365 Days of Photos

(Warning: This post is quite a ramble, and it's very photo-heavy)


WHEW!


Finally, a year later from the start of my 365 project, I'm done. I made it out alive, but most importantly to me, I made it through the whole project without ever once missing a day or cheating in any sense. It's probably one of the hardest photo challenges I've ever had. It was also simultaneously the longest year of my life, and the shortest year of my life. Confused? Here's why:

We all pride ourselves on being creative, whether we are considered "creative professionals," just hobbyists, or even just dedicated parents helping your children with an art or science project. We all feel, and utilize the little sparks of creative inspiration that pop into our heads from time to time. But can creativity be forced? I'd like to say, for certain, it cannot. It can be coerced, it can be coaxed out of hiding, you can certainly bargain with it. However, it is as stubborn as a mule and if it doesn't want to come around, well, it won't.

This project gave me many almost-sleepness nights. I'd be up until 4 or 5AM at times, trying to force creativity to deliver some magical idea to me. Most of those nights it did not. I would settle for less, if absolutely necessary, but I was never happy about it. Some of the toughest days were the ones that I didn't have anything in particular planned. Some days I'd wake up with an idea, or it would hit me at lunch time, or I'd finally have the time needed to go after a planned photo idea that maybe had come to me weeks prior. Sometimes it would depend on the weather, sometimes it would depend on my day-to-day schedule, sometimes it even depended on my location, or even my health.

The bottom line is that I really wanted to stick this out. There were so many nights that I thought I may fall asleep just trying to think of something, and to me, if I didn't have a new photo before I officially fell asleep for the night, then I failed. There are some shots in here that I knew I could have done better if I'd had the time to bust out an entire lighting setup with stands, modifiers, clamps, background holders, and other items that only photographers would know by name; but quite simply, I was too tired, or in too much of a hurry, or something was in my way that could not be helped. So I did my best and uploaded the least-worst of the batch. This was meant to be a learning experience, and sometimes the only way to learn is by missing the target from time to time.

So, what did I learn? In no particular order:

• You can't force inspiration, you have to feel it. It will find you, not the other way around.
• Anything can be made to look great if given the time to really set up a shot with meaning
• When you rush, you can still complete a masterpiece, but it's hit-or-miss
• Having no experience what-so-ever with a particular photographic method is all the reason in the world to finally give it a try
• When in doubt, grab a flash
• In the words of Zack Arias: "What really is a studio? A floor and a couple walls? You got a floor and a couple walls? You got yerself a studio!"
• A-clamps are absolutely invaluable
• Always carry at least one light stand and a tripod in your car at all times.
• In general, things start looking different after the first few weeks. You notice more photo opportunities where you never thought of looking before.
• Learned how to plan more involved shots into smaller spans of time
• Invaluable lessons in timing and quick setups
• The first time you try something new, it's going to suck, unless you get lucky, but it's the only way to get started. You always need the first building block.
• Any photo can be interpreted in a thousand different ways. If you have a specific message to get out, you need to put as much into it as you can.
• If you lock yourself into one specific style, you will fail. You don't have to master everything, but you have to be open to trying new styles and ideas
• You can improvise backgrounds out of anything as long as you can get enough blur from an open aperture.

Hell, there's probably lots more, but that's most of it. Most importantly though, I'd say about 90% of these photos had no real "Photoshopping" done to them. Sure, maybe I'd boost some brightness, bring out some more shadow detail, change the saturation; minor tweaks that you would do even with film in a darkroom. Aside from one photo where the purpose was to layer 2 images, I did no recompositing; there are no sharks jumping out of the water attacking a helicopter in this gallery. Everything was displayed the way it was shot. If you can't learn to get it right in-camera, then you're not bettering your photography, you're bettering your editing skills, and that is opposite to the purpose of doing a project like this in the first place.

Were there days when I wanted to quit? Sure, of course. There were times when I was sick, physically sick and stuck in bed, but still dragged myself out to take a shot. Many nights I'd pace my house for hours before something hit me. I had people telling me I should just let it go so I could get back on a regular sleep schedule. Hell it took me a few days just to write this entry. I needed to finally get my mind off of it. The funny thing is that I still get that panic-like rush when the sun starts going down and I forget, for a moment, that I'm done and don't need to take a photo for the day. Then the calm washes over me and a sense of accomplishment rushes through me.

