Neel from LearnFoodPhotography.com posed an interesting question to me in email a short time ago. He asked “What advice would you give to someone who is just starting to build their portfolio? What are some things to keep in mind?” This is actually a question I get very frequently. In fact, I’ve answered it here before, and I sent along some of my thoughts for Neel’s upcoming article.

But, as I was catching up today on some old magazines, I happened to read an article in the Dec/Jan Organic Gardening issue about hunger and malnutrition in America. Along with the article was a whole list of organizations trying to help this problem. Most of these are non-profit or governmental agencies… groups that don’t have a lot of money and rely on volunteers. The idea occurred to me that this is a great way for any food photographer to give back, and particularly, an interesting idea for those new to shooting food to develop their work.

I hear (and preach) not to give your work away for free all the time. I still stand by that, even for new photographers. But as in all of life, there are times to break the rules, and building your portfolio by volunteering your photos to groups that help feed hungry people or educate people about healthful eating? That sounds like a win all around to me.

Here are the groups listed in the Organic Gardening article, but I encourage you to check into food banks and services such as the United Way in your area for even more opportunities.

gardenwriters.org
ampleharvest.org
foodforward.org
portlandfruilt.org
pps.org
serve.gov/healthyfoods.asp

I enjoy both food and travel and love flicking through cook books and magazines. Your photos are exactly the kind of photography I could look at for hours!!

Do you have any advice as to how I could build up a good portfolio and gain some experience? I’m doing an intensive course in photography but don’t know much about how I could go about creating a specific portfolio.

My main piece of advise is just to practice, practice, practice. Take your camera with you everywhere and try to take the kinds of photos that you like to look at. If you are more interested in travel, start looking at your own city as a tourist might… imagine the kind of article you’d want to photograph for. If you are more interested in food, start cooking & shooting… or just buy easily transportable stuff (bakeries or candy shops are best) and shoot it at home. (notice I didn’t say start shooting in restaurants… you’ll be at a disadvantage because you can’t control the lighting).

Once you are ready, start finding folks to give you feedback on your work. Flickr is a great place for this… look for groups that specialize in food & travel and offer critiques. And, don’t be afraid to add a note on your description asking for feedback. you’ll get a lot that isn’t very helpful (ie, the “great shot” type stuff which makes you feel good, but doesn’t help you get any better), but you’ll also get some nuggets of wisdom.

Also, simply because it helps you shoot and get your work seen, I think everyone should have a blog and try to publish on a regular schedule. Even if you don’t want to write much, you can post photos. It’s a good exercise in delivering something on a regular basis, and you never know… you could be discovered. It’s free to do, so why not!

Of course, if you want to go pro, schooling is a good choice. If you can afford it. Personally, I think both culinary and photography schools are outrageously expensive. But, you will learn to deal with all kinds of situation and build a solid foundation of skills.

Finally, again if you want to go pro, find a pro photographer in your area, and ask to take them for lunch or coffee and get to know them. Maybe they can give you a portfolio critique. See if they have internships. Watching others work is a great way to gain experience.

How about you? What did you do to get started?

Photo by Thomas Barwick

As luck would have it, I also got to spend a bit of time this morning with one of the local Seattle photographers whose work I’ve been drooling over for the last six months or so. Thomas Barwick’s work really struck me in the November issue of Seattle Magazine. All of his photos in the issue (as well as subsequent issues…) have been beautiful, but the one that really grabbed me was a photo of well worn hands all covered in dark soil holding out a selection of cranberry and string beans… brilliant pinky purple speckled pods hiding a few dappled beans. Simply gorgeous. So, being the goof that I am, I googled to see if he had a portfolio, and popped off a piece of mail asking if he’d indulge me in a little chat over coffee. It took a few months for him to find some time in what sounds like a very nutty schedule, but everything finally fell into place this week, and we chatted for a bit at El Diablo Coffee, in the Queen Anne area of Seattle.

Now, before I continue, I should preface that:

a) I’m not a good interviewer. I ask questions in random order, as I think of them (even though I had done a bit of work to pull together a printed list of questions) and I don’t take notes (even though I bought a little digital recorder, I just feel weird using it).
b) Tom warned me in our first email exchange that he is a bit curmudegeonly and doesn’t interview well. He also said that when he talks about photography, he might not sound like other photographers, who talk about passion and creativity. Those are all fine and good, but he’s a bit more focused on the business end.

Given my focus for the past few weeks, that sounded perfect to me. Plus, I in the spirit of a negative times a negative equals a positive, the fact that I don’t interview people well and he doesn’t interview well, turned to out be a comfortable conversation that had no problems covering the full hour we had. I found Tom to be thoughtful and honest about his work and photography as a business, and despite his protestations, not particularly all that cynical.

