Behind the Camera: 2021 in Review

Welcome back to Behind the Camera, and I would like to wish everyone a Happy New Year!  This is the first entry of the new year, and it is one of the most important ones I think because it is an encapsulation of the entire previous year.  This is convenient for you because it is a quick way of seeing what has really gone on behind the camera through the year.  For me, it is a little deeper, because I get a chance to see how I am progressing with my art as well as from a business standpoint.  I will often refer back to these entries years later to see where I was in comparison to where I am currently and that is a lot of fun for me and could be interesting for you as well.

What better way of starting out this entry than with the first photograph that I shot for the year.  This was a quick trek on January 3rd which took me out to Traphill, on what I can only describe as a perfect winter day.  It is always a good sign when I can get out in the first few days of the new year because that generally sets the tone for most of the days that will follow.  That was kind of the case here as I found myself searching out foggy and different atmospheric conditions for most of the year.  Something that I learned from this, or maybe just fully realized is that the conditions that I shoot, more than anything else truly dictate my photographic style.  What I mean is this, I would say that most landscape photographers only try to shoot at the beginning and ends of the days to get great color in the sky.  They look for that sunlight to fall on the landscape to chisel out the features.  I enjoy doing this as well, but it is not where my heart is when it comes to my personal style.  I love dramatic skies that are brooding and deep for my photography.  I really enjoy the somber moods brought on by fog and the calm of the even lighting across the scene.  It allows me to have a very painterly image when I’m done with the processing.  I think that this is my style, at least for the time being and it is foggy days like this first trek of the year that really brings that out.  I’m thinking about delving into my personal style a little more in depth later in the year in another Behind the Camera.

I spent the first month of the year just doing my normal thing, going out on days where the weather was favorable for my style of photography and that was pretty much it.  I was able to get one of my bucket-list images at Stone Mountain towards the end of the month, which was a great surprise for me.  I had been seeing this grand, long exposure shot of Stone Mountain for a number of years, but only in my head.  I finally had the opportunity to see the conditions line up to where I could actually try to get the shot.  It was a process to get it all put together, but three filters, and several minutes later I had the RAW data that would later be converted into a black and white image that nailed my vision.  It was an early entry into my list of most successful images of 2021, but just fell a little short on the final cut.  It was, however, a really great start for the year when it came to landscape images.

February brought with it a bunch of new changes on the back end that I alluded to in a few of the blog entries.  The first thing that came up with this website migrated to a new hosting service because it was having much slower than reasonable load times due to the image heavy content.  This was causing problems for the visitors of the website, and for me when it came to editing the posts and gallery images.  My friend and web builder, Nick, worked very hard at getting the website moved between hosts and it went seamlessly for those visiting the site and the only thing that was noticed to my knowledge was that things just went faster when they visited.  That was the goal, and it was a worthwhile move for sure.

This was also the month that I did my first workshop of the year.  It was actually a shared venture with the Wilkes Art Gallery when I was asked to put on a classroom workshop.  The only classroom workshop that I had put together was my Introduction to the Art of Photography course which was a four-hour class.  They were wanting something a little shorter, so I thinned it down to two hours and went with that.  They set the maximum occupancy at 10 due to COVID, but that was plenty in my books.  I set a reasonable price for the class considering that I was only getting 70% of the admission price.  I was figuring on five in attendance and hoping for more.  When I arrived on the day of the workshop, I found out that only two participants had signed up.  Well, I’ve done workshops in the field for less than that, and I wasn’t going to complain because I just enjoyed teaching photography.  The workshop actually went to nearly three hours because of the great questions that they had, and I had a wonderful time doing it.  Financially, my time was barely covered, much less the preparation time for the class because it took several days to revamp the class and remove about half of the information.  It was still a great opportunity and one of the participants really got the photography bug after that.  We have actually remained in contact since that workshop, and she has been learning more and more about her camera.

Right around the time that I was getting this workshop put together, I was approached by the Wilkesboro Tourism Office about their upcoming Barn Quilt brochure project.  They had seen some of my work on Instagram which had included several barns with quilts, and they wanted to purchase the licenses for these images so they could be used in the brochures and for online marketing.  We went back and forth on what photographs they were wanting and came to an agreement for four of my images to be included in the brochure.  This was actually a first for me and it was a very exciting time.  I was really starting to feel like I had arrived as a photographer in this part of the state.  I was working with a local art gallery as well as with tourism development and I just couldn’t be happier.  Things were really off to a great start in 2021, and I was hoping that would continue.

I had set the date for my first ever online workshop towards the end of 2020, and it was set to go live during two different weekends at the end of February.  It was going to be the full version of the Introduction to the Art of Photography that I had done for the Wilkes Art Gallery.  This was the second time that I had attempted this rather involved course.  You might remember that I also tried it the year before at a community center near Walkertown.  I had four participants in attendance for that class, which was nice, but I was expecting more.  In fact, the money that I made off of that course paid for the space rental, and for the purchase of the projector and screen that I was going to need to do the class.  In short, I donated my time to teach which was right at four hours, as well as the roughly 60 hours spent putting the class together.  That was ok, because it was a learning experience for me and allowed me to tweak a lot of things in preparation for this online version that I was now doing.

Things had been going well so far this year, so I guess it was time for a bit of a letdown.  I saw this coming as I was getting closer to the first evening of the class.  I only had one person signed up.  That was going to make for a boring class because I thrive on the questions that I get as we go along, but I wasn’t going to cancel the class because of only having a single participant.  Instead, I decided to invite some others that I thought might benefit from parts of the class or might want to see how I did the class.  I filled up three additional seats in that fashion, but those were complimentary invites just to have the full experience of the workshop.  Yeah, I was feeling a little down about that, but the show must go on.

Well, on the first night, I was on early so that the participants wouldn’t have to wait for me to get into the online classroom.  There were three that showed up and were ready to go.  I held the beginning of the class for about 10 minutes waiting on the fourth to show up.  Why did I wait?  Well, that fourth was the only one that had paid to attend, and I thought that was the least that I could do.  However, I wanted to be respectful of everyone’s time, so I went ahead and got started.  To make a long story short, the first day went great and I followed up with the one participant who hadn’t showed up.  She let me know that she just forgot about it due to lots of things going on and she apologized.  I offered to do the first day over for her so that she could attend the second day, but she opted out and said that she didn’t feel like attending the second day either.  Just like that, I was down to three participants, all of which were my invitees.  On the second night, I got word from one that he wouldn’t be able to attend which left me with two.  I was there waiting with the classroom opened up and had one person join, but nobody else.  After about 10 minutes, we decided to just let it go and I started to shut down the operation in complete failure.  As I was doing that, I got a message from the last participant that I hadn’t heard from, and she apologized that she was late but was ready.  I cranked everything back up and did the second part of the class for a single participant.  It went well, and I think that she enjoyed the last part which really got into the nuances of artistic photography.  My first online class was now finished.  It was a huge amount of effort for me to get worked out and done, but in the end I really questioned if this one is worthwhile.  It was a punch in the gut after what had been proving to be a very positive start to the year.

Having put a lot of effort into getting an online environment put together, I decided to try something a little shorter in duration to see if I could get interest in a quick hour program.  I came up with the concept of “How Did I Edit It?”  It was a simple idea where I would pick an image every week or so and go through the entire process of how I edited it in Lightroom.  I would charge $10.00 for the link to get in and watch and ask questions since it would be live.  I was going after volume here which was why I went with such a low price.  If memory serves, I ended up doing these three different times before I realized that it was another waste of time and resources.  My first evening had three in attendance and was very much worth the time that I spent doing it.  The second one only had two in attendance, while the third, had just one.  I think that I advertised a fourth, but nobody signed up and I just let it go.  The funny thing is, whenever I did these, I got great feedback on the points that I was teaching with Lightroom.  It wasn’t as in depth as I would do for my workshop follow-up demonstration since these were just with a single image, but there was a lot of information shared that many just don’t know about Lightroom.  It was enough of a benefit that I thought that I would do another online classroom workshop in August when it was too hot to be outside.  It was going to be two days of learning Lightroom from global edits to local adjustments.  I was really looking forward to teaching this, but by the time August came around, nobody had signed up and I just pulled the plug on the whole workshop.

