Ever been afraid? Ever had that moment where your feel like your lost in a fog of fear and doubt going what am I doing here?

I have them often and in fact I have them almost daily. In summer of 2010 I stepped out of a job that I had grown to dread and on an act of faith went full time as a photographer. Not only did I go full time, but I was crazy enough to choose a path that put my work and name against some of the best photographers in the world. Here I am in my mid forties with a wife, two sons (one of which is in college) and I have this wild hair brain idea to be a freelance photographer. Oh and I want to work in the entertainment industry specifically with musicians; and did I mention I didn’t know anything about or anyone in the music industry? Only a person who is crazy steps out into nothing and expects to land on something.

This is where I was last night. I just gotten home from a photo shoot for a new client, I am trying to make the simplest  dinner and get moving because I was asked to attend a marketing meeting with my local church. I standing over the stove cooking and it hits me…”What are you doing?” Your throwing your name in a hat with names like McNally, Jarvis, Arias, and Cowart. You think anyone wants what you have to offer when those guys are out there? Your a nobody in a backwoods town that is so small minded they actually built a roadway to lock in there little world.

Who do I think I am that I think I can work in places like Miami, New York, Chicago, and Los Angles? My wife is working a job that stresses her, my oldest son is working his way through college, and my youngest daily forgives me for being distracted and often times broke. Words like useless, old, and failure regularly haunt my dreams and thoughts. I feel like I’m balancing on a thin wire over a great chasm and one misstep, one wrong move is going to send me plummeting to my doom. So why do I do it? Because I love my art? Couldn’t I do my art on weekends?

Then I remember that I didn’t take this step with out thought. That I didn’t just jump with no concept of what I am trying to do. I stepped out in faith because for me personally I believe what I do is more than just a job but a calling. While that may sound like I think I’m living on some higher plain than everyone else, trust me I’m not. I just know that this was birthed in me to do at this time. As a Christian I hold to belief that God leads in directions He desires for your life if your willing to listen. I know photography is not saving the world, its not stopping hunger or turning the tide of despair, but it does open doors that would not normally open for me. It puts me in places to share my faith, my hope, not just for myself but for those I meet. It provides me the chance to say if I can get up and face my fears, my insecurities, my problems, and push through to my prize so can you. If I can move forward no matter if I’m running, walking, or crawling then anyone can move forward.

Often the only thing stopping you is fear. Fear of failure, fear of being shamed, embarrassed, fear of the unknown. Well so what if you fail? The Beetles failed and were told no one likes guitar bands before they became who we know them to be. Walt Disney was fired as an artist because they said he had no imagination. Abraham Lincoln failed at everything he did his entire life until he became President. The CEO of Walden Books laughed in the face of the creator of Amazon.com saying no one would ever buy a book offline. Yahoo told the creators of Google to come back when they had a grown up program, so they started Google.com in a garage. Time and time again people we admire and call successful have gone through some of the worst hells to get there. That’s what made them successful, they went through it rather that running away from it. President Ronald Reagan (who didn’t make it to the White House till he was in his seventies) said, “Heroes may not be braver than anyone else. They’re just braver five minutes longer.” The prize goes to the one that endures, the one that refuses to quit even in the face of the impossible.

Oh and this particular “old” photographer has in the first year been published nationally and internationally more than once, photographed the new album for Phillips, Craig, and Dean, is the fashion photographer for a magazine out of the Gulf Coast, covered the Dove Awards, and has managed to survive physical problems, financial crisis, and a host of haters and nay sayers. Have I arrived yet? Not even close, but I am walking out my purpose. What are you doing?

Yesterday was a GOYA day for me. GOYA stands for “Get Off Your A$$” and go do something, which for me is shooting images. It is real easy to get into the habit of just sitting around reading blogs, posting on forums,writing your own blog, and networking with art directors. While of that has its place at the end of the day I’m a photographer and I need to take pictures. Yesterday thats what I decided to do. I needed some background pictures for some composite work I am going to be doing and it was just a good day to get out and take pictures.

Now this is not my favorite type of pictures, like Joe McNally I have never seen a landscape that couldn’t be made better with a person in front of it. It would be great if I had a model that I could just call up and say stand there and pose like this at a moments notice. I shot a few HDR images for backgrounds and then just things that caught my eye. This isn’t portfolio material but is necessary for keeping your eye fresh. GOYA days should be a requirement for everyone but especially creatives. No matter if your a artist, photographer, writer, designer, or whatever, if you create you need a GOYA day. As creatives we tend to fall into to ruts of repetitiveness, we get stuck doing the business or our business so much that we can at times forget to create just for the sake of creation.

It doesn’t have to be awe inspiring and it doesn’t have to be perfect just the experience is worth it. GOYA it’s a good thing to do.

I had the idea of a sky behind Hope with the bank sign in the background. To get this shot I waited to closer to sunset so I could get the colors I wanted in the sky. A hot shoe flash in a Westcott softbox to camera right was all that was needed to get the shot.