The project finished Tuesday night. Originally I was going to grab a picture of my cat's behind, sort of as a "kiss my ass" to anyone who thought I couldn't pull this off (myself included, believe me) but instead I had the chance to get out and photograph Sevendust's concert that night. I think it's incredibly appropriate that a project like this end with a concert photo, since concert photography is what got me started in the first place.

If I had to give any advice to people wanting to do something like this, the most important thing would be to make sure you've got the strength to go through with it. Anyone who doesn't understand probably thinks I'm over-dramatizing right now, but it's the truth. It's very taxing on your nerves, on your thinking, and on your time. If you don't make time to use the creativity that hits you, you'll fall right off the horse. Try planning shots over time, that way one days when no inspiration hits you, you've at least got a backup list of things you can shoot. I only figured that out more than halfway through, and even then some of the ideas I had were too intricate to pull off when you've barely got one eye open.

Not all of the images in the gallery are masterpieces, but they serve a purpose. some of them tell a story, and some of them were just nice ideas in-and-of themselves. I am proud of each and every one of them. In fact, some of the crappiest shots are very important to me because those are most likely the ones that came to me at the very last minute in the early morning before I could barely stay awake any longer.

Finally, the images. Here are some of my favorites:


Day 14: 10-26-09 Lemon Ice


Day 36 11-17-09 Sparks (probably my absolute favorite of all)


Day 52 12-03-09 Seasons Greedings (first attempt at bokeh)


Day 61 12-12-09 Identify


Day 71 12-22-09 Butcher Shop


Day 79 12-30-09 Down In A Hole


Day 121 02-10-10 Snow Day


Day 136 02-25-10 Someone In The Oven


Day 167 03-28-10 Ignite


Day 174 04-04-10 Infinity


Day 181 04-11-10 What Does This Do?


Day 202 05-02-10 Lost In The Summer Sky


Day 216 05-16-10 How Could You?


Day 262 07-01-10 Paradise


Day 285 07-24-10 Drill Sgt.


Day 320 08-28-10 Ferris Wheel


Day 358 10-05-10 Crimson


Day 361 10-08-10 David Ellefson


Day 363 10-10-10 Coexist

Of course, there are others, but it would take too long to go through all of them.

I am definitely going to make myself a photo book of this entire gallery. I don't know if anyone else would care to own a book full of all these shots, but they're definitely special, and important, to me. If anyone has any interest in a photo book full of my 365 shots, please contact me ASAP. I will try to order a few at once to keep the pricing down, but due to the cost of putting something like this together I probably can't make it available indefinitely just yet.

Thanks to everyone who supported me by sharing kinds words about my photos and by visiting the gallery every so often to catch up on what's new. Extra special thanks to Lisa, my fiancee and best friend. I wouldn't have the determination I have without you, and I certainly wouldn't be the person I am without you in my life.

More soon.
-Rob

Mind in the Gutter

This shot was my 365 photo for yesterday, March 11, 2010.

This project has been tough and there are days/nights where I have absolutely no idea how I'm going to complete the task for the day. Last night on my way out of the house I noticed this soda can laying in the curb by my car. It hadn't been there all week, yet it looked like it'd been there for a year. It was crunched, dirty, rusty in spots and conveyed a general sense of despair. Yeah, us photographers are nuts, we can start sensing feeling in inanimate objects. I was looking at it and the composition it could create within a photo, and I knew I had to shoot it, but I was already running late. So I got in my car and just hoped it would still be there later.

Well, I did my running around for the night and surely enough, when I got back, there was my sad looking little can. It was so lonely looking, just laying there in the gutter like that. I guess it's the mood I've been in lately. Hell, the mood most people have been in lately. But it spoke to me, it had meaning behind it, and it would be a shame not to document how life imitates art, or however that saying goes ;)

The basic idea of how to get the shot I wanted came to be pretty easily (Hey, I guess this project is paying off after all.). But it would require being eye level with the subject. So yeah, there I was at 1AM laying in the street with a camera in my hand and a speedlight flash in the middle of the road, on a corner. Thankfully my street isn't very busy at night or this entry might have a different ending!