By the time March was rolling around I was wanting some good news.  It was seeming that everything was starting to go South for me.  Well, I did get some good news finally and it was from the Wilkes Art Gallery who approached me to be a juror at their Blue Ridge Overview photography contest in early 2022.  I was honored and humbled to be asked to do this and happily accepted.  I was told that I would be contacted with details on this very shortly and that as part of being a juror, I would have a gallery showing.  A gallery showing?!?!?!  This was just the opportunity that I had been looking for.  I was going to have a room dedicated to my work for folks to see and that was quite exciting for me.  I had photographs in my personal collection that would be used there for the two weeks, and I would be able to add a few new pieces to the collection; it was going to be perfect!  Things were back on track once again.

Right on the heels of that request, I was informed that they wanted another workshop scheduled for the Spring to get folks outside.  I did some thinking on that and came up with a mini workshop that I could do for different levels of photographers.  I let them know that the workshop would be “Compositions in the Landscape” and made sure that they were OK with me doing it at Doughton Park. They were thrilled with the idea, and we got it all put together for May.  I was again figuring that we would get about five participants based on what the Art Gallery was telling me, and I set the price accordingly.  They did all of the marketing for the workshop through their membership which took a great deal off of my back, but I also did some marketing for it as non-members could also attend.  I was really looking forward to this workshop and thought that it was a great concept since there are just so many ways to work compositions at Doughton without really moving around much.

As we closed out March, I found myself on a trek that was completely designed to capture a sign in North Wilkesboro.  When I got done with the edit on that image, I decided that I needed to open up a new gallery room dedicated to signs since I had done a number of really interesting photographs of old signage around the area so far this year.  It is always a fun thing to open up a new gallery room to put a spotlight on a specific kind of image that I am starting to shoot more of.  It was a bit of personal and creative growth to go in this direction and I was excited to have a little fun with the presentation of these signs since they lent themselves to a bit more creative editing than my regular subjects.

The end of March into the beginning of April was a very exciting time for my photography because this was when Toni and I went back to the beach for the first time in well over a year.  This was a much-needed trip for us and allowed me the chance to get photographs of scenes that I just can’t find anywhere else.  It was by far my favorite trip to the coast and the images that I came back with were far and away better than any of the other coastal images that I had captured before.  I was able to play around with long exposures, dramatic lighting as well as some really cool clouds.  This one trek revitalized my coastal gallery with almost all new images.  I just couldn’t ask for better than that, but still got better because it was a really fun time with Toni out on the furthest edge of the State.

With April off to a great start, I was really happy to make delivery of the four images to the Wilkesboro Tourism Office for use in their updated barn quit brochure.  I had to do a little research to figure out the right wording to use for the license agreement for the images, but it went flawlessly and just like that I had been published for a second time.  The first, was for a book cover several years back, but I was actually more excited about the brochure than the book cover believe it or not.  I think it was a matter of I was feeling very much a part of the community where I lived having my images used to promote the area.

April also saw a bit of back-end changes with the website.  I had been doing quite a bit of shipping through the beginning of the year, so much so that the lady at the post office I went to once said, “Business must be going great, I see you a couple of times a week now.”  Yes, business was going great, and I was shipping out prints on a regular basis by this time in the year.  The variation on shipping costs was starting to get confusing for bookkeeping and trying to get the averages right so I had to do something different so that my sales tax was going to be applied correctly.  The easiest option was to just include the shipping costs in the print prices based on the averages that I was seeing on each print size.  That streamlined the ordering process, as well as my own bookkeeping for tax purposes.  I was able to lower shipping on the smaller prints, while fully realizing my shipping costs on the larger ones.  The one negative of that was that the print prices seemed to go up.  In actuality, the only one to really increase in price was the 13×19″ because I was actually charging what it cost to ship that particular size as opposed to an average shipping which was less.  The smaller prints got comparatively cheaper though, so it all worked out in the wash.  I’m afraid that the higher face prices have scared off a lot of potential clients because after this change, my orders dropped significantly, but I am not going to go back to the other way of pricing things because it was a lot of work to keep up and I ended up overcharging and undercharging for shipping in many cases.  Now that isn’t the case at all which is good for all of us and will make the government happier when I am filing my taxes and paying sales tax.

What is it that April brings?  Oh yeah, it brings showers.  That is just part of the reality when you are basing a business outside.  When it comes to my workshops, I have really had great luck with weather for pretty much every workshop that I have done.  The only exception would be my first Summer Landscape Workshop which was held in 2019.  For that workshop, we were plagued with clear skies which I absolutely hated working with.  However, I would have gladly traded those conditions for the ones that I had for my Spring Decay Workshop which was held in April.  I guess I shouldn’t complain about it because we did have about half a day before the pouring rains happened.  It was touch and go right up to the day of the workshop as to whether or not it was going to be rained out, but I had three great participants that chose to give it everything that they had to make it happen.  We were rewarded with really decent conditions right up to lunch when the heavy rains started.  I had brought a 10×10′ canopy which I set up after lunch so that we could continue with the workshop and cover some of the more discussion aspects after having gotten the shooting portions out of the way earlier.  It was the roughest workshop that I had done, but one of the most fulfilling because I was able to really consolidate the information into about a half day worth of practical work covering all of the stations that I usually cover.  I really appreciate those that attended this one because they worked very hard to get through all of the teaching points before the weather called an end to the day.  By the time I paid the property owner for the use of the property, and added in the cost of the canopy, I was barely making enough for the time I had invested in this workshop, but it was still a very good experience for me, and I love doing the decay workshop for folks because it is always a crowd pleaser.

My workshops had been a little hit and miss so far this year, but I was excited about trying out a new mini workshop experience which was a partnership with the Wilkes Art Gallery.  This workshop had been in the planning stages for several weeks at this point and I had no idea how many were going to be in attendance.  That is the downfall to doing workshops through the art gallery because they are the ones that are having contact with the participants beforehand.  A few days before the workshop, I was contacted by the gallery and they said that with the chance of rain for the day it was scheduled, nobody was wanting to sign up and they were suggesting that I come up with an alternative date.  So essentially, nobody had signed up and they were throwing me a bone to try and get somebody to sign up.  I contacted one of the two which had attended the Intro course I had taught earlier in the year because she had said that she was going to sign up for this workshop.  We talked about it and came up with a date that she would be able to attend due to childcare issues.  I got back to the gallery and gave them the new date which was sent out to the members.  As the time approached, I only had that single participant which was not ideal considering this was a heavily discounted workshop, where I was only making 70% of the ticket price.  I contacted the one participant to let her know that it was probably only going to be the two of us and she jumped right into action by talking to some friends of hers that were also members of the art gallery.  Thanks to her efforts, we actually had three participants for this workshop which was enough to make it worth the time and effort on my end.  The workshop went well, with just a couple of hiccups which wasn’t bad at all considering I didn’t have the ability to really contact everyone before-hand and get everyone on the same page as to what the workshop would entail.  Knowing the needs of my clients is a very important part of the workshop experience from my point of view and short of one participant, I had no idea where the others were in their own journey’s, not to mention what they were wanting out of the workshop.

While I liked the idea of the art gallery doing the marketing for the workshops which took a good deal off of my plate, I was really starting to question the benefits when it was all said and done.  I had done two workshops for them, where they had made 30% profit from my work and had only produced two participants for one of the workshops, and on the second, I felt like it was more my doing with the invaluable help of one of the participants that got the workshop off the ground in the first place.  I was getting a little soured with the relationship that I was having with the art gallery, but there was still that gallery showing that I was looking forward to.

