I Do Not Want to Do Video!

Tribal elder, Mayalan Village, Northern Guatemala

As the business of commercial photography changes with the times, more and more photographers are reorienting their businesses to add video production services, and some are even switching over to video entirely.

Frankly, this makes me glad I’m late in my career. My dedication has always been to the still image and I don't want to do video!

I got my start in the early 1970s, working for a film production company that did   what used to be called industrial movies, short films which were mostly used for sales and promotion.  However, our bread and butter was filmstrips (older readers may remember them), mostly for food service employee training. It was an interesting time for me, and a different world.

(A filmstrip, for the uninitiated, is a sequence of still photographs on one strip of film, usually with a soundtrack, and shown by means of a projector.)

Boy with puppy, Mayalan Village

After a stint with another company as director of advertising, I opened my own photography and production business in 1978, majoring in slide shows and filmstrips, but not movies. I did, among other things, 36 filmstrips for the Krystal hamburger chain, teaching employees how to do everything from cooking the burgers to cleaning the toilets; and more than 60 promotional and fund-raising filmstrips for Church of God World Missions.

By 1985, many of the A-V programs I did were set up as three-projector slide shows playing on one screen with dissolve effects, and transferred to videocassette for distribution. I loved that medium, and really thought it would last. But by the end of 1990, all was swept away as the world converted to video. I firmly believed, and still believe, that a sequence of still photographs is a better teaching/training tool for most things than video.

But I tried video for a couple of years and absolutely hated it, so I re-invented myself as a commercial photographer.

Young scholar, Mayalan Village

A few years ago, as the digital age advanced and I saw more and more work going to amateurs and semi-pros with automated cameras, I decided to find specialties that were as safe as possible from those people. I chose the dual disciplines of architecture and business headshots, both of which require lighting skills a bit more advanced than flash-on-camera. Fortunately, those specialties are also the most impervious to the encroachment of video.

As I get older and no longer need or care to call on art directors less than half my age, I'm finding my final refuge in photographing and writing for books and magazine articles. I believe in the power of the still image and absolutely do not want to do video.

And now I don't have to.

If you would like to see a sample of a still-photo-based audio-visual program, check this one out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=8qVWeosEXBo

The (Difficult) Business of Photography

The Corporate Portrait is a staple of many photographer's businesses.

For any of my readers who may have thought of professional photography as an easy, fun way to make a living, let me enlighten you. Professional photography is one of the most difficult ways in the world to make a living. The only field I know of that is comparably difficult is the performing arts. And in the performing arts, where most languish with an occasional part-time gig and a few make a reasonable living, a very, very few make it big. And those few who make it big in the performing arts can make it very big indeed.

On the other hand, those few who make it big in photography don't make it all that big. The best most of us can hope for is to make a reasonable living. Skill with the tools of photography is essential, of course, but is by no means the most important. It's just an entry level thing. The most important factors are a personal vision and business skills. And the most important of those is business skills.

So you’re an amateur. You know you’re really good with a camera, and people love your photographs. They even tell you, “Why, you’re better than so-and-so professional photographer!”

There was a time when skill with the tools of photography was enough to launch a professional career. But no more. Digital makes it all too easy to make sharp, well-exposed photographs, so even a very high order of skill with the tools and techniques of photography won't make it. With a very, very strong personal vision, you might make it. But without business skills, and especially the ability to sell (there’s that ugly word you probably hoped to avoid) you won't last.

If this sounds discouraging, I'm sorry. But if anything I might say could discourage you from a career in photography, you weren’t going to make it anyway.

As many of the traditional sources of studio income began to dry up, I turned increasingly to architectural photography. (The Hunter Museum of American Art, Chattanooga, Tennessee)

But if you are serious about making it in this difficult but deeply satisfying profession, I recommend you start by buying the Commercial Photography Handbook by Kirk Tuck and begin learning the business of photography. Start following his blog visualsciencelab.blogspot.com. Go back into his archives and research his articles on business. Print them out and put them in a binder. I print out his business posts and keep them in a binder even though I’ve been a full-time professional for more than 40 years. And I still learn from them.

My Favorite Photographs

Louise, Rob, baby Don, 1968

My very favorite photograph in all the world, taken several years before I became a professional, hangs on the wall by my desk.

