Due Diligence

Rail crossing, San Joaquin Valley, Dec 2010

Over the years at various jobs, I had downtime. Sometimes for several minutes, occasionally for days, even a week or two. Reading the papers got old. So I began to practice working on problems.

In the paste-up days, I’d xerox and make assemblages. It kept me nimble. Later when the agency I worked at went digital, I’d set up problems and situations for myself in Quark. Yes Quark, the Error 39 Dark Star of my firmament. While the guys next door were sitting in their office with their fantasy baseball leagues, I was skulling out the business of how this goddamned program worked.

Sooner rather than later, I began to encounter actual old-school typographers who’d washed up into ad agencies. They worked with the invisibles on, frames and all. I was hooked. They willingly taught me about style-sheets. Often times I’d outrun the then-feeble processing capacity of the machines I was working on.

As a freelancer I always had to stay ahead of the full-timers. They had a certain security, while I could be more obviously bounced. That is an unfortunate trade-off, one less and less certain as each new day passes in these grim times.

I too became complacent. Until one day I realized I need to know a whole lot more about Photoshop. So off to night-school I went, and discovered that for over fifteen years I was a mouse gnawing my way around a very large cheese. I’d never cored into the program.

Now I was scared. I went to school for the next 2-1/2 years. Always night, on my own dime. That way I didn’t owe shit to anybody. I’d hear from guys I’d worked with over the years the following statements. You might know them too:

 

• I’d go to class if somebody paid for it
• I’ve been meaning to do this
• It’s too expensive
• This shit’s too hard

 

When I started into Photoshop night school, it was about 18 months before the economy went straight into the shitter. I had several classes, one of which was blighted by a perfect storm of self-centered overtalkers, in over-their-head clueless, and some people who just didn’t take it seriously. One night, I’d had enough, and opened up a can of whoop-ass.

“For those in this class who haven’t noticed, the economy is about to go into the toilet. There are some of us in here who would like to live in a better quality of cardboard box than at present. If you don’t have anything positive to contribute, I’m going to ask you to [shut the fuck up], because your talking disrespects the professor, your classmates, and mainly yourselves…”

Dead silence.

The situation improved slightly. The instructor’s hands are tied, because they can’t tell these idiots to shut the fuck up, because then said idiots would cry that their rights had somehow been violated, and so on. For the record, I’m a stone-cold liberal, but this manner of disrespect I will not abide.

Time took care of them. By 2009 the poseurs and clueless were gone, replaced by a full class sitting stock still, eyes forward, terrified by the economic apocalypse unfolding daily. However the “Special Olympics” mentality is deeply entrenched. Too many expect somehow that just showing up gets them a finisher medal, and a victory lap around the track.

And that’s when getting into a community college was easy. Now that education funding has cratered,  just try getting into those classes. They are probably twice as expensive, and half as long as they were before.

What are your choices? Maybe its what you have to do.

But back to my working life. I make war on bad layouts inside the InDesign Creative Suite, currently 5. I taught myself the mysteries of tables, because where I work, they live and die by them. And I was fed up with working on weird-ass legacy documents where the previous operators had glued all kinds of random shit together with drawn rules, color boxes, tab-delimited text boxes, floating in an ambiguous space, with no definite margins.

Which you’ll never see if you work with the invisibles off.

Here’s the bottom line, ducklings: if you think your skills are the end-all and be-all, you are sorely mistaken. Because they probably aren’t. So if you aren’t going to school, and you go home and drink, watch whatever’s on TV, maybe you ought to slice off an hour and begin to study a problem. Put it on a flash drive, and take it to work, and when shit ain’t happening, study it there too.

All this is out on the webs. Ask the question. And here’s the hook: When you’re sitting at work, surfing, you’re slack. You’re not engaged. Eventually people notice.

But this requires a spark of intellectual curiosity.

So. What are you going to do about it?

Big Film, Big Picture

100713_4692_5 / LA props, junk and stuff

Forward!