Speaking of that, I really needed to get in touch with them to find out the details of the showing so I could start preparing for it.  I had a good number of pieces available in my collection but knew that I would want to add some more current, and local pieces as well.  That was going to have to take place gradually because framing isn’t cheap, nor is making canvas prints.  My plan was to add one or two pieces each month to build up the inventory, I just needed to figure out how many they were expecting.  I went through the painfully slow email process with them as I waited for folks to get into their offices and respond.  I was ultimately directed to the person that is responsible for doing the Blue Ridge Overview event to talk about the gallery showing part.  I explained that I had no idea what they were wanting from me for the showing and needed to know how to prepare.  She eventually (like two weeks later) got back to me that they were looking for around 25 pieces at sizes of 20×30″ or larger for the print size and ready to hang.  I wasn’t counting on that many pieces, but that part didn’t scare me as much as the size did.  I had nothing in my personal inventory that was anything near that size, so I had nothing at all on-hand to take to the gallery in January.  Before I responded to the email, I started to crunch some numbers.

I was going to have to outsource the printing at that size which wasn’t a problem, but it was going to cost a good bit more than doing the printing here.  I was either going to have to do canvas prints for ready to hang convenience, or I was going to have to have them framed.  Either option was roughly the same price, but to save in shipping, I decided to go with having them framed at Hampton House.  Looking at averages between print prices and framing, I was looking at a bare minimum of $6500.00 to get this gallery showing put together.  That was a very significant amount of investment into something that I would then have to store and hope to be able to sell later on.  The thought of storing 25 large, framed prints in a way that they were safe didn’t sit well with me.  I then looked at how many I would need to sell to make back my investment without making any profit.  I took that number and responded to the art gallery and asked if the prints that were on display during the showing would be available for sale.  I followed that question up with in her experience, would it be reasonable to assume that I could even sell that number of prints to break even.  I thought those were realistic questions, and regardless, they were questions that I needed answers to in order to make my decision on how to proceed.  I just couldn’t invest that kind of money into something that I was going to have to store for years and try to market for sale at around $500.00 a piece.

As reasonable a request as that was, I never heard back from the art gallery after sending this inquiry.  I assumed that they didn’t want to bother with me, and quite frankly I was done bothering with them as well.  Everything that I had done with them had turned out to be a wash at best and I just couldn’t go on fostering that relationship when I was really getting nothing at all out of it.  As an aside, I happened to check out their website in the last couple of weeks because the last I had heard, I was going to be doing the jury portion of the overview.  I saw where they had selected another photographer to fill that spot, which is fine, but it would have been nice for them to at least let me know that they were going a different direction.  Again, I’m just not happy with how they do business so I’m glad that I’ve moved on.  I wish them well in their future endeavors, but I have a feeling that I won’t be involved with them from here on out.

May also brought a new direction to my photography.  I was contacted by an acquaintance of mine in Greensboro about doing some portraits for her.  She was needing them for a political project that she was embarking on.  I really didn’t want to get into portrait work, but I was needing the income, so I agreed to do it.  This was probably the most significant decision that I made all year long.  In order to do the best that I could do for her, I took a long and hard look at my own capabilities as well as what equipment I had at my disposal.  I learned how to work the portrait end of photography a little bit better than I had understood it before and learned a lot of neat tricks around off camera flash.  I put all of that to use for her session and came away reasonably happy with the outcome, although it took much longer than it should have to get the final products.  The more I considered what I had done, the more I came about two different conclusions.  The first was that I loved using off camera flash to control the light because of how sharp and vivid the images became.  I also found that I didn’t know nearly enough about the quality of artificial light, and I needed to add just a few things to soften that light quality for future portrait sessions.  It was the start of a rabbit hole that I’m still not at the bottom of.

We will revisit the portrait stuff here in a bit, but for now, we have another workshop to talk about.  So far, my most successful workshop had been one that nearly got rained out back in the early Spring.  Here we were in the later parts of Spring when the mountains were starting to come to life.  So far, I had only a single person signed up for the workshop which is getting to be an all too frequent occurrence.  I’ve done workshops for single participants plenty of times, so I wasn’t going to cancel the workshop, but I was looking for others to sign up.  I had also been talking with the president of the Sandhills Camera Club where I had done a presentation in 2020.  We had been discussing doing a workshop down in their area for their club members.  He had a location in mind and was asking if I would be willing to teach the workshop.  I was very happy to work with him on that, and since he had never actually done a workshop wanted to know how I actually conducted.  That was a great opportunity because I was looking for another person to join in on the landscape workshop.  He thought it was a great idea and since he was wanting to have a mix of observing as well as participating, I gave him a very discounted rate which was fair.  I had two in attendance, and another that wanted to go, but had other obligations for that day.

As we got closer to the date, I was contacted by my client that had signed up originally, who said that she was having some medical issues and wouldn’t be able to attend.  We talked about different ways of making it right for her since she had already paid, and we ultimately landed on a solution that she was happy with.  I was left with a workshop with a single participant that was there to observe how a typical workshop was going to go.  I reached out to him, and we decided that he would rather not attend a workshop where he was the only participant.  I understood that and contacted my other client who had a scheduling conflict.  I figured out what weekend would work for her and then checked back with the club president.  The workshop was now back on, with two in attendance for the following weekend and things were back on track.  I had gone from a single participant to having two for this full day workshop and that was good enough for me.

Well, when that weekend came, John backed out which left me with Sue.  I did what I have gotten used to doing and made it a full day one-on-one workshop where we covered the basics of the workshop as planned, but I went further into the areas that she was wanting more help with.  It was not ideal, but it was quite a fulfilling day for me as I was able to help her out on a level that I never would have been able to in a full workshop setting.  I realized during this hybrid workshop that I really liked doing the individual instruction even better than workshops with lots of attendees.  It allowed me to really get into detail to answer questions and to show them what is possible with their cameras.  I just wished that more people would take me up on the individual instruction.

As it turned out, I had been contacted by one of my clients who had attended the Waterfall Workshop that I did at the end of 2020.  He was interested in doing a one-on-one with me as a follow up to what he had learned during that workshop.  We had it set up for June and it was a half-day session which would give us all sorts of time to go through the topics that he wanted covered while at Linville Falls.  It was a great experience and with the exception of my losing Bob briefly going down to the basin, it went flawlessly.  He was found and mostly intact, so I count that as a win.  Actually, he was fine, just got a bit of extra hiking included because I had to take an emergency phone call which forced me to stay locked where I had phone connection.  He chose to continue hiking down to the basin and missed a turn.  We got reunited about 20 minutes later and continued on with the day absent any more incidents.

These individual sessions are just wonderful experiences, I think.  I will always ask for a list of points that the client wants covered before we get out to the location that is agreed on where we can discuss those topics.  Once we are there, I will have a curriculum put together where we can discuss those finer points and really get the practical experience that is needed to fully understand what is being discussed.  It is a fun way of working through weaknesses in your photography and turning them into growing points, all while getting images that you didn’t know you were capable of.  I highly recommend that if you are wanting to build on your photography, you look into one of these personalized sessions with me.

Speaking of learning things, June marked that month that I really started to jump into learning portraiture.  My income streams were starting to dry up and I needed some more options available to me.  Portraits seemed like a good path to go on because I had a little bit of experience with them, and I had seen a side of portraiture that I hadn’t really considered before after my last portrait session in May.  Since I was mostly excited about the studio lighting aspect of portraiture, I started to build up my lighting options.  I added another speedlite and a few modifiers which were designed to soften the light on my subject.  I got a few books to read on the subject so that I could better understand what I was doing.  I should have known what was coming next because I never do anything half-way.  I’m haunted by what a friend told me years ago when he said he was glad I never tried drugs.  I would have gone from 0 to full blown crackhead in record time.  Buying that one extra light, a few modifiers and some books was all that I needed to go full tilt into portraiture.

