Photography Mentoring a new hot thing?

6FPS V1#3

Welcome to the new issue of 6FPS. I'm dropping this issue after the Labor Day holiday, in part because of the holiday, in part to time issues around our upcoming trip; we're headed to a few days in Newport Oregon, followed by Astoria, Portland and then home via Klamath Falls so I can scout that area a bit for a possible winter road trip I'm considering.

This is familiar territory for us; we've found a nice little place on the bluff overlooking the water (the Agate Beach Motel), with nice views if the weather cooperates and that'll give us good access up and down the coast. We're planning on visiting the volcano, the gorge (I'm both looking forward to this and dreading seeing the results of the fires) and hopefully Ridgefield NWR. I'm hoping for some nice photography along the way, but we'll take what mother nature gives us.

Mostly I'm looking forward to breaking up the routine, unplugging from the day to day chaos a bit, and recharging the batteries.

Also, I talked about this a bit last issue, but I signed myself up for David duChemin's The Traveling Lens, a new instructional series from him about travel photography. I'm part way through the material, which is a series of videos with supplemental writing and other material, and I'm finding it a really useful way to reset my thinking and get me moving forward with this form of photography again. I've struggled with travel stype images in the past, and it's nice to get some guidance on setting good expectations with myself on what I should be trying to accomplish, and also learning technique from David to help accomplish that.

And so, without further delay then, on with the show! And thank you for being part of this.

This issue brought to you almost live, from a secret lair deep within a secret volcano in the bowels of Silicon Valley...

What's New?

Here are a few other things I thought you might find of interest:

Gear Kit: What to carry when you go out and bird: I've updated my birding gear with my new binoculars and scope and talk in some detail about the kinds of things people might want with them when going out to look at birds.
The iPad vs. the iPad Pro: trying to decide whether to spring for the extra cost of the iPad pro? I cover the differences, and having lived with both for the last few months, I have some opinions on what works best for most people (TL;DR: most of us don't need the pro).
The New Portfolio Site: I've revamped my smugmug site to focus on my best images and enable prints and licensing (so no more Fineartamerica). it also has a new design. Simpler, cleaner, something I've wanted to do for a while but finally made the time to get it done.
Macro Photography Experiments: Where I stop finding excuses to keep re-arranging my new tabletop photography set up and start taking actual photos with it instead.
Bandon Lighthouse print: Oh, and I had one of my images printed, and I think it's gorgeous. And if you happen to want a copy of it (or one of my other images, you can do that now>

Photography Mentoring, a new hot thing? (Things Photographic)

I have seen a number of photographers that I follow announcing mentoring programs or portfolio reviews of some sort in the last couple of months, which makes me think this is the new hot thing for photographers trying to find ongoing revenue streams.

I realize some photographers have done this all along, whether or not they publicize the offering on their web sites. William Neill, for instance, has had this as a feature for a while, and I've seriously considered signing up for one of his reviews, only to get foiled by lack of time.

But there are a number of new photographers starting to promote this as a service they offer, and I find that an interesting shift in where photographers are putting their energy, and I think overall it's a very positive one. A good workshop takes a lot of time, energy and expense to set up and operate well and make sure everyone is happy with the results: it's hard for photographers to do more than a few of these without a staff handling the logistics without turning them into cookie-cutter outings, and I've always felt there were only so many participants (aka inventory) to spread around. I keep seeing indication that growth in workshop attendance is either flat or shrinking a bit.

Evaluating portfolios or setting up mentoring programs seems to me a good way for a photographer to share their knowledge with others in a less labor-intensive and more personal way than workshops allow.

The key for both sides is to make sure that the photographer is the right advisor or mentor for the student.

Students need to research potential mentors to get the one right for them and what they're trying to accomplish. But the mentor has to vet the student to make sure they're the right person to be offering advice, too. It'd be easy for this to go sideways if you pick the wrong people -- and it would be really bad for both sides if the photographer just accepts any request (and check) that comes along. A mismatched mentoring and a loud complaint via social media could screw over the program completely.

