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Survey Challenge Sub-Challenge: The Art of Capturing Small Community Groups and Events.

June 2, 2023 (updated June 2, 2023)

All photographs by Curran Hatleberg.

Survey Challenge, Sub-Challenge: The Art of Capturing Small Community Groups and Events.

During the height of the pandemic, we went pretty hot and heavy with the pace of challenges, and it makes sense since there was more free time. But also the challenges were a little simpler and easy to pull off in a short time.

But often the best photography takes time. And also with lives getting a little busier again, it’s important to fit in photography at a pace we can handle, but also to take advantage of this return to socializing and the energy that is in the air.

This survey challenge and sub-challenge are going to go through the Fall and will culminate in a two-part zine that will be created over the winter.

OCTOBER 15TH IS THE FINAL-END-ALL-BE-ALL-DUE-DATE FOR BOTH THE CHALLENGE AND SUB-CHALLENGE.

But this challenge is a bit like a culmination of three years of working together, inching closer and closer to having the skillset, understanding, and nerve to pull it off. And it’s something we’re going to hopefully continue working on after the challenge is over.

And I know that there is a section of the Salon that just won’t want to do this sub-challenge as it’s not their enjoyable way of shooting. That is fine, in that case, focus on the original survey challenge in the way that you like to shoot best. There’s no reason to push outside your comfort zone if you don’t think it will ultimately be enjoyable or enriching for you.

Now let’s talk more about photographing communities.

Photographing small community groups and events offers an opportunity to document the essence of a place and its people, and you can contribute to a greater understanding and appreciation of the community’s culture and traditions. 

In this sub-challenge, we’ll take inspiration from Curran Hatleberg, and we will have another hangout in the next few weeks to go over his work again, in the spirit of this challenge.

The spirit of his work ultimately comes down to his intimate and detailed portrayals of communities.

Integrating within a Community

Building Trust and Relationships

The key to capturing authentic and intimate photographs of communities lies in building trust and genuine relationships with the people you’re photographing. This involves spending time getting to know the community members, understanding their stories, and participating in their events. Actively engaging with the community will not only create a strong foundation for a project but also enrich your experience as a photographer.

And it may give you more opportunities to present and share the work once it is completed.

Repeat Visits

One-time visits to a community or event may not be enough to fully capture its essence. Schedule multiple visits and grow deeper connections. If you want, you can continue this after the challenge is over and document the subtle changes and patterns in their lives. It will also help to give them more enthusiasm for what you are working on and to take an active part in helping you pull it off.

Repeat visits will also give you the chance to review your previous photographs, gather feedback, and improve your approach.

And forgetting photography, this is a great way to make more friends and to have fun in a way that you might not be able to without the camera. Repeat visits will allow you time to be involved without the camera, but to use it when the times are right.

Documenting Cultural and Social Events

Community events, such as festivals, parades, and gatherings, will be great opportunities. Look for moments that define the community’s culture and values, and the specific people themselves.

But in addition to larger or more established events, look for smaller things as well. Maybe it’s a local card game, a group that hangs out in a park, or any get-togethers that happen in the scope of everyday life. There may be lots of these occurring right under your nose.

Focusing on Individuals

You can use these events to build connections and portraits with interesting individuals over time. Maybe someone will eventually invite you to their fascinating home for a portrait and give you time to pull off an interesting one. Or maybe they’re having a BBQ and decide to invite you and you can bring your camera. Or maybe as you get to know their interests and hobbies, it will give you both better ideas for capturing the right portrait.

Learning from Curran Hatleberg

The most interesting aspect of Curran’s work is that the communities he has focused on were not where he was from. While he used the camera to integrate himself into new places, it’s clear that he truly looked to integrate himself in a personal way that went beyond just as a photographer.

There are intimate moments with people unencumbered by his presence, which makes it clear they saw him as a member of the event and not just a photographer.

Hatleberg’s work shows us the importance of adopting an empathetic approach when photographing communities. By immersing himself in the lives of his subjects, he is able to capture authentic images that resonate.