I was just in the learning phase at this point and there was not really all that much that happened during the month of June because I was filling most of my time with my new addiction…. uh…. education.  However, I did keep an awareness about things that would benefit my photography as I was learning.  One of those things that caught my attention was when Red River Paper added a fine art Baryta paper to their catalog.  OK, I hear it now… I’m going full on photo geek here because I am getting excited about paper.  It is a big thing though because I have been using the same two styles of paper that I had been using since 2008 which were a Polar Pearl Metallic and an Ultra Pro Satin paper.  These were all that I used here in the studio and have loved them for years.  This new paper that had been developed was on par with the top tier paper manufacturers and was what was being used in galleries for most types of photographic prints.  It is a very stable paper with wonderful archival qualities with just enough sheen to saturate the colors just right.  It is a perfect paper for me, and I would gladly trade in all of my existing paper to use this exclusively.  It is a bit more expensive, but the print quality is very much worth it.  I’m so happy to now offer that paper in my 13×19″ print size.

While I was spending a lot of time looking into studio photography, I started to get the itch to do some studio work (not just portraiture).  I started to look back at some old smoke images that I had done using off camera flash which I then did some fresh edits on. Those turned out quite nicely and really got me interested in doing more of this kind of photography.  Since I had been spending some money to set up a studio here once again, I decided to bring all the gear out and give it a try once again after like four years.  It went well, and even after honing my editing skills on the old images, I still tried some new techniques on the new images using a bit of color theory that I had been reading about.  The resulting images were much better than what I had shot years ago which was a good thing.  It showed growth as a photographer and that was what I am always wanting to see in myself.

I guess it should also be mentioned that during the month of June, while learning a whole new type of photography, re-editing old images, doing two different studio still-life sessions, I was also going out on regular treks.  June saw seven different outings into the field where I captured landscapes, rural, as well as decay scenes.  It was a very busy month for sure and I covered a lot of material as it progressed.  It was about time to slow down on the education and start putting some of the concepts to practice in order to determine just how much I had actually learned.

July was the start of my portraiture venture.  My first victim….uh….target…..uh….model, happened to be one of my existing clients.  I had been delivering several prints to her a couple of months before and she had asked me about doing headshots for her company profile.  I had told her that there were probably other photographers better suited to that task but said I would do it if she wanted me to.  Her reply was that she was hoping that the company would forget about having it done and she could just skip it.  I fully understood that and left it there.  However, now that I was fully committed to figuring out how to photograph people, I contacted her and asked if she had found anyone to do the headshots yet.  To make a long conversation short, we set up a time for her to come out to my studio where we had an incredibly short session for two different headshots.  I think she was in the studio for about 30 minutes to get the two images which turned out fantastic.  The edits took about that long and after that session, I was hooked.  I was a full-blown crackhead when it came to studio portraits.  I logged into my B&H account and started adding things to my wish list and creating a fully equipped studio of things that I was wanting to have on hand.  I researched what I was looking at and made some decisions based on the money involved.  I looked at how much I had in my business savings to see what I was able to spend.  This routine went on until some time in October when I finally ran out of money from equipping my studio.  Like I said, full crackhead status achieved.  I’ve got my cardboard sign ready so I can sit at the offramps of the highway.

Even though most of my Summer was spent immersed in portraiture, I was also still actively engaged in doing landscape images like this panorama.  This one happened to be from June but represents the last pano that I heavily cussed during the making.  You see, my computer is rather old and dated.  It was fine when I was shooting with my 5D Mk3 which was 20 something megapixels, but when I stepped up to the 5DS R with 50mp I started to see some slowing in my computer when it came to editing the images.  After shooting this pano and processing it, I realized that something had to be done with the computer.  I was either going to have to replace it or find a way to make it faster.  Even though my existing 16gigs of memory was supposed to be enough to run Lightroom, I found in some research that suggested that during peak operating times, it would draw more than 16gigs of RAM.  Since RAM was cheaper than a new computer, I bought another two 8gig sticks and added them in for a new 32gig RAM machine.  That did the trick and made building and processing the panoramic images much quicker.  By much, I am talking by an hour or two on each image just from having to wait for the machine to do operations in building and saving the large files.  It is a patch fix I’m sure as I’ll still need to upgrade machines at some point, but for now the computer is moving along quite well, even with images that are formed from 5-11 individual 50mp frames.

When August rolled around, I was excited about my first Lightroom workshop that was going to be virtual.  I had put together a great curriculum for the two different parts and had honed my own skills with the program so I could accurately demonstrate the different things that the software could do.  It was all going quite well with the exception of the fact that nobody had signed up.  That really surprised me after the positive response I had been getting from my Lightroom demonstrations after the workshops and even the short-lived “How Did I Edit It?” series.  Having this be an online workshop, there was no issue with traveling, and everyone could take part from their home.  For some reason though, there was very little interest, and absolutely nobody to sign up.  A week or so before the workshop, I went ahead and cancelled it to avoid the extreme embarrassment of begging folks to attend this one.

The rest of August was spent opening boxes from B&H as they came in and playing with my new studio gear.  I was watching my savings going away, but I was also talking to several folks about doing portrait sessions that would give me a few portfolio images to be used in marketing.  It was going to take time to see a return on the investment and I was going to have to be OK with that.  The difference between this investment and the investment that the Wilkes Art Gallery wanted me to make was that this money would be used to make more income for a very long time rather than hoping that somebody would want a particular framed photograph in a particular size.  I really felt like this was a better use of the money, and still wasn’t spending as much as I would have for 25 framed photos.

As things were getting ready for me to do portrait work, the Delta Variant hit the US and COVID was back on the table once again as a concern.  This was going to make portraiture difficult because there was no way to do it without having contact with people.  While I don’t have a problem with it, I understand that there are many more that would rather just avoid close contact with anyone.  All I could do was hope that this would be a short-lived scare and I could still go forward with the portraits.

Early in September I had my first test shoot scheduled.  This was a free session designed to give me practice and to provide marketing images for the website.  It was going to be the first real test of my education because I was going to be dealing with some dramatic lighting and trying to capture more than just a photograph.  The shoot went surprisingly well, but it was a very involved session with multiple wardrobe changes, lighting changes, as well as background changes.  I found out that I knew more than I thought, and also found out that I needed to learn even more.  I also found that there were a few things that I needed in addition in regards to the gear that I already had as well as needed to procure.  Most notably was larger backgrounds that I could use of full-length portraits.  What I had available wasn’t going to work for anything more than a 3/4 length shot and I didn’t want to be limited by that.  I also wanted to get another studio strobe to pair with the one Indra 500 that I had just started to use.  I evaluated every one of the photographs that came from this session and tried to figure out how I could do better in the future.  I also added to my shopping list and reluctantly spent some more money to fill in the gaps that I had in the studio.

As I mentioned, I was at a severe disadvantage when it came to being able to shoot full-length portraits.  My research showed me that seamless paper was going to be the most flexible option and that was what I wanted to go with.  That brought me to another obstacle dealing with the flooring in the studio.  The entire house has tile and hardwood floors with the exception of the finished basement which was where my studio was.  That was carpeted, but at least it was very low carpet.  Paper on any carpet was terrible idea though, because of the wrinkles that would develop underneath.  I had to change out the flooring for the paper to work, but the thought of redoing 900sqft of floor was financially out of the question.  What I ended up doing was getting a tiled athletic floor which could be built to suit with 1sqft interlocking tiles.  I bought enough tiles to do a 100sqft stage which was going to be the main part of my studio.  I was able to get a background stand with a 9ft roll of seamless paper which I could unroll and do full length shots at will.