I shoot film for aesthetic and technical reasons. Aesthetics are covered by quality of films and lens-sets. The films are far more sensitive and responsive than digital, the coverage is wall-to-wall, and is far more robust than a digital interface. The optics and chemistry of the lenses are more interesting.

I’ll discuss the mechanics of scanning further along, but first, some fun stuff. Here’s a comparison of various digital sensors compared with medium-format film.

Imaging area of film and digital sensors

Simplifying matters even further, compare the imaging differences between 35mm and 6x9cm:

35mm imaging areas compared to 6x6 and 6x9cm film

Already you can see that with a larger field, grain is reduced (if that’s a concern), but detail can be recorded, and extracted at will. Absent from this discussion are medium-format digital systems, whose costs are stratospheric compared to readily available film interfaces. But hey! If you have $30,000 burning a hole in your pocket, or can bill the client your rental day rate, go for it.

Film, and why I love it

• every image is high-res
• film has a greater range than digital
• shooting film is shooting “cold”, while digital is always a form of “hot”.
• Film is visually inspectable, digital is not
• My film has way more info than your MP files.
• There is no interpolation, data loss, cutting corners.

Ken Rockwell discusses all this and more in his hilarious takedown of digital, here.

Cameras: ways of seeing and recording

In 2000 I read an interview on a retired Washington Post photo editor. The journo noticed his office was lined with thirty years worth of cameras. When asked about them, the editor said [and I paraphrase] that “95% of the news images we see are made with Canon and Nikon glass. These lenses are very good, but not the only way to see the world…”

That pole-axed me. It made perfect sense. And it changed the way I looked at cameras, and later, film.

In 2008 I went to a Walker Evans retrospective at Stephen Cohen Gallery in LA. There were images I’d grown up with, but now new and fresh, literally 48″ wide. There was detail I’d never seen before. Why?

The lens saw it. The film recorded it. But the reproductive media of the time couldn’t convey it. Photo paper, printing technology, paper chemistry all were not capable of reproducing these images. Digital scanning brought all this forward to a new century.

Walker’s lenses were probably 40 years old at the time. Brilliant optics. Going back further, to the dawn of photography, those lenses killed. In 2005 I saw a Southworth & Hawes [c 1845] daguerrotype  show in New York. The image quality was utterly brilliant.

I began to shoot with demi-vintage cameras, and getting very familiar with the eternal Sunny 16 rule, to sharpen my mind. Also at that time, I was working at the Workbook as a pre-press tech, and saw hundreds of pro-shooters’ work a year. It showed me what I could do, and more importantly, what I didn’t have to do.

The Royal Scan

The luxury of shooting a large juicy negative never pales. The fun starts in translating those negatives into editable digital files. Either you do it, or someone else does.

In 2008 I bought a Nikon LS9000 ED film-scanner to access 35mm negs I’d shot back in 1979, and current 120 negs. At $2199 these machines are not cheap. Rationalizing that the unit cost per scan of that project was $10 ea, if I scanned 250 images it would pay for itself. It did.

The next thing I realized was that the supplied 120 film carrier was inadequate. What you really need is the optical-glass neg carrier which sandwiches the neg flat. I ordered one from B&H for $250. An occasional Newton Ring occurs, but its all in focus.

Nikon then announced that their NikonScan software would not be updated to the Mac OS 10.5. I started using the Hamrick VueScan.  More details here.

Hamrick VueScan is not easy, but not thoroughly impossible either. You conform to it, not the other way around. Then you get on with it.

In time I discovered that some scans I’d gotten from labs were horrifyingly bad. Like magenta shifts in color files, crushed shadows and blown-out highlights in black and white files.

Horrifying lab scan on left, my un-curved scan on right.

Details below:

Note crushed tones and blown highlights on left. Much more detail on right, which can be shaped.

I nearly had an aneurysm when I saw the image on the left. Had I really forgotten everything I’d learned? And then on the right, when I realized I’d been screwed. The image on the right is before I went in and recurved it slightly to give it more depth. That lab is no longer in business.

