Brenda Lockie-Knight plays the harp, ukelele and sings at Peet's here in Chico, CA.

Brenda Lockie-Knight plays the Harp, Ukelele and sings too. Wish we could have heard her better, it's a little noisy on the outdoor patio at Peet's here in Chico. She says she also plays at Cafe Flo sometimes. Found her on Facebook http://facebook.com/brenda.lockieknight but she says she's not on there much. Super nice lady. We told her we'd post these photos online, so, with any luck she'll be able to find them.

The first wedding I ever shot in 2005

Looking back at a favorite image from the first wedding I shot in 2005. I realize that it's unusual to see a bride in white holding a baby, and that's part of what I've always liked about it. Life is unusual. It's hard to believe it will be eight years as of next month.

Wedding and Portrait Photography in Chico

 

I decided it was time to go back and look through a set of photos that Sheryl and I shot at the Naked Lounge ( it's just a cafe with great coffee ). Talia Lupita Azul was our model and she did a great job. This was shot with available light only, and Sher helped me modify it a bit to get what I consider to be beautiful light. I really enjoy doing work like this, and I look forward to doing more in the near future.

I had thought that putting up a few ads on Craigslist would get me some bookings, but around here that doesn't seem to work very well. My general impression is that approximately nobody is using Craigslist in the Chico area to find a photographer. I get a few website hits which can be traced back to Craigslist ads, and I've gotten a few contacts, but I also notice that no other photographer posts consistently to craigslist-- they all drop off sooner or later and that wouldn't be so if the ads were actually working. I'll have to explore other channels for selling my work.

I'm actually biting my tongue right now to avoid commenting too much on what other local photographers are doing. I decided a while back to keep a very loose, casual eye on what they're up to. Well, it seems to break down into a few different categories. There are the hobbiests, and there are tons of those. Digital photography just keeps growing in popularity. There are serious hobbiests/ semi- pro photographers. Some of those are pretty good ranging to very good, but in that group mostly what I see is that they get reduced to playing "dress-up" with friends who want to be models or at least play at it. This is likely true all over, not just in Chico. You can be a great photographer but if you aren't good at marketing and selling, you probably won't get hired except by family and friends, and some of our locals are pretty damn good. 

The phenomenon of getting hired by family and friends, church members, coworkers, fellow club members, etc, is that as a marketing strategy, if it were one, it works better than, say, advertising. Your friends may actually follow through with hiring you. There's some trust there already built. They'll probably expect a discount and they'll probably get it, especially when you just think of yourself as "turning pro". You'll probably bump into them over and over again until they remember to actually pony up and do a shoot and so on. None of this is true when you really are a pro. As a pro you have to build trust through other means, you can't afford to offer bottom barrel pricing, and your potential clients aren't predisposed either to hiring you or actually following through, even if you've spent significant time with them already. They won't see you again so it's easy to blow you off.

What's actually bothering me that I've been avoiding talking about is that some of the local photographers who are actually getting some work ( cut-rate work, yes, but still work ). And what bothers me most is that they are absolutely awful at photography. They haven't a clue what they're doing, and it shows. I'm not even being picky: we're talking baby picks where the baby is completely out of focus, bad light, bad composition, bad color, underexposed or wildly over-exposed. . .  pretty much everything a photographer can do wrong is done wrong.  Only fifty bucks for the shoot? So what. And yet, and yet-- they're working and continuing to be hired by family and friends, building confidence, planning to do more and more and more: but they aren't learning from their mistakes. They aren't getting any better. Somehow their clients aren't complaining. What I have to assume is that the proliferation of amateur photography is keeping expectations very low. Is it because the low rate photographers are so cheap? Well there's cheap and then there's worthless. Maybe if the end result marginally beats a cell phone pic it's considered acceptable? I don't know. This "dumbing down" of the art of photography is pretty troubling to me, where the expectations of quality are so low, and the price point as well. The low end photographer and the low end client threatens to kill off the mid level photographers market where there's actually some talent.

