Draining and Rejuvenating

I finally managed to start shooting some more creative stuff.

Real photos will come later.

Shooting personal projects again is mentally and creatively rejuvenating in a way that I desperately need.
It is also physically exhausting on top of my work, class and sleep schedule. Something has to give and recently that has been sleep. I still get 4 to 5 hours of solid sleep every night... but I'm used to double that. The transition is supremely amusing to watch and very interesting to experience.

I haven't had time to do anything other than load and backup the photos from these personal projects. I expect I'll spend the majority of Sunday editing before I start the whole process over again on Monday with classes and trying to squeeze in something fun.

Today I'm covering Track and Basketball, and hopefully getting a little nap in somewhere.

Here's a photo from the assignment I was working on until 2:30 this morning.

Mad Chad Taylor juggling three running chainsaws at the After Hours event on Friday night.

Action - interviews at NAU

After such a great response to my post yesterday, I've decided to get the ball rolling, get off my arse, and do something about the state of the NAU photo program.

The first step in my solution process is to interview students and faculty with a standard list of questions. My goal is to get a fairly comprehensive view from each person I talk to. In doing so, I can determine if a small group of people are unsatisfied, or if a lot of people in the program aren't happy with what they're getting.

With that in mind - I'd like YOU to help me make a list of questions that I can ask both the faculty and the students in the program. I have a few below, but please leave a comment (or two or three) with your suggestions either about subtractions from my current list, or additions that should be made.

1) Name. Title. Organization.
2) Do you think the photography program at NAU does a good job teaching its students?
3) Do you think the program prepares students for a real-world career in photography?
4) Does a bachelors degree in photography help in the real world?
5) What is the biggest strength of the photo program?
6) What needs the most work?
7) Do you think all the instructors have real-world experience working in the industry?
8) Are there any instructors who you think should not be teaching?
9) Are there instructors who you think teach really well?
10) Do the instructors care about the success of their students?
11) What do you think about the in-class critiques?
12) Are the instructors accessible for out-of-class critiques? Are these critiques helpful?
13) Do the instructors and the program in general keep up with current technology and market trends?
14) Do the current instructors still photograph on a day-to-day basis? Are they producing work?
15) Are the facilities available to students enough?
16) When students need equipment, is it easy for them to get access to it?

That's my list so far. I need your feedback! Send me what questions you'd like to see answered and I'll make sure that answers are forthcoming.

NAU's photography program

For those of you who don't know, I'm a sophomore at Northern Arizona University.

I am currently double-majoring in photography and marketing. Two entirely separate colleges, two separate cores, two entirely different mindsets.

The photography program at NAU is a joke. I'm being honest. The truth hurts sometimes. 

There are a few instructors who know what its like to work as a photographer. I'd say about half of them are up to date with digital and what the modern market is like. The other half are out of touch - they suck at teaching and they barely know what to teach us because the market is constantly changing.

I did a portrait session with a client the other day who expressed interest in switching his major from Exercise Science to Photography. I told him not to bother. Straight up - it isn't worth the money or the time.

There are two great ways to learn photography. The first (and best) is to do it. A lot. Nothing beats taking literally tens of thousands of pictures. The second is to learn from experts. People who live and breathe photography and who are good teachers. Learn from a photographer you respect and whose work you admire. The internet is full of photographers just giving out information. The tough part is finding someone who does it well. People like David Hobby, David duChemin, Zack Arias, Scott Kelby etc.

Chase Jarvis has a mantra of sorts - Create, Share, Sustain. Note that the central idea is to SHARE. Photography may be a super-competitive field. There may be millions of people who call themselves photographers and you may all be competing for the same clientele, but when it comes down to it, the only way we can learn is from each other. Chase knows this and so he does behind-the-scenes videos to show how he preps, shoots and closes with a client. Start to finish, he doesn't hold anything back. There are many photographers out there who are willing to sit with you and teach you the next step. If that's learning the basic functions of a camera, lighting setups, or advanced post-processing technique, you can find someone who has something about it on the internet.

The program at NAU doesn't do very well with teaching, but it does have decent facilities that give students the opportunity to use equipment that is well beyond a student's budget. Once you get access to those facilities, the program isn't so bad. Whenever I want to learn how to do something, I ask Google, not my instructors at school. Once i've figured out the basics of how to do it, I go use the studio at school to try it out.

