April 28 – Busy season, photo credit, and LIFE

As the busier season of my year continues, I’m starting to see the longterm effects of my chosen path. How my days off are more like days “off.” Meaning, I don’t have a pressing engagements to get to, but I have just as much correspondence to take care of. Emails, invoicing, thinking about this ongoing blog that basically nobody reads… I keep writing these posts for reasons I’ve elaborated on before. The Meta-owned app has now introduced an AI search feature that I find annoying and seems to further sink the user experience of a once exciting creative community. If I want to post my photography anywhere, it’ll be over on Foto app (still in beta testing.) Keeping my own space on the internet, not dependent on algorithms has become more and more important.

Do what you love and you’ll never stop doing admin a day in your life.

I found out that my photos from an event were being used in press with the wrong photo credit. That kind of thing is so distressing, but we as photographers have almost no recourse. I reached out to the sites but there’s not much I can do about it at this point. This kind of thing can really affect my business. But, as with most things in business, I have to take most of the responsibility. It just means I’ll have to be more direct about photo credit moving forward.

I’m gearing myself up for one of my favorite clients of the year. Starting this week, I’m back with the LA County Fair as one of three official photographers. Even though I grew up going to this Fair, last year was my first as their photographer and it was all things exciting and overwhelming. The event itself is the biggest I’ve ever shot in terms of scale. It’s about the size of a small city, and it truly is an endless visual feast. Sensory overload. This year, I’m working on a more focused approach. I’ll be trying to capture more classic images, stuff you’d see emblazoned on a billboard, with a strong central focus that still captures the essence of “Fair.”

For research, I’ve been looking through a photo book called Life 75 Years: The Very Best of LIFE. It’s a huge coffee table book I’m lucky to own. As I was flipping through, I found myself almost bowled over. No one takes photos like this anymore. And rarely do we see photos in print like this anymore. The word “iconic” is so terribly overused online, but these photos truly are iconic in that so many of them became emblematic of their time. We’ve sort of lost that in the digital world of endless scroll. Yet, I also realized that the aspect ratio of LIFE is similar to the smartphone screen, only much larger.

I might make more effort to direct traffic to this blog, seeing as I enjoy making this more of a weekly update of my goings-on now.