Moving out of the wedding business

bridal photo from a popular tutorial about using curves in Photoshop

It's been almost a year that I've quietly been transitioning out of the wedding photography business. It's not that I don't enjoy weddings. I've actually been extremely lucky to have had great clients (no bridezillas ever. no obnoxious parents. yep. that lucky). But even with chronic insomnia there are only so many hours in a day (and I'm also a full-time professor, so that eats up most of my time). It got to the point where I dreaded getting jobs because of all the post-shoot work. The better I got at retouching, the more picky I would get, and the more time I would spend fixing things that no one but another photographer would notice. In that way, digital is really a curse (at least if you have obsessive tendencies).

I've refused or otherwise found a way out of most jobs for the past year, which has not been easy to do financially, but I don't want photography to become a chore. At this point, I've decided two things:

1. I will only work on art photo projects that really interest me
2. The only event/portrait work I will do will either have to be "commissioned" at a rate that I assume most people will be unwilling to pay (I'm honestly not sure how much that is right now) OR it will have to be charitable work.

Doing a really great wedding shoot for a couple that would not otherwise be able to afford a photographer sounds a lot more appealing to me than doing a wedding for pay. But how do you know? How do you find that couple? And still, it's not something I could do very often.

Of course there are other types of photography projects that might be a good service. I know of a few photographers that have done amazing projects. I'd like to explore possibilities for service-oriented photography here on the blog. Maybe some of you have ideas to share. Let me know in a comment.

The end of the monetization experiment

Marc Olivier, Eiffel Tower at 6 a.m. (buy it here)

So, a while ago I decided to experiment with "monetization" (is that even a real word?). I like to be up front with everything, so I did a post about it. I wondered:

1.Could I do some form of affiliate marketing that wasn't obnoxious?
2. Could I possibly earn money from it?

My answer: yes on the not obnoxious part and no on the money part. I chose skimlinks because I had read that Pinterest had temporarily used it. I have nothing but good to say about skimlinks. It was easy to set up, they represent a broad spectrum of affiliates, and unlike those annoying pop-up ad words, they don't seem to hijack your blog. But at the end of the day I earned maybe less than $30 total. So I don't blame them. My downfall is probably due to the fact that I have posted less and less, and that when I do post, I'm not trying to get you to buy stuff—oh yeah, except for that little link by my photo up there (notice that?).

Based on my extremely limited knowledge of web marketing, the best way to make money from your blog is to push your own products and services (not someone else's). So that's the next experiment.

So this is the end of the skimlinks experiment. I'll scour out that code as soon as I remember where it is. And I'll get back to posting.

The Plague of Pinonymity and How to Stop It

Who took that photo of Ewan McGregor? No idea. But I'm sure the photographer would prefer to have her/his name credited. The number of pinners on Pinterest who like photography enough to create boards and boards of photos but apparently not well enough to bother attributing those photos simply astounds me. And don't get me started on Tumblr, which seems to be the most frequent source of those orphaned photos.

If you have come to this blog, chances are, you like photography. Maybe you have your own blog, or tumblr site, or pinterest account. If so, consider what you can do to rescue photos from pinonymity.

Don't just repin if there is no credit line. First, click through to see if the link gives the name of the photographer. Then, when you repin, you can add the name.

In this case, the pin took me to jeaninebrito.tumblr.com
Ok. Fingers crossed.....NOOOOOO!! Worst possible outcome. The pinner didn't pin to the stable URL. This meant that I had to go to "archive" and search back all the way to June 2012 to find the photo:

What do you think the odds are that her post included a photo credit? Slim to none. So I clicked through to "above-the-charming-clouds" and eventually to the source which—surprise—had no credit.

Open google images and drag the photo into the search bar. You will get a result like this:

See that image at the top? That's the one I dragged into the image search bar. Click on "All sizes" under "Find other sizes of this image" and you get this:

You can then click on individual images and go to the sites that have posted them, hoping that somewhere, somebody gave an image credit. Most of the time, you can find a reputable source that gives the photographer's name. In this case, most of the results were repins or tumblr reblogs—none of them attributed. What's the responsible thing to do? Don't repin it. 

But if you absolutely can't resist repinning a photo with no credit, at least acknowledge your desire to know by writing "photo by?" or "photographer?" or something that might make other people stop to think for a moment that there's a person who took that image that you like so much.

I'm not going so far as to say that every pin needs a photo credit, although I'm sure some people will accuse me of hypocrisy for having a double standard. The person who took a photo of that light fixture on eBay, or that ring for sale on Etsy, for example, likely operates under the assumption that their photo will not be credited—not that product photography can't be a work of art (I'd buy a coffee table book of Modern 50's catalog in a heartbeat.) Same goes for most stock photography once it has been licensed. Or, to use a personal example, my DIY dictionary print post has been repinned hundreds and hundreds of times without photo credits and I don't care in the least, because the photos in the post are not meant to be "photos" (i.e. my "photography"); they are meant to be purely descriptive visual guides to a DIY project. In fact, I would probably be embarrassed if someone thought that the shapshots in my DIY post were meant to be art.

However, if you are pinning a photo to a board like "Black and White Photography" or "Photos I like" or "Portraits" or anything where the photo is the object (i.e. is meant as art), then credit the photographer. It may take extra time, but if you stop and relabel a casually posted, non-credited photo, you might just help eradicate "pinonymity."

Now who can tell me who took that photo of Ewan McGregor?

Date Due

My otherwise minimalist man cave has been overrun with library books lately, most of them from interlibrary loan. I've been obsessively reading late at night for various projects, usually annoyed if I can't get through two or three books a week. Last night, for some odd reason, I noticed the stamped "date due" slips pasted in the back of the books. I thought about what an enigmatic chronology they represent. I wondered who checked the books out. I wondered about the clusters of dates, the ten-year chronological leaps of dormancy, the layers of check out slips or the complete lack of them (Has no one at Colorado State checked out Zizek's The Parallax View? Has no one in Toronto checked out Lyotard's The Inhuman? Not that I'd blame them.), the colors of the ink, the relation of the stamps to the lines, etc. I realized that the library's digital books have no such history, no traces of past users, of frequency, or of the librarians. At least half of the books I read are digital. I imagine that the percentage will increase rapidly in the next few years. The "Date Due" slips are chronicles of how information has been circulated. They remind us of other readers (and sometimes of hierarchies such as "FACULTY LOAN") and of the physical passage of a book through the hands of other people. They are stories attached to books that will no longer be told.

So late last night, I spread out all of the books on my coffee table, and when I got up this morning, I photographed them. I will probably do more as other books make their way into my home. In fact, I may do some work about other signs of the material history of library books (like the annoying underlined passages left by disrespectful readers)—that is, if I can pull myself away from reading enough to pick up my camera.

Techniques of the Observer, Washington State University Libraries

Suspensions of Perception, Texas Tech University Libraries

Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern, BYU Libraries

The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft, BYU Libraries

The Parallax View, Colorado State University Libraries

Brought to Light: Photography and the Invisible, 1840–1900, BYU Libraries

New Media, 1740-1915, University of Oklahoma Libraries

The Culture of Time and Space, Washington State University Libraries 

Between Film and Screen, BYU Libraries

The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, University of Toronto Libraries

The Emergence of Cinematic Time, BYU Libraries