livebooks blog

• This week marks the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Protests. The iconic image of the “Tank Man” is splattered all over the internet, except on the Great-Fire-Wall-bound Chinese internet. The New York Times photo blog, Lens, has a great interview with photographers explaining how their version of the Tank Man came about. Most interesting of all, though, is a follow-up post yesterday showing a never before published photo of the Tank Man getting ready for the confrontation.

• Have you seen The Vendor Client Relationship video yet? If not, you might be the last one. Go check it out now and we won’t tell anyone ;-) It’s a hilarious take on the real world situation for those who work in the photography and advertising business.

• A Photo Editor pointed us to another noteworthy new online video — Michael Almereyda’s documentary about photography icon William Eggleston on Snag Film, William Eggleston in the Real World. The fillmmaker followed Eggleston on various trips around the country, capturing his complex personality and how it affects his work.

• The winning images of the PDN Photography Annual 2009 are now available on its website. We want to give a big shout out to our friends and contributors Alan Chin and Ed Kashi, who won the Photojournalism/Sports/Documentary and Corporate Design/Photo Products categories respectively.

One of Ann's signature dog images. ©Ann Hamilton

Miki Johnson: Tell me about how you got started in photography.

Ann Hamilton: We all have turning points in our lives and, for me, it happened in January 2000 when I was laid off from a dotcom company. A few months later, and still unemployed, I was interviewed by a reporter from U.S. News & World Report about my experience working at a dotcom. During the interview, the reporter asked what my next plans were. Without thinking, I said, “I’m going to be a professional photographer.”

My only experience with a camera was a disposable plastic one. I didn’t know what an SLR was, or what “aperture” or “shutter speed” meant. Subconsciously, though, I think I had always wanted to be an artist. And having worked in the corporate world for nearly 10 years, I was ready to start a business of my own.

The article hit the newsstands in May, and the following month I interviewed with a local portrait photographer who had done a handful of weddings on the side. I had no portfolio or any knowledge of photography, but I was willing to learn and very enthusiastic. I told the photographer that I would work for free in exchange for experience. I was hired on the spot and wound up assisting all summer, getting a taste for weddings and learning about every aspect of photography. In October, I photographed my very first wedding, in Mendocino on a bluff overlooking the ocean. That was the day I fell in love with weddings.

Now dog portraits also make up a significant part of my business. That became viable in 2005 when I opened a storefront studio with my colleague and friend Gene Higa. Gene encouraged me to launch my dog portrait business, and having a permanent studio to work in made that possible. My logo of a bride walking a dog (left) was inspired by my pug, Bogie, who was the inspiration for my dog portraits and was by my side since the inception of my photography business.

MJ: How were you able to parlay the skills you learned as a wedding photographer to photographing dogs?

AH: I’ve always been attracted to clean lines, natural light and negative space in my wedding work. It was only natural for me to use a clean background for my dog work too. I also use a single strobe because I don’t want the images to look too artificial. I had to adapt to shooting my dog portraits in a 330-square-foot storefront studio, cutting down a 9-foot roll of seamless to 6 feet because of the small space. Having to work within certain confines also helped define my shooting style.

At weddings, I crop everything in camera, so what I deliver to my clients is the full-frame image. But with dogs, because our studio space was so small, I would shoot everything wide and crop later. Now, I’m working out of a new studio space, a tri-level loft in the Dog Patch neighborhood of San Francisco. The new space has afforded me more room in which to work, with the added benefit of being able to work out of my home, with a separate entrance for my business.

As my dog portrait business grew, I found that I needed to define the two areas of my business with two different brands. I hired the Collective Lines design firm to create a logo specifically tailored for my dog work. The result is a clever dog tag design (below).

Now that my wedding and dog brands are distinct yet complementary, it  is easy for my clients to cross over. Many of my wedding clients have dogs, and I end up doing dog portraits as well as shooting their wedding. And it’s not uncommon for my dog clients to inquire about my wedding photography services. Plus, having a niche has helped set me apart from other wedding photographers in the Bay Area.

My dog portrait business has become an important supplemental income to my wedding photography business. Weddings are seasonal — dog portraits are year round. By diversifying, I’m able to maintain my normal wedding rates and not feel pressured to booking every weekend throughout the year. It allows me to have a greater level of flexibly and balance in my life and work.

Ann's beloved pug, Bogie. ©Ann Hamilton

MJ: Is it a harder sell to convince people to spend significant money on dog portraits?

AH: Dogs are the new “fur babies,” especially here in San Francisco where there are so many services catering to dog “parents.” Doggie acupuncture, massages, and hotels are the rage. Photography is another of those services.