It's a bit like Walmart. Your local hardware store gets driven out of business because everybody is buying the cheap crap at Walmart. One day you go back to the old hardware store because you need something good and it just ain't there. Gone.

The thing about the mid level photography market is:

#1 That's where all the new talent gets developed. Eventually this feeds the higher end markets and that's where the top end talent gets nurtured.

#2 It's accessible but not "dirt cheap" to consumers. Maybe there's just enough profit to keep a dedicated photographer going, to continue to build his skills and move onward and upward. 

#3 It helps to "set the bar" for a certain level of quality in the field, and expectations for better things to come in the future.

    So I don't think we can afford to lose that. It's kind of like the middle class in America, it drives everything.

RIP Brett Olson

A young man was lost to drowning in the Sacramento River this past week. His body turned up a week from when he went missing. Some 90,000 people in the meantime got together and tried to help find him, or became involved in one way or another. Not to mention the County Sheriffs and Chico Police dept. Anyway my point is not to be a news source here-- you should look elsewhere for that. I noted that in the interim many, many false sightings occurred and I'm sure many well-meaning people who thought they were helping feel kind of bad right now. One thing I noticed within the last couple of days was that Brett's missing iPhone was somehow found,  and that Brett's mother appeared to be very encouraged by this.

I'm just hoping that everybody who thought they saw him, or otherwise tried to contribute positively to the case can realize that anybody can make a mistake, and that they should forgive themselves. It was wishful thinking, and a lot of people wanted very badly for this young man to be found safe and returned to his family and friends alive and well.

Some people, myself included, were less hopeful about the outcome, but that doesn't make the ending any less tragic-- no matter what anybody did, thought, hoped for, this is one of those times when something just happened and you can't turn back time and change that.

Is Self Defense Spiritual?

So. . . this isn't the first time that the question came up, and to be honest it isn't usually a question, it usually arrives in the form of an accusation, or worse, an insult. The question, if it were put in a civilized way ( I'm big on civilness lately ) would be "Is self defense spiritual?" And the answer is: of course it is. Never heard of Martial Arts? Distinctly spiritual. Or how about the Shao Lin order: kick ass monks, they are. There are gentler forms of martial arts such as Aikido which turns an opponent's attacking energy back against them. Then there's Tai Chi which is even gentler, but it's still about moving and redirecting energy to where it is appropriate and beneficial. Redirecting energy is healing, and so I say, let the healing begin.

Pacifists can be spiritual too, of course. I don't question pacifists. I don't insult them. I don't even wonder whether or not pacifism is connected to their spirituality. It might be. It might not. What it really is, is, none of my business. I respect a pacifist for their choices just as much as I respect the next person for defending themselves, or others. If a pacifist changes his mind I still respect him. Same goes for a non-pacifist who says "no" one day to self defense, even if he changes his mind five minutes later. It's really all about personal choice and the right to live one's life as one chooses. Naturally if we do that we recognize the same rights for others. That's the ideal scenario, in any case.

Where does it become a gray area: how about when a pacifist gets all up in my face for having defended myself? Yeah, would a pacifist do that? Yep. I can witness on that, several times in the past. There will probably be more attacks by pacifists, or those who otherwise find themselves more "spiritual than thou" whenever I do or say virtually anything which does not agree with what they personally think is "spiritual". The good news is, I've only ever been attacked in such a way by people who don't know me at all: they just do a "drive by" and then keep on rolling.

And then it got very quiet and peaceful, downright civilized.

So. . .  we're not famous enough to have to institute an email blacklist yet. Not that we ever set out to be famous, but we did discover a while back that getting enough business involves getting noticed enough statistically to secure sales. Any shyness we had needed to go away or at least be dealt with. One of our outreach tools was Youtube ( more on that in just a minute ).

The update on my angry little troll is that he made another squeeky angry sound at me so I reported him to his ISP and to his domain registry for "cyber-harassment" and I may have taken some further steps to try to make sure that anyone else he's harassing can figure out who he is, where he lives, and how to reach him by telephone should they need to file a police report. Yep, a police report. Harassing isn't legal, it pretty much falls under "stalker" laws. In this particular case we're talking about a guy who setup a domain name and email for the sole purpose of hurting people, and like I said in a previous post, he's been at it for years.