6×6, 6×9…oh, what the hell!

In 2009 I began shooting with the gorgeous Fuji GSW690iii (shown below), which yields massive 6×9 cm negs on 120 or 220 stock. I was having problems pulling effective preview scans of 6×9 negatives. The last time I would pull a preview scan of one neg, flip the strip, preview the other one. This is time-consuming and very annoying.

Big G-One comes home to find Little Miss Olympus 35RC being romanced by hulky Mr Fuji GSW690iii. This is one of three Fuji medium format rangefinders. 690 image size: 9x6cm. The 65mm lens corresponds to a 28mm wide-angle lens in a 35mm format. This beast has no batteries, no meter, and lives in a Zip Code all its own.

Scanning medium format negs is a different mechanical process than 35mm film. The 35mm carrier is physically indexed with 2 rows of 6 frames each. The medium-format carrier is blank, in both the default version and the way-better optical glass carrier. You have to provide the correct numbers in the VueScan interface to make proper previews and scans, because the scanner does not automatically know if its going to scan 6×4.5, 6×6, 6×7, or 6×9.

I looked for answers. The VueScan manual was opaque. A salesman at Samy’s Camera in Pasadena archly told me that the scanner would not batch scan all 3 negs in the tray, so why bother. Thanks.

Finally this spring on photo.net, Dave Goldsmith provided the answer

(edit) “It’s a simple fix – use “Input | Frame spacing” – use a ruler to measure the distance between the beginning of the first frame and the beginning of the second frame.

Note that it is is Frame SPACING, not Frame OFFSET! For the 6×4.5 ratio the value for the Spacing parameter that I have used is 48 +/- 2 mm, and for 6×6, 64 +/- 2mm. With those values I get for a strip of 6×4.5 images four distinct frames and for the 6×6 ratio three distinct frames.

So, set VueScan for Batch mode (All or List), set the appropriate Frame SPACING value, click on Preview, and when the previews are done, yes, you will probably have to adjust the crop frame (not a big deal!) for each picture frame. Finally just click on Scan. Considering all of the frustration about this subject (including on my part as well) the recommended method worked perfectly.

OK! This begs the question as to why the hell didn’t Ed Hamrick say that in plain English in the User Guide? Why do User Manuals have to be written in Techno-Esperanto?

Hamrick Vue-Scan, with a black & white neg. Note numbers on left-hand side of image.

My old-school Schaedler rule was put back to work as I measured it out.

For scanning 6×6 negs:

120, 6x6 with frame offsets

under INPUT:

• FRAME OFFSET: -5
• FRAME SPACING: 60
• BATCH LIST: 1,2,3

That took care of the 6×6 neg issues, on to 6×9.

For scanning 6×9 negs:

120 6x9, with frame offsets

under INPUT:

• FRAME OFFSET: -5
• FRAME SPACING: 93
• BATCH LIST: 1,2

TREATING THE IMAGE

After scanning the image to its proper folder, I’ll preview it in Adobe Bridge. This is where I use the EXIF template features to mass-tag files. Create the template[s] you want and go for it.

Now your gorgeous film images are in the digital workflow. Color-balance, spot, edit at will. More on that, later!

“Kid, it sucks now. You shoulda been here two years ago!”

The day after I graduated, the day before I left.

After graduating from college, I moved to Los Angeles in June 1977, after an eventful trip west on my mortally wounded ’75 Suzuki T-500.

The first place I lived on my own was a dumpster apartment complex in Van Nuys, Located on the corner of Victory and Fulton Blvd, it backed up to a dinky strip mall on Victory Blvd. California Donuts, a CPA, laundromat, maybe a dry-cleaners. It was right across the street from Jimmy Smith’s Supper Club, where Jimmy held forth on his Hammond B-3 Fridays thru Sunday nights.