Research and Plan

One thing that’s also clear about Curran’s work is that it’s a mix of research and serendipity. Create a plan for yourself, dates to shoot ahead of time, events, and places to go where people congregate. A plan could simply be about going to a local community space or park to search for groups to photograph, and your ideas will probably morph as you progress.

But this challenge will be hard to pull off if you take it fully willy-nilly, without any direction or planning.

Put a plan in front of your face, maybe next to your computer, and pull it off this summer!

Links

1. Curran Hatleberg Website

2. River’s Dream Book Video

3. New Yorker: Curran Hatleberg’s Florida, Past and Future

4. Artist Talks: Curran Hatleberg

Lost Time

April 27, 2023 (updated April 27, 2023)

Lost Time

A few months ago, I started a daily practice to stretch more and keep in better shape when I’m tired and work gets busy, which is now always.

The only thing I need to do is lay on a mat for 5 minutes each day. Don’t feel like working out? Exhausted? It doesn’t matter, if I tell Alexa to set an alarm for 5 minutes and lie on my back on the mat, I feel great about myself.

Setting a low bar and showing up.

Just showing up like that daily has made a nice difference.

The world’s moving again. People are planning weddings, soccer on Saturdays, nice weather, Knicks in the playoffs, everyone’s making up for lost time.

It’s overwhelming. And it’s particularly tough to keep up with creative practices when your mind isn’t clear.

Creativity comes naturally when you have time to escape. When people talk about being inspired, or feeling inspired, or a lack of it, my guess is usually that it has more to do with life events than overall creative inspiration. If life was easy, we would all feel creative 24/7.

And think about the word which must not be spoken anymore, seriously have you heard anyone say the word pandemic in the last 4 months? Crazy.

Obviously life was hard, but we had more time. And more time equals more creativity.

But I think one of the biggest things you learn when you start doing a creative career is that, while you have to take advantage of those creative spurts, wringing them like a wet rag for every last drop, you also have to show up other days.

I love writing just as much as I love photography. I’m not overstating that, writing is bliss for me. A creative pursuit you can do reclining on a couch with coffee and air conditioning, when your body hurts. It’s been a particularly straining week and I have an event job tonight and a trip to Washington over the weekend (to the Air & Space Museum!)

My work computer broke last week after 6 years. I’ve been doing a lot of strictly 5 minute mat sessions.

It took me 3-hours to sit at this computer and do what I wanted to do all morning, write this post. A long 10 minutes to figure out the first few paragraphs.

I thought of the idea for it last week in a moment of feeling creative late at night, put a note that just said LOST TIME at the top of my notes app, and went back to other things. Then finally I got a chance to sit down on the mat for 5 minutes and the whole post spilled out in 20 minutes.

Friends and family are the most important things, especially right now. But we learned this during the pandemic, to feel fulfilled we have to just show up on the mat for that 5 minutes. And if we just stare at the popcorn ceiling for 5-minutes and move on, all the better.

That’s the post, but just an update on how I’ve been shooting. I’ve still been shooting a ton, mostly on workshops (thankfully I take people mostly where I like to go anyway), but unlike me, I haven’t taken the time to organize and edit. I actually just filled up my card a few days ago. So here are some photos from that card.

The survey challenge for me was the project I did during the pandemic, It Was All A Dream. I’m trying to actively think of something else, but nothing yet. But saying it here so you’ll hold me to continue thinking about it.

But it’s been amazing to look through the stream and see more of the areas where you all live. It’s really interesting, I feel like it’s something I’ve been trying to get you all to do for a while and now it’s all clicking.

Keep it coming! Please!

Argentina and Travel Photography versus Home

April 10, 2023 (updated April 10, 2023)

Argentina, and Travel Photography Versus Home

I’m sitting on a sleepless 11-hour flight back from Argentina in the middle of the night. Clearly the most fun 10 days I’ve had, especially when considering sharing it with my son, but also one of the most exhausting stretches of my life.

