Wednesday, May 25, 2022
Keep reading to find out the answer to the global energy crisis!
OK, that was a cheesy clickbait title if there ever was one, and I apologize profusely for it. It isn’t exactly an inaccurate title though as there is a little humorous connection that can be found at the end of this entry… but you must keep on reading. Of course, if I’m being completely honest, there is an energy crisis, and it is affecting us all to one degree or another. I’m not going to pretend to know how it is affecting you specifically, but I can certainly speak from personal experience when I say that the current gas prices have really reduced my want to travel for photos. At $4.39/gal for regular here, I have to be pretty sure that cranking up the 4Runner (18mpg) will be a worthwhile experience. That has been a lot of the reason behind me not going out for these past few months. With inflation slowing down my direct print sales significantly, it just isn’t really cost effective to go out looking for new subjects to photograph as much as I used to. I’m sure you remember those weeks when I would go out at least twice a week, if not more. I would take road trips that would cover 4-6 hours of driving without thinking twice about it. Those days are over I’m afraid because I’m having to be nice to the gas tank these days.
The other reason that I’ve been hanging closer to home these days is I’ve been tied up with workshops, mentorships, and contracted photo sessions. I’ve also been spending all of my free time learning new skills for my people photography as well as doing some overdue equipment upgrades to make all forms of portraiture much easier than they have been. With that thought in mind, I won’t be talking a lot about gear in this entry because I’m quite frankly geared out. I’ll just leave it at, I am using all my same old stuff for this type of photography and I’m using it in the same old way. The new gear is just for photos that include people and one of these days I’ll talk about why I have upgraded and how I use the new stuff.
Since it has been a couple of weeks since I have last been out, and that was primarily for the Composition Workshop at Doughton Park, I was starting to get a little stir crazy. I hadn’t picked up a camera or shot anything since that day. I had been regularly going through editing skills with one of my clients as I was helping her process her own photos. That just made it all the more apparent that I wasn’t doing any of my own work which made me feel kind of odd. I love teaching and helping others learn their craft, but there comes a point when I start to look at myself as a complete poser because I’m offering all this advice on how to do this or that, while I’m not actually doing anything on my own time. Yeah, I know I have nearly two decades of photography under my belt, but when I’m not creating, the imposter syndrome gets really bad.
That is where I had ended up. My photography must be a complete charade and I must not be worthy of the title of photographer. I mean, I sat at the computer daily researching this and that, making orders, getting the studio freshened up with some new sets, but I wasn’t making any photographs. I was teaching workshops and doing mentorships with quite a few other photographers, but I wasn’t making any photographs. I was studying new techniques that I can use with my people photography, and I was paying particular attention to the types of photos that I wanted to be able to achieve in my own work, but yet I wasn’t making any photographs. None of what I was doing was feeding my need to create, and it was starting to come to a head.
Come Tuesday night, I looked at the weather and saw that it was going to be cloudy all day on Wednesday and the rain was looking like it was going to hold off for most of the day. It was a good scenario for getting out and doing some photography, which lead to the question of “where and what to photograph?” This is usually the part of the conversation where I just simply say that I don’t know what I want to shoot, or where I want to head to, and I just stay home. I didn’t know what I was wanting to shoot…well, I did, but doing some creative portraiture just wasn’t in the cards. Being an introvert loner is great, right up until the time you need to have friends to do things like model for you. Since that was the area of photography I desperately wanted to experiment with, that was what I really wanted to be shooting. Absent having a model in the studio, I was going to have to find something else to photograph which is where driving around comes in handy. That was going to be what I was going to have to do. I didn’t have a direction in mind, nor a particular subject, but I knew that I had to get out and create and do it quickly before I landed in a deep depression from lack of creating.