I was hoping that this was going to get here before my next test shoot which was a couple of weeks later on.  Sadly, I didn’t have the paper by the time my next client showed up, but I did receive the floor the day before.  I was able to get the second Indra 500 in and ready for that shoot, and I had some other little odds and ends that I found lacking from my previous session.  I spent a bit more time before the shoot talking with my client to get an idea of what she wanted out of the session because my first goal was to create images that she was after.  That would also stretch my learning because I was having to meet her needs, not shoot within my own comfort zone.  The mood for the session was going to be more of a fashion feel so I got to experiment with bright colors and a little more pizazz than a regular portrait which I was all for.

The day of the session came, and I was all set up and ready for a fashion shoot.  It was going to be an interesting experience and we had a really good time with it.  I think we did either three or four wardrobe changes and shot some outside as well.  We did the outside images so that we could do the full-length shots, but it was still nearly 90 degrees outside, and we cut that short because of the heat.  It was really miserable, and I was wishing that I had the full background option for my client, but that didn’t come until midway through the shoot with not enough time to get it all put together for her.  Even though I didn’t have access to all that wanted for the session, I was still thankful for the opportunity and had learned a lot more about portraiture from this test shoot.  It was the first time that I had really worked with gelled lights for the background like the one above.  That is actually a gray background, but I lit it with a strobe using a red gel for the stylish effect.  I learned a lot more about communicating with the client because she was a little apprehensive about being in front of the camera and I had to make her feel more comfortable so that the photographs would turn out better.  That was probably the most important thing that I learned through this session with the second being editing images in a more fashion look.  An interesting realization that I came about was that I actually had an easier time directing my male subject than the female which is completely opposite the norm.  It is something that I will consider when booking clients as I prepare for the shoots.

Speaking of booking shoots, I was starting to see the benefits from my earlier test shoot because I had two of his friends contact me and want to schedule their own sessions.  The first was going to be a couples maternity shoot which was completely different than anything that I had done in the past.  The second was going to be a standard portrait session that she wanted to do as a birthday present for herself. I got the basic information taken care of during the booking and had them both scheduled for the following month which gave me time to consider what I needed to know in order to handle their sessions.

Yes, I was very busy with the portraiture at this point and that was pulling from my normal focus in photography, but only to a point.  I had been listening to folks over the years and I had been asked to do a workshop on light painting a number of times by a lot of different people.  With all of this focus on lighting, I had been thinking about doing just that kind of workshop and I put that together for an evening in September.  Due to the logistical aspects of this type of workshop, I decided to limit the attendees to only four so that I could work four different stations at the same time with no light contamination from the other stations.  I had a lot of interest in this one, but people were slow to sign up for it.  The first one to sign up was one that had missed the Spring Decay workshop and really wanted to go.  Since the location was going to be the same, I contacted her, and she jumped on the chance.  As we got closer, it was appearing that she was going to be my only participant as the interest faded and nobody else was signing up for it.  Just a week or so before the workshop, I got one other person signed up which made for two.  I could work with that.

It actually turned into a great workshop and instead of having to break up into stations, we stayed together and learned from each other as we all progressed through the stations at the same time.  Since this was my first attempt at a workshop like this one, I wasn’t really sure what to expect with it, but it went very smooth, and I was able to cover all that I had hoped to…and then some. Both of the attendees really enjoyed this workshop, and one of them has already signed up for my upcoming Composition in the Landscape Workshop coming up in May.  The other was going to be attending another workshop that came later in the year but had to cancel due to medical reasons.  I take it as a very good sign that my workshops are worth the money because I get a lot of repeat participants after they attend one.

That brings us into the Fall which brought with it all kinds of possibilities.  I had two paid portrait shoots scheduled for the month of October and the leaves were already changing in the upper altitudes.  This was going to be my month!  I got started early by going up to the Blue Ridge Parkway to get some of the early colors.  I was trying something different this year with my planning.  Normally, I try to get the areas that are in peak color and stay around those locations.  This year, I wanted to avoid the crowds because the Blue Ridge Parkway has become the mecca for folks seeking out Fall color and I didn’t want to be a part of that.  I personally liked having some green in the frame as well to really have the warm tones pop.  My plan was to stay just in front of the droves of photographers so that I would be getting the shots that they weren’t getting while having the area to myself.  For the most part, this was working out great and I was out on the Parkway several times each week at the beginning of the month.

It was the weather that kind of put a damper on my Fall images for the year.  The month started off with great clouds, but with those clouds bringing rain.  I spent my time on the Parkway dodging rain showers trying to get good lighting with my images.  It was frustrating, but I was getting an early enough start that I still had plenty of time to get more color as the month moved on.  Due to the weather patterns over Summer, the color change was happening kind of strangely and it was taking more time than normal which was a good thing.  I was out just about every few days or so taking advantage of the cloudy days right up until the week of my maternity shoot.  Knowing that I had to be in the right headspace to get that done, I decided to take a break from landscape photography and start concentrating on how this shoot will go.

There was a lot of different facets that I was going to have to be ready for since this was going to be a location shoot with two people and a mix of natural and artificial lighting.  I wasn’t going to have my Photo Wench with me because she would be at work which meant that I was going to be managing all aspect by myself.  I was confident that I was going to be able to do this, but there was going to be a lot of equipment that I was going to be bringing for the different locations within the venue that I wanted to get shot.  I was constantly looking at different posing ideas and had spent an hour on the phone with them doing a video chat to get to know them.  I had taken notes from that conversation, so I knew what shots we were going to be looking for through the session and knew a bit about their personalities so I could bring that out in the photographs.

A few days before the shoot, I was informed that she had just gotten her dress and that it didn’t fit right.  She was going to try and get it altered or have another one by Saturday when we were scheduled to do the shoot. By Friday, I still hadn’t heard if the dress was going to be able to be used yet or not, so I started to text and call trying to get in touch with her.  I hadn’t been able to reach her all day which meant that I was already starting to load the equipment into the truck since I wanted to make sure that I had everything that I needed.  She finally got back to me and said that there was no dress and that they wanted to reschedule.  I understood that she wants the dress in the pictures and that was a main part of the styling.  I said that I was happy to reschedule and gave her my schedule for the next two weeks since I knew that this was a time sensitive matter for her.  She said she would let me know, but that she was definitely going to have it done within the next two weeks.  I wrote this off as part of doing business and went down to unload the truck and put all of my gear away again.

To this date, I have never heard back from her, and my last message to her was to let me know when you are ready and gave her the one day that wasn’t going to be available.  I got ghosted by this client after investing several hours directly on that shoot.  Oh well, I didn’t have time to dwell on that because this was peak photography time for me, and I still had another portrait session scheduled for the studio.  Since that was about two weeks out, I had contacted her and gone through what she was wanting to wear and the mood for the portraits.  She was wanting a studio shoot with two or three wardrobe changes and was asking for everything from headshots to full length.  After hearing what her concept was for the session, I started to look at my backgrounds and decided that having a seamless gray background was probably not the ideal color for this.  It is a flexible color as I can gel it as needed, but for a traditional portrait setting, that would not really work.  I needed a beige background, and some floor texture to go with that.  It was back to B&H once again and I found a vinyl floor drop that looked like a wooden floor which I loved.  I also got a roll of pecan seamless paper to go with that to give it that earthy warm tone.  With shipping, this cost me over $400 which I could stomach knowing that I was charging just under that for the session.  Essentially, I was going to break even, but I would have the prop material available for other shoots as well so there was an investment aspect to apply here.

These new pieces came to the door about a week later and I got them all set up.  Everything was going to be perfect for this session and I was thrilled that I would finally have the flexibility of the various backgrounds that I had available.  I was already coming up with ideas on how to get this done in a very traditional feel.  Then I got a call from her, and she sounded upbeat, so I wasn’t expecting what followed.  She started to tell me about how she had plugged my address into her maps and saw that it was on the far side of Wilkes County.  That was further than she had driven before and didn’t like the idea of driving in the mountains.  I assured her that short of some curves in the road, this is not mountain driving, but she stood by this hesitancy.  She was interested in finding a place between her home and the studio to do the session which is not an easy task when she is wanting the studio approach and not a natural light, outdoor session.  I don’t just have space available anywhere to shoot, so I said that I could come out to her house and do the shoot instead.  She agreed to that, and I confirmed that she had room available in her home that I could work in.