Update: However, even in trying to do good, sometimes mistakes get made. Not every bit of information can be verified, and sometimes despite all best intentions, things go wrong. I'll still try to do the right thing if I see or experience bullying, but the fact is, if somebody is determined to do wrong and then hide under a rock-- it may not always be that easy to find which slimy little rock they're hiding under.

Youtube just instituted a new policy: they're asking people to use their real names. They aren't requiring it yet, but I think they should. This quote pretty much says it all, "95 percent of comments still contain either a racial slur, a sexist tirade, is totally incomprehensible, or some combination of those,"--Leslie Horn of Gizmodo. Because basically, if you create and foster "troll heaven", you're responsible for the outcome, and the outcome in this case is disgusting and harmful.

Anybody seen the Saturday Night Live take on this?

Photographing Talia Lupita Azul in Chico at The Naked Lounge

Images from a recent photo shoot here in Chico, CA at a cafe called "The Naked Lounge". These were all shot in available light in the course of one hour. The model's name is Talia Lupita Azul. She's a joy to work with, really conveys a lot of subtle emotion and presence.

Presenting your art like you mean it

Presentation, presentation, presentation. In Real Estate they say the three principles are location, location, location. I'm pretty much saying the same thing. The idea being that it is where it is and you're stuck with that. Would you rather have the best house in the worst neighborhood, or the worst house in the best neighborhood? You want the worst house in the best neighborhood if you were forced to choose. You can't change the neighborhood ( not very easily, anyway) but you can always fix up the house. And the fact is that most of all what defines the value of real estate is less what it is and more where it is. Similarly I've found that if your art is in a high end gallery, you're going to do better with it than if it's hanging in a run-down coffeehouse. Same art, different location and inherently better presentation will help to equal either more sales or sales at a higher price.

Don't get me wrong, I like run down coffee houses. But then I'm not currently an art buyer. If the run down coffee house is what you have access to, at least try to make sure that you have your work nicely matted and framed and well lit. You may or may not sell anything, but you will have made a start and that's important too. I think the most important thing when considering where to hang your stuff is to get an idea who the clientele is. Maybe the run down coffee house is frequented by a clientele who can actually afford to buy your art--- like, if it's near a University, you never know, an administrator or a tenured professor with a few bucks stashed away might take a liking and buy a piece. In that case it's also pretty important to make sure that everything is decently labeled and priced. You may or may not decide to say much about each piece, but if you leave out the words aspect of presentation, make sure it's a very deliberate choice. In the very least say something about yourself even if you don't care to define each individual piece. This may just be my preference, but my artist statement will probably include a nice photo of myself, and I will at least look approachable, friendly. If your coffee house is frequented by doctors, lawyers and other professionals that's good too. The people who buy your art have to have the money to buy your art. There's no getting around that.

If your run down coffee-house is frequented only by college or high school students, don't expect to sell anything unless you're selling whatever is currently popular amongst that age group by way of a large poster for about 6 bucks. I don't in any way claim to know what's popular with people 30 years younger than me. I'm pretty sure a lot of 20 somethings are spending their life savings on tattoos. In fact I know of a few younger artists who are concentrating their efforts on tattoos because at least they can get paid that way.

When we spent a couple of months in Santa Fe, we asked every single gallery owner about the marketing of art. We thought they'd all have the same things to say about what worked. Well they didn't. There was a surprising amount of variation, but one of the common threads was all about presentation. All these galleries were in the known gallery districts of Santa Fe. The prime locations were the most accessible locations: like right on the plaza, or on the lower to the middle part of Canyon Road.  Santa Fe, New Mexico is within the top three art markets in the country. Even at that, there are galleries going bust. If you're in all alleyway off Canyon Road, that might be enough to drive you out. If you're the last gallery at the top of the road, that could be a problem too because the road is on a slight incline. It's walkable but the altitude of the town is over 7000 feet. A lot of art buyers are elderly. Many of them are from sea-level climates and are just visiting, they aren't acclimated and they never will be. They can't buy your art if they're about to pass out getting to it.
So. . .  rather than try to detail or compile what all the gallery owners imparted to us ( it would be impossible, there were too many contradictions ) I'm just giving an example or two to show the common sense of it all. Selling art is like selling anything. The presentation includes the location, the lighting, the overall atmosphere, the access to "qualified" buyers and so on.