When I got up the weather was looking pretty much the same as the forecast had called for. There was going to be even light all day long which meant that I was under no rush to get out and find anything. I just got my morning routine taken care of down in the office and loaded up the truck with the camera. It felt a little off leaving the brand-new camera bag with the virgin camera inside in favor of taking my well-worn Lowepro with the 5DS R inside. It was the right choice to make for this type of photography though. I think it was about 9:30 or so when I started off on my drive. My heart fluttered a bit when I cranked the truck up and saw a half tank of gas. It wasn’t going to be long, and I’d be refilling that very large fuel tank. Hopefully it wouldn’t be today, and hopefully I would have some photographs to show for the effort.
I started off with the intention of heading up Hwy18 into Sparta, but the clouds forced a different decision. I ended up on the way out to Traphill, but before I got too far into that town I diverted again towards Ronda because the clouds were looking better that way. I still didn’t know what I was going to shoot, but I was determined to do something creative. I eventually found myself on a road that I had been on before and I saw an old Ford truck in front of a shed or some sort. I had seen this before and it hadn’t really caught my attention. This time, I was liking the colors that were present between the truck and the metal siding of the shed. The composition was weak, but I was hoping that the colors would pull it through.
I went ahead and pulled off on the shoulder to try out some compositions. It was drizzling a little bit, but not enough to bother my filter on the front of the lens which was all I cared about. I started making exposures and couldn’t land on a perspective that I liked. It was a long bed truck that was nosed up to the shed. No matter what lens or focal length I used, the bed was just too prominent in the shot and there was no real interest to the truck or the shed. I think I shot seven variations on this scene and never once landed on one that I thought would work. I had tried, and most likely failed to get the first shot in the bag. It was not the start to the day I had been hoping for, but it was a start. I was a photographer once again and that felt good.
I licked my wounds and hopped up in the truck in search of my next subject with the hopes that I would be able to do the next scene more justice. I found myself back in my old stomping grounds from when I was last out in Ronda, but I happened to see a barn that I didn’t recall seeing before. It was up on a hill away from the road. I probably would have missed it again this time had it not been for the yellow flowers all around it. The Spring greens also made a dead tree pop from the background that likely wouldn’t have been the case in the dormant Winter season. Whatever the difference was, the barn had caught my attention and that was a start. I got turned around and pulled off on the shoulder of the road. Before I got the camera out, I walked the property line to see where the composition was going to be so I could choose the right lens for the occasion. Everything from the shoulder was pretty standard without a lot of depth to the scene. There were foreground elements present, but I didn’t really like how they could be organized in relation to the barn. As I got to the edge of the property, there was a driveway that went down the side of the fence. It was that fence that I felt gave me the best chance of depth and if I got the camera positioned right, I would be able to get the barn situated right at the opening of the gate within the property. It gave the visual flow that I was missing from the front of the property, but yet I was still very close to the roadway.
I went back to the truck and grabbed the camera before going back to that corner once again to get set up. I found the composition that I wanted and shot a few frames. I was reasonably happy with how that worked out, but I wanted to try some of the other ideas that I had from the front of the property. I wasn’t confident that they would work, but I wanted to try them since I was here. As I was getting a few exposures done from there, I noticed a car coming to a stop at the next street down. The driver was looking at me and I knew it was going to be one of two things. Either this was the property owner wondering what I was doing there, or they were thinking I was a surveyor, and that the property was about to be sold. I’ve had it be both of those things at the same time and that makes for an awkward conversation when the property owner thinks that the state is getting ready to buy their property. The car slowly pulled out and approached me. I could tell that they were not accelerating at the regular rate, so I was fully expecting them to stop and talk to me.
Sure enough, the window was coming down and the car was pulling to stop. I was prepared for either of those two situations but was thrown for a loop. The driver simply asked, “are you Greg Kiser?” I did a quick mental check to see where he could have seen my name. My hatch was up so my website address was no visible, and I wasn’t wearing my official name tag. How did he know who I was? I confirmed that he had the right guy and he introduced himself. As it turns out, Don follows me on Facebook and recognized me behind the tripod. We had a great little conversation and I found out that he travels many of the back roads that I do during the course of his job. He even mentioned two specific subjects that he had run across after seeing my photographs of them online.