In addition to the location change, she had also been thinking about the price and wanted a cheaper package.  Well, that would have been easy to do in the studio, but now we had added travel to, and from which was over an hour away for me.  I was also going to have to transport gear which changed up my options greatly.  We decided on a single outfit, and I would do what I could with the space available, so I dropped the price of the session by $100.  For those keeping track, I was now in the hole about $150 for this shoot since I had bought props specifically for this one.  Oh, about that vinyl floor and pecan backdrop…I couldn’t use them at all for this location shoot.  So, I had spent the money that wasn’t even able to be used.  Oh well, that is the nature of the beast, at least I have it available for other shoots.

I was all set for that portrait session, so I needed to get back to doing my landscape work for a bit since this was now peak leaf time for most of the area.  The problem that I was running into at this point wasn’t the leaves so much as the weather.  This period started what was going to turn into nearly two months of constant clear skies.  I could not buy a cloud for the remainder of October, and that meant light which I don’t like to work in for my personal style.  I just kept holding out for clouds, but they never came.  Well, I say they never came, but they actually did on one glorious day.  The clouds were amazing, but I had a portrait shoot to get to which was going to take the entire day to work through.

Yep, on the day of the portrait shoot the clouds were great and I would have been able to get some great photographs, but that wasn’t what I was being paid to do.  So that I didn’t dilute my creative eye, I just blocked all landscape thoughts from my mind and focused on the portrait session.  I grabbed two speedlites, an umbrella, a couple of reflectors, my stool, a backdrop and a few stands along with my camera bag.  I had only seen a picture of the space that I was going to be working in, but I knew that it wasn’t going to be all that big.  I would have loved to have brought my studio strobes, but I wasn’t going to need the power they offered, and they would take up much more room.  I got out there about 15 minutes early as I like to do.  I was able to get in and get set up in about 30 minutes.  The room was much smaller than I had initially thought, and I was very limited in where I could put the main light.  It was not nearly as compact as the hallway that I had shot my first portrait session in back in May, so I wasn’t complaining.  The session went well, and I was able to get about a dozen images with limited ability to move around.  I wasn’t able to do much at all with the light source since it was positioned between furniture and the reflector was kind of propped on another chair.  Using the pop-up backdrop kept me from being able to do anything full length, but I was able to get a few 3/4 length shots at least.  It was a disappointment to me because I had really been envisioning so many different things that I could have done had I had the space and equipment here in the studio.

It may sound like I was not happy with this session but that really isn’t the case.  Because of how I had previsualized the photographs, I had a certain aesthetic in mind with the color palette.  The backdrop that I was using was a black with hints of green because it was the one that I felt had the best qualities for the shoot.  The gray that I usually liked was going to be too bright for the look I was going for and using either a black or white background wasn’t going to fit the style she was after.  When I got the images onto the computer, the black/green was fine, but lacked that traditional quality that we were both after.  I took this opportunity to push my own skills in post processing and work with the colors of the background.  I was able to make use of the new masking capabilities in Lightroom to isolate the background and then I was able to adjust the tones and tints of the color.  Since I was lighting it with an umbrella, there was a good bit of light on the background, so I did have color to work with and it all came together quite well.  I had the beige toned background which I was after from the beginning and was able to achieve it after the fact to fit the vision that I had for the image.  Just in the education part of this, I actually came out ahead of the game.  I’m always happy to be able to learn something new.

It was a shame that I had to pass up on such a great day for landscape work, but paid business will always come first for me.  Unfortunately, this did turn into the only cloudy day in several weeks, so my regular photography was kind of shelved at this point as I waited for the right conditions to go out once again.  With that down time, I was spending time working on the business itself.  I needed to go ahead and move the official business registration to Wilkes County from Forsyth where it had been based.  This was necessitated by the fact that I had really been starting to think about business insurance.  it has come up a time or two during workshops when I had those thoughts of what if this or that happened?  Now, I was looking at doing maternity shoots, and I was having clients come out to my studio.  There was getting to be too many possibilities of things going terribly wrong, so I bit the bullet and acquired business insurance.  It actually wasn’t as expensive as I thought it would be, but it was a sobering moment when I did a catalog of the equipment that I was wanting to insure.  It turns out that since 2013 when I got back into photography, I have amassed roughly $27,000 worth of equipment that is used completely for photography.  Toni has ADD, so she won’t be reading this far into this entry so….please don’t tell her how much I have spent on photography…..PLEASE!

At any rate, I was fully set up for running a proper business out of the house and I felt better about having a studio set up in this fashion.  Overall though, my attitude was not as optimistic as it had once been.  The constant sunny days as the Fall color was fading away combined with the recent portrait experiences and realization of how much I have invested in photography over the years put me in a really bad place emotionally.  I get like this when I am not able to go out and use my camera because that is the outlet for most of my emotions.  I was left sitting and looking out the window seeing clear blue skies and harsh lighting knowing that I had nothing on the horizon in terms of photo projects.  The only bright spot that I had to look forward to was a presentation for the Charlotte Camera Club with was scheduled for mid-November.  This presentation actually originated back at the end of 2020, on a Waterfall Workshop where one of the participants happened to be a member of this camera club.  He inquired about me speaking with the club on my decay photography.  I was all for it, and I ended up speaking with the club officially during the Summer and this was set up.  I had spent a good bit of my downtime this Fall revamping the presentation and getting it ready for the club.

The presentation went very well and was done virtually.  The slightly new format that I had decided to go with made the entire presentation a bit more fluid which was great.  It was the first presentation that I had done for a club this year and it reminded me how much I miss doing the public speaking.  They were a great audience and there were some wonderful questions there at the end.  There was even a short discussion about doing a decay workshop for the club.  This was revisited a very short time after the presentation as I spoke with the president of the club.  We worked out a pricing plan for the club based on the number that might sign up.  I wrote up a description of the workshop and we set a date that worked for the club to be in early December.  She was thinking as many as eight would be in attendance which would be outstanding, but we had it set up to where we had confirmations on attendance before I collected any money, so we were able to set the price accordingly for the number that would be in attendance.

Despite the possibility of doing a workshop that I loved to put on, I was still feeling very off.  I just couldn’t shake the depression that I was in and being in the middle of a creative slump while the weather was not conducive to photography made it even worse.  I was making my daily posts to Facebook and Instagram with photos from six weeks prior as that was how many I had in the que to share with the groups.  These were all welcomed with the same barrage of comments ranging from “nice pic” to “thanks for sharing,” and my personal favorite, “that’s beautiful, can I paint it?”  Nowhere in there was any print sales and that got me really stewing about the fact that I put a lot of work into my photographs and to what end?  It was seeming like I was doing it just for content on social media which was never my goal or intention.  Was I just a Facebook photographer after all I had been through?  That was a deeply saddening thought and just really cheapened everything that I loved about my photography.  I made the decision one day during November that I was just going to stop posting to social media and concentrate on the website and try to give a bit more exclusivity to my photographs.  It was going to be a hard hit because my web traffic was due to Facebook and Instagram for the most part, but it wasn’t resulting in any print sales, and I was even having a hard time filling workshops through those avenues.  As I was really working through my thoughts, I was prompted to write them all down right here in the last Behind the Camera.  Ironically enough, putting those thoughts into words really helped with my emotional state and I really felt good about my decision to stop sharing everything that I photographed.  I found out just how much people were paying attention to what I was posting during this time which was eye opening.  When I would post a link to a blog entry that included an arbitraily cropped version of one of the photographs that was featured in the blog, I would get a string of comments that all read the same as if I had posted the full crop of the image as a photo share.  I can count at least a dozen comments in my head since making this change where the commenter would talk about how much they liked the picture that I had posted and thanks for sharing it.  They were just seeing the thumbnail of the post and not clicking to see the other images within the blog entry.  Since I would do a quick narrative to talk about the trek as a whole and suggest clicking the link to get the full story and more pictures, it was obvious that most were not even reading the post to know to click the link.  Social media really is about being seen for a fraction of a second and then forgotten about.  That is not what my photographs deserve, and I was increasingly happy with me decision to distance myself from it.

