Building a community through education and transparency.
A soft edit is usually the first step a photographer will take after a photo session. I like to wait a couple hours and return to the whole session and look over the images one by one. Being very particular about what is in and what is out. For me I usually eliminate about half the images on the first pass, so typical session with 60 to 100 images is now around 30. Since I prefer to converse with my subjects as I am photographing a lot of this is just what I call “closed eyes and open mouths.” If you have been following my experiment on flickr you may have noticed I like to include one of these bloopers in the set, partly for fun and partly to help the audience to understand the process of photographing a single subject.
Exceeding expectations:
I didn’t expect the response to soft edits that I’ve received, seriously my mom doesn’t even read my blog. So to have a community build up around such a simple idea really excites me. I notice both parties starting to learn and grow together and yet it remains accessible to experts and beginners. Since I started to treat my business with authenticity and transparency I’ve only seen positive results, now I don’t think I could ever go back.
Upcoming Special:
I’ve been toying around with the idea of having an avatar session special and I am very close to having all the details worked out. Stay tuned for more information.
Final thoughts:
I am always looking for ways to improve the experience. Any questions or suggestions for improvement are welcome in the comments below.
This is the new image for dog a day, it is also my wife’s “favorite image so far.” and I agree.
My education on the history of photography is one of my most cherished possessions. And so the reference to early photo history and the pictorialist movement in this image really excite me. It was a movement that tried to establish photography as a fine art often by distorting the lens in an attempt to mimic the effects of the impressionist painters that were popular at the time.
With no intention of doing so (I realized as I was writing this entry) contemporary photo history also has a reference as well by one of the artists to cause controversy for National Endowment of the Arts, Andres Serrano. Of course this image is far less controversial and has no intentional religious or political foundation. It was just a creative way to photograph my dog Huxley.
For me being able to reference work to the past elevates the experience of creating. Do you think understanding history is an important element when creating? Or is it enough to be talented with color, composition, lighting, following trends, etc?
I knew this shoot was going to be trouble. Ever try to get your dog to do yoga? It seemed simple enough he is seemingly always doing these great stretches and is incredibly flexible, 86 images later we got a couple good ones.
Day 21. I actually got this image done before noon today, actually while eating breakfast. As the sun comes up in the morning we get this pretty dramatic shadow coming through the back gate, since I generally talk about photography as the act of recording observation I’ll just say: I like how this looked.
The reason I needed to get done early with Dog a Day today was because Phoenix Art Space came over this afternoon to interview me about my upcoming Fine Art project. I will link the article on tysoncrosbie.com/blog as soon as it is posted next week.
The Phoenix series of images is currently being edited to 20 from about 2000 raw images taken over 10 months. I will also be placing all twenty images in a self-published photo book scheduled for release May 15th, 2008. Look here for more information around the 1st of May.
Jamie loves horses, she practically grew up on a horse farm. Since we have moved to Phoenix she has been saying over and over that she wants to buy a horse, so I bought her a horse one day. A toy horse. Today she asked me to photograph it, she set it down on the floor and a strange thing happened, Squid totally started guarding the little toy horse. It was his little baby for a few minutes, he even snapped at Huxley for getting too close.
For some reason when our dogs get a lot of nervous energy or when they are being defiant they end up yawning, I suppose it releases the pressure.
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