We spent 4 days touring Patagonia with a bus of 14 family members from 4 generations, and the rest in Buenos Aires, culminating in an 8-hour bat mitzvah with basically a full circus of performers. The well-off live good lives here.

It was basically what you’d expect, stunningly beautiful, urban planning in some neighborhoods that I saw that blew NY out of the water, steak every night, Malbec, late dinners, keeping Avery up at family events till 1:30 in the morning, stacks of inflated cash that we got as good rates from uncle Carlos, the peso going down in value 7% in the week that we were there and seeing the harm it was causing as fancy meals basically cost $25 a person.

Patagonia.

The plan is to make a family book of the trip for the family and Avery and his one year old cousin Niko to look at when they get older, written in their perspective.

But, I’ll be honest, I always internally cringe when people tell me to take amazing photos when traveling, or how excited I must be to photograph. And the cringing is not on purpose, I love the sentiment, but that feeling is just not for me, at this point in my life. 

Friedlander Inspired.

Some get so inspired by photography when they travel and spend time in a place, but I can’t do work that I enjoy on an artistic level when I’m not home, at least when considering the brainpower and opportunity that I have now.

Home is where I get lost in my mind and can think creatively. Probably if I was able to travel solo and spend a lot of time getting to know a place, I’d feel completely different. But I often have to remind myself to take photos when traveling because I’m trying to stay in the moment, to use my memory instead of the camera and to slow the week down, if that makes sense.

A few times, Sara asked me to take out the camera to take a photo, and while most of the time I say yes, occasionally I would ask her to do it because I wanted to experience the place without a camera.

Similarly at home, I use photography to stay in the moment and slow life down. On one hand, they’re opposites, but philosophically, it’s the same idea.

But anyway, in the process of the survey challenge and thinking about my photography as I recover from the last few months and get excited about being home, I want us to think about the salon as not just a place to talk about photographs, instead it’s a place to talk about places, feelings, and ideas. And to use photographs to illustrate these thoughts.

And, with the exception of a few Friedlander inspired tree photographs, even though these photos seem pretty, and they are interesting and meaningful for my family, they’re the opposite of the photography that I try to do here.

Photography, in the sense that I’m describing, is something that I do for clarity of mind, and to focus attention. And I just didn’t have the time or mental space to be able to create photographs in this environment that live up to that feeling. 

I’m still sharing them in this piece because they’re beautiful and fun to share with the story, and a big part of why photography is wonderful.

Or I guess in the spirit of what I just mentioned, talking about ideas instead of photographs, perhaps the heart of the story of the trip was the family – A Jewish family that was split up during the war, half getting into NYC and half into Buenos Aires, and losing touch for 30 years until one Argentinean family member traveled to NY and contacted every Abe Lerner in the phone book.

And the Irish/Italian mutt (me) with two psychiatrist parents, one bipolar and one on the spectrum of something, whose religion and culture and larger family (in later years) had dwindled. And so he subconsciously searched for someone with a strong family culture. And on the upper west side of NY, that was the Jewish culture. 

My first girlfriend married a rabbi, if that tells you a bit about me.

And now both families are great friends. My wife lived in Argentina for over a month one trip and we hope to host their kids for similar amounts of time in the future.

And yes, it’s family, it’s blood, it’s making up for the horrors of the war and giving a big fucking middle finger to all the atrocities with fun and dancing and singing and love, with excessiveness in the face of difficulty. And her family down there is wonderful, they made me feel like I had known them forever. But family in this case is also a key for experiences.

And hopefully, it can be similar here. As we create this family of dysfunctional photographers, this unique culture here, we get to share our experiences and insights with each other. And that’s the spice of things.

It’s not really about photography. It’s about culture and ideas, and maybe we can even think about it in the context of this challenge, surveying our lives and where we come from, or where we ended up.