I knew that the texture of the gritty can worked perfectly with the rough pavement and the abused looking cement curb. I also knew that the textures played into their respective colors perfectly. The black of the pavement, the bright-yet-faded yellow of the curb, and the once-was-green of the soda can really meshed. It was a dynamic bunch of colors and textures. I purposely hit it with pretty direct, harsh light, to really bring out the gritty textures of the street and the dirt on the can.

I just love how alone and forgotten this looks. It can be seen as a symbol of our throwaway society where we take everything for granted, or it can mean something deeper to anyone who feels like they've been left in the gutter. With the way the world has been lately, I'm sure everyone who looks at this can come up with some way to relate to this poor, forgotten, abused soda can.

Click the image above, or right here, for a full view of the shot.

More soon,
Rob

365 Day 133

I took this shot last night for my ongoing 365 Project. This isn't the first time I've done a shot with this same kind of setup, and since people have asked in the past how I get shots like this, I thought I'd give a quick lesson on how something like this can be done.

Now, for the more advanced photographers out there this isn't really anything you haven't already done, but since there are plenty of people out there who have never done this kind of thing before, I thought it would be helpful for them to see one of the ways you could go about achieving this type of result. Also, for the art lovers out there who don't have any intention of ever doing this themselves, it's just a nice little glimpse into how some of us work.

This shot may look like it could have been done in a studio with a backdrop and a food stylist, but really it was done in about 5 minutes in my kitchen. Again, for all the strobist readers out there who have seen Mr. Hobby talk about this kind of setup over and over again, I know this is kind of post has been done to death, but this is my turn to put up a quick how-to post.

The truth is, when you're doing a project that can be this demanding, you are sometimes left improvising nothing into something at 2, 3, maybe 4AM. If you don't shoot something for the day then you've failed your own assignment, but you can't just take 365 pictures of your shoes. You start looking around for something, anything, that could be made even remotely interesting.

I've always liked detailed close-ups, especially of everyday things, that make them look more interesting than usual. I could have taken a quick picture of the whole lemon, just sitting there on the kitchen countertop, but how boring would that have been?

Anyway, for something like this you really don't need a lot of stuff. You need a lemon (duh), or any juicy fruit, really. In my case I used 1 light with a diffuser cap, triggered by a Pocket Wizard, but you could also shoot this ETTL if you want to be all Joe McNally about it. I suspended the lemon slice above a bowl (to catch the juice, and to hold water in case I needed to reapply some juicy-ness) using a paper towel holder I got at the dollar store with an A-clamp. In the A-clamp jaw I used a bamboo skewer from the kitchen drawer and speared the lemon sideways. I propped the whole thing up on top of a tissue box to give me some height and to distance the subject from the light source just a bit.

Here is a pull-back view of the setup:

The whole thing took no time at all and gave me a great photo to add to my 365 gallery. The shot could also make it into the portfolio if I ever needed to display food photography, or could be uploaded to my stock gallery since I was able to shoot with a low ISO setting. So I can get 3 potential uses from one shot, how's that for making the most of your efforts?

Oh, and for the record, that drop of lemon juice was right from the lemon itself. Some juice dropped down after spearing it with the skewer and was just enough to make a nice droplet bulb, but not heavy enough to fall, so it stayed there nicely for the few shots I took before I was happy with my settings. The dropper in the bowl got put away unused.

Settings of the final shot: ISO 100; 1/200 @ f/13; 100mm 2.8 Macro lens; Canon 5D Mark II

More soon,
-Rob

Climbing that Mountain

So I'm gradually getting caught up on the massive backlog of work and different projects that have been keeping me from seeming very productive lately. But I have still managed to stay on schedule with my 365 project. It's really a relief because when I started it I was worried about how long I'd actually be able to see it through. It's hard to be artistic every single day, and I wasn't going to let myself settle for just some snapshots. I wanted to do things that took some degree of thinking, even if only relatively little at times. Some nights I am up into the AM hours trying to find something worth shooting, but I make sure I get it done.