Craigslist works great for some things, not for others.

When I lived in Santa Cruz I was using Craigslist to advertise our spiritual counseling and healing practice, my photography business as a photographer for hire, and separately to promote my art photography and Sheryl's art as well. I even used Craigslist to promote Sheryl's Mamalove Perfume business. It being the Bay Area, Craigslist had a wide reach. We also used some print ads to promote the spiritual healing work, but never to promote the art and photography. I'm not sure why that is, probably it was just a matter of having a budget. Plus, Sheryl and I primarily got together to do the spiritual healing and counseling even though the arts and literature ( and music too, and in my case, film ) were a big part of our lives.

Well things change. We moved around a bit. Eventually we settled in Chico, California. Craigslist itself has gone through a few changes too, and some of the stuff like the healing practice isn't so easy to promote there, but at least the "Therapeutic Services" section is no longer as inundated with sex ads. In any case, here in Chico I tried to utilize Craigslist to promote a host of things over the course of a year and nothing happened. Pretty much nothing. Possibly, absolutely nothing. It can be hard to track, but I am relatively sure that I got nearly zero response until I decided to sell an old bicycle for cheap, then some old bike parts, then a used microwave. Those ads drew overnight and enthusiastic responses. Bing, bang, boom; I actually made money. I had not made money on any other ad, diligently posted and re-posted over the course of a year. Hmm.

Craigslist is for locals, it's supposed to help locals at buying and selling goods and services-- all kinds of goods and services. In the Bay Area, we got some response, not overwhelming, but something. Here, we get nothing. And I don't just mean people aren't buying, I mean people are barely even looking. I have decent enough tracking to know that. Further the pattern is to see similar ads, like for photography services or even spiritual counseling-- to note that they crop up from time to time and then quickly disappear. That's what I saw. That means it's not working for them either. If the ads worked, they'd re-up them. We've moved around enough to discover that it's not the same Craigslist everywhere you go. Bizarrely, it's not the same Google either, but I may write about that another time. I think the first key is to recognize the strengths and weaknesses of a specific medium of communication, but the real lynch-pin, the anchor is to be willing to accept what you see, to act on that and to move onward, onward and upward.

A Chico Photographer on Photo Groups

 Oh, photographer's groups. . . and why I'm pretty reluctant to be a part of one. So, the first time I joined up was in Bellingham WA, about a thousand miles from where I am now in Chico, California. I don't speak of this much but photographers, as a group, have a rather high percentage of assholes. I'm not sure why this is. Male photographers in particular: they certainly aren't all assholes, but seems like a lot of them are, compared to the general populace. So the first photographers group I joined had a couple of "pro" photographers and a couple of hobbyists and one guy who used to be a pro commercial photographer but he had quit. At first I liked all these guys well enough, but pretty soon I got tired of the guy who was sort of randomly hostile for no particular reason. He founded the group and slowly he managed to drive everyone out of it. I couldn't for the life of me figure out why he started the group to begin with. His buddy seemed nice enough, but shortly I got a little tired of his holier-than-thou attitude, not just about photography but about pretty much everything. He's one of these guys who says "Anything I can do to help, just ask me, anytime." And then you do ask him something, some simple question, once, and you're ostracized forever. For the record I'm not one of those guys who says "anything, anytime" because I really, really would not mean it. I'm also one of those guys who usually gives detailed answers to anybody who asks me for a little help, I just don't promise that, because some time or other I won't mean it. Same guy lent me his book about his trip to India looking for his guru wherein he pretty much proceeded to play the right fool. Only he'd written the book in this pompous, elevated style and he hand bound the book and signed it and then proceeded to freak out like I wasn't going to return it to him. Of course I returned it. After a while i realized that the hostile guy was always saying the thing that the holy guy wanted to say but was too holy to do so. Yuch. There were two or three other guys in the group including me and we never managed to get anybody new to show up more than once ( surprise! ) and after a while the whole thing fell apart.

