Santa Fe Photographic Workshops and Outside Magazine

I wanted to give a quick plug to Hannah and my former colleagues at Outside who’ve finally collaborated with Santa Fe Photographic Workshops Director, Reid Callanan to create their own series of workshops with magazine contributors (here, here and here); an idea I had at one point that’s almost as good as the one where I proposed writing a blog. The workshops were always a bright spot of working in the relative isolation of Santa Fe as they brought high caliber photographers to town–I first met Dan Winters, Antonin Kratochvil and Keith Carter after the workshops. Instead of just a plug I thought I’d ask Reid a couple questions.

Can you give me a little background on the Santa Fe Photographic Workshops and your involvement?

After working 14 years at the Maine Photographic Workshops and doing every job that business had to offer, I felt it was time to venture out and start my own business. So, in 1990 I moved with my young family (wife Cathy and son EJ) across the country to New Mexico to start the Santa Fe Photographic Workshops. This year we are celebrating 20 years in business. It has been a great success — due mostly to picking the right location at the right time, hiring an amazing staff of energetic and dedicated people then getting out of their way, and convincing the most creative and influential photographers worldwide to join us as teachers for our week-long workshops.

I’m surprised by the caliber of photographer that teaches at SFPW. You have commercial and editorial photographers in their prime, who probably don’t have much experience teaching amateurs or time to develop a curriculum. How do make it so it’s easy for someone like that to come teach?

One of the foundations of this business is to bring the best photographers in the country to teach workshops. We have been fortunate to have people like Albert Watson, Mark Seliger, Brigitte Lancombe, Platon, Jim Nachtwey, and Nadav Kander join us. Teachers at this level can attract working pros to take their workshops. We prepare our instructors by scheduling their week for them in advance. We have a formula, honed over 20 years, that works incredibly well of: daily critiques followed by assignments followed by shooting and then more critiques of the images just made. The instructors follow this structure and work with each participant to improve their vision and craft. Lectures, demonstrations, and discussions led by the instructors round out the intense week. So, the Workshops staff provide the overall structure for the week enabling each guest photographer to focus on imparting their years of experience and inspiring the class to create new images. As long as the guest photographer is open and giving of themselves and follow our lead, their teaching week is a success.

Do you attract a lot of semi-pro photographers to these workshops?

Our core audience right now are advanced amateur photographers – people who have a passion for photography and are willing to spent their free time and money to follow their dream of becoming a better photographer. These folks don’t make their living as photographers. We also have a healthy audience of emerging and professional photographers who take workshops for two main reasons – to improve their technical skills and/or to rekindle a love of imagemaking that may have become lost while building their careers. And pros come to take workshops with photographers whose work they find inspiring–like Chris Buck, Jonathan Torgovnik, Joe McNally, and Karen Kuehn to name a few of our guest instructors this past summer.

What are the traits and skills that photographers who are good teachers have?

All great teachers are articulate, caring, thoughtful and have their egos in check. If they can’t get outside their own box and be open to what their students are doing in the class, they won’t be successful as teachers.

One criticism I have of just teaching people technique and leaving out the business part of being a photographer is the potential that students will not understand the value of photography and not grasp their responsibility to the photographic community to help it remain a profession. What are your thoughts on this?

Since almost all of our instructors are professional photographers, they understand the importance of discussing business practices and the financial value of an image in their classes. I wouldn’t say it’s a major part of their workshop week (unless you are taking a workshop with Mary Virginia Swanson), but it does get the point across that images are valuable and need to be protected and treated as such. I think our audience places a high value on photographs because of their commitment and passion for photography. And, they also understand how difficult it is to make a really great image, so selling images for $1 is not the right thing to do. I do believe that it is our responsibility to impart this message to our audience.

Have you seen enrollment dramatically rise with the explosion of public’s interest in taking pictures?

Our enrollment has seen slow and steady growth over 20 years. We haven’t seen a dramatic rise because this wouldn’t match with our business and marketing philosophy of steady growth. Likewise, we haven’t seen a dramatic decrease in our enrollment because of the recession. I believe in moderation in all that I do and have placed a high value on this practice in my business. There is not much that is overly dramatic nor explosive about the Santa Fe Photographic Workshops. We do what we do very well and will continue to be successful for years to come.

What have you got coming up that you’re excited about?