I just completed an assignment for Independent Banker Magazine out of Chicago. I was to cover an array of bank activities for the  article. Most of the pictures dealt with the typical corporate style images (working with customers, conducting business, etc.) nothing very exciting or dramatic but all part of telling the story. The magazine wanted pictures of the bank owner Hope Johnson as well. The article dealt with how Hope was leading her bank during the current financial crisis so I need pictures that showed the strength and hope of the bank leader. We tried several different set ups but the one of her with the sky, sign and flag became my personal favorite.

Shooting corporate work is very different than working in music or fashion. The first thing you have to remember they are not accustomed to being in front of cameras and probably more than any other don’t like having their picture taken. You also have to remember that as leaders and directors they are not accustomed  to being told what to do. In order to get the shots you have to be patient and allow them to process ideas. Especially if those ideas are outside their normal scope. You hear no more often but if your patient and can explain yourself, you eventually will get the shot you need.

The Billboards

At the end of last year my pastor asked me to help him put together a series of billboards that would promote the church and at the same time give a message. We talked about it and decided to use the theme of “People Need Hope.” As 2012 kick starts it is apparent many people are afraid, they are afraid of governments, afraid of the economy, afraid of the world ending in December, you name somebody is afraid of something. So to address this I created a series of billboards that reflects different things in peoples lives that are “messed up” within their own minds and placed them with models and church members under the theme of People Need Hope. We are running three billboards a month with themes on achieving success, overcoming doubts and fears, and improving lives.

For the artwork on these I was inspired by a portrait of Steve Jobs in black in white (I’m sure you’ve seen it, it is everywhere since his death). I like the contrasty image against a solid white background. So I decided to adopt this idea and make it fit with what we are doing in the billboards. I felt that the extreme contrast between black and white would help the board stand out, however on the first layout I realize the type was getting lost. So to compensate for this I made the type a dark burgundy. It gave the signs just a little color which really helped them once they appeared on the digital billboards.

The Author: Ginger Dean

Ginger is writing her first book “I Will Restore To You…The Years the Locust Have Eaten.” Ginger sent me the first and last chapters of the book to read to get a sense of where the book was going. The photograph I was taking was for the back cover of the book where the authors bio will go. In the first chapter Ginger talks about sitting on her porch in the early morning hours reading her Bible and reflecting on what’s she’s been through and where she is going. I decided to try to recreate that problem was Ginger had moved and no longer had a porch and we couldn’t arrange our schedule until late afternoon which meant a different color to the light. So to solve this problem I first off found a porch that someone would let us use (one of the great things about being in the south, you can ask total strangers to let them use their porch and they say yes). Second was lighting. Morning light, especially pre-dawn light is cooler in temperature than late afternoon so I had to covert warn sunset to early morning pre-dawn. The solution was a hot shoe flash in a large 40″ white umbrella with a 1/2 cut CTO gel (color temperature orange) aimed directly at Ginger, my camera white balance set to tungsten to turn ambient light blue and finally underexposing the ambient light by about 1.5 stops. In post I had to tweak the colors a little but for the most part I got it in camera.

The Magazine

I got in the artwork for cover of the new issue of Coastal Lifestyle Magazine. The difference between being an assignment photographer and say a wedding photographer is you don’t have say-so in what images get used. I had another picture that I was totally in love with that I thought would have been a fun cover however they chose another. Not horrible but just not the one I liked best. At any rate the magazine should be on stands (or at least it should be soon) so be sure to check it out. Maybe next time I will slip the graphic artist a $5 bill and see if it sway them my way…what do you think?

Vogue

Vogue Italy has opened up submissions for photographers. Now to date I have shot for national magazine’s and publications but nothing on the level of Vogue. And while I enjoy editorial more than fashion, fashion is still a ton of fun (most times). Anyway I submitted about half a dozen images to their site yesterday…along with several thousand other photographers, but we will see. You never know and after all the worst they could say is no. Well actually the worst they could say is “Hell NO you #$@#$ @#$@#$@$ @#$@#$%@! @#$@@!!!!” but its still just a no.

For the submission I decided to send this composite of Pastor Vivian Goode that I shot a few months ago along with a few others.

For this shot I placed Kerry on the back porch of her home reading a book. The goal was to create a cool morning feel outside while Kerry sits in the warmth of her home enjoying her book. To light this I placed a speed light on a stand above her near her feet with 2.5 CTO gels. Typically I would use one to two CTO’s but for this image I need the extra to get the warmth I wanted. This was a hard light source with no modifiers so to soften the shadows I placed a second speed light near Kerry’s head to camera right with a 24×24 softbox. This light had a 1/2 cut CTO gel to add just a little warmth. I set a custom white balance on the camera to around 3000K, this gave my ambient light a blueish tint while the gels provided the warmth to Kerry.

