livebooks blog

A frame grab from photographer Martin Sundberg's first video project. ©Martin Sundberg

MJ: You mentioned that you found yourself making the same “Martin Sundberg” images with the video camera that you would have with a still camera. What do those look like and how do you recognize them as your signature look?

MS: This first foray into video felt like a seamless transition from shooting photography, and a lot of that can be attributed to the Canon 5D Mark II. It was amazing to use the tools I’ve always used, in terms of the feel and function of a still camera, and do this entirely different thing with it. For me, this really facilitated a consistency in my vision. In my still photography, I try to use the elements of the moment, exploiting light and weather whenever possible, to add to the photograph. I also am often trying to capture motion and distill that feeling into a photograph.

When it came time to post some teaser videos on my blog, I went to pull some frame grabs to situate next to the videos, and that was when I realized I had shot the video footage in the same way. This is an intriguing revelation, and I’m excited by the idea of moving between the two mediums for a client, creating both stills and video for a campaign. This also reminded me that the creative process is really a series of choices. Planning sometimes precedes these choices, but very often it’s a matter of simply reacting to what’s in front of the camera at that moment.

I now understand photography and video as having a more synergistic relationship. When I bring elements together that I’m passionate about — light, water, inspiring people, and evocative environments — I tend to act in a way that defines and supports the style that I’ve developed through many, many experiences with the camera at my eye. Being facile with both mediums is just another way to keep exercising, challenging, and honing the process of seeing and creating images.

MJ: What did you learn from this shoot and what advice would you give to photographers going out on their first video shoot?

MS: When the project concluded and we all went back to our respective parts of the country, I realized how much I love the still image. I continue to be excited about the outcome of this project, but I was honestly shocked to discover that I didn’t have a body of still images after all of that effort. Of course, I knew I logically hadn’t been making still pictures, but I did feel a pang of regret for not having a second body of still work. No prints, no stock, no licensing usage for my clients.

A week after the shoot, I was fielding calls from magazines specifically interested in the triathlete project and I have almost nothing to offer them. Typically, after a personal shoot like this, I would be able to field those requests. With that in mind, I’ll definitely try and schedule a couple of days for still photography on my next personal video assignment. And in the meantime, I’ll begin exploring the portals that exist for distributing video pieces in similar ways.

I would advise anyone moving into video to assemble a good team. For me, I like to have the flexibility to be quick and nimble with my team, so for this type of project, I’d make sure to include an assistant, a stylist, a sound person, an editor, and the models. That would be a bare-bones assembly. You don’t need an army, just a few enthusiastic and interested people. I love the collaborative process because when you get a few good people together, each with his or her own expertise, it can be like igniting a haystack of ideas.

Tikchik Mountain, Wood-Tikchik State Park ©Robert Glenn Ketchum

The next place this special publishing model I’d developed came into play, and really the place it came into full force, was Bristol Bay in Southwest Alaska. In 1998 there was no mine proposed, no oil proposed, just this huge wild area called Southwest Alaska that is larger than the state of Washington. And it’s the habitat for the richest, most productive salmon fishery in the history of the world, Bristol Bay. And I’m on the board of the Alaska Conservation Foundation (ACF). I’ve been there for seven years. We’re making a big difference. Having a lot of victories. I’m working as a board member, I’m not pushing myself as a photographer, but I’m offering my advice about media.

And the retiring board director says to me, have you ever been out to Southwest Alaska? And I haven’t, so he and his friend, who’s a writer from Wyoming and also an expert fly fisherman, take me out there for a 7-day fly around. And his position as a fisherman is, this is a goldmine for fishermen and conservation, and he thinks I should bring it to ACF, the group I’m on the board of. He is leaving ACF but thinks the Bristol Bay area is going to become an issue in terms of developers wanting it. And I think it sounds like a great idea, and I’m not working on a project, and I’m about to retire from the board.

So I start writing my grants. And I write in the grant that I’ll do a book and it will be about this fishery and its protection, and in funding the grant they can guarantee that 5,000 at-cost copies will be available for the ACF to use in direct mail campaigns to bring more money in. I weave in the grassroots, the foundation strategy, my book strategy, and this advocacy work you can do with direct mail. It was the maturity of all my previous projects coming together. And we went out with that grant, and everyone we showed it to was in. We brought in several smaller family foundations and we brought in one very large foundation, the Turner Foundation. Then, when I was nearly on press with the first book, Rivers of Life, I also noticed I had this extraordinary amount of material specifically about Wood Tikchik Park, which is more than one-third of the water shed. It is the largest state park in Alaska — it’s huge at over a million and a half acres. Just one fishing lodge and everything else wild park.