Besides working with Outside Magazine to produce a series of week long workshop with some of their key contributing photographers (Jake Cheesum, Jeff Lipsky, and Paolo Marchesi), we are also offering workshops this Fall in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. This will be the 9th year we are moving our workshop operation to this amazing colonial town and producing 12 workshops with the likes of David Alan Harvey, David Hobby, Sam Abell, Greg Gorman, and Paul Elledge, to name a few. I know travel to Mexico has gotten a bad rap the past couple of years, but San Miguel is a safe haven that is easy to get to. We wouldn’t be going if we didn’t feel it was totally safe. It’s such a great venue to explore photographically and also to build a closer relationship with your own imagemaking process.

Publicis SVP Ed Han: Where Photographer Promos Go Wrong

“One of my pet peeves—the biggest one—is that photographers don’t seem to think about the target audience,” he says. “In our business, you’re always thinking about the target and how to appeal to them. So if you’re thinking about the audience, then you have to consider not just the content but how that content is best delivered. The successful photographers are the ones who understand that.”

via Via Photoserve.

Teru Kuwayama- Working In A War Zone

Over on Gizmodo (here) Teru has practical advise for photographers headed into the war zone:

The daily mechanics of photographing in a “war zone” don’t have much to do with photography—mostly it’s about getting from point A to point B without getting your head cut off, then finding a signal and an outlet.

For what it’s worth, here’s some advice for first timers heading out to the badlands.

Wear Your Seat Belt… it’s the traffic that’s most likely to kill you.
Learn How To Say “Hello” and “Thank You” and To Count To Ten
Stop Looking For the “Front Line”—It’s a Mirage..”battlefield” has been replaced by the “battlespace,”
Equip Yourself With the Right Gear… Avoid the faux-commando stuff …Bring plastic (not your credit cards)… Pack your go bag – AKA, your grab bag, jump bag, snatch bag, bug-out bag, etc.
Embedding Has Both Perks and Consequences… You can spend an entire deployment embedded with the US Marines in Diyala or Helmand, but don’t fool yourself that you know anything about Iraq or Afghanistan—what you’ve seen is the inside of an armored bubble.
Get In Shape Before Deploying… I’m hauling a backpack that’s more than 50% of my body weight.
Fixers: The Tour Guides of War Reporting… don’t trust them blindly… many of the ones I’ve worked with are dead now.
Don’t Follow the Pack…by the time it’s “news,” it’s pretty old.
Visit Lightstalkers.org… sharing network of people who do inadvisable things in sketchy places.

teru

Found it on Exposure Compensation.

What To Charge – Advertising Photography

This was sent to me as an example of what people are charging now in advertising photography. You can certainly see they’ve trimmed all the fat out, which isn’t a problem if you don’t have a ton of overhead.


National Advertising Shoot –

Bid number 2 comes from a Pharmaceutical job where the photographer had the middle bid, was not awarded the job and told the decision was strictly creative.


AdBid –

Here’s a couple editorial invoices for glossy celebrity lovin checkout mags. One is for syndication, next for a weekly and finally a monthly. Numbers look middle of the road to me.


Editorial Invoices –

If anyone else wants to send examples I’ll black them out for you.

The Ones That Show True Grit

While watching the 4-H youngsters going about their business at MontanaFair in Billings this month, I was struck by a parallel. Here I am in 2009, at a fair ground: a photojournalist, making pictures of cowboys in every direction I look. Don’t any of us know that none of us are supposed to exist?”

[…]Professional photojournalists have only their eye, their experience and their work ethic to create lasting images. It has nothing to do with what kind of lariat they’re carrying.

[…] if you can’t make a great picture in your own backyard, it isn’t going to happen anywhere else.

Nice piece by Kenneth Jarecke on the Lens Blog.

The massive attention surplus

Big companies, non-profits and even candidates will discover hyperlocal, hyperspecialized, hyperrelevant… this is where we are going, and it turns out that this time, the media is way ahead of the marketers.

via Seth’s Blog.

How Do You Decide What To Charge?

Taking a cue from the Creative Review Blog I wanted to ask my readers as well: How do you decide what to charge?

Here’s an excellent Cost of Doing Business Calculator (here), where you input your desired salary, then add up all the business expenses that can’t be billed back to the client and it gives you a day rate based on how many days you expect to bill for the year. In cases where the fee is fixed and below your day rate–editorial comes to mind– you would simply make sure you could subtract something from the promotion or testing category to make it all balance out (or your salary if it has some perceived future benefit).

