The business of photography and retouching
This is another view-from-my-office photo.
It was obvious while photographing some of the federal election campaigns over the past two weeks that news media turnout has drastically dropped over the past three federal elections.
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Canada is currently in the middle of a federal election campaign. Let’s take a look at the business headshots of the party leaders and all the candidates. (Note that political party web sites change from time to time especially with regard to information about their leader.)
If you have a few minutes, click on the links to each party’s candidate page and browse the portraits. Which ones do you like, which ones do you ignore? Why? Is it the lighting, the smile (or lack of), the eyes (or lack of eye contact), the background, or maybe something else? Which ones get your vote based only on their business portrait?
My very long, annual rant about the recent Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) from a photographer’s point of view. If you’re not somehow involved with TIFF then you might be advised to skip this post.
The point of this is not only to vent my frustrations with the 44-year-old film festival but also to make suggestions to the folks that run TIFF. It seems that someone at the film festival reads this blog because some of my suggestions get implemented the following year. Thank you very much.
After the film festival, TIFF sends out a survey asking for journalists’ thoughts about the event. There’s no such questionnaire for photographers. This post provides my answers to a nonexistent questionnaire.
TL;DR: As always, some things got better, some got worse and a few things haven’t changed. You’d think that after four decades the event would be a smooth running, polished machine. But no.
Changes have included an actual red carpet, three sets of lights, blue gels for some of those lights, a clear roof on the media tent, white-only barricade covers and letting photographers wait under the tent before an event if it’s raining. All of these necessities were obvious to everyone except TIFF.
But the covered photo area is still too small and too narrow and there are no photo risers (at any venue).
A few leftover thoughts for the end of the month:
What they didn’t teach you in photo school is the value of blue food colouring.
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De-skill: to reduce the level of skill needed for a job.
Many tasks today require less skill to perform due to advancing technology. But when something requires less skill, some people wrongly assume that it also requires less creativity, less expertise and less talent. A good example of this is photography.
For the third time in seven weeks, a company sent me business headshots they wanted fixed. It was plainly obvious that all of these companies had used amateur photographers (or a really bad professional).
A small law firm today sent two business portraits and a list of what they wanted fixed:
– fix the uneven brightness of the faces
– make skin colour better
– the eyes are too dark. Make brighter.
– replace the [office] background with a plain background
– add shoulders to each person and make the pictures square
If you’re like me, you probably buy too much photo gear. Not so much cameras and lenses but things like bags, light modifiers and various accessories. Here are some of my purchases in 2018:
I’ve been meaning to get a half-decent cart for some time. A homemade dolly-style cart with a bright yellow mat ($55 in parts and plywood from Home Depot in 1985) has served me very well. An over-priced Tri-Kart 800 is something I regret buying about 18 years ago because it was of limited use to me. But many local TV crews use the Tri-Kart.
This year I bought a RocknRoller R12RT. It’s pretty good but it takes up extra space because it’s not small and it weighs 33 lb. Fully extended, the R12RT won’t fit in some elevators.
A TV news article reports on a Canadian photographer who didn’t bother to read the contract when submitting one of his favourite photos to a cheap, royalty-free, stock agency. Apparently he was only thinking about the easy money.
His photo was used on 500,000 calendars and greeting cards.
He earned US$1.88.
Other photographers would probably laugh at this person because this is not news. It’s well known that cheap stock photo agencies have been taking advantage of unsuspecting photographers for 20 years.
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