I tell you what, there could not have been a better time for that meeting to have happened. Here I was feeling very much not like a photographer and getting firmly into my Imposter Syndrome. The current batch of photographs wasn’t really helping that matter either. Here Don comes along reminds me of all that I have accomplished with a camera and that immediately changed my outlook on the day. I’m not saying that my ego needs to be stroked, or I look for compliments because I don’t. There is just something to a person following your work and then recognizing you on the side of the road to extent they even remember a name. That is pretty powerful stuff right there.
Filled with a bit more energy and drive, I decided to ignore the fact that the rain was starting to come down again and I picked up the camera to go back to my favorite composition and to work on that one a bit more. I fine-tuned the location that I had started with and got what I felt was a more effective composition after taking care of some separation issues and simplification issues with elements. From my new position, I fired off several more exposures until i was positive that I had something good. It was that last frame where it all came together for me and was by far the strongest image of this barn from the group. I was now 27 frames into the day and was only sure about one of them making it into the keeper batch.
I was feeling a good bit better at this point and started back down the road looking for my next subject. I was happy that the clouds were looking good, but I could do without the rain that kept showing up for a few minutes at a time. It wasn’t terrible, but I don’t like to deal with rain drops on my filters so I was hoping that the rain would move out of the area. Within about 5 miles, I found another interesting barn, or I should say a cluster of barns. They were situated under a really dramatic sky, and it was a good enough scene to look at a bit more in depth to see if there was a chance that I could make some photos. I got pulled off on the side of the road and grabbed the camera. I had determined that the best composition was going to be from the back side rather than the front where everything was just squared to the camera. I was looking for dimension with this scene and I needed to get angles which I was missing from the front of the barn.
I got the camera set up and started to make exposures. About that time, I heard a big dog barking and getting closer. I looked to the left and there was a rather muscular dog in full run coming towards me. I could hear the owner yelling for him to come back and all I could do was hope that the dog would obey. I was left preparing for battle with the dog. As I was starting to get into position to receive the brunt of the attack, I saw him stop running and submit to his owner’s commands. I was very happy about that because I was really not equipped to fight a dog. The dog reluctantly turned and went home and that was the end of that. I finished up my set of four exposures on the group of barns and felt that I had something there worth keeping.
Well, you can see here in the blog that there are no other barn pictures, so my thoughts weren’t exactly correct. When I started to look at the photos on the computer, I loved the sky, and the composition was fair, the barns were even interesting with the way they were overlapping. What killed all of the photos was the two layers of fencing that ran across the foreground and the scattered trash just inside of the fences. The more I looked, the more complicated the image got, and the less I liked it. After doing a basic global edit and considering doing some cloning in Photoshop, I just abandoned the photos all together. So, if you are keeping score, I have now shot three different locations and only one of them has resulted in an image.
Never feel bad about deleting an image that you don’t like. It is easy to get emotionally attached to every image that we shoot, but the reality of it is, most of what ends up on our memory cards is doomed to end up being deleted during the culling stage. That was what was happening here. I had one frame out of 31 that I ended up processing. The good news is that I wasn’t done for the day, and I was feeling like I was just getting warmed up.
I was back on the road again and heading down back road after back road. I happened by a location that I had passed several times before where there was an old ’30’s coupe parked as yard art in the front yard. There was an old military truck out there as well. I had considered photographing these before but would have needed the owner’s permission to access the property. In the past, the light wasn’t good enough to waste an ask, but this time the light was good as was the sky. I was a little sad to see that the vegetation had grown up around everything so much, but that was minimal and I could make use of that I was sure.
I pulled down the driveway and saw that the front door was open. I went up and knocked on the screen door and waited for an answer. It wasn’t but a few seconds and a lady came to the door. I introduced myself and explained why I was there. She was happy to let me photograph the yard art and gave the impression I wasn’t the first one to have come by to do that. I thanked her and gave her my card so that she could see the images when I got them uploaded. I’m always happy to bring the property owner a complimentary small print if there is one that they would like to have. It is my way of saying thanks for letting me capture the scenes.
