With the increasing trend in copyright infringement, or just plain theft through the Internet, it’s hard to believe why anyone would try to make a living as a photographer.

Years ago, the profession was fairly straightforward. Someone with an eye, the talent, and the inclination would make a sizable investment in equipment, work as an apprentice for a photographer somewhere, find the connections to get in with the right crowd, and then try to sell their work to a particular market. Wedding and portrait photographers create the most revenue, but the job can be a bit of a bore. In addition, there are fickle clients, deadbeats, and the occasional Bridezilla and family to contend with.

General portrait photographers fare no better. Kids can become unruly or develop an uncooperative attitude. Parents may try to run the shoot, which makes the photographer wonder why the parents didn’t just photograph their kids in the first place. Couples can’t decide which proofs to print. Some customers want the negatives as well as the prints. So much for photographer’s intellectual property rights.

Freelance stock photography may be on its way out as a profession. As the cost of digital equipment decreases while technical quality improves, just about anyone with Photoshop on their PC can be a professional photographer. Those with looser ethical standards may just surf the ‘net and copy whatever image they want to suit their own purposes without a thought about license fees. Unless they are making big money from their ‘take’ they will likely never get caught passing the work of others as their own, especially if they can hide in a foreign country or change the images’s metadata to their liking.

I think that I did it the smart way. I first got a job, and later an education, then finally a career doing something lucrative that I enjoy. Photography is, and always has been, a hobby. I can shoot as often or as little as I choose. I can use whatever equipment is available and experiment with different optics and developers, or try different methods in the darkroom. I don’t have to worry about deadbeats. I don’t care about clients who wouldn’t know a work of art if it fell off the wall and hit them. I can shoot monochrome 35mm film one day and medium format color film the next. I have work hanging in a few small galleries that are happy to do so just to cover a bare wall. I even sell a few.

I have had access to some areas inaccessible to most photographers. I have shot flight operations on ships while I was in the Navy. I have photographed the interiors of churches where I was a member. I choose my own assignments without deadlines or production staff getting in the way. I love my job and the boss is a dream to work for.

Life is good.

Tags: process, Mamiya M645, exhibit, filmphotography

What does it take to create a great photograph? Is it the subject? Is it the media? How about the theme? I wish I knew.

I have many friends who tell me how wonderful my photographs are, but very few strangers. I have sold a few pieces, but little more than that. At my class reunion last June, a former classmate told me that he liked what he saw on my website. He sought me out just to say so. Despite this, I feel that I have hit a creative slump that I just can't seem to overcome.

One obstacle is equipment. Apart from a daylight film processing tank and a film scanner, I don't have access to the facilities that other fine art photographers use. Enlargers, different types and grades of paper, different chemistry, and other tools that can change a boring photograph into something special and unique. Even if I had the equipment, I don't have the space.

Another obstacle is subject matter. Kitsap County is next to a temperate rain forest. There are lots of indigenous flora and fauna. I see many photographs of eagles and bears and birds shot by local photographers, so I feel that anything I could produce would just look cliché, like a cheap copy of what has already been done. Bremerton has a rich industrial heritage. Submarines. Aircraft carriers. Artillery batteries. I think that I have covered most of those already.

I suppose the moment of sudden realization came after the last Kitsap County Fair. Out of four entries, I received three honorable mentions and a second place ribbon. I don't mean to appear ungrateful, but I expected more than that. Perhaps it was my own arrogance, but I did better in prior years and this year I thought that my entries were quite good, and even better than in prior years.

Perhaps it is a weakness of mine that I don't use Photoshop. I don't cut and paste parts of an image to create another. Apart from removing specks of dust or changing the color balance a bit, I don't manipulate the final image. I might dodge or burn-in portions of a print, but what I see in the viewfinder is what I expect to see in the final print. Judging by what I saw in the winner's circle this year, this may no longer be enough.

No matter, I'll keep soldiering on. I have lots of film. I have patience. Maybe I'm just my own worst enemy, but all I need is inspiration to catch my imagination so I can feel fulfillment with the final print again.

I'm sure glad that I have a day job.

So just how hard could it be to build a web gallery? You see them all over the web and they vary in quality. I was pushed into building a website about a year and a half ago at the request of the owner of one of my venues, the Global Bean Coffee Company.

There was a bit of a learning curve. I had to find a web hosting service and learn how to set up the site and the domain. Then there was the web publishing software to find, set up, and learn to use. It’s not quite as easy as falling out of bed, but it becomes intuitive after some practice.

There are many web hosts available and it wasn’t hard to find a reputable one. There are scam artists I’m sure, but a bit of research should ferret out the good ones. The software needed to build the site was a different issue. I looked at several, but decided on RapidWeaver offered by Realmac Software. The iWeb software that comes with OS X just wasn’t sophisticated enough. You can also download a free version of RapidWeaver. It does everything the licensed version does, but you can only build three web pages which isn’t very useful unless all you need is a homepage and two gallery pages.

To begin with, RapidWeaver is built for the Apple MacIntosh, which is the platform that I use for the native graphics features in OS X. RapidWeaver is supported by a wide range of theme developers from all over the world. A theme establishes the look and feel of a website. Some are rather plain, but functional. Others are highly customizable, such as the one that I used for this website. I used the PageMix theme from MultiThemes, an Italian developer. They offer themes at quite a reasonable price for what you get. They even have a few simple themes available at no cost that help the neophyte learn how they work.

Themes are very helpful, but there are also plug-ins built for RapidWeaver that simplify building web pages. Your Head Software offers a number of plug-ins. My home page was built using the Stacks plug-in and the gallery pages were made with the Collage plug-in. The Method and Resume pages were both built with the Accordion plug-in. All of these plug-ins came from Your Head. For months, I used the RapidAlbum photo gallery plug-in, which is free from Mackie Software. I have never required support from the third party developers, but I needed a bit of help from RealMac once and they were better than any company I have ever dealt with.

There is FaceBook and Flickr, but why not try to be more independent? Even if I am the only one who visits the site, at least I know who created it and the domain name is mine to keep as long as I keep it registered.