Immediately across the street was an Alta-Dena Drive Thru Dairy, where you could buy milk, smokes, and the LA Times for a dime (but not all together). Down the street was Changing Times Hair Salon, owned by the irrepressible Juan Lizarraga; “Hair styled by Pierre of Pacoima, formerly Walter of Watts”. But that was in the future.

The traffic was constant, the air gritty with smog, and the neighborhood was relentlessly ugly. It seemed all the trees were several blocks away.

The apartment building itself was a faded 2-story courtyard complex with an alligator pond for a pool. I looked at the apartment the day after my grubstake arrived after being lost in the mail for three weeks. I’d been staying with a college friend whose young marriage was dissolving, the job she’d lined up for me had evaporated, and my wheels were a gigantic beast of a Dodge ’71 pickup truck to replace my dead motorcycle.

When I walked into the courtyard, the pool was half-empty, with several of the mullet-headed vato chicas with their KISS Army t-shirts and heavy eye makeup standing around looking at it. The rental agent was glad that the unit was occupied, and vanished seconds after I wrote the check.

Everything I owned in the world fit into the corner of the apartment, which was $200 a month. That night I went to a Lucky supermarket, wandered the aisles, wondering what I was going to feed myself. I remember buying fish, white rice, household stuff, and a mop. Then I went home and made dinner, and ate it in silence.

As the days passed, I slowly began to come to terms with my new home. The building manager was a rowdy Filipino with a large fish-tank. The Vietnamese extended family lived in one of the 2-bedroom units in the back; the patriarch, wife, daughters, grandchildren, and the Anglo son-in-law. There was a spectacularly ugly Chicana who lived upstairs, and had a face an iguana would’ve loved. She entertained callers at all hours.

The Filipino vanished after a late-night drunk-fight with one of his homies ended in a sickening crack of his fish-tank, followed by a dead-silence, then 50 gallons of aquarium and fish hitting the carpet. He was replaced by a married couple that used their 2 small boys as basketballs. Tom, the husband, was a comic-book palooka with a room-temperature IQ. The wife was a porcelain-faced, Cupid-bowed mouth, heavy-hipped foghorn whose profanities were loud and memorable. Nothing she said was ever less than 90db.

I looked for work. Navigating this very large, strange city was exhausting. My truck got 8mpg with a tail-wind, had one locking door, and a concrete-splattered bed, minus the tailgate. The FM radio had 3 options; KBCA for jazz, KROQ for low-wattage New Wave, and maybe KMET for what’s now classic rock. It was the Ultimate Chick Repellant, which might as well have said “Never Get Laid” on the sides. I’d park this beast next to Jags, Benzos, anything that looked better than me. Nobody jacked my portfolio.

Looking for work here was only somewhat better than looking in Cleveland two years earlier. Now I didn’t have a fallback. This was it.

“Aw kid, it sucks now. You shoulda been here two years ago!”

“Didja go to Art Center? You shoulda”

“Ohio what?”

“Art Center”

“Art Center”

“Art Center”

I kept at it because I’d crossed the Mississippi with the express intention to escape Ohio. I got a hand-typed rejection letter from ABC. After that, the mailbox was empty most of the time. My dad sent a large box with paperbacks he’d plowed through and tossed. There were days I didn’t leave the apartment.

One day I got a call from a tiny magazine I’d interviewed at. Was I still interested? Uh, yeah. I was down to my last $150. It’d taken me 3-1/2 weeks to find a job. Now I had  it.

Only later did I understand how lucky and fat that was.

Looking for Summer Work, 1975: A Fugue in 2 Parts

Dog Star In Red Dwarves

In 1975 I was a horny, depressed graphic design major. Maybe that’s a given, but I also had vague notions about finding some kind of work for Summer ’75. With a heavy heart I decided to look for ad agency work in Cleveland, Ohio, which at that time had the most agencies in Ohio.

My European summer of ’74 was a fond memory, and no offers were forthcoming. Ginger, the girl I’d hooked up with on that trip had family in Cleveland; but was either in school in Connecticut or at the family escape at Sanibel in Florida. She made herself very scarce.