Fast forward and I inadvertently got added to a Chico Area Photographer's group through the magic of Facebook. It's OK probably, for a lot of folks-- there are some 70+ members whom I don't know whatsoever. But only two or three people are ever posting anything. Yes, I could post, sure I could. One of the latest postings was some guy ranting and raving about how much other photographers should share everything they know, and bring him along personally on photo shoots as an assistant so that he can "watch and learn" and how despicable it was that these other photographers weren't doing that. Um, yeah. Well, last time I checked there was a huge amount of teaching material available for free on the internet. Then there are these things called "books" and a whole huge population of people called "teachers" who quite frequently disseminate information, often at places called "schools". As often happens on Facebook, people went "Here here! Yes you are so right, why, every other photographer is personally responsible to educate you!" and nobody suggested to Mr Ranty Pants that he might actually be responsible for his own education. I don't know. In my case my dad taught me a hell of a lot, but later on the things I didn't pick up, or things I forgot, or things I never truly understood in the first place I looked up and studied and memorized. Failing that, a lot of things have been learned through experience, trial and error, or some combination of applying book knowledge to the ever changing conditions of real life. While I am sure that there's a place for peer based learning, and I have for sure published teaching pieces about photography ( and I might do it again ) I never signed up to teach everyone in my path about photography. A big part of this has to do with the fact that a lot of people who think they want to learn photography, don't. If I do sign up to teach, I'm going to expect to be paid. This brings me to my next point about photo groups.

Unless a photo group has a really clearly stated mission, it's likely to end up populated with a hodge- podge of people with a lot of different ideas, goals, and expectations. It can get messy. In this case we've got photographers: some are pro and some are amateur, and that's a big enough rift right there. There are also models, MUA's and I don't know what else. What I see right now are a couple of strong personalities ( one in particular ) milking the rest of the group for free labor on her own photo shoots. I just received a personal complaint that she doesn't treat people very well--- but here's another thing, if your group lacks a mission statement it might also lack any kind of codes of acceptable behavior. Under those conditions, sometimes, you get a wolf, or possibly two, but really one is enough, whose mission becomes eating all the sheep as rapidly as they can consume them. Contrary to how it may seem, I'm not real big on structure or discipline. I'm also not real big on groups unless they have, or can develop at least, a reason to exist. Mostly my experience with groups is that they accomplish what an individual can accomplish with an efficiency which is inversely proportional to the number of members of the group. Back to my earlier point though: one of the bigger problems with photo groups is that pros and amateurs have distinctly different interests. The primary imbalance is that pros expect to be paid, and when they are shooting quite often they're being paid to shoot, and to edit, and indirectly to do outreach and marketing. If they aren't busy, then they aren't doing terribly well as pros. You might have trouble putting together an all pro group in a given area because too many are in direct competition with each other. If there's an all pro group there will be an agenda, or agendas amongst it's membership. An all amateur group might work better, but you run the strong risk of the blind leading the blind, of bad info being spread from member to member--- whatever, I mean if it's all about point and shoots and potlucks then it's all hunky dory. I've just never been interested in that. In an all pro group I myself am concerned about the agenda's. In the particular group I'm in, about 90% of the membership don't appear to be participating at all, less than ten percent are posting anything and one aggressive "pro" is just using the membership to exploit free labor from naive amateurs ( gobbling up the sheep ).

Come to think of it that potluck group sounds pretty good. If we can all agree to leave the cameras at home that could work out just great. We all arrive hungry and carrying food, we all leave full and happy, and in between we all had a great time.