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“This goddamn tree, man. It’s a real eye-sore, a monstrosity of mundanity. It’s like staring into the abyss of banality and realizing that nothingness is staring right back at you. But, somehow, that’s what makes it so goddamn fascinating, so damn powerful. It’s like a symbol of the everyday drudgery we all have to endure, a reminder that life is full of inescapable boredom and routine. And yet, there’s a strange beauty to it, a haunting quality that grips you like a vice and won’t let go. You can’t help but feel drawn into the abyss, seduced by the sheer banality of it all. It’s like staring into the void and finding a kind of solace in the emptiness, a strange kind of comfort in the absence of meaning. This tree, man. It’s a real mind-fuck.”

Now not to beat a dead horse, in the future I’ll just use this to help stimulate ideas in my own writing, but I tried inputting this article above and asked ChatGPT, this question (because it has apparently read lots of my writing in its training, it can write like me).

It sort of reiterated a lot of what I already wrote above, but it helps clarify the ideas well and I think is well worth reading. There are some points here that if I wasn’t still fully back in the swing of things, I would have taken some more time to clarify in the piece.  

Can you think of anything to add that might improve this article, in the style of James Maher the photographer?

“In this article, it would be interesting to explore how the process of creating a family book can bring people together, both in the present and in the future. The act of collecting and curating images and memories from a shared experience can help to create and strengthen bonds between family members. By involving Avery and Niko in the process, they will have the opportunity to learn about their family history and develop an appreciation for their heritage.

Moreover, the article could also emphasize the importance of balancing the desire to document life’s moments with the need to stay present and engaged. For instance, James Maher could share some tips on how to approach photography mindfully, without losing the essence of the moment. Encouraging others to adopt a similar approach may allow readers to develop a deeper connection with their surroundings and the people they travel with.

Additionally, it would be interesting to dive deeper into the concept of the “salon” as a space for discussion and connection, not just about photographs, but about life experiences and shared interests. This idea can be expanded upon by providing examples of conversation topics, activities, or even prompts that can help facilitate meaningful discussions within this space. By fostering a sense of community among the “family of dysfunctional photographers,” the salon can become a platform for personal growth, inspiration, and connection.

Lastly, incorporating the unique stories and perspectives of the different family members in the article can add depth and richness to the narrative. By highlighting their individual journeys and the ways in which they contribute to the family’s collective story, the article can help readers gain a better understanding of the power of photography in preserving memories and connecting generations.

Overall, by adding these elements, the article can provide a more comprehensive and engaging exploration of the relationship between photography, family, and the art of staying present.”

Dreamlike Challenge, Part 1

March 1, 2023 (updated March 1, 2023)

Kimberly Manson

Dreamlike Challenge, Part 1

I haven’t been quite sure how to explain what I’ve thought about this challenge, or my experience viewing all your dreamlike photos over the last few months.

And that’s all my fault, because you all did a wonderful job as you’ll see from the photos below.

But seeing a variety of similar and disjointed dreamlike photos just did not inspire me in the same way that the other challenges have done, and I’ve been trying to figure out why.

And I’m thinking it’s because this turned out to be a technical challenge. I hate technical challenges for this Salon, I really want to push things conceptually, and when I wrote it, Dreamlike felt like it was a conceptual challenge. 

But really, this challenge was about how to shoot in a way that feels mysterious, that has mood and feeling, that alludes to something lurking beneath the surface. It had conceptual elements to it, but it was mostly technical.

And in this case, I think it may be good that we did this and think about it this way, because the next step for everyone is to figure out how to integrate this type of photo into your larger projects and ideas to create the feelings that you want to create.

A smattering of dreamlike photos from a variety of photographers all seems to blend into each other, whereas integrating these photos into your projects will have a profound effect on them, so please think about how you can keep this going.

I’m going to pull out 12 random photos from the first half of the group and just put them together to create an interesting feel – just an experiment in the different in seeing them presented that way. And I will do another one for the part 2 post as well.

 

It’s cool to see what can be done from the set, and I think these fit relatively well together even though they are so varied in look. But at the same time, this also lacks some feeling, because it’s not me.

It’s when we figure out how to put ourselves and our dreams into our larger projects and bodies of work, is when this type of work will truly shine.

Here’s the first half of the photos submitted.

Thoughts?