One thing I would consider useful for both sides of this would be for the photographer to record and publish a mentoring session (or portfolio review) with a willing subject. That way, prospective customers could see exactly how the session happens and would know exactly what to expect. Without that, I think you need to know the work of the photographer you're asking to mentor you well and feel their view of good imagery is compatible. Guess wrong, and it might be a painful, and worse, useless or destructive, waste of money.

But overall I see this as an interesting evolution in the relationship between the professional photographers who build an online presence and the newer photographers who look up to them for advice and inspiration.

Personally? I'll probably set myself up with one (or two), once I sort out I am trying to get help on.

If you're curious, here's a list of some of the photographers that I've noticed have this service; about half of them have announced it in the last couple of months, which is what initially caught my eye.

Art Wolfe (when he's not traveling)
William Neill, who has done it for at least a few years
Brian Matiash, whose announcement made me go looking into this more carefully.
Michael Frye, while it's not public on his site as I write this, Michael's indicated he's going to be offering it soon.
Ben Horne, who I think is frankly under-pricing his time with his current offering.

Interested in getting an objective outsider look at your work? Hopefully this helps gets you started finding the right voice to get you feedback.

One Thing: Photography as a Guild

David duChemin just published a wonderful rant titled Everyone’s A F*cking Photographer, where he goes off on someone he ran into in Venice complaining about being surrounded by people taking photographs. And this sucked, because this photographer seemed to want to be special -- and he wasn't. How terrible it's gotten because all these people are wandering around with cameras and having fun taking pictures.

Instead of, I guess, staying home and buying prints of his precious creations? Horrors.

David rightly bitchslaps him into another county in his piece, but this attitude isn't new. I took my first digital photograph in November of 2001. In 2005 I bought my first DLSR. God help me, I realize I've been doing digital photography close to 20 years now.

Along the way, this digital transformation has changed the industry massively, and I most, if not all, photographers saw their way of life transformed or their business destroyed by this. This kind of disruption is many things, but painless is not one of them, and I'm not minimizing that pain one bit.

But I've also seen photographers take one of three paths in dealing with these changes.

The Path of Adoption: Some photographers saw the changes happening and found the ways they could adopt it into their work. People like George Lepp, Art Wolfe, anyone shooting for National Geographic... These are the ones who experimented with the new tools, found how they could be useful, and found ways to leverage and adapt to the people brought into photography by them; they shifted to teaching and mentoring and workshops as stock and prints and magazine income faded.

The Path of Denial: Some photographers tried to deny the changes, and just kept doing business the way they'd always done it, until there wasn't enough of the traditional business left to sustain them. I won't mention names, but I can think of eight or nine off the top of my head who either refused to adapt to the changing industry or tried to change too late, and now they're not making their living with the camera any more.

The Path of Exclusion: These are the photographers who keep trying to explain why they are real photographers, and you aren't. The photographer David goes off on is one of those. They want to be special, to be exclusive.

Photography as status: The shift to digital photography has been littered with photographers attempting to justify why they're real photographers, and you (and I) are not. Some of these attempts to define their specialness that I remember:

Real photographers shoot raw
Real photographers shoot manual
Real photographers don't use auto-focus
Real photographers shoot full frame, not crop sensor
Real photographers don't use zooms
Real photographers use Photoshop
Real photographers also don't need Photoshop, because they get it perfect in camera and don't manipulate their images
Real photographers don't shoot microstock
Real photographers don't give away their images

I could go on and on...

Every step of the way, I've seen groups of photographers attempt to build that moat around their specialness, defining how what they do is real photography, and what the rest of us are doing really isn't.

Meanwhile, the rest of us mostly ignore them, except when we're stupid enough to attempt to argue with them on social networks, and go off and create images we love. And along the way we've adopted new techniques, from HDR to Panoramas to night photography to drones, and if you stop and look at who's most successful in the industry today, it's the people too busy adopting in all this new stuff, not the people trying to hide inside the moat complaining about how things have changed since the good old days when they were special.