Here I was on the tail end of a depression and fighting to come out of it.  I had started to see some cloudy days and I was able to get images here and there when the conditions would warrant it.  I had broken away from social media and my web traffic was still roughly on track with where it had been.  I had picked up a few more subscribers (by the way, be sure and subscribe to this blog at the bottom of the home page for notifications on new posts).  I had also gotten a final count from the workshop that was being put on for the Charlotte Camera Club.  They had five that would be attending, and I had one other client that had said she would be there for a total of six.  I had sent out the invoicing with the proper pricing and then found out that my client had to back out due to a medical concern.  That still left me with five which was a higher attendance than I have had since before COVID.   Things were turning around, but then they announced that the Omicron variant had arrived in the US.  REALLY!!!!  Can’t we stop with the new variants that scare everyone?  This was supposed to be the new Black Plague that will end humanity once and for all as it wasn’t affected by the vaccines and was spreading an alarming rate.  Well fortunately, this one turned out to be a milder variation of COVID and seems to have not been worth the original hype.  It was a concern as I rounded out the month of November though because that could have an impact on my workshop coming up in a week or so, and if we were to go back on lockdown for this, that would greatly affect all aspects of my business.

One other thing that I wanted to mention that was going on during this month was that I was offering a special deal on portraiture to try and get more people in the door to build my skills and portfolio.  I have a price point in mind that I want to achieve, but I know that I can’t demand that price currently so I am trying to build up, but the only way that I can do that is through experience and word of mouth.  I marketed the discounted portrait plan and never heard a peep from anyone for any portraits.  That kind of fed into my depression as well through the month because I had been looking at how much I had invested in portraiture vs how much I had seen in return.  I have seen nothing in return on the investment, and I had emptied out my business savings to even make portraits possible.  Thanks to a couple of print sales, I had managed to get back into the black fortunately, and the workshop was responsible for giving me a savings once again which eased the financial worries behind my photography.  I still needed to do more portraiture to have it earn its keep, but I have very little control over that unfortunately.

It was around this time that I was also starting to put together a Google Business and Yelp Business Profile.  I’m still not convinced that this is a worthwhile idea, but it will give the ability for clients to go in and post reviews to either or both.  It also gives me another way of marketing which should be beneficial with the portraiture end of things as well as the fine art prints that I offer.  Both platforms are still quite new to me, and I haven’t seen much activity on either one yet, so if you are so inclined, drop by and leave a review.

We are now getting to the end of 2021, and you can see that it has been a wild ride with more ups and downs than a rollercoaster.  I was slowly getting back on track as the cloudy days were returning.  I still was able to get a little bit of Fall color here and there as well.  The downtime and forced reset of my priorities had actually had a positive effect on my photography.  I was less pressured to create content for social media and to keep feeding that machine which took a lot of the stress off of me.  I was able to focus more on creating the images that I really wanted to create.  It was all about portfolio images now which meant that I could be much more selective about what I was shooting and how I shot it.  I was starting to feel….shall we say creative again?

The creativity came none too early because I had a workshop to host, and I really needed it to be a good one because this was my best chance at a great workshop than I have had in a very long time.  As it turned out, the weather was fantastic for the workshop, every one of the participants worked hard, and it all went off without a hitch.  I really needed that, and it was a boost to my confidence.  Hopefully, I never let on that I was struggling internally during the workshop because I do pride myself for being able to put those feelings away and concentrate on the job at hand.  I had to be confident in order to effectively teach the points that I wanted to teach during the day.  It was probably my favorite workshop yet, and I was feeling that throughout the day so I’m sure that I presented myself accordingly.  I do want to thank all of my participants for an amazing day, and I’m so glad that we were able to put this workshop on.

There were some other things going here at the close of 2021, which are worth mentioning.  I had been keeping track of what I felt were significant images through the year and it was time to go through that list and determine what the 12 most significant images actually were going to be.  This is not an easy process by any stretch, and it took me about four days to compile the list and write the blog post associated with it.  I was able to work on that during a string of sunny days which helped keep me focused on photography even though I wasn’t going out to get new images.  When I got done with that list, I had to start writing this blog which has taken three full days up to this point to put together.  I was finally getting to benefit from the blue-sky drought conditions that we have been faced with since the second week in October.

While working on these year-end blog entries, I was made aware of a project that a local publishing company was embarking on by a client of mine.  I looked at what she had sent and saw that they were wanting to highlight Ashe County photographers.  My first response was that this was one of those schemes to get a catalog of stock imagery which seems to be the trend these days.  I did look at it deeper since it was a respected book publisher and they had done a similar book with painters in the past.  The concept was that they wanted to feature around 100 photographers that worked in the area of Ashe County and select around three of their images to include.  Each photographer would receive a brief narrative about what they do and who they are.  OK, this is sounding promising, but figured that it was going to be selling their book to a captive audience where the featured photographers would have to buy the book as a preorder which I’ve run into so many times before.  Well, when I got to that part, they said that the featured photographers would actually receive a copy of the book for free as payment for the use of the photographs.  This is actually quite a low payment for the use of imagery in a book, but taking it all into account, it was reasonable.  It was also the correct thing to do from the publisher’s standpoint and it was the first time I had run into this.  I decided to go ahead and submit five of my images to the publisher to see if I might be selected.  I won’t know anything until March of this year, but I’ll have my fingers crossed in hopes that I can make it into the book.  It would be the right kind of exposure that I needed, and in the area that I wanted to be associated with.  It wouldn’t be significant, but it would be the step in the right direction and would give me a bit of bragging rights if included in that list.

Another late addition to the website is a page dedicated to just old homes that I photograph.  I have been adding so many of them over the last year that they were starting to limit the number of barn pictures I could include in my Rural Gallery.  I was also running into the same problem with my Old Iron Gallery where I had been including Rat Rods, which are not quite the same thing, so I gave the Rats their own place within my portfolio as well.  With the addition of these new galleries, I can keep these specific types of photographs from crowding out other subject matter in their respective parent galleries.  I try to keep the number of photographs under control within these rooms to make it a little easier to browse and select which photos you are most interested in.  I would love to just have them all in the galleries, but not all of my images are portfolio worthy and shouldn’t distract from those that are.

Another late in the year change to the website has been my print prices.  In order to keep up with the cost of the materials that I am using, I have changed the layout of the pricing slightly.  If you will remember, I had changed the pricing to include shipping on each print months ago and essentially kept the price of the prints the same.  That meant that I had not had a price increase on my actual prints in several years.  Taking into account the cost of making prints which is going up right now, I had to look at the prices that I was charging.  I hadn’t really wanted to change the price, but I really had no choice in the matter.  The bump in price is marginal, and I am still including free shipping for my clients in the new price plan.  Additionally, I removed one of the options in paper size.  For years I have held onto the thought of keeping a basic 8×10″ option available for my clients, but more and more I’m seeing that option destroy the compositions that I have set up.  There is just no way to take a perfectly crafted 3:2 ratio photograph and cut it down to a 4:5 ratio, let alone a 16:9 ratio which I am shooting more of these days.  When that size was selected, I felt that the photograph suffered just so it could go into a basic frame and with this update I just deleted the option.  In its place is the uncropped letter sized print which will keep the composition as it was intended while keeping the overall size small.