Challenge #12: Survey

February 22, 2023 (updated February 22, 2023)

Challenge #12: Survey

For this Spring we’re going to take the idea of Close to Home to the next level.

Title: Survey

Deadline: May 20th

Uploading details: Up to 10 photos. (Hi-Res – details will be shared closer to the deadline).

*This will end up as a zine later this year.

The idea is simple – put together a survey of your area. This area can be where you live, where you work, or where you spend a lot of time. It can be a one block stretch or an entire neighborhood.

The idea of a survey can be taken in many directions, and it’s up to you to determine those directions. You can take it in a documentary direction or you can take it in an emotional and personal direction, or you can create a mix.

The survey could be straight and even tempered or it could be surreal and emotional. The idea is to bring us into your world however you see fit. 

Think about whether you want to include people or not and think about capturing interior views in addition to exteriors.

Please feel free to include text, up to a few paragraphs. You can even include statistics or history.

Think about socio-economic status, architecture and urban planning, social issues, change, gentrification, political status.

If anyone has any thoughts about how this challenge can be interpreted, please share ideas below!

It’s up to all of you to interpret this challenge. And we’ll talk about this a lot more over the coming months.

Series of 6: Challenge Results, Part 2

December 28, 2022 (updated January 10, 2023)

Tom Jefferies

Series of 6: Challenge Results, Part 2

Here is the second half of the challenge results.

I’m going to keep the commentary to a minimum for this. For practical reasons, I wasn’t able to include the text for the projects, it was too much with the amount of people who submitted, but also I think it helps to see these unencumbered and all together.

Going through like this, it’s easy to see which sets feel consistent and some that don’t fit as well together or pull you into the set as much as others.

There are many situations where disparate images, color & B&W, different looks and aspect ratios can fit well together, but you can see here that in general, the sets with a consistent look and feel to them, it helps the viewing experience significantly.

This is ultimately just a start, but I want this challenge to underpin a lot of what we do here going forward. Sequencing, series, it’s the art form within the art form and there is so much power behind it.

Great work everyone!

Series of 6: Challenge Results, Part 1

December 23, 2022 (updated December 23, 2022)

Jessica Margo.

Series of 6: Challenge Results, Part 1

Happy Holidays everyone!

Here is the first half of the challenge results – the second half I will post next week.

I’m going to keep the commentary to a minimum for this. For practical reasons, I wasn’t able to include the text for the projects, it was too much with the amount of people who submitted and the time creating the name plates you’ll see below, but also I think it helps to see these unencumbered and all together.

Going through like this, it’s easy to see which sets feel consistent and some that don’t fit as well together or pull you into the set as much as others.

There are many situations where disparate images, color & B&W, different looks and aspect ratios can fit well together, but you can see here that in general, the sets with a consistent look and feel to them, it helps the viewing experience significantly.

This is ultimately just a start, but I want this challenge to underpin a lot of what we do here going forward. Sequencing, series, it’s the art form within the art form and there is so much power behind it.

Great work everyone!

Challenge: Dreamlike, Part 2

December 16, 2022 (updated February 6, 2023)

Dreamlike Challenge

Deadline: February 20th.

Upload Link: https://www.dropbox.com/request/oVAnEGzfuxDqYfsr44rC

Submit: Up to 5 photos, but please don’t share 5 photos just because you can. If you only have 1 or 2 that you like then share those only. I’d rather see less good work than too much mediocre work. And please share these either as a series or individually.

*Please try to get these details correct, especially the naming, as it makes my life much easier, and just message me with any questions.

File Naming: Firstname-Lastname-1.jpg (2, 3, etc.). This is especially important if you want to share them in a specific order, so this will be the order of the series. 

Sizing: Same as for uploading to website. 1000 pixels long, jpeg, 72DPI, 65% quality.

A Dystopian Nightmare with Vin

To many this might feel like a nightmare, traversing the city on a cold, blustery winter day. Just warm enough for a nagging light rain, but a fierce enough wind that it finally destroyed my nice photography umbrella.