A little background on Tom. He’s been in the business for 17 years, after leaving university and finding that he could start to make a living at it. After assisting in several locations for about five or six years, he started working on his own, with the notion that he’d see where it took him. If the business kept improving, he’d keep at it. And every year, that’s what’s happened. “So far,” he adds with a little grin. Tom’s work is about 20% food, some in the studio and some on location, and he clearly has a knack for it. But unlike a lot of other food photographers, he isn’t obsessed with food (and rarely cooks)… he’s more passionate about the image… how it’s composed, how it’s lit, whether it strikes him with a “Wow” factor. He can’t rattle off a list of photographer inspirations, but instead talks about images that inspire him, or make him think “Damn, I should have done that!” Much of his business is stock photography, which has been quite successful for him, namely because when he shoots, he makes a point to find a new angle or something different… whether its making spears of asparagus appear to dance or creating a cocktail image that feels that it’s been ripped from a Hopper painting.

Tom shoots with a Phase One back on a Hassleblad P30 (drool…) and while admits to not being a tech-guy, rattles off numbers of terrabytes he fills up in a year and RAID arrays with ease. His shop is completely digital at this point, and he shared some very interesting insights on digital photography, which were quite a bit different than you might hear from other photographers… that digital now produces higher quality images than he can get with film, and it’s faster in someways… but that film production was quite a bit cheaper than digital. Between post-production time and archival, costs and time add up quickly.

Photo by Thomas Barwick

Tom has been thinking a lot about what is going on with the business, particularly to photographers who are in the middle. Like many businesses these days, on the high end, there are some (although few) really amazing opportunities and photographers who produce some truly fantastic work. On the low end, the growing sector, there are more and more people taking shots and selling them either as one-offs or as stock for less-than-profitable fees. The middle is rapidly disappearing… and in the past, that’s where a bulk of the professional photographers made their keep. Each year, the business changes a little bit more, and it’s hard to predict where it will go from here.

As I’m entering the field, certainly in a very different place then Tom– I’m one of those people that John Harrington would likely dub a “trust-fund” photographer, which is to say, while I don’t have a trust fund, I don’t need a full-time job to pay the bills– and I’ve set what, at the time, I thought were particularly reasonable rates. I don’t think my rates are so low that they hurt other photographers, but I also don’t think they are so high that I price myself out of beginner level jobs. But, I start to wonder if I’m right. Or, really, if there even is a right.

When you are just starting out as a photographer, it’s nearly impossible not to lose money on jobs, but at some point, that creates problems for everyone involved… clients get the wrong expectation about what the real price of photography is, the photographer can’t keep it up and has to raise rates at somepoint as skills improve or at least as equipment needs upgrading. It’s a fascinating issue… one I’m sure has been around for a long time, but seems to be more in focus these days with digital cameras and a sense of crowd-journalism… that is, people are taking photos of everything, everywhere. In someways, it isn’t a lot different than the debate over food criticism being done on blogs versus traditional media by professional reviewers. I love that Tom doesn’t spout out an answer or even imply that there is one… he’s unsure of what the industry is going to do next, but still hanging on and curious to find out. With images like his, I’d put my money on him sticking around for a while…

Technorati Tags: Photography

Most professional photographers out there put some sort of transparent-ish watermark on their images when posting them to the web. It’s one of the few, albeit not necessarily fool-proof, ways to keep your photos from being used without your authorization. For pros, this is important not only to protect the value of the work, but often because the photos are under exclusive use license… it’s bad for both the photographer and their clients if those photos are misused.

With services like Flickr making it so simple to “borrow” images from, unauthorized use is becoming more of a problem. I can name quite a few cases where Flickr photos with All Rights Reserved clearly indicated on the web page were taken and used in magazines or websites without permission. In fact, I just stumbled upon this post with an old image of mine that was used without my permission. As a result of this kind of issue, more and more people are tagging their images with a copyright notice, and sometimes even quite a big one.

I started adding a copyright notice to my photos some months ago, once I started getting paid for some of my shots. It seemed the best way to show good faith that photos that I might sell as stock in the future haven’t been used before. Initially, I just tagged on the copyright by hand in Photoshop. I’d create a new layer, add the text, set the transparency and be done with it. This was fairly tedious and time consuming, but for most images, I was using Photoshop to do other image tweaking, so it wasn’t too terribly much overhead. After some weeks, I created a little action to do the same thing… it was flakey, and wouldn’t position the text where I wanted it to be, but it saved me the step of typing the same copyright string over and over again. I’m guessing that Image Ready, that comes along with Photoshop CS2 does some of this for you, but I haven’t played around with it much. Likewise, I’m sure there are some good Photoshop actions out there… better than the one I created… to help aid in this task.