Back when I used to work for photographers and negotiate the shoot fees the goal was to make the client cringe and not hang up. It would have been much better to do a budget and make sure we were making what we needed to. There seems to be a sudden spate of high end photographers headed for bankruptcy (here), don’t be one of them.

“Speaking as someone who enthusiastically sold out, every time I’ve done something just for the money, no matter how much they paid, it was never enough.” — Pentagram’s Michael Bierut

Life Magazine Reprints Woodstock Issue On MagCloud

Here’s an interesting idea. Magazines can now do single issue reprints using MagCloud.

“To commemorate the 40th anniversary of Woodstock, LIFE teamed up with MagCloud to release a Special Edition Woodstock Magazine. Originally released 40 years ago, this special issue has more than 100 photos of the performances and amazing community that attended Woodstock.” (here)

You can also make your own magazine from scratch using their archive:

“Life.com will partner with HP’s MagCloud to offer users a personalised “timeline”. They will get to print their own edition of Life magazine comprising a selection of catalogue images from any given date, as well as their own uploads.” (here)

It’s a cool idea along the lines of getting a picture on a mouse pad or coffee mug but I’ve had a couple conversations with people looking to make money off big magazine archives and I think the public’s ability/patience to put a magazine together from scratch is very limited. We’re on the firehose end of the information superhighway so finding someone you trust to edit everything down to something relevant is more important than having a trillion choices.

If Fred Woodward edited a copy of Life out of the archive I might actually buy that.

Found it on Magtastic Blogsplosion.

lifewoodstock

lifewoodstock 2

Has Monocle brought a corrective lens to the business of magazines?

Media owners around the world are scratching their heads, asking why magazines and newspapers aren’t selling anymore. Why? Because you’ve downgraded the experience. When you are competing against digital, which can zoom in and animate? then your print experience needs to be tactile and exciting and, for magazines, a bit collectable.”

— Tyler Brûlé

via The Independent. Thx Myles

There are a lot of people in this business but damn few really good ones. — Hal Riney

The frightening and most difficult thing about being what somebody calls a creative person is that you have absolutely no idea where any of your thoughts come from really and especially you don’t have any idea about where they’re going to come from tomorrow. — Hal Riney

Screenings (here).
New York, NY
Fri. August 21 – Thurs. August 27 12:50, 2:35, 4:20, 6:20, 8:20, 10:20 p.m. IFC Center, 323 Sixth Avenue, New York, NY

Denver, CO
Fri. August 21 – Thurs. August 27 5:00, 7:30 p.m. Denver Film Society, 900 Auraria Parkway, Denver, CO

Chicago, IL
Fri. August 21 5:45, 7:45, 9:45 p.m. Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. Southport Ave, Chicago, IL

Two Scholarships Available for Workshop Starting Sunday – NYC

David Turnley Photography Workshops is announcing two scholarship opportunities for the New York workshop being held from August 23 – 29th, 2009. The scholarships will cover the full tuition cost for the workshop, a value of $1550. Winners will be only responsible for a $200 guest speaker fee.

Applicants should send a link to an on-line portfolio or examples of work and a brief paragraph describing their background to workshops@davidcturnley.com. Please do not send images as attachments.

Information about the workshop can be found (here).

Matt Mendelsohn – The Lessons of Lindsay

In 2007 Matt Mendelsohn heard from a friend about a recently graduated fashion student who had all 4 limbs amputated. At the time she was near death but soon turned the corner and a year later was teaching fashion at her alma mater, Virginia Commonwealth University. Matt, a longtime journalist, decided he needed to go document her story on his own, he knew the story needed to be told but didn’t want to waste time lining up an assignment. He ended up photographing and writing a compelling 10,000 word piece about Lindsay that was recently published… on sportsshooter.com (here). He shopped it around to several publishers but they all turned him down. At one big national newspaper the publisher said “advertisers wanted happier stories, not ‘depressing’ ones.”

matt mendelsohn

Of course none of this is news to photographers who now regularly see important stories get trounced by the celebrity/fad of the week. In my own brief magazine career I would often get important stories handed to me with an edict to make the images “happy” so the advertisers don’t get upset. I have a little “lesson” of my own for publishers that I’d like to impart. No matter how much ass kissing you do, your advertisers are still leaving. In fact they may be leaving more quickly now because your readers no longer consider you a “must read” after you’ve taken the edge off everything (due to all that ass kissing, natch).

After the EIC of Self magazine defends their body image distorting cover retouching policy by saying “Did we alter her appearance? Only to make her look her personal best.” The proper response is for a competing magazine to run Matt Mendelshon’s “the Lessons of Lindsay” and tell Danziger to go stuff it. Why won’t anyone do that anymore?

