film I’ve written about from time to time on this blog. (It would be a good investment to get the Pieces of April DVD with Hedges director’s commentary to gather tips on indie filmmaking.)
P.S. A little bit of Screenwriting from Iowa trivia—Peter Hedges was born and raised in Iowa.
Suzi, as she was called when she was younger, doesn’t look tough in this photo. But she was tough.
She was born in the middle of the Great Depression and a chunk of her youth was taken up with the scarcity of the effects of a world at war. Those raised during the Depression and World War II were engrained with an exceptionally particular view that economic turmoil was always on the horizon and my mother was no different.
And despite my mother’s father having a job in advertising at National Cash Register (NCR) during those times of high unemployment he was an alcoholic. He died of cirrhosis of the liver at age 57. Having an alcoholic father is tougher than tough. It’s a wound.
Happy Mother’s Day, right?
But it is a happy Mother’s Day for me because I recall a woman who endured hardships and went on to have a productive life. I gave my mom her last Mother’s Day card a few days before she died last month.
Before she graduated from Fairview High School in Dayton, Ohio she had played field hockey, was a homecoming queen, and worked at the Dayton radio station WINK where she met comedian Jonathan Winters and humorist Erma Bombeck early in their careers. She also took classes at the Dayton Art Institute.
She met my father when she was a student at Ohio State University and part of the Delta Gamma Fraternity (Delta Gamma was formed in 1873 when what we commonly call sororities were called women’s fraternities). And to show how tough she really was—she taught art at South Seminole Middle School for 30 years. Days before she died I saw a woman at Starbucks wearing a shirt that proclaimed “I ain’t scared—I’m a middle school teacher.”
A student’s creation at South Seminole Middle School
She also raised two kids mostly as a single mother, and mostly on a teacher’s salary. Did I tell you my mom was tough? One year I gave her a Mother’s Day card featuring the iconic World War II art work of J. Howard Miller that originally encouraged women to roll up their sleeves and do wartime jobs in the defense industry.
My mom was strong. And she was also loving, funny, and supportive. Looking back perhaps one of the toughest/loving/supportive things she did was sit through all of my football and baseball games. That’s part of her life spread over a decade just standing or sitting in the Florida sun watching her son play sports.
My mom went to high school and college in the 1950s which was during the peak of cigarette smoking being cool. She started before the dangers of smoking were widely known, and unfortunately never stopped long after she knew the damage it was doing to her lungs.
I took the below photo sometime after she turned 80 and shortly before she was wearing oxygen full time due to having COPD. Living and dying with COPD has been called the long goodbye because it can be a long, slow process. For my mom it was a decline of six plus years from when she really began having difficulty breathing.
Over those last six years my mother never missed a chance to tell me that this could be her last Mother’s Day. I knew one of these years she would be correct so I tried to maximize my time with her in person and on the phone.
My mom’s final act of toughness was enduring a month in various hospital rooms, an intensive care unit, and at a physical rehabilitation facility. She always said she wanted to go peacefully in her sleep and she was able to do just that with her son and daughter on each side of her holding her hands as she took her final breath.
It was a sad and sweet moment. I’m thankful for my mom bringing me into this world and giving me the foundation to live a creative life. And I’m glad my sister and I had the opportunity to help her in the later stages of her life.
Happy Mother’s Day to all the mothers out there. The definition of tough is to “endure a period of hardship or difficulty”—so I think all mothers are tough.
And another group of tough women were the nurses, med-techs, and care workers at the assisted living facility where my mother lived in her later years. They oversaw her medication, brought her food daily when she after she could not longer go to the dining hall for meals, made sure she got her daily paper, joked with her, often has extended conversations with her, and maybe put up with a complaint or two from my mother.
My mother was an avid reader of novels, enjoyed well-done witty Tv shows (Young Sheldon was her recent favorite), and I look forward to watching Cannery Rowagain because that was one of her all-time favorite films.
It was a tough but human process to watch my mother die. And it will forever shade how I live my life.
P.S. One of the fringe benefits of having someone close to you die is you get to hear stories you never heard before. I just received a phone message from Vivian Hurston Bowden (who is author Zora Neale Hurston’s niece) and she commented on how much she loved my mom and enjoyed working with her at the junior high/middle school. She also let me that my mom did the decorating for her wedding in Sanford, Florida back in 1971. A long time neighbor of hers told me how my mom bought her little gifts when than woman went through treatment for cancer. I love hearing those stories.
“I learned a number of things [working on my first firm]. I remember there is a scene in the film [What’s Eating Gilbert Grape ] that I was so proud of—it was about seven pages too long. [The director Lasse Hallström ] said the scene is about six and three quarters pages too long. I kept rewriting it and I got the scene down to nine words. So I learn economy. About that time I heard a great story about Peter Shaffer the great, wonderful playwright had adapted Amadeus for Milos Forman. And there’s a very famous monologue in the play where Salieri rages at God—there are still monologues in the film, but this was a particular speech that Peter Shaffer really wanted in the screenplay. He’s like if you’re going to adapt my play as a movie you must have this monologue in the film. Milos Forman said no. Shaffer said, no, no, no you need to understand something, this is the best piece of writing I’ve ever done. Salieri is angry at God—it has to be in the film. No. And they went back and forth, and finally Milos Forman said Salieri there is a cross on the wall, Salieri grabs the cross and he throws it in the fire. There’s your monologue. And that is a great example of learning that you can use image or you can use a cut to tell the story. Whereas I came from the theater where I was always trying to tell the story with dialogue. So I learned a lot there.”
Writer Peter Hedges (Pieces of April, Ben is Back) The Q&A Podcast with Jeff Goldsmith
Screenwriting from Iowa 