I feel sorry for them. Partly because I do realize in many cases their careers were blown up by this digital transformation, and that hurts. But also because they're attempt to stop change doesn't hurt anyone but themselves, and if there are wounds from this transformation of the industry, they are self-inflicted wounds of denial.

And if their are hundreds, or thousands of photographers who's livelihood were disrupted or destroyed by this transformation, there are tens of thousands who had opportunities created that didn't exist before. And the photographers who did survive this transitions saw those opportunities and grabbed at them, rather than attempting to deny them.

And as a photographer who has almost always been on the wrong side of that I'm special, and you aren't argument, all I can say is: I love the images I take, and I enjoy being able to take them. Do you?

Because if you aren't, then why are you doing this? And if you are, why do you care about anyone else?

If your self-worth is tied up in how being a photographer somehow makes you special or better than the people around you, you're doing it wrong.

For Your Consideration

Once gone, eagles flourish in Bay Area skies: A great success story in conservation and protecting endangered species. A favorite species for me to photograph in the winter around here, it's been fascinating watching the populations increase over the last decade.
The Sugar Conspiracy: more and more the general public is starting to learn just how screwed up our dietary suggestions have been from the experts. This is something I've written about before, if you want more about this, try Everything you Know about Eating is Wrong.
1,000 Paths to Success with Jack Conte (video). Chase Jarvis sits down with Jack Conte, founder of Patreon and one of the members of the musical group Pomplamoose about why he started Patreon and how the patron model for supporting the arts has a strong history.
Nikon unveils the DF-M1, a Dot Sight for Super-Telephoto Tracking. I've been watching the commentary on the new Nikon offerings (and Canon is lined up to join the editorializing with their mirrorless announcements soon). This red dot sight is on my list to grab and experiment with once it ships, and I expect a year from now there'll be a few other models on the market that, um, borrow heavily from it. Anyone using big glass should give this one consideration.

Reviews

To start 2018 I gave myself a challenge to finish two books a month and get back to reading more. About half of my reading is actually listening, since I hit middle age and progressive lenses in my glasses, I've discovered the joy of audio books, and that's helped me keep up the rhythm.

My reading splits into two main categories: Science Fiction and Fantasy, and history/biography, especially military history non-fiction. I also end up reading a sprinkling of business type books. As of August 1, I've finished 26 titles, and here are a few recent reads I can suggest you might find interesting:

Norse Mythologies: I was curious when I saw this book was about Neil Gaiman had gone and done a retelling of the classic Norse mythology stories. I went and grabbed this on Audible where it was read by the author, and that was a great decision. I was able to just sit back, close my eyes, and listen to Gaiman tell me these stories as if we were sitting in the woods at a campfire, and it was a magically wonderful experience. Highly recommended.
Vietnam: A history by Stanley Karnow. I am old enough that I grew up with the Vietnam War playing out on the TV at the dinner table most nights, but young enough that I was out of school before it was being taught, and while I'm a fan of reading up on history and military history, I'd never really dug into Vietnam before now. The Karnow book is one of the classic studies of that period, and it's a fascinating look at how intelligent people can walk themselves into really stupid situations and then compound them by refusing to see the challenge of the suck cost problem, where you keep investing in something because you've already invested heavily and you're unwilling to cut your losses and move on. Vietnam was an incredible comedy of errors, but an expensive and painful one, and the Karnow book does a great job of bringing this to light in informative detail.

About 6FPS and Chuq

6FPS (Six Frames Per Second) is a newsletter of interesting things and commentary from Chuq Von Rospach (6fsp@chuqui.com).

Coming out about every two weeks, I will place in your inbox a few things I hope will inform and delight you. There is too much mediocre, forgettable stuff attacking your eyeballs every day you're online; this is my little way to help you cut through the noise to some interesting things you might otherwise not find.

See you in a couple of weeks

And with that, I'll see you in a couple of weeks with the next issue. I'd love feedback on this, what you like, what you want more of, what you want less of. And if you have something interesting you think I might want to talk about, please pass it along.

Until then, take care, and have fun.

Chuq