But these are my favorite days. Staring down at the soggy train floor, this is when the city is at its best. On one of the busiest tourist days of the year, a Friday the week before Christmas, the city was empty. The air was fresh. And the train was empty, I got to sit back and stare out the window. And nod off occasionally.

There’s actually no place I feel calmer and more disconnected.

Since high school, I’ve always slept like a baby on the subway. One time, I suddenly woke up passed out on an old lady’s shoulder. ‘You looked comfortable, so I let you sleep.’ It was a great sleep.

Another time, I dreamt I was smacked in the face. Really, I had fallen fast asleep standing on the way to school in rush hour traffic, and smacked my face into the subway pole. Everyone was looking, so I closed my eyes and went back to sleep.

(All photos from today, taken with the Ricoh GRIIIx / 40mm version.)

The goal of the day was to take some dreamlike photos. I was hoping for a sunny day to help me focus more on the content of a dreamlike photo, instead of everything inherently looking dreamlike. But I shouldn’t complain, it was a perfect day, and particularly because it scared the tourists away. And hopefully, there will be a sunny day next week.

But it was emptiness that I was looking for.

I made last minute plans to meet Vin to see the Eggleston exhibit before it closed over the weekend. Of course I didn’t take any photos at the actual exhibit.

I delivered some Cactus Jelly to share with Vin, a delicious holiday gift from John Gearon and the desert of Arizona. At lunch, I tried to photograph it like Eggleston might.

It was pretty astounding to see the Eggleston prints, my first time. The quality of those pictures, that large, the color. They’re perfect prints.

There are many photographers who are doing more interesting work these days, especially with decades of progression. But it’s hard to deny that Eggleston is a damn amazing photographer. And he found a way to show an area that he felt was quiet and boring in such interesting ways. There is feeling in those photos.

Since the exhibit was near the High Line, I wanted to wander over there to photograph after. I’ve always hated and been fascinated with the High Line and Hudson Yards.

The neighborhood is the epitome of a bad dream coming true. A dystopian city nightmare, a neighborhood for people who don’t actually want to live in the city.

Honestly, it’s shocking how much of the design is reminiscent of prisons, only with nicer materials. And nicer clothes.

Each building has a gym. Chelsea Market and Little Spain act as the commissaries. It often feels like looking into little prison cells of luxury.

There’s no interaction with the city. The neighborhood is so far removed, but just close enough to Times Square to be filled with hoards of tourists gawking through the windows at the rich lions.

You walk outside surrounded by people consuming, shopping, gawking. There’s no place to escape, except on the rainy days. There’s no quiet corner to interact with regulars.

Anyway, that was a long introduction to the dreamlike challenge. But frankly, there’s not much to really say about it. I’m in the weeds of this challenge with you.

Photos will be due at the end of February, so we have time to focus on this after the holidays. We’re going to get a dreamlike photo book talk and general hangout around it, and I’ll have the recap post for the series of six challenge up over the holidays.

But push yourselves, and I want to see new photos.

You can create dreamlike photos through feeling, emptiness, loneliness, intimacy, warmth, color, blur, quietness, loudness, anger. Blur and trees are the most common thing I’m seeing right now, and that’s great. Keep that going. But that’s also going to get old, fast.

Most importantly, don’t forget that you have to photograph something. There has to be something present in the photos, as slight as that something may be. Something intriguing in some way. A blurred photo of nothing is still a photo of nothing. There has to be something, anything. Unless nothing is the subject, ha!

Share a few dreamlike photos together in a story, or for an idea. Combine the last challenge with this one.

In this case, this post is the dream of a dystopian neighborhood for the rich, glass prisons in the sky.

Series of 6, Trivia, AI, Celebrity Stylists, and Backs of Heads

November 15, 2022 (updated November 15, 2022)

Series of 6

***Series of 6 Challenge images due Sunday, Dec 11th. I’ll put the info on the Challenge Tab this week and send an email about it.

I think this has been the toughest challenge to wrap my brain around. There are so many ways to take it but I also think there are some boundaries as well.