For the last image Kerry had a dress from Mardi Gras. Lighting was a single speed light in a Westcott softbox. I zoomed the flash as far out as it would go to 105m. Since the light was zoomed so tightly it didn’t feel the entire softbox giving me a smaller more spot light effect against Kerry on the opposing wall. In post I used a double raw process to mix color balance effects. Around Kerry I pushed the kelvin up to cloudy then using a layer mask I blended a layer set to tungsten for a cooler effect.

We shot more last week, but I will post more of them later.

Some of these were used in the CD art, others were not but they are still kind of cool.

This is my personal favorite and it was used on the inside of the CD

I had thought this was possibly going to be the cover. We were on top of a parking garage and I have a VAL (voice activated lightstand) holding up a large shoot through to block the sunlight.

This was shot in the concert hall where they were singing that night.

Behind me on stage is Point of Grace. They were practicing for their half of the joint Christmas concert they were doing with PCD. The guys has been trying to distract them and mess them up the whole time we were in there. I don't know what happened behind me, but whatever it was it gave me this laughter.

Just prior to this Shawn (far left) and I had been trading bad jokes. I got the last one in with "What to you call a 1,000 Wongs in the phone book? A lot of wong numbers."

I've posted this before but I still am very partial to it for the colors. Sadly this one didn't make the album art.

– Vincent Price Thriller Rap.

When I was a child my mother not only wanted me to read but to enjoy reading. To prompt me to read she bought me comic books with heroes like Batman, Superman, and Spiderman. As a skinny non athletic kid in the south where sports is a form of religion these became a great way to escape to a safe place. I loved the costumes, colors, stories, and the way they would spark my imagination.

As I grew older I became fascinated with other forms of imaginative literature and movies. The more far fetched the more I was enticed by it. I couldn’t get enough of books and shows such as Planet of the Apes, Star Trek, Tron, and Star Wars. This hunger for the impossible drove me to library to get books on magic, ghost, folklore, and legends. By the time I was in high school I was a true nerd. My sophomore year I did my classical literature report on Dracula by Bram Stroker and a my love of scary stories was born.

It was probably a cumulation of these stories and images that probably drove me to create this particular image. The idea came to me one day while watching the Addams Family movie on TV a few months ago. Morticia Addams was always captivating to me, the most recent incarnation of her played by Anjelica Huston really made a visual impact on me. I noticed that they kept a spot light focused just to her eyes to give her a unworldly feel.

I knew wanted to create that feel in an image and within a few hours I knew what I wanted. A patch of trees in a line with fog and a pale faced girl. A few days later I got my wish when a heavy fog settled on the area. I drove out to a grove of trees I knew about and snapped a few pictures of them before the fog dissipated. Now I began searching for my girl. This took several months with my first few attempts at getting a model not working out. Finally after trying to get a model with long black hair, I went to a model with short red hair and asked if she had a black wig. We ended up with black extensions and the top hat to created the effect. Porcelain make up and red lipstick finished the face. For the dress my model, Teddie, had a black and red gown. I added a large strip of black lace and the riding crop and before you can say jeepers creepers we had a mysterious scary woman.

Teddie was shot against a grey seamless with a 24″ softbox on a boom up to camera left and a strip box behind her to camera right. This was to imitate the light from the picture of the grove. The final image was created from four different images total: sky, trees, model, and clouds for extra fog. The color effect was created using mixtures of greyscale, color balance, selective color, curves, and hue/saturation layers. If you want to know how I used these, your going to have to guess because I don’t use a set procedure over and over. I experiment with each photo so no two are exactly the same.

The best part is that I got the picture out of my head so its no longer tormenting me with desires of being born.

Every photographer has personal work they enjoy doing. Stuff that has nothing to do with money or assignments but just enjoyment. For me figure art and glamour style are some of my favorite styles. I avoid the “traditional glamour” of butts pushed into the air with thong undies. I prefer more of a contemporary style that is glamours and sexy with out looking trashy or slutty.

I lit all of these with one light no fill. The draped figure was lit from behind with a standard 7″ reflector, the one of Bobbie sitting in the chair was lit with a medium softbox set close to the edge of the frame.

Once this set was over I had to pack my gear and drive to Mobile for a fashion shoot with Coastal Lifestyle Magazine. This will be the February/March issue. We shot most of the day Sunday, then on Monday I was back home to shoot for Independent Banker Magazine out of Chicago with Friendship Bank. I will have some images from these two shoots later after the magazines prints.

It made for an interesting three days jumping from art/glamour, to fashion, to corporate. Each require a different mindset and different approach. Which is one of the fun and same time challenging aspects of being photographer.  Each day is a new challenge a new  opportunity to try to do something different.

Ok I had nothing really to do with this, but its kind of cool to me. When I photographed Phillips, Craig, and Dean at the end of November they filmed some videos promoting the new album “Breath In.” I stood around behind the scenes and did some pictures of the production just because I thought it would be kind of cool.

A few weeks ago they released one of the videos about the song “When The Stars Burn Down.” So I thought I would just show the video and tell you I was there.