I finally uploaded 7 days worth of backlogged 365 submissions to my website last night after (also finally) finishing the latest issue of Paragon Music Magazine (link goes directly to PDF issue).

The new issue contains some awesome interview with Faith and The Muse, Mark Tremonti of Alter Bridge, Matt Heafy of Trivium, and Toby Knapp. There is also a full page photo I took of Duff McKagan when he passed through NYC a few months ago with his band LOADED, as well as other goodies.

Upcoming tasks in my scope are to finally sort some nature shots for the website from my last trip a few weeks ago, finally finish the HAIL! photos from NYC, updates to Paragon Earth, and some new stock photography that I've been wanting to shoot for a while now.

As I complete these things you will updated, either through here or through my Twitter page, so make sure you head over there and follow me. It's a great way to get quick, short updates, without having to read a whole bunch of stuff. You can get Twitter updates sent to your cell phone even if you don't have one of those fancy iPhoneberrydroid gadgets. So you could think of it as a personal message right from me to your phone. Or not, do as you wish. =)

More soon,
Rob

Happy New Year: What's In Store

So, this is it for 2009, and good riddance to such an awful year. But now isn't the time to air our grievances with what has passed, it's time to look to the future and try to expect the best.

I want to take this time to thank everyone who has read this blog through the course of this year and who has followed me on Twitter. The online community is great because it can bring people together from across the planet and I am grateful that so many of you have been appreciating my work and coming back regularly to see what's new.

I also want to apologize for not being as active on social media as I had wanted to be. This has been a trying year for me on the personal front and professional front alike, and I am sorry that I let it get in the way of keeping people informed on what's been going on with DIGImmortal Photo.

2010 is going to bring some big changes for DIGImmortal. I've been spending the last few months researching the best uses and practices of social media services as well as traditional marketing techniques and I plan to hit all of them pretty hard this coming year. It's time to take that next step and really push myself in everyone's faces. I've got some nice job prospects on the horizon that will allow me to round out my portfolio even better but I am also taking Zack Arias' advice and will try to be more selective about what kind of work I show. I will also be applying much of what I learned at a recent Joe McNally seminar to my location lighting techniques.

I've basically been sitting around this year wondering why my business hasn't grown in the ways I want it to, and as it started to come together for me I realized that I need to stop admiring some of these big-time photogs that I follow and start embracing what it is they put out there for us to learn from. At the same time I finally started that 365 project that I had been putting off for so long, and so far I'm very happy with the results. Not only the results I get from the photos themselves but from what it's been doing for my discipline and creative eye. I will be doing this thing until October 2010, so I've got a long way to go, but it should continue to be both trying and fun all at once.

Anyway, there are only a few hours left in 2009, and I want to wish you all a safe, healthy, and happy new year. Let's all focus on what good can come in 2010 and put our collective conscious together and make it happen!

Happy New Year, and thanks for everything!

More soon.

-Rob

365 Project Begins

I know it's been a while since I've put anything up here, life has been in the way. I've been busy with some personal things, as well as some charity photography I've been doing for a local cat shelter that I volunteer at. All this leaves very little time to keep up with blogging.

However I wanted to let you all know that I've started a 365 Photo project to keep the creative juices flowing. The idea is that you take at least 1 photo each day for a full year. It's supposed to help you develop your creative eye, as eventually you run out of cool things to shoot and have to make the most, artistically, of your bland everyday surroundings.

I hope this will enhance my skills, and I'm going to share the results with the online community on either a daily or weekly basis. It's hard enough to shoot something and post it online daily, it's even harder to write blogs and announcements and things, so I'm thinking I'll shoot daily, and update my website gallery daily, but maybe will post the results on here, FB, Twitter, and my business blog weekly, so as not to overload everyone.

I'm open to suggestions of what to shoot during the next 365 days, just don't be offended if I don't get to your request. Shots will range from ordinary things that border on snapshots, to full on studio work, to concerts and other things.

The first photo is online now, it's a photo of my new motorcycle sunglasses sitting on the headlight of my new (used) motorcycle.

Take a look here

Swing by and see, then bookmark the gallery or just look for updates on here. Most of these photos will also be for sale, so if there is something that catches your eye pick it up and help support independent art!

-Rob