Hard times had begun to stalk the Rust Belt. The ’73 Energy Crisis was still being played out daily. Coal was four times more expensive than it had been two winters before, and all the power plants burned coal. Legacy steel mills, auto, and other mid-century manufacturing had just been stabbed through the heart, and would never recover their previous glory. Ever. Welcome to the new economy, kid.

The first trip was in early January 1975. I stayed at the YMCA, went to ad agencies and showed my student book. The responses were polite, guarded, tepid. The city was bone-cold. I wore what passed for good clothing; non-jeans, street shoes. I froze my ass off.

At night I’d head back to the Y, and look out the window at the corner liquor store/carryout across the street. It was dead. The steam-heat was alternately comforting and stifling. I’d look at my dress-clothes as they came out of the pack, read whatever paperback I had, and wait for the morning. In the morning I’d go to a diner down the street and eat, hot coffee and something, and head out.

I plodded on for several days. No leads, but I got into more than a few agencies. My theoretical job began to look like an ever-lengthening line that curved over the horizon. Finally, I beat it back to the bus station for Athens, with brave promises that I’d do better over Spring Break.

School started up again, I buried myself in classes. Living at home was not fun, and I had a non-existent social life. It was a self-perpetuating cycle, with no clear escape.

Spring Break loomed, and I made plans to go back up to The Mistake On The Lake. The Sunday afternoon bus trip to Columbus was a reefer-madness comic episode. There were 3 or 4 exuberant young black guys in the back row who had a very large cassette-tape boom box, and a lot of dope. They lit up, and as the bus rolled on to Columbus, the bus slowly filled up with reefer smoke. Meanwhile the tape deck started playing slower, and slower. The mix tape was songs recorded off the radio, with the ends clipped as the DJ would back announce over the end of the song.

B-A-C-K-S-T-A-B-B-E-R…..

On the outskirts of Columbus, the bus passengers had essentially passed out. Finally somebody went to the bus-driver, who opened a wing-vent. A writhing snake of smoke collected itself, and like out of a movie, got sucked out of the bus. Everybody woke up by the time we pulled into the bus station.

The trip to Cleveland was muted. No joy here. I stayed at the Y one night. Then I opened my wallet and realized that I didn’t have enough to stay at the Y. Checking out, I found a SRO cheap-ass hotel—Hotel Bolivar, if memory serves, on 9th St. Walking up the single-width stairs to the buzzer-locked cashier’s window, I rented a room for the next two nights. He handed me a key, a dirty look, told me to read the rules, and buzzed me in.

Walking a maze of jumbled hallways that were painted in cast-off colors, I found my room. It was clean, dry, and barren, opening to an airless airwell. It made the Y look like the Ritz. Here I was. Time stretched on forever.

The first night was punctuated by footfalls in the hallway, faint snorings and phlegmy coughs by men who’d smoked their entire lives.I took a shower in a dim, blighted room that looked like it came from a prison-camp yard sale. Rarely have I showered so fast.

Note to the traveller: Celine’s “Journey to the End of the Night” is not light and frolicsome reading. Save it for when you have lots of money, on a beach somewhere. Also that night I lost any remaining taste for Tom Waits, who was then a boho fave with his “Nighthawks at the Diner“. Here there was no romance; only old, tired, used-up, broken men.

The few days that followed were more futility. I rotated in and out of agencies. One agency studio had middle-aged men sitting at their drafting tables, reading paperbacks. Nobody made a sound, so the bean-counters wouldn’t hear their inactivity, and fire them. It was foreboding.

My slender finances permitted a day-old loaf of bread, bracketed by 2 cups of watery coffee I got somewhere. The Y, with the vending machine, and the corner carryout was a mirage. Ghetto life in its full ’70s glory was on full display. Street-life characters could only afford one aspect of the Look; the apple cap, the chunky shoes, the high-rise flared pants. The rest of their outfits lagged a decade behind.