I got the truck parked out of sight and grabbed the camera. I started with the coupe in the front yard as it was what had caught my eye the most. I set up a composition that I liked and started to check my exposure. The sky was way overcooked for the rest of the scene, so I went back to the truck and grabbed my bag. I didn’t want to just get a single filter that I would have to hold onto when not needed, so I just grabbed everything because I wasn’t sure where this was going to go. I added an ND Grad filter to control the sky and started making exposures. These were turning out decent, but not quite what I had in mind. I decided to switch to the other side and see what I could do there.
From the passenger’s side, I had access to a bright pink fender that was laying just off the back corner. That gave some compositional possibilities that I liked. I was liking these images better than the ones that I had started to capture on the other side, so I committed to this side and fine-tuned what I had. It really didn’t take long before I had a couple of shots that I liked, but they had required me switching out to my wide-angle lens which is not one I would usually use in this situation. It just seemed to do the trick to make the car pop away from the background and include more of the sky.
Feeling like I had what I wanted from that car, I moved over to the military truck and started to work compositions there as well. It was an interesting truck, but I just couldn’t get an interesting composition with it. Teh fact that it was overgrown with weeds kept the most interesting parts from shining through like I would have liked. In the long run, I ended up abandoning the truck in favor or trying my luck at a VW Beetle. I always have good luck with these cars, and I felt that there was a photo to be had with that one.
I moved over to it and started to survey what I had to work with. Even though this was a derelict car, it was actually in pretty good shape with minimal patina to it. The fact that the car was back made it a bit boring against the green surroundings and depending on the angle that I was shooting it from there were houses and newer trucks that would enter the frame. The more I looked, the more I was positive that an overall wasn’t going to work. However, something that I have found over the years of photographing these cars, is you just don’t need to include much of them at all to have them be totally recognizable. That was just how I approached this one. I looked for intimate captures and isolations. My favorite one happened to be from the front right quarter. From here, I was able to see the headlight and fender completely along with enough of the hood to sell the image. I got down nice and low and composed the photograph in a way that I thought had plenty of visual appeal.
As I started to make exposures, I realized that doing the landscape thing with maximizing the depth of field wasn’t really working here. I needed to go for a limited depth of field for this composition and take a page out of the outside portrait photographer’s handbook. I opened the lens up to f/2.8 which was the widest it would go. It softened the background as well as the greenery up front. I realized that I was at 55mm and found myself wishing for my 50mm f/1.2L lens which was at home. I think that f/1.8 would have worked great here, but the shot that I had was satisfying to me. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, the more I learn about portrait techniques, the more my landscape and decay photography improves. Knowledge is never wasted!
Before I put everything back in the truck, I made one more walk around the property to see if there was anything that I might have missed. There was just nothing else at the big truck even though I really liked it. The Bug was pretty much the one-shot pony in the current conditions. The one that I wasn’t quite finished with was the coupe that I had started with. I still wasn’t happy with the first composition from the driver’s side, so I decided to go back and try it again. There were a couple of things that I had to take into account on this side. The biggest problem was the house across the street as well as a large power transformer in the trees on the other side of the road. The road was another concern that I was facing from this direction. Originally, I had shot high and incorporated the road in the composition which pointed to the car. My idea was to help make it visible in the overgrown vegetation. it just came across as a boring composition though. This time I went at it with another way of thinking. I got down very low and used the body of the car to mask the transformer while the tall grass covered the roadway. I cropped the frame just to the side of the house so that it wasn’t a part of the composition. I used the taller trees as bookends for the composition and included the sky for about a third of the frame.
This composition seemed to do the trick. I had to pull my grad filter back out for the sky, but that was no problem at all since I still had my bag with me. I shot maybe four frames from this composition and felt that this was much better than the last group. I had foregone the depth afforded by the road and relied completely on the trees to give me a bit of depth. That was not as effective, but the sense of place changed completely, and I liked this version much better because it gave a sense of isolation and abandonment to the scene which really fit this old car.