When I started using Capture One, as you know, my workflow changed considerably. At this point, I only use Photoshop on about 5% of my photos… in those cases usually to clean up some little nit kind of thing that showed up in the macro shot that I didn’t see before-hand, or to clean up an all white background. The rest of the time, all my color and exposure correction is done in Capture One, so outputting from the raw files to the various formats and sizes is all automated. Capture One lets you set the specific file type, sizing, color profile, compression ratio, file naming and, my favorite, lets you set and place watermark a string, all as a part of the output processing. Set all these things once, and save the settings to an output type and then you can use those same settings on any batch of photos. I have different settings saved off for my TIFF files, full-sized jpegs for clients, web-sized jpegs for clients, web-sized jpegs w/watermarks for Flickr, and sized to fit my online portfolio. After I color correct a batch of photos, I just pick which output types I want and wait a few minutes for the results. Easy-peasy, and no more dinking around with watermarking manually.

Recently a question from one of my fellow Flickrites on how I watermark prompted a bit more searching for other tools that aren’t quite as pricey, and I found a couple that look interesting. I have not tried these though, so take this just as info, not as a recommendation.

First, and the one that looks the best to me, is Downsize by a company called Stunt software. This little Mac-based app lets you batch resize your images, but also do all kinds of cool stuff in the process… like add a border or a drop-shadow, round the corners, or add a watermark. It integrates with iPhoto as well, so you won’t have to worry about having to refind all your photos buried away in the crazy mac directory structure.

On PC, check out ReaWatermark2 by ReaSoft. It doesn’t do all the same cool stuff that Downsize does, but it does do transparent watermarks, including graphics.

You might also check out iWaterMark, which works on both PCs and Macs.

Once you have the tool, you need to decide what your watermark will say or look like. I like to keep mine small, so it doesn’t interfere with the image. My goal is that no one notices it on the first glance of the photo. Other folks go big, to make sure it’s clear that the work is copyrighted immediately. Here are some examples of what other Flickrites have done. There isn’t really a right or wrong here… it’s all about what you want. The images is copyrighted whether or not it has a watermark.

My copyright is just text, and reads: Ask First! © 2007 Plates & Packs LLC/Lara Ferroni http://www.platesandpacks.com/ All Rights Reserved.

That little copyright symbol, ©, on the mac, by the way, is Alt-G in most fonts.

Don’t think that adding a watermark is going to do a lot to stave off the very ambitious image thief. What it will do, however, is help let those who really don’t understand copyrights from accidentally taking your images without permission. Since I started watermarking, I’ve been surprised (and pleased) by the number of people who have sent me mail to make sure it was ok for them to use one of my images. Sometimes, it was, and I granted them limited use rights. Sometimes, I had to say no, and explain my reasons.

*Note. I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one on my blog. Please don’t consider this post as legal advice!

I was already a lurking member of a couple of groups related to photography… showing up to one of those would probably be a good start! But, none of those groups really focused on food… more shooting landscapes and people. Not really what I was looking for. So, with a fire in my belly, I decided to simply start my own. Build it and they will come. I went to meetup.com and created a new group for food stylists and photographers in the Seattle area. Frankly, I hoped I might get one or two people interested, but I really wasn’t expecting much.

But, lo and behold, just a few days later, I have 18 people in the group… most of which really do share my same excitement about food styling & photography! I have to say, I’m a bit taken a back and completely thrilled. Who knew it would be so simple to connect with other people! Why didn’t I think of this sooner?

Which leads me to this post. Having a local community of food stylists and food photographers in your area can be a huge motivator and learning experience. Whether you are an amateur or professional or somewhere in between, there are great opportunities when you can share what you know. If no group exists in your area, try starting one yourself and doing a little local publicity (Craigslist is free! Or, make print outs to post on the bulletin boards of local artisan cafes and shops).

If you are looking for ideas of what to do with a group, here are some that I came up with:

- Have field trips to restaurants that feature gorgeous food
- Arrange tours of farmer’s markets or farms
- Hold photo lighting classes
- Educational seminars on food styling and presentation
- Prop swaps
- Host potluck dinners
- Share studio space
- Collaborate on food projects (cookbooks, freelance stories, etc.)

If you have other ideas, let me know! And, if you are in the Seattle area and food and photography is your thing, feel free to join us!

Technorati Tags: Food, Food Styling, Photography, Seattle