"Endless Meanders" in Southwest Alaska ©Robert Glenn Ketchum

I talked to one of my friends who was head of department of natural resources for the state, and he said, please do a book on this park and talk about all the inholdings that are at risk. An inholding is an amount of land that was given to a Native American tribal holder as part of his native claims stake when the lands transferred between natives and park. And every person got to extract a certain amount of acreage, I think in 60-acre squares. So they’re all patchworked through these wild lands. And the presumption was the natives would continue to treat them as they had for 3,000 years. But the reality was that parents would be saving them for their kids who would grow up, go to college, and never want to come back to the village, so the traditional values of that land would erode. The parents would look at it and think, well we can sell this to a white guy who wants to build a fishing lodge and we will become millionaires. Among the rest of us there was this feeling of, oh my god, don’t let this happen to these habitats. So with the first book already on press, I began working on a second book with another author, and we wrote the second book directed at these issues of inholdings. So one book was, don’t let this resource be developed by offshore oil and gas or on-shore anything. And the second was, don’t let this land be fragmented by inholdings. Please work with the conservancies and the tribes to see that it all goes into parkland protection.

We took those two books as a set and we did a very substantial mailing and a traveling exhibit. Talk about all these things happening blindly but at the right moment. At the time that we did the mailing, Canada announced plans for Pebble Mine, the largest open-pit gold and copper cyanide-leach mine in the history of the world right in the middle of the biggest part of the fishery. And of course the state leased it. So here’s the two books sitting there and just being mailed and the show’s just going up and they announce the proposal for the Pebble Mine. And then Bush gets Ted Stevens, the Alaska senator now indicted for felony, to pull Bristol Bay off of the no-drill oil moratorium, which it had been on for 18 years, and announced leasing through the Department of the Interior. So immediately the books had more weight.

Among many things that happened because of the momentum the mailing created was a $10 million, three-year grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation flowing to the conservancies in southwest Alaska to purchase and buy into the inholdings when the native villages were willing to strike deals over conservation easements. A 21,000-parcel deal was struck recently with eight or ten very significant tribal elders, which sent out shockwaves in the native community because they don’t really embrace white legal systems. So by those native elders signing on, it has a huge impact at other levels in other tribes. What they did was sell the rights to commercially develop the land. They do not give up their right to own the land. The land is put into an easement that is managed by a conservancy, and the natives can go and use the land any time they want to fish or hunt, but not for commercial development. Even if they sell it, it remains in easement. So it’s a way of putting land into wild status in perpetuity.

Fishtrap Lake And The Headwaters Of The Little Mulchatna River, Lake Clark NP ©Robert Glenn Ketchum

This project was where everything came together in its most mature form, with the Bristol Bay and Wood Tikchik books, the show, and the pre-deemed funding to buy out a portion of the run. The picture books themselves were commercially viable; Aperture sold them in the market. But I would say we got rid of just as many of them in the community by doing direct mail and target-specific sales at lectures and exhibitions. The exhibition has triggered a lot … we took it to all the major cities in Alaska. We triggered discussions between the communities and the mining representatives from Pebble Mine. We’ve had the exhibition go to Washington D.C. as a bi-partisan request from Newt Gingrich and Mark Udall.

In my opinion, the reason some of the projects were so much more successful is, first of all, I enjoy the theater of the advocate role. I’ll go to Washington and lobby directly and use personality. This is an age where cult of personality plays well. You know, James Audubon was an American sophisticate. An intellectual, a researcher. But when he went to England with his drawings of the America birds, he had this fabulous fringe leather suit made for himself and he walked around with his musket. So it’s been theater for a long time. And I’m perfectly happy to play the “outdoor adventurer” Robert Ketchum and show up at Barbara Boxer’s office, especially now that she’s head of the Environment Committee, and ask her to please consider being a co-sponsor to John Kerry’s Bristol Bay Marine Reserve Act. And of course she’s seen the book and all that.

I think if I have had an impact in the book market, it has been to find a way to make the book more useful from an advocate point of view. Perhaps that is a corruption of the coffee table tradition, but so be it, it makes for a much more useful and purposeful publication. I feel like, if these concepts were somehow a secret of mine all these years, they shouldn’t have been, and I didn’t intend it that way. I’m happy to have other photographers think about how to use it. Because a lot of them get frustrated. They get nice books published, they get nice conservation groups all lined up. But then they have a subtle subject like, say, a book on grass prairie, and it doesn’t have a national audience, and it doesn’t really get out there. So it sits and languishes on bookshelves and it gets remaindered. That won’t change anything!

• The long-awaited new LIFE.com has finally launched this week. A collaboration between LIFE and Getty Images, the new website features millions of images from the LIFE and Getty archives and more than 3,000 images are added to the site every day. You can download, share or print any of the images for free for personal, “non-commercial” use. We can’t deny this is an amazing (well-designed) resource, but like Vincent Laforet, we wonder how this will affect editorial licensing in the long run.

• This April is the inaugural Month of Photography Los Angeles, produced by the people behind the Lucie Awards in New York. The festival consists of exhibitions and lectures around the city, including a Douglas Kirkland exhibition at the new Annenberg Space for Photography and one by glamor duo Markus Klinko and Indrani at the Pacific Design Center.