On one hand, I think it’s a pitfall to make the images match too much, such as six different views of similar things. Why share six when one will do the trick? In a large project sure, but each image is valuable real estate with only six.

There’s also the pitfall of making the idea too simple, such as six images based on the color yellow, or something like that. As we’ve said before, I’d rather you fail with something difficult than succeed with something too easy.

On the flip side though, it’s really easy to overthink things, to think you need to have a formed idea that you can explain, a story, something very concrete.

Some of the best projects don’t have any answers or ways to explain the photographs, but they do a wonderful job of bringing out questions and mystery in your head, allowing your mind to wander.

They create the boundaries of a world and lead you down a path, yet it’s a path of your choosing.

On this note, I recently scanned a good portion of favorite photos from my book collection. I didn’t have the energy to do the city books yet, so these are all the more suburban side of things.

My goal was to put together images from this archive into different sets of six, but to try to have the connections between the images not be so concrete. 

I don’t know how effective these are, it was a quick experiment and these are possibly on the border of being too loose, but the goal here was mainly to get your mind to wander and fill in the blanks between the images.

What do you think of these?

Trivia, AI, Celebrity Stylists, and Backs of Heads

Last Tuesday night, I shot an event from 5-10pm called The Dozen at some concert hall on the Westside. It was a trivia/reality show through Barstool Sports with 6 trivia teams and a crowd of mostly 25-year-old sports fans in hoodies. The show had a bit of a MTV’s Jackass quality to it.

Anyway, they paid me extra to get the photos to them by the next day. But after I agreed I got another job, which I couldn’t refuse, starting the next morning, from 9am-6pm.

Enter Imagen AI – a company that my photographer buddy Scott Wyden Kivowitz went to work at last year. I gave it a try a week before and it was incredible. I wouldn’t recommend it for personal work, but for jobs it is the craziest thing.

I uploaded 4,000 of my edited raw files from past events, and it took a day to process them and build an AI profile for my events.

So at 11:30 at night, I uploaded the 600+ photos to the server, and 10 minutes later the edits were available to download. For 7 cents an image, it will edit, straighten and crop your images for you, an amazing deal.

And the exciting thing is how well it works. Of course, with most of the edits you have to tweak a little, but it often gets damn close, especially in the crop. I was able to tweak the top 180 photos in less than half the normal time (and then you upload the tweaks to the server so your AI profile learns and improves over time). The photos were ready by 2:30am, although I didn’t send them until 7 so the client would think I worked longer through the night on them.

And I was able to do the job the next day, fairly functionally. Otherwise, I would have been up all night. 3+ extra hours of sleep because of AI.

While that first event was a 10/10 on the masculine scale, the next day I had to photograph an influencer event at a fancy salon in Chelsea held by the haircare product and hairdryer company, Sally Beauty. 

Editors, bloggers, and writers would come in and have champagne, a 30-minute shampoo and head massage, and then a styling by a celebrity stylist, 2 of whom had been on one of those hair styling reality shows.

It was fun and relaxed thankfully, cool people, but tough in that I had to capture photos for the influencers to want to use, photographs of all the products being used, there were mirrors everywhere so I had to make sure I wasn’t in the photos nor any other clutter, and that the hair looked amazing.

And I had to be present consistently while not being annoying, pleasant enough to be around, and not awkward, but somewhat of a fly on the wall. It’s a complicated dance.

Anyway, I got the idea to shoot the back of their heads in this way from Mimi Plumb’s books. Nobody shoots the back of a head the way she does, and it was a fun inspiration.

Nothing too fancy, I might not have captured these without that inspiration.

Anyway the point to this random story, besides the Imagen-AI shoutout, and the random humor of the events, is just that the more you immerse yourself in other people’s work, the more it’s going to influence you in ways that will surprise you.

Let yourself be influenced. Let yourself copy. Copy the ideas you like best all together into your own creation.

Now finally, here’s my work in progress, series of 6, for Manual. It’s a mix of some old photos with the new ones to create the feel I’m going for, but will try to shoot more over the next month to get some more new photos to replace.

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