With that, I was pretty sure that I had everything that I wanted from this location, so I packed things back up and headed on down the road. The thought crossed my mind that I could be done at this point and just go home. I had shot four locations which was actually pretty good for a road trip with no clear expectations. In fact, my average is getting just three locations shot during a road trip before deciding to head home. I was getting a little tired after stretching those creative muscles so much after so long being dormant. I had 58 frames so far and that wasn’t too bad at all. I made the decision to start in the direction of home and keep my eyes out for anything else that piqued my interest.
I was heading South towards Hwy 268 and the idea hit that I might want to try a couple of Opel Gt’s that I had passed countless times before. I had never stopped because there was a Suburban parked right in front of them, and they were tucked in beside a newer model Civic and in front of other cars. I had considered options before, but never really landed on a good enough compositional idea to bother stopping and asking permission to get the photos. Since I had no expectations for this trek and was already ahead of the game in terms of frames captured, I decided that unless something wild happened, I would stop and see what I could do with the Opels. That was, if the owner was home and would let me photograph them.
It didn’t take long before I pulled up to the shop where the cars were located. Nothing had really changed here in the last two years or more, so I had no new hurdles to get over for compositions. One thing that I saw which interested me was a large plant growing out of the engine bay of the yellow GT which added just the right amount of visual interest to the car. Now, I just had to worry about how to compose the image with the car sitting among so many other cars that didn’t tell its story.
This seems to be my luck with Opels though, I love the design and have always wanted to photograph one, but it seems that when I do find them, they are crowded into some of the worst settings for photographs that could be imagined. You might recall the last trek of 2020 when I found a green Opel GT in Traphill and had to get creative in order to photograph it. That one turned out really good considering what I had to work with. These twin Opels were in a worse situation because they were blocked in from the front and the back, with limited possibilities from the sides. That was all secondary concern though because first and foremost, I had to get permission to access the property. Yeah, this was a shop, and I could articulate public vehicular area for the parking lot, but I knew that I was going to have to get in beyond the Suburban to get into position and that was going to put me not only well within the property, but partially concealed from sight. That would just look too sketch if I were watching me, so I would feel much better having the blessings of the owner.
I pulled in front of the house that was attached to the property and went to the front door. I knocked and waited. I head a man respond, but he wasn’t at the door. It sounded like he was on the side of the house which wasn’t uncommon when I knocked on doors. I walked over to the side of the house and there was the owner standing there. I didn’t think that this was going to go well, but I introduced myself and explained why I was there. He had this look like he was about to refuse my request, but ended up saying that it was OK for me to photograph the cars. I made my standard offer for property owners which he declined saying that he had no use for photographs of the cars. He was in the business of restoring them and his interest centered on the shining finished product. I laughed, and told him my interest fades in them when they look brand new like that. I thanked him and went to park the truck.
I grabbed the standard lens and a polarizer before I started to figure out where I could get the best composition. I worked in a small area between the civic, the Suburban, and the yellow Opel. There wasn’t much room to work, but I was able to get a focal length and position combination that allowed me to get enough breathing room around the Opel while omitting the rear-view mirror on the Suburban, and not having to stand on the Civic. I shot a series of horizontal images that used both of the Opels as repeating patterns showing depth. There was a VW Microbus behind the Opels and the edge of the shop that interrupted the flow of the composition, but it was a starting point for me. Feeling that there were better options to be had with isolations, I took a page out of that green Opel shoot and started to work the details.
I first moved around to the rear of the yellow car which had the most interesting patina to it. I worked on a composition that played homage to the unique curves of the car while showing the ravages of time. This was working out much better than the overall shot that I had started out trying to capture. I played with the composition for a bit and adjusted the depth of field until the grass went slightly soft keeping all the focus on the textures of the age. My favorite variation on the composition had the rear wheel balancing out the rear taillight sockets with a pronounced diagonal element built in by the elevated position of the camera. There is just something about these cars, and the minute I can find one that I can get an overall shot of, I’m going to be in hog heaven. If they are this easy to get isolations on, capturing the entire thing will just be a celebration in lines and curves that will truly excite me.