It’s important for me to market my business to the right client — someone who understands that a dog portrait session is a luxury item, yet someone for whom price is not the deciding factor when booking a session with me. There is value in what I’m offering and my clients understand that. The photographs are something to remember their dogs by, now and long after the dog is gone. I know this all too well as I recently lost my beloved Bogie.

MJ: Do you have advice for photographers who are considering expanding into dog portraiture?

AH: Dogs are not always easy to photograph, but I’m always up for the challenge; I never go into a shoot thinking I’m not going to get the shot. My dog clients come to me with certain expectations. They want their dog photographed just like the images they see on my website. Sometimes the dog has other ideas, though. Especially when I’m shooting a puppy or more than one dog, getting the dog to stay focused can be a challenge. It takes a lot of patience. Dogs can also sense if you are a dog person or not. You have to have really love and respect animals to do this.

My advice to photographers considering dog portraits as a career is to follow your passion, work hard, and be original. Take a photography class or workshop, attend a convention like WPPI (Weddings & Portrait Photographers International), or shadow a few photographers whom you admire and absorb as much as you can. Be prepared to put some time and effort into your career. A photographer I apprenticed with when I was starting out once told me that there are no shortcuts in business. In an industry where we all have access to the same tools, it’s very easy to be influenced. The challenge is to be original.

This week my writing career is in the toilet. Literally. I was standing in my hotel room lavatory recently, evacuating a few gin martinis, when I happened to glance at a fabulous picture hanging on the wall. This wasn’t some trashy iStock photo, this was a gorgeous image. (I love boutique hotels — they take the time and money to get the good stuff.)

I had a look around the rest of my room and realized that all the art was of equally high quality. Of course my next thought was, “Is there a money to be made in photography sales to hotels?” So I thought I’d find out.

I started with a call to Jill Crawford, a world famous interior decorator who you would recognize from TV’s Guess Who’s Coming To Decorate. She told me that she sources photography for her interior designs in two different ways: directly from the photographer or from an art consultant like Fresh Paint Art Advisors in Los Angeles.

Ms Crawford advises photographers to pursue both strategies — direct to the designer and via art consultants — if they want to get into this market. Also keep in mind that the people you connect with for hotel projects will also be your conduit to corporations, restaurants, bars, and large mansions with empty walls.

Speaking with Helene Brown, of Fresh Paint, one immediately gets the sense that she has a singular passion for art and photography, as well as a veteran sensibility for brokering it. Ms Brown explained that the usage rights for the photography she negotiates is based on 1) the quantity of the prints, and 2) the quality of the medium that the image is printed on.

Higher quality print processes will fetch a higher premium. But on the other side of the coin, a large run of offset lithographic reproductions can also get a good return. The rights granted are one time to print, with varying levels of exclusivity based on the negotiated deal.

If this all sounds like a good idea to you, you’ll want to do a little research before launching the hotel art section of your website. My suggestion is to do a cocktail crawl through a few five-star hotels and have a look at what is hanging on their walls. You’re not looking to emulate the work so much as you’re trying to understand the artwork’s tone and how it fits into the interior decorating palette.

Finally, remember that the designers and consultants you’ll be contacting are savvy people, so don’t try to pitch them crap. And if on your cocktail crawl you encounter a writer holding a martini glass in the washroom, that’ll be me looking for an idea for next week’s column.

From Claudia Wiens' story on women wrestlers in Mexico, produced at last year's Foundry Workshop. ©Claudia Wiens, Courtesy Foundry Photojournalism Workshop

Miki Johnson: Tell me about how the Foundry Photojournalism Workshop started.

Eric Beecroft: I was thinking a few years ago, I’d been doing photography for about seven years and I wanted to take a workshop. I looked around and there were some great ones, but they were all impossibly expensive, particularly for students. I’m also a teacher, and they were too expensive for teachers too. Then I wondered, how could a local photographer from Latin America or Asia take one of these workshops? They could never afford it. So I thought, let’s just put one on ourselves. I teach photography and history at a small high school where I lead a lot of international trips, so the organization wasn’t that hard.

What has been really amazing is that it wasn’t hard to find people to teach for free. I think instructors are drawn to the notion of doing a workshop for people who are passionate and who they normally wouldn’t reach. The students aren’t all young — last year they ranged from 16 to 65 — and they’re not all trying to be professional photographers, but they’re passionate.

Another of our original ideas was to bring a lot of instructors together for one workshop. Most workshops are several thousand dollars for just one instructor. By having a dozen or so, we can offer a range of classes, lower the cost, and, best of all, create a mini-community that is almost like a festival on top of the workshop.

It was really important to me to create a community where everybody is really accessible. I remember reading a blog by a student last year. She wrote, “I walked into the opening party, and I went, oh my word, there’s Andrea Bruce, there’s Stanley Green, there’s Ron Haviv, and they’re all sitting there just drinking a beer and talking like human beings.” There’s a lot of God factor in photojournalism, and we want to take that away. We want to remind students that photographers are just people.