I threw in the towel on Wednesday. Caught the bus outta there, back down in painful slowness to Columbus, then back to Athens. The closer I got, the slower it became. I lulled myself to sleep with notions that it wasn’t always going to be this cold and bleak, and somehow I’d have a job, and get laid more often than not.

Once I got to Athens, I started walking through the deserted town,  out to Rt 50, and hitched a ride out to Albany. I then walked the last 2 miles from Albany out to the farm. I think I walked up the road to the house that semi-gray, raw March day, and saw Laird schooling a horse in the ring. Arnold was holed up in his office. I changed back into my workwear.

That summer I was a poorly-paid camp counsellor to the children of rich Texans in New Mexico. I nominally taught art, and having never taught art, made shit up. It was terrifying. I’d gotten out of the mud for 6 weeks; got drunk, fell in love, became fast friends for the summer with people I never saw again.

Tech Triumphalism Never Sleeps

Extracting assumptions and trivia from this video…

1/ Assumes that the mere weight of data is somehow better or more valid than previous technologies or cultures
2/ That an issue of the NYT has more data/info than an 18th century person would encounter in a lifetime assumes that…

• the info was only written, in a time when most working technologies and cultures were non-literate.
• ignores the fact that an 18th C. individual was probably better equipped to feed/clothe him/herself than the 21st C urban techno-servant. For instance, when was the last time anyone in any office you worked in made a pair of pants, skinned a rabbit, tended a bean-patch?
• that all info/data in that lucky issue of the NYT is of equal weight and value to all. In freight terms, what is the difference between a pound of lead and a pound of feathers? None. Mass is a different story.

3/ Broadband penetration: Geography & infrastructure is key. #1 Bernuda = tiny. #19 Japan = highly developed archipelago

4/ Number of text messages? How many actually say something? LOL/STFU. Highlights the metrics of availability and theoretical cost of use.

5/ Water, water, water. The invisible missing element.

6/ All these networks, infrastructures, systems are kept alive by electricity. When the lights go out, party’s over.

For starters.

The “Plan B” Photo Shoot Weekend

Saturday, June 28 2009, 1945hr

I was on location at the finish line of the Western States 100 Mile Endurance Run. The winner was due in about an hour.

I was setting up my lights—A Norman 2000 power pack, 2 lamp heads, one with softbox, the other with translucent umbrella. I was taking preliminary flash readings when I heard a loud cracking sound from the powerpack, followed by a slow puff of smoke. I toggled the switches, hoping that I had been hallucinating. The test switch was inoperative. I had a dead power-pack.

I could’ve been totally screwed. However—I’d packed my Lighting Plan B: 2 Vivitar 283s, 2 285s, a radio slave, and some Wein Peanuts. Incidentally, the case was a dumpster salvage from Art Center, thanks to my friend Lars who is the Shop Supervisor at the Lida St campus.

I quickly took new readings. The winner arrives. I make my shots, and await the next runners.

image shot 2100hrs

Over the next 12 hours I photograph another 40 runners.

TECH DETAILS

site shoot plan

1. 283 firing into silver umbrella at purple setting
2. 285 set to 1/4 power, firing thru translucent umbrella
3. 283 set to 1/4 power, stofen’d, set to 1/4 power
4. Film: Kodak TriX ASA 320, 1989 vintage, shooting at 1/250 f 4
5. Camera, with 4i Radio Slave

So far, so good. Until about 0945 on Sunday. The 80mm lens on the Hassy decided it’s had enough. The Plan B Camera is pulled from the green room—the Yashicamat 124.

I shot the remaining roll of Kodak 160 in it, then switch off to Kodak ASA 400 TCN. Keep shooting.

Now comes the fun part: had I learned anything in the last 6 months, and more importantly, did I remember when I needed it?

I’d heard about using small strobes for big jobs. To tell the truth, I didn’t quite believe it. Looking back I needed to have big lights dump light to overcome a tendency to underexpose.