My wife is sitting in my old easy chair, now long gone, with infant Don in her lap while eight-year-old Rob is seated on the ottoman and leaning in, lightly embracing Don. Both are in their PJs, ready for bed. Illumination was from a table lamp beside the chair and another lamp across the room. The camera was a roll-film Polaroid, and the film was their 3000-speed black & white. Since Polaroid roll film did not make a negative that could be printed in any conventional way, Polaroid offered a service to copy the 3¼x4¼ prints from their film, make a copy negative, and then make prints as requested. I sent my little print to them and had them make a 5x7.

There many things wrong with this photograph, but not the love and trust, which are palpable.

Rob and Don are now 58 and 51.

Byrl Thornton Jenkins on his 90th birthday, October 5, 1999

My second favorite photo is this one of my Dad, taken on his 90th birthday, October 5, 1999. He posed on the front porch of his home, holding his Bible, and with a background of fall foliage. I used a Hasselblad CM and 150mm lens with Fuji NPH color negative film rated at ISO 320. I love this photograph because it shows the basic sweetness of the man.

My Dad was a man who was always young, always looking forward to the next thing. At the age of 89 he was operating two flea-market mall booths. On the last day we spent together, just a month before he died, we spent the day shopping for a computer system so he could go online and sell his antiques.

Dad passed away in February, 2000. The goal of my life is to emulate his faith, courage, and perseverance.

Cameras Get Better; Pictures Don't

Syracuse Gothic: Mony above all
Konica Autoreflex T, Tri-X @ ISO 800, Processed in Acu-1

 As the great photographer Ernst Haas is reputed to have said to Bob Schwalberg (European editor of the now defunct Popular Photography) when Schwalberg was enthusing over the latest equipment developments, "Ach, Schwapselberg, why is it that cameras keep getting better but pictures don't get any better?"

Pictures indeed have not gotten any better, but we are in the closing stages of a great sea change in photography. Photography is essentially a product of the modernist era and was perfectly suited to expressing the ideals of that philosophy, which implicitly included optimistic humanism. Photographically, this reached its zenith in Edward Steichen's great "Family of Man" exhibit and book. The influence of optimistic humanism continued strong in photography for many years, although we gradually forgot why.

Now we are well into the postmodern era, and support for optimistic humanism has greatly eroded. There has been a crashing loss of faith in man. Who today would say with Hamlet "What a piece of work is man, How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, In form and moving how express and admirable, In action how like an Angel, In apprehension how like a god, The beauty of the world, The paragon of animals?"  

Instead of being seen as an heroic figure with unlimited potential for progress (the twin-lens reflex camera, by the way, was the perfect instrument for expressing this heroism because the viewpoint was usually one of looking up at the subject), he is now seen in a negative way as a threat to the environment and a creature for which we can have, at best, only tentative hopes. Man has been deconstructed, and this is the reason nature, landscape, and environmental photography, although they have always been with us, have now come to the fore. The idea that "the proper study of man is man" has been largely abandoned, and where it continues, it is often the study of people living in primitive cultures, as in much of Chris Ranier's excellent work; people who are living closer to and presumably in greater harmony with the environment. This also accounts for the recent spate of books about "Native Americans."

The great humanist photographers Robert Doisneau and Fritz Henle are dead, as is Henri Cartier-Bresson who exited this life dabbling in water-colors. Elliot Erwitt is in his 90s. B.A. King, least-known but one of the greatest humanistic photographers, spent the last 20 or so years of his life using his camera to advocate environmental concerns. These men and many others were part of a movement that produced much of our greatest photography, but it is on its last legs. As a Christian, I consider modernism and optimistic humanism to be flawed philosophies, but they nonetheless created a climate in which great photography was produced. 

Syracuse Gothic: Do Not Enter
Konica Autoreflex T, Tri-X @ ISO 800, Processed in Acu-1

Photography is about reality, but under the influence of postmodernism we are fast losing the concept of reality. This is reflected in the trend to computer alteration of photographs, which loosens the connection between photography and reality and threatens to break that connection altogether. From that moment, photography, as photography, will be dead. It may continue to be a nice hobby, a more-or-less profitable commercial activity, and a pretty plaything, but its power to inspire a sense of wonder will be gone. A virtual reality is no substitute for the real thing.