Speaking of the website, things were going pretty well at this point, or at least going in the right direction finally.  I had settled into my routine without social media and was starting to have more movement on the website thanks to increased treks due to the cloudy days that were coming back.  I was thinking that the remainder of 2021 was going to be free of any more disruptions but that just wasn’t my luck.  I had been having some issues with the website where I kept getting an Error: 524 notification every so often.  It would keep me from viewing the website or even accessing the back end for editing purposes.  It was a nuisance, but nothing that was overly problematic.  I was keeping my fiend in Florida apprised of the situation as he takes care of my website IT issues.  Of course, he was unable to duplicate the issues because it was always short lived.  That was until the 14th when the site went down for good it seemed.  For hours I had no access and neither did he.  He was able to figure out the problem though and found it to be brute force attacks on the server trying to hack into the website.  There was added protection that I could buy to prevent this, but it would have been tens of thousands of dollars which there was no question about whether or not that made sense to do.  We were left with blocking the IP addresses from the offending countries, but it turned out that it was the US that was trying to hack in.  That wasn’t going to work, so he decided to take the entire site down for a few hours so that the bots would think that it was no longer there.  During this down time, he found out that the host and Cloudflare had just come up with a solution to this problem and had been implementing updates.  Between this and the downtime, by the time the site was brought back up, the issue seemed fixed, at least for the time being.

A few days later I was back on the same kick with the error message, and I could see that the number of viewers to the site were down significantly.  This is something that we are addressing as best we can.  The hope is that I won’t have to abandon this website in favor of another platform, but it is getting rather tedious to deal with the interruptions of service.  I do apologize for any inconvenience that this might have caused.  It is a big deal to me since I am now roughly a month removed from social media so my only connection to the outside world with my photography is through this website.  If I don’t have that available when potential clients visit the website on my business card, I am certain to have lost them for good.

While I was spending time dealing with the downtime on the website, I was considering redoing the entire website which got me thinking about improvements that I could make here as well as products that could be offered.  As it turned out, over the last couple of months, I’ve been doing a lot of unofficial mentoring with other photographers and had decided that I was going to make that a formal part of the services that offered.  I just didn’t quite know how I wanted to go about offering that particular service.  It all came together one evening when I was talking with a prospective client of mine, and I was really getting into the benefits of a mentorship program that I started to see the direction that I wanted to go in.  For a while now, I’ve offered individual instruction both in the field and with Lightroom.  These were based on hour rates and were pretty customizable.  The way I went about them was more like a mentorship program, but without the follow-through.  With just a few days left in the year, I decided to lay out my 2022 program for individual instruction.  In short, what was there is no longer available because I’ve decided to replace it with something so much more inclusive and holistic.  The basics of what I did are still there, but there is so much more offered now with my Photography Mentorship Programs.  You can read all about what is included here through the link, but in short, I have changed things up to offer individual instruction by the image, by the hour, or spanning weeks.  This is a completely customizable program designed to fit the needs which are as specific as you are.

Another positive note that I would like to end on for the year is that Hampton House Art and Framing is starting to work on a project with a hospital at the coast.  These have always been very good for me in the past as I have roughly 40 prints in various Wake Forest Baptist Medical Centers and another ten or so at Moses Cone Hospitals.  For this project, I was asked to submit a proposal with 30-50 images of the NC coast.  My proposal included 49 images which I hope will turn into a sizeable order at some point later in the year.  That will be a very welcomed project because it has been a year, I think, since I have done any work with Hampton House.  This is the kind of thing that I love to see happening around my photography, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

That brings us to the end of 2021.  This is also probably the longest blog entry that I have ever done.  If you have made it this far, then you are probably only a few months away from seeing my wrap-up of 2022.  I’m kidding, hopefully you were able to read this in a sitting or two.  I’m sure you are asking what is in store for 2022.  Well, I really don’t know.  I have two main directions that I am going to proceed in with my photography.  I want to continue creating the art images that I have always strived for, but I also really want to put more effort into my portrait work to see where that takes me.  I’m going to sit patiently and wait to see what happens with the book on Ashe County Photographers, and I really hope that by the Summer I’ll be sharing a link where you can buy the book with my feature in it.  My main goal is to turn the business around and get some different things in play that might help bring in revenue to recover from 2021’s expenditures.  I’m actually really looking forward to seeing the tax implications of how much I have spent during the year.  There is no question that I’ve taken a tremendous business loss, but I just don’t know how big of a loss that is.  I would like to turn that around and make a profit for the first time during 2022, and that is going to be my goal.  It is going to require a lot of work from me though, and I just have to figure out exactly what types of effort will be worthwhile.

Since I started off with the first image of the year, I might as well end this entry with the last image that I shot during 2021.  This is from a more or less accidental trek that I went on just a few days ago here locally where I finally got the chance to get some images that I have had in mind for a while.  What is interesting about this when compared to the opening photograph, you can kind of see a transition that has taken place during the year.  I started off going for the overall view of the subjects with kind of a muted tone to the colors.  That theme seemed to stick with me through much of the year.  Here lately, I have had a resurgence of some of my earlier methods of capturing subjects where I will go for the more vivid colors and will concentrate on the details as I have here with this Ford Truck.  I don’t really think that we are seeing a stylistic change here, just a different mindset as compared to earlier in the year.  I’m enjoying the textures much more than I was a year ago and I’m embracing them once again in my photographs.

As of the 30th of December, it looks like the website hosting issues have been addressed and fixed finally.  It took a few days for a full website backup to be performed due to the constant barrage of attacks, but once that was done, Nick was able to make a transition to a new host.  There are a few little issues that have popped up from the change, but those will get worked out as the website settles into its new home.  There is nothing that anyone needs to do other than continue visiting the site and recommending it to your friends and family.  Word of mouth is by far my best chance for exposure these days, and don’t forget to subscribe to the website at the bottom of the home page.  I really appreciate Nick for making this website possible and for all of his continued hard work that he puts in on the back end of things.  I think that without him, I would still be doing my website with my old Blogspot account from years ago.

I would also like to take this time to thank my beautiful wife Toni for putting up with me through the year.  I have spent a lot of time away from her squirreled away in the office/studio downstairs as well as out in the field.  I’ve been excited to the point that I’m just talking about aspects of photography that she has no interest at all in knowing, and she’s also put up with me while I’ve been so depressed about photography that I didn’t want to speak.  She has never had an issue with the different directions that I have wanted to take along the way and hasn’t batted an eye at how much I’ve spent.  Of course, she only thinks I’ve spent $47.50 on photography, and we aren’t going to tell her any different, are we?  I know it can’t be easy to live with a self-employed artist as that is just another way of saying “Starving artist”, but we love each other, and we make it work.  I am looking forward to having her be involved with the portrait photography in the future as that is definitely her strongest skill when it comes to photography.  Now that I have worked things out on my end, I think that it is time to pull her ideas into the mix once again.

Thank you for joining me on this not-so-quick recap of the year.  Be sure and check back next month as I talk about something that came up during my last Decay Workshop.  I started to get into the difference between “competition level photography” and “art photography.”  Of course, there will hopefully be a lot of blogs entries between now and then with lots of new images added to the website.  Remember, you can help support my efforts and my art by purchasing prints of my photographs.  Maybe you need some updated pictures of yourself or family and would like to schedule a portrait session?   If you are looking to improve with your own photography, I can help you there as well with one of my brand-new Photography Mentorship Programs where you choose what is being taught as well as the scheduling of that education.  Also remember, if you are shopping at Amazon or B&H Photo, be sure to use the links that appear throughout this website.  It won’t cost you a dime extra, but it will throw a few pennies my way with certain purchases as long as you access the sites through my links regardless of what you ultimately purchase.  All of these avenues will ultimately help me to continue with photography and to continue producing the images that I do.

I wish everyone a prosperous and Happy New Year and thank you for joining me on my journey.

Until next time….