Now that New Year formalities are over I figure I should get down to business.  The site is going through a bit of redesign this week nothing too drastic but I figured I need to add a gallery, an “about” page and probably a way to get in contact with me (you know;in case someone wants to contact me).

mtk

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Happy New Year 2009! I hope it is healty, happy and prosperous for everyone. 

2008 was a pretty good year; did some traveling (got lost in the Gobi Desert), took some pictures, sold some pictures, got a new camera (or two) and nearly fulfilled my 2008 New Year’s Resolution.  What was my resolution you ask?  Well, for 2008 it was to take 6 (six) images that were good enough (both in composition and image quality) to print (at 17×22), frame and sell in a limited of editions of 10 each.  So out of the thousands of images taken in 2008 I got (drumroll please)… 4 (four)! Which was pretty good if you ask me. Sure I had quite a few images that were pretty good (some I felt damn good); but in the end only 4 made the cut. 

Selling my work was quite an experience.  I don’t quite know how to describe it; I sell commercial work all the time, but selling something as “art” was somehow different.  I took it personally (which I never do with commercial stuff), I was actually concerned with people’s opinion.  Well let me rephrase that, I’m always concerned with the client’s opinion (after all they are paying for it so I’d better care), but I don’t take it personally when they don’t like it or want me to make a change; it’s just part of the business.  But this was different I cared what people thought, I mean really cared.  I remember walking into a framer with one of the buyers (he opted to buy an unframed print; and pick his own frame); there were 20 people in store not including the staff and every one of them had something to say about the image (some good, some bad) needless to say I was very uncomfortable.  And things only got worse when the framer asked me to sign the matte (the signature on the image was covered by his choice of matte) and a few of the customers realized I was the photographer.  That made for a few awkward moments but in the end resulted in another sale, so I guess it was a good thing.

I haven’t decided on a goal for 2009 yet but I’ll post it here when I do.

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In the last week I’ve realized something… making frame worth sharing (or even something interesting) everyday is hard work, much harder than I thought.  I do have frames from everyday this past week but most of them are, what’s the word? Oh ya, “Crap” as in a waste of pixels.  Sure I learned something in the process and perhaps that alone made the weeks’ photos worthwhile, but the whole process has been very discouraging. Looking for a bit of encouragement I emailed a better shooter and asked for his advice, his response was brief: “Did you read [Joe] McNally’s post on Sept 10?”. So off to McNally’s site I went and read the Sept 10 post, and it was like he was speaking directly to me (you can read it here) and I’ll save you the trouble of figuring out what part spoke to me:

…Cause this is hard to do, right? Day after day, you come back without a great or even good frame. I’m reminded of the conversation betweeen Tom Hanks and Geena Davis in League of Their Own.

Jimmy Dugam: “Baseball is what gets inside you, it’s what lights you up. You can’t deny that.”
Dottie: “It just got too hard.”
Jimmy: “It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. It’s the hard that makes it great.”

There’s a lot of analogies between photography and baseball. Ray Fitzgerald of the Boston Globe wrote, “A critic once characterized baseball as six minutes of action crammed into two-and-one-half hours.”

Sounds like a photo shoot to me.

So I’m picking up my camera and getting back to work, not because it’s easy (well sometimes it is) but because it’s hard and like Jimmy said “it’s the hard that makes it great”.

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