One thing I’d tell students is, don’t come to the workshop with preconceived notions. And don’t be scared to talk to the instructors. They don’t want to give autographs; they don’t want to be on a pedestal. We start the workshop off with an opening party where everyone’s just hanging out. That always blow student’s mind. If they can get past being star struck, they have the opportunity to build relationships that will last long after the workshop.

This year is going to be even more intimate because we capped the number of students at 100. But slots are still assigned on a first come, first served basis. I want it to be open rather than something you have to apply to. I thought, if a photographer is at a level where they’re going to Eddie Adams or they’re getting chosen for World Press Master Class, then they’re already pretty advanced. There’s this intermediate ground where you’re a beginner or you’re intermediate, you’re coming along, maybe you’re a hobbyist. And there’s nothing out there for that level of photographer that’s affordable.

From Monte Swann's photo project on firefighters from Fenix Ave. in Mexico City. ©Monte Swann, Courtesy FPW

MJ: So what kind of schedule can a new student expect at the Foundry?

EB: You’re taking one intensive class that is six days long. There are several specific classes students can choose from, and the end goal is to show your work to everybody at the final Saturday night show. That might be an individual story or it might be a collaborative effort, like Stanley Green’s class last year that created an amazing group project called Blood on the Floor.

We tell all the students to research stories before they arrive. Bring pictures if they’ll help; get access if you need it. It’s really hard to show up cold-turkey without any story ideas. Some people do anyway, and we try to help them. But the most successful ones either arrive a couple days early, or they get online and do a lot of research to develop a well-honed idea.

I don’t know how they did this, but two women got access to the women’s prison in Mexico City last year. I could not fly from Mexico to the United States and say, I want to go to the prison, give me access. And we had other people riding around with the ambulance drivers.

We like students to think of the workshop as an international photo assignment. A lot of people have this dream of being an international photojournalist. So we say, okay, here’s your shot. Come in, internationally, and do a story. Some students say, well, if I was professional, I’d have a $5,000 budget, and I’d stay in a five-star hotel. We have photojournalists like Andrea Bruce, a staffer for the Washington Post, and  Mike Chavez for the L.A. Times, and they just stand up there on the panel and laugh. They tell the students, “I’m lost half the time. I don’t know what the heck’s going on. People won’t talk.”

Or the students will say, “You’re Ron Haviv, people never say no to you. Ron says, “Are you kidding me? People say no to me all the time.” It’s so important for aspiring photojournalists to see the reality versus their ideas of glamor. You know, we’ve ruined a few photographers. People have said afterward, I don’t want to do this.

But if you’re serious about becoming an international photographer, the Foundry can be like a halfway house. We’re here to help you with the first steps. Student who haven’t traveled, or they’re scared of travel, or they’re scared of shooting internationally — this can bring them to the next level.

As an example, last year some of the students struggled with story ideas. They came in wanting to shoot things like the president of Mexico. You can’t just show up one day and get that kind of access. So we said, let’s ask around. We met a man from Syria who was an orthodox monk stationed at a Catholic monastery in Mexico, because I think they’re running out of monks. He wasn’t even Catholic; he was Eastern Orthodox. It’s a great story. And he let four students stay at the monastery and document their lives. They ended up producing a great piece from that.

Kristen Luce profiled a clown workshop in Xochimilco, south of Mexico City. ©Kirsten Luce, Courtesy FPW

MJ: Why was it important for you to bring in a significant number of local photography students?

EB: This year we’ve got a lot of South Asian photographers coming, and last year we had quite a few Latin American photographers come — that’s what we want. We want them to get access to inspiration, to communities, to slideshows, to classes they normally wouldn’t get. And we also want non-local photographers to learn from the local ones. We tell all students, bring business cards, share them around. I know the connections students made at last year’s workshop haven’t stayed online. People have made friends. People have started dating. There’s kind of a huge web of people now.

We also wanted to help photographers understand what it’s like to work in an area, South Asia this year. We have panels with different photographers and points of view. So if someone is thinking about becoming a stringer there, they can find out what it’s like to work there, what challenges they might face.

We’ll also have one night where we show only work by South Asian photographers, where we try to get them some exposure that they wouldn’t normally get. We had a lot of good things come out of that last year. One amazing photographer ended up getting work with some major agencies, because of meeting people, networking, and showing his work at the workshop.

Then we had a couple young Turkish photographers in their early to mid 20s. They’re amazingly talented, so I won’t say the Foundry made all the difference, but since then, one is shooting for the Wall Street Journal, others are freelancing for the New York Times. One is in Afghanistan right now. They’ve met a lot of people and they’re jump starting their careers.