In the industry, a degree in photography doesn't mean squat. So if a university is giving you a useless degree, doing a poor job of it and taking your money in the process... I don't see what the point is. If you want to make a living as a photographer, get a BS in business! If you know business, you can make a living as a photographer, even if your photography skills are lacking.

The only reason I'm still in the photo program at NAU is for access to the studio and computers. If things continue the way they have in the last two years, I may well drop the major, get a minor with the classes I've already taken, and call it quits with the photo program. There have been rumors that some of the older professors are retiring. With any luck, the system will hire younger instructors who are up to date with photography and the real world - and most importantly - how the two come together.

Classroom shoot

Most of the time when one of the photography professors decides to do a demo on how to shoot in the studio, it is 100% boring-as-can-be. The prof usually shoots, one of the students generally models. Everyone else gets to stand there and wait until the demo is over.

That's not quite how Jess does things.

Jess Vogelsang (who we've heard about before here) brings teaching photography to a whole new level.
He brought in a bunch of his personal lighting equipment and set it up before the students arrived for class. He arranged to have a hair/makeup artist work on a model for three hours before the shoot.
When all 33 of the students showed up for class, each of the us got at least 50 frames shooting with the pocketwizard or Jess' own camera, using a six-light setup. It was my first experience using big professional strobes, and my first time using more than three lights. I think six lights may have been a little excessive, but my style is much more contrasty and moody than the look we were going for with this shoot. I hear in the future we'll be doing more dramatic lighting setups.

We cranked up the music (Britney Spears channel on Pandora, at the model's request) and had a blast sitting around, talking with one-another and photographing a model who (we hear) is about to be signed to a big agency in Phoenix.

I got a few decent shots - but most of us are going to have very similar photos. To show you what it was really like, I took a video on my Blackberry. The quality is miserable, but I think it gets the idea across.



I'm off to spend today photographing the NAU Track meet, then Men's Basketball.

Late night shoot

Finally... the moment you've all been waiting for!

I really enjoyed making these photos, Sarah and Andrew - two models who are crazy enough to work with me - are an absolute blast to be around.

We took over the laundry room in one of the dorms on campus. To do that with a minimal amount of traffic, we chose to do the shoot at 2am (and yes, people do still do laundry at 2am).

Here are a couple of the end-products!

Sarah

Andrew

Sarah and Andrew

Shown in order of increasing light complexity.

The most important light in this shoot was my pizza-box softbox.

It attaches to my SB600 (or any speedlight) with velcro. Made out of a pizza box from Papa Johns, covered inside and out with copy paper. Really simple. Amazingly inexpensive. To keep the light moderately even, I put a piece of aluminum foil in the center. The flash fires directly into this foil, which then bounces the light around to the rest of the softbox. The catchlight (specular highlight reflected in a person's eye) that this creates is much more interesting than just a solid white one.

The first shot above of just Sarah was taking only with this pizza-light. It was used as the key light in the rest of the photos, with various other speedlights as rimlight and background light. Check out the series on Flickr to see a few more photos and some more in-depth light explanation. (Please note that some of these photos are not quite work-appropriate)

Most of the photographers I know trigger off-camera lights with Pocketwizards. I was pleasantly surprised to be able to trigger all the lights for this shoot with just the pop-up on my D300 in "Commander Mode." I used an SB600, SB800 and SB900 and they all triggered flawlessly.

Have a great Wednesday!

February Backgrounds

Whew! February totally snuck up on me!

You've seen both of these pictures in recent blog posts - Now they have been resized and optimized for your screen!

Just click to enlarge and right-click to set as your desktop background.

I'm using the water-droplet photo right now - reminding me that both my monitors desperately need to be calibrated because the photo looks completely different depending on which screen I look at.

Portrait - sneaky style

Photographed this gentleman at the track meet on Saturday. I didn't have the huevos to ask to photograph him, so I used the Live View feature on my camera while appearing to look in a different direction.

My late-night/early-morning photoshoot turned out pretty well. I'll post a few of those in the near future!

Stay tuned :-)