Realizing I needed more information, I’d started to read the Strobist.com back in December ’08, as these guys are all about creative solutions with small strobes.

Over the years I’d collected a stable of Vivitar 283s and 285s. No, I couldn’t afford Nikon Speedlights, and yes, I’m a primitivist. These Vivitars are the AK-47s of flash—sturdy warhorses that dump an unholy amount of light. Even dialed down to 1/4 power, they make a lot of magic, and go all night.

When I got the film back, I saw that overall reduced light at night gave me rich shadow and modeling. As the sun came up behind the light-proofed backdrop, the same settings opened up deep shadows in the faces, and left enough modelling so there was dimensionality. By 11:00, the official end of the race, the sun was nearly overhead to give that special “hair-light” effect.

image taken around 1030am.

A major added benefit of smaller strobes: a lot less weight in travel, quicker setups and knockdowns, and the versatility of photo-guerilla shooting. I’m a way happier camper now.

Oh yeah: all the pix right here.

“The Art Doctor” Cannot Reanimate the Brain-Dead

Mr Shark has his own thoughts on the subject of art.

I’m delighted to assure you that bullshit knows no boundaries or statute of limitations. The New Yorker had a lengthy article on “the Art Doctor”,  conservator Christian Scheidemann. I respect Mr Scheidemnan’s encyclopedic expertise. What I find thoroughly laughable is his considerable talents are keeping art swindles by the likes of Damien Hirst et al, on life support.

Exceptions to the sorrow were some droll moments where beetles were gnawing the guts of a Wilfredo Lam canvas because they liked the glue. Wilfredo could kick the asses of all the current Po-Mo darlings, and then entertain their mistresses in style.

So, I decided to fire off a letter, to hurl a dead cow over the parapets if you will:

Editors:

Did it occur to anybody else while reading “The Art Doctor” that the real task was conservation of a preposterous fraud? Every “artist” reverentially mentioned is a slick bullshit artist, a mountebank, a swindler and cheat; pimply adolescent trolls stumbling in the footsteps of giants. I can’t wait for all of their “works” to implode due to their moronic ineptitude.

There was no thud, but it felt good anyway.

The Sixth Interview Principle

Panhandler Posts Her Working-Rate

There are Five Big Things you want to avoid during an interview. They are:

1. Being unprepared
2. Behaving inappropriately
3. Appearing unfocused
4. Seeming insincere
5. Stretching the truth

That’s according to an article by Jerry S. Wilson, Senior VP-chief customer and commercial officer at Coca-Cola Co, in addition to his current incarnation as a motivational marketer, etc.

The 60-Second Pitch

Super Hero, Straight Guy, and the Femme

Its all about you. Describe who you are and what you do. Its professional speed-dating. That was the exercise before us that evening.

How are you going to be concise, informative, engaging, and confident? Without the hems, haws, errrs, and latent narcissism that is just dying to get out and run with muddy boots on white shag carpeting?

It was a messy start. Words got stuck in my throat. I was stumbling. All the reference points in my head were now floating furniture in a zero-gravity un-fun house. I closed my eyes like I was trying to see a match-flare in the dark.

If I’d been sparring in the boxing ring, I’d be knocked-out. If I was driving, there’d be a fireball. Help!

Start at the beginning.

“I’m a graphic designer with over 31 years of print production experience”.

Good start! Establish a professional bona-fide that you hadn’t been living as a Trustifarian.

“I am also a photographer that works with vintage cameras and film because of their unique visual qualities. The photos are then composited into unique digital illustrations, or left as freestanding documents”

Lumpy, but getting closer. Onward!

“One of my long-term documentary projects is photographing 100-mile runners immediately after they finish, in a mobile studio set-up at the finish line of the race. I shoot with medium format camera, using black-and-white film”

A definable, tangible artifact!

The second hand is sweeping towards the finish.

“I also…”

DING!