• These days pretty much anything seems “greenable” so it’s not surprising that Aurora Photos is launching a “Green Collection” that “focuses on creative photography illustrating contemporary environmental themes and issues.” We like the journalistic approach of its “Nature and Environment Feature Stories,” which has slide shows that cover environmental issues from all over the world.

• The New York Times broke the sad news on Monday of Helen Levitt’s death. The photographer, famous for her poetic imagery of New York City streets, passed away in her sleep at her Manhattan home at the age of 95.

An image from the Edmonson's Indian wedding site. ©Edmonson Wedding

When we started working together, my father’s business was primarily commercial photography: magazines, books, CD covers, annual reports. So one week I got sent to the West Coast for an assignment, and he got sent to the East Coast for an assignment. And I said to my father, I came back here so that we could shoot together, but I don’t feel like we’re doing that. This is the commercial world, and that’s the way it’s going be; but we have our Saturdays, and wedding photography has changed. Have you ever considered doing weddings? I showed him that wedding photography today is little bit more lifestyle, more photojournalistic. I also showed him how the coffee table wedding books now are more of a magazine layout, which he could relate to.

So we kind of put our sign up in the world to do weddings. The first year, we did everything wrong. We did 120 weddings at $1,000 each, which was way too much. But you learn from your mistakes. So we changed our prices and we ended up doing more weddings the next year. We almost burned ourselves out because we were just all about volume — that’s what we thought success was.

So we learned from our mistakes again and changed our business model. One of the big ways we did that was with our websites. I have background working with websites, so when I very first started, I started off doing it all by myself, ’cause I thought nobody can do it as good as I could. But then I ended up realizing that the only way to grow your business is if you free yourself up to do what you’re best at, which is getting  business, running your business, being a photographer. So we started out with four sites. Those first four were a site tailored to our American weddings, a site tailored to our Indian clients for Indian weddings, a website for David Edmonson, and a website for Luke Edmonson. One of the reasons we had our two individual sites was because some of the organizations that we are part of, for instance WPJA, have specific parameters for the type of images that you show, and if you can identify who the photographer is. For us it was much simpler just to say, let’s take our consistent look and feel from our wedding sites, and we’ll make separate sites dedicated to each target audience.

The second reason we wanted separate sites was that, when we looked at our client, we saw that our most profitable clients are either our high-end Indian clients and our high-end American clients. We’re not making much profit on the in-between, middle-ground clients. But if we were only going after one group or the other, then we would be limiting ourselves. So we said, let’s go ahead and invest in completely separate websites.

Then number one, we could choose a domain name that meant something special to our Indian clients. That’s why our domain for that site is EdmonsonShaadi. “Shaadi” means matrimony in the Hindi language. And the messaging, the tone of what we wanted to say to clients was different, simply because culturally Indians are Hindus, Muslims, and Christians and have 10 thousand different languages and dialects. So rather than presenting ourselves in English, we wanted to be able to talk to say thanks to them in their own languages -– the different greetings that they would expect from other people who understand their culture. We were blessed to shoot a wedding in New Delhi, India, and we had the ability to see things first-hand. For us, when we’re looking at how to divide up the website, it was really important to be able to show our Indian clients things that relate specifically to their expectations. And then, vice-versa, for our American clients we could do the same.

©Edmonson Photography

Another thing that was important to us was that our separate sites link to one another, to allow people to navigate to the different types of photography we do. So for our wedding sites, at the bottom you’ll see that it says “Wedding,” “Indian,” “David,” and “Luke.” That is simply because we want our Indian clients who maybe know somebody who is non-Indian, to realize that we do work other than just Indian weddings, and hopefully recommend a new client. And likewise for our American clients, who could see we do Indian weddings and might tell a friend.

The same thing goes for our commercial and portraits and other related businesses. One of the things my father taught me long ago was that it’s very hard to be profitable the first time you do business. Profitability comes from a lifetime relationship working with someone. So we start out showing clients that we put an emphasis of the type of photography that we’re doing for them, but then we expand to their other needs.

For instance, someone might start out as a wedding client; then, of course, they’re going to have portrait needs. Maybe that starts with babies, maternity photos, and eventually those become senior portraits, family portraits, and so forth. Perhaps the dad has a business, so it’s awesome if he can see that we do commercial work as well. There are an infinite number of ways to grow your business by just putting it out there. One of the things that we found was that whenever we were initially introduced to a client, they wanted to be able to see that we focused on them. If it’s a commercial client, they didn’t want to see any portraits. They didn’t want to see any wedding photos. They wanted to see commercial photos. Likewise a bride who is looking for wedding photos, that’s all she wants to see. It’s only later in the relationship, when they started to explore some of our other offerings, and once they’ve already gotten connected to you and liked you, all of a sudden they start thinking of you and other ways that they can use you in their life.