I was warming up to this rather difficult shooting environment and decided to work my way around to the far side to see if I could get an overall of the car which was completely opened up from the side. Well, I was able to get a clear shot of the car, but the background was just a jumbled mess which did me no favors. There was no sense in even trying to get anything from that side, so I moved back into the mix of cars for the sake of shooting with a clear background. I found that I really liked the front of the orange car because the lower light was still intact, as was the bumper. These cars have a very distinctive front end with the narrow nostrils and closed headlights. This was the element that I really wanted to capture next. I just had to figure out how best to do it.
I found that the part that I was most interested in was below the bumper which forced me to get down low with the camera. I had to figure out the right balance for the scene because my initial plan was to include the entire front end. By the time I did that and found the right place to crop the passenger compartment, I was seeing the corner of the shop and in some cases, the back corner of the Microbus. I decided to do a very close crop on the top elements like the headlight, marker light, and even the top of the hood. This played down the visual weight of the area on top of the bumper and allowed more of the attention to be given to the lower portions where my eyes wanted to explore.
In comparison to the larger frame that I had started with, this more intimate crop showcased an Opel GT and all of those elements of the front that I truly love. The larger crop example looked like a Jaguar unless you took a bit of time to look at the visual clues. That perspective from this distance really elongated the front too much and I thought took away from the character of the car. The proportions and the lines were all accurate in the more intimate shot and that was what I went with. When I started looking at the file in detail and had decided that I preferred the natural perspective, I confirmed that this had been shot at 55mm which was pretty well in the middle of the “normal range” of the focal length.
After I had gotten up close and personal with the front of the orange car, I decided that I wanted a second chance at the front of the yellow car. The condition was much worse and that gave for more visual interest, but there were key pieces missing that hurt the composition when compared to the one that I had just shot. However, I still liked the concept of the repeating patterns between the two cars and thought that had some validity.
I moved back to my place between the Opel, Civic, and Suburban and started to frame up my horizontal shot once again. I defaulted to the horizontal crop because the cars were long in the horizontal orientation and that made the most natural choice. The problem that I rean into though was a repeat from earlier with the cars behind the twins as well as the corner of the shop. I could get them to look organized as a composition, but they still didn’t add anything to the composition and proved to be more distracting than anything. I was seeing a composition that was too good to give up on though, and I fought to make it work. As a last-ditch effort, I decided to flip my camera to a vertical orientation and go against the logical school of thought. I still wasn’t going to get my overall composition of the Opel GT like I was hoping for, but the vertical composition allowed me to tell a more compelling story.
The vertical framing with a relatively wide-angle focal length forced the foreground to be filled up with the front clip of the yellow Opel. This was the car without a hood which had the plant growing out of the empty engine compartment. I had my visual interest as well as a compelling story for the foreground, and the background was a slightly soft Opel showing a repeating pattern before you ended up in the more blurred trees in the background. It was the composition that I had been after but hadn’t seen until now.
About the story that I was seeing developing and going back to that clickbait title of this entry. Since I am a Dad, I’m allowed to tell Dad jokes, so buckle up, here it comes. The answer to the energy crisis is to go green. Well, here we have green coming out of where the engine used to be. The green is in the form of a plant, that is replacing the source of power for the car. Ergo, Green-Power-Plant! Ba-dump-pah!! I’ll be here all week, thank you! The story continues because as we are forced to give up our dino juice drinkers that run on push water, I have a feeling that we are going to be seeing more and more of these scenes where cars are left to rot after they have given up their engines to keep one more dinosaur going just a little longer because electric just isn’t right for that person. It is interesting times, and I hope that the current state of affairs doesn’t keep pushing gas prices beyond what is reasonable and affordable. I know I can’t afford to switch to electric, and I have no interest in driving something that I can’t work on myself. Who knows, one day I might be swapping out the motor in my Miata with a weed eater motor. The good news is that I might make the car a bit faster with the swap as the 2.0L 4cyl puts out about the same horsepower as my weed eater. It could be an interesting swap when motors are hard to come by.