And now it’s your turn to listen to somebody else’s pitch.

At the end, I was wrung out. No surprise there—these muscles are flabby from inactivity. But its a start. As I went through the 60-second pitch process, I found that I thought I had it almost-wired. Almost. Until I got home and realized that I’d left out a lot. Like the fact that I’m writing this in a way that’s hopefully concise, informative, and engaging.

21 Questions In An Unsettled Time

Abandoned 1920s Billboard, N of Mojave CA. 1989

I was contacted recently by a student who is going to be graduating this spring from Brooks. She included a survey and asked for answers so she could figure out her next move.

Tell me about yourself and your business.

Self-employed freelance print-production expert, with a sideline in photo

Where did you go to school?

Ohio University

Why did you choose that specific school?

A complicated story. There was no choice in the matter–my dad taught photo there, and with a faculty discount I paid (you’re not going to like this part) $79 a quarter (1973-77). However I had to cover all my own school expenses, while working nearly fulltime at his wife’s boarding stable. Much, much later I discovered that my grandparents had salted away money for my education…

What was your major?

Graphic design

How did you get started after school?

Looking for entry-level jobs. Got a job as a paste-up guy at a tiny magazine for $4.50/hr

Did your schooling prepare you for the industry?

Not really.

What are your most effective methods in growing and sustaining your business?

Being adaptable, learning new skills, learning old-school techniques and processes. Showing up on time. Meeting deadlines. Not being a dick.

What was the greatest challenge in starting your business?

Overcoming the terror. Yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

Is there any particular methods you would target and approach clients?

Be honest. Get a mentor

What are your favorite strategies of promoting yourself and your business?

Word of mouth. Social networking via LinkedIn/facebook. Its not surefire, but it helps.

What is your branding method or strategy?

Selling my experience.

What is the job market like in your market for new college graduates?

Really bad

What is the competition like in the industry?

Fierce

What is the competition like in your geographic area you promote and operate your business in?

Same as above

How do you determine your pricing?

1/ not being a CraigsList low-ball dick.

2/ realistically cover your costs, because this is a business

What would be your advice to a recent grad from a photography school about art direction for a career?

An effective art director is somebody who understands that looks alone are not going to make truly effective or interesting advertising.

I had a teacher who observed that fashion advertising is a world where the rules of gravity are suspended. I read W because the photography is alternately wonderful and horrifying, and gravity-free. Like the recent Marc Jacobs stuff where models are in a swirl of what appears to be mustard gas. Those are somewhat interesting images, but missed opportunities for art direction and design. By contrast there were some Chanel ads that were brilliant in their understated strength.

Are you growing as a business or entity?

I′m trying to grow my business as a specialty photographer using vintage cameras and film. Since my work is not insta-deadline driven, its a set of techniques like an illustrator

Would you recommend going to marketing classes or seminars?

depends on who’s teaching them. Get on a photo/designer list, ask questions, poke and pry. You’re trading money for talk.

Do you attend seminars?

Yes, very selectively

How is changing technology affecting your business?

Too numerous to mention. Suffice to say I watermark every image I post. Yes, its a dick move, but until I get paid for that image, its there, at 5% opacity, and meta-data’d as well.

What advice do you have for a student photographer desiring to enter the business?

Get ready to work very, very hard. Some joy, a fair amount of heartbreak. The stuff you thought was soul-deadening in school will probably pay your bills.

CODA

I mentioned my dad taught photography. Every quarter he‘d review the numbers for his Basic class:

450: annual number of students in Basic Photo [150 x 3 quarters]
100: number of students accepted into Intermediate, annually
25: number of students in Sr Class
10: number of students as graduate students
1: number of students making their living in photo, 5 years after graduation

This did not take into account the photo-journalism shooters, which was a different program. The numbers may have shifted over the years, I don‘t know.

I sincerely wish you the greatest success in your efforts. I really do. Hopefully the soundings I offer will help in some way, and not be discouraging. If I can be of any other assistance, let me know.