Sports Shooter Q & A: with Matt Mendelsohn.

Slicing the Bread but Not the Prices

Panera has been bucking conventional industry wisdom during the downturn by eschewing discounts and instead targeting customers who can still afford to shell out an average of about $8.50 for lunch.

The St. Louis-based chain of 1,400 cafes says it has been able to persuade customers to pay premiums because it has been improving the quality of its food.

via WSJ.com. thx Terry.

The Sad Strange Financial Predicament Of Annie Leibovitz

NY Magazine has a well reported story by Andrew Goldman on the financial predicament Annie Leibovitz finds herself in today. There’s some awesome quotes in the story referencing her legendary temper and insecure perfectionism but the financial meltdown is simply astounding to read about.

No matter what you think of Annie’s pictures today she’s clearly a very talented photographer, has long been a pioneer in this industry and deserves some level of respect from everyone. But, of course these quotes are too juicy not to republish:

[…]Her bloated work expenses were a chronic concern. Anthony Accardi, Leibovitz’s onetime printer, recalls that jobs were often rushed, like the time he had to show up to a lab at 3 a.m. to pick up film of Bill Clinton and have work prints ready by 7 a.m., a job so hurried that he billed Condé Nast three times his regular rate. Accardi was stunned by the number of work prints Leibovitz would order, and apparently so was Condé Nast. After Accardi printed 300 oversize work prints of a Roseanne Barr shoot and billed Vanity Fair some $15,000, he received a letter from Graydon Carter himself, informing him that after this job, he’d be paid for no more than 50 such prints. “Like I was going to tell Annie that?” Accardi says with a laugh. “She would’ve boxed my ears.”

Eccles says Leibovitz could be downright tyrannical. “I once narrowly escaped being hit by a pair of shoes,” he says. “To this day, I’ve never been as nervous photographing a subject as I have assisting her. And that includes the several times I’ve been sent to the White House.” Leibovitz, Eccles says, once slammed her fists on a table, swearing she was going to kill him after a lighting test hadn’t gone well. “Go ahead, hit me,” Eccles said. He was by then so accustomed to the behavior, he says, that he didn’t flinch. “You’re not afraid of me,” Leibovitz lamented, skulking off. “It’s not fun anymore.” After her outbursts, Eccles says, Leibovitz would almost always call and apologize. Still, he left on good terms. “I adore Annie,” he says. “I’ll go to the mat for her as the greatest photographer there ever was in any genre.”

[…]In 2007, Leibovitz agreed to take Tina Brown’s portrait for her Princess Diana biography. “I thought she would just take a snap at my home,” Brown says. Leibovitz insisted that the shoot be on the beach near Brown’s summer home in Quogue, even though it was March and freezing. Leibovitz showed up in a van with a stylist and assistant. A second car stuffed full of clothes soon arrived. A wind machine would eventually be engaged. This was all on Leibovitz’s dime; she refused to charge Brown a cent. Unsatisfied with the day’s work, Leibovitz suggested that they try again the next day. “We’re through!” Brown told her, appreciative but worn out. “She’s a massive perfectionist,” Brown says, “and absolutely doesn’t care about the impact on her own bottom line.”

[…]Leibovitz has to come up with $24 million, plus interest, by this September. Under the terms of the agreement, says a person familiar with the loan, Art Capital could be entitled to up to 22.5 percent of all the proceeds from the sale of any of Leibovitz’s work—even for two years after she’s paid off the loan. And that percentage could increase to close to 50 percent if she were to default.

Read the entire story on the NYMag website (here).

Conscientious Portfolio Competition

Joerg is running a free portfolio competition over on Conscientious aimed at discovering some emerging talent:

The winner of the competition will have her or his work featured here on this blog, in the form of an extended conversation/interview (which, of course, also showcases the photography). Details below.

First of all, the Conscientious Portfolio Competition (CPC) is free. It’s no pay-to-play scheme. There are no costs involved for you, other than whatever time it takes to send me your stuff.

Second, CPC is aimed at emerging photographers. Of course, the term “emerging” is not extremely well defined; what it means that photographers not represented by a gallery will get preferential treatment over those that already are (but of course, the quality of the work also plays an important role).

Read about it (Here)
It will be interesting to see what he turns up. Whenever I’ve done something similar in the past I’ve discovered excellent photographers I knew nothing about.