Soap box aside, this trek has been a good deal of fun for me. It was nice to go out without expectations and to just create as the inspiration hit. My world feels much more level now that I’ve had that opportunity to get out and make new images. It might not have been the human art that I have been itching to do more of, but it was photography and that was the key aspect I was needing. I ended up the day with 85 frames and you see the seven keepers from the day. It is less than 10%, but when you figure there were two locations that I just discarded completely that hit rate is actually quite a bit higher. If you just look at the last stop of the day, my hit rate was about 20% which goes to show that it just took me a while to get warmed up.
I hope that you enjoyed the trek and the new images. Remember, if you connect with any of these and would like a print, I would love to talk to you about purchasing one. There is just no better way of enjoying a photograph than in a physical form which was intended by the photographer. No matter what device you are viewing the photographs on, there is no way that it will have the same impact as a photographic print, canvas, or metal presentation will have. When you order a print, not only do you get to enjoy a photograph as often as you would like, and any time that you would like, you are also helping to fund these treks and to keep me going to continue making these images. It really is a win-win for both of us!
If you are interested in photographing these types of scenes for yourself, consider joining me in November for my Fall Decay Workshop. This newly released workshop already has one participant signed up, with another one considering it. As one of my most popular workshops I suspect that this one will fill up so if you are wanting to join in, I would jump on getting signed up as soon as possible to ensure your spot. We will cover how to create shots from difficult scenes like the Opels, and look at how to ask permission from property owners like I had to do with the coupe and Bug photos. It is a great day and one that has always met with rave reviews. However, if workshops aren’t you gig and you thrive on more one-on-one attention, consider a mentorship with me. I have done several different variations with mentorships since releasing them late last year. I’m about half-way through my first Advanced Mentorship program which has gone so much better than I could have hoped. I’m realizing just how much bang for your buck that you get with that large scale mentorship.
One other shameless plug before I wrap this up. My other large source of income right now is portraiture. With warmer conditions outside, now might be that perfect time to get that family portrait session done, or maybe you are looking for something just for yourself. I am able to work in a studio setting here in Purlear, NC, or I can come to you within reason for a location shoot. I’m also conveniently located near the Blue Ridge Parkway if you want that bit of mountain flavor in your portraits. On that note, if you are looking for something a bit more creative, like a themed shoot, I might be willing to work a really good deal for you because that is what I am wanting to practice right now. I’m also doing free boudoir sessions to build experience. If this is something that you have been wanting to try but haven’t felt like you are the “right look” for a boudoir session, allow me to remind you that I am a decay photographer, so you are already leaps and bounds better off than what I normally photograph. In all seriousness though, everyone has the right look for a boudoir session because it is all about attitude and angles. I would love the opportunity to work with you in order to capture those photographs that make you fall in love with yourself, possibly for the first time.
One last mention about the affiliate links through this entry and here at the bottom. I don’t sell advertising on this blog or website to keep things totally under my control as far as content. I do however partner with Singh-Ray, Amazon, and B&H which you will see links and references to from time to time. By using these links, or the discount codes, you are helping me, and it will never cost you any extra when you buy anything after entering through one of my links. In the case of Singh-Ray, I can actually save you 10% on your entire purchase by using the discount code KISER10 at checkout. The commission I make from these links is minimal, but everything helps, and since it doesn’t affect your bottom line and is only a matter of clicking a link it is just another easy way to support my photography.
If I don’t see you before, I’ll be back here next week with a new Behind the Camera where I talk about how to photograph waterfalls. Tune in to see what I am doing differently, and how your own waterfall photography might be wrong. Too click baity? Yeah, you are probably right. Just join me next week as we talk about how I’ve evolved as a waterfall photographer over the years and the new setting that I am starting to incorporate.
Until next time….
Remember to use the code KISER10 to get 10% off your purchase
