Happy New Year to everyone! I hope that everyone enjoyed the holidays and are looking forward to the new year ahead. If you have been with me for any length of time, you certainly know that the first blog entry of the new year is always a look back on the previous year to see what has happened and how I’ve grown as a photographer and as a business since 2019. For me, it is a great way to look back and see what my struggles were, and what my successes have been. In fact, just looking back on my previous yearly review I am reminded about so many things that seem so far away. The beginnings of the two years actually shared some things in common from a website end, and I was fully invested in building a portraiture element to my photography during the Summer of 2021. I went a little overboard in the Summer of 2022 with the same goal in mind. I had ups and downs with workshops in 2021, but most everything was pretty much to be expected in a business setting. I still have the same struggles, but I’m seeing more gains than losses and I’m learning from the experiences that aren’t working, like trying to offer an online Lightroom workshop which was a total flop in 2021.
Without further hesitation, let’s dive into what happened during 2022. I always like to start these entries out with a look back to the first image of the year. In this case, it was made on January 1st just down the road from the house. I decided to go out and do some photography because of an old tradition among cyclists to get out and go for a ride on the first day of the year. It is a great way to set the tone for how the year will proceed, and I can say that this trek set a great tone for me. As you have seen in my recent 12 Most Significant Images of 2022 entry a few days ago, that most of what I shot through the year was of decay, and a good many of them were in black and white. There might be some truth to how you start the new year is how the year will go.
It wasn’t long after this first trek of the year that a problem with the website that I thought was all behind me, had started to pop up again. Even with the new host that we had migrated to, I was still experiencing error messages and difficulties accessing the website either on the back end or as a viewer. Nick worked very hard at getting those issues resolved, and we determined that the size of the website was getting too large with all of the photos that were included in the pages. He was able to determine that each file I uploaded turned into multiple files at different sizes for different applications throughout the website. My file storage looked like the National Debt number, and Nick wanted to figure out a way to get that changed.
His solution was simple, to go through and delete the files that the website had created at different sizes. We tested it, and it seemed to work just fine. Over the course of a couple of days, he worked on deleting all the extra versions of the images. When he was all finished, I went through the website to see how it worked. The posts looked great, the gallery looked fine, but I started to see that thumbnail images were missing, and in many cases, the odd sized images in the galleries were missing. The more I dug, the more I realized that we had made a grave mistake. Unfortunately, the answer was going to have to be reversing all of the work that Nick had put in on the website which I regretted terribly. This took several days to do even though there were backups. It was a gradual process and if you visited the website during the month of January, you were certainly aware that something was amiss. Eventually things calmed down and the website went back to normal. It was also during this time that the error messages seemed to cease and access to the website was available once again.
It might seem like a minor thing for there to be website issues, but if you remember back to the end of 2021, I had all but left social media. This meant that my only online presence was this website. I didn’t have a brick-and-mortar establishment for my work to be seen, which meant that without a website, I was drifting in a void of nothing. It was not the way that I wanted to start off the year, but I had to roll with the punches as they came. Fortunately, even though this was a long running problem since several months before, it seemed to come to an end by the end of the month.
January wasn’t all toil and doom though. It was early in the month when the Wilkes Art Gallery reached out to me once again to do a workshop for them. They were looking for something in February and while I had reservations about it, I agreed to do it. If you look back on my history with workshops that I had partnered with them on, they have not been all that grand. There was a classroom workshop that had only two participants, and that was followed up with a location workshop dealing with composition at Doughton Park. That one almost got canceled due to the threat of rain with only a single participant signed up. Because I had a good relationship with that one participant, the workshop was salvaged, and she recruited two more to join the following week. It was a moderately successful workshop. Then there was the mess with the request to be a juror for the Blue Ridge Overview event which you can read more about in last year’s wrap-up. I wasn’t sure what to expect from another workshop with them, but I decided to give it a shot.
I set to work to build a classroom workshop on the topic of Exposure. This was a very small portion of the full intro class that I had been working on for years and had done a watered-down version for the WAG in 2021. Even reduced to the bare minimum, the class was too long and had too much information. I decided to reduce it down to just exposure which I started making a PowerPoint presentation for almost immediately after getting the green light from Tiffany. I didn’t think that it would take that long to put together, but I worked on it almost daily for about a month to get it ready for the workshop.
In the middle of getting ready for a workshop and dealing with website issues, I also had a request from Nick who is associated with the Masons. They have their own product website where they sell clothing and accessories which I never knew about. Part of what they sold were neck ties and bow ties. Nick had asked me if I could do some product photography for them, so they weren’t just shooting the new additions with a cell phone. This is not something that I would typically do, but I considered the options. I had studio lighting, and enough set material to get the images that they were after. Nick had told me that they were willing to pay a good price to have the shoot done. I reluctantly said that I would do it for them and would work out a bill and license for them to use the images. I spent several weeks during January trying to figure out how I wanted to do the shoot and how I could make it creative. I sent him an example of what I was thinking about doing and he agreed that it would work. I just had to wait for the products to arrive at the house so I could get things in motion.
If it seems like January was a bit rough around the edges, you are right. It was starting off to be a bumpy year. However, February brought some very good news in the form of my largest portrait shoot to date. This was going to be a corporate headshot session for a company out of Huntersville, NC. The connection here was through one of my clients, and also a subject of my first headshot session in 2021. As it turns out, the company that she worked for was headed up by one of the former Police Chiefs that I had worked under. The assignment was easy enough and just required me to shoot headshots of about a half dozen employees. That was easy enough, but the more I thought about the process, the more complicated it became.
I was going to have to shoot these on location at the business so I wouldn’t have access to my studio. That meant that I was going to have to pack up a mobile studio and take everything that I needed there. To keep things simple, I decided to only take my speedlites and leave the studio strobes at home. It was simple to pack, but it added the wildcard of whether or not I would have enough light power to overpower the ambient light in the room. I also didn’t know how much space I was going to have to work with which I had been burned on before doing something that should have been simple. To make a long story short, I overpacked and took way more than I needed, but got the session done very efficiently with a pretty good outcome. The six subjects turned into eight, and the last one wasn’t able to make it to the office on picture day. I was happy to schedule him in later on at my studio when he could make it. Even though I did the session for a discounted rate since it was my first attempt at it, I still made good enough money to be able to do the follow up without charging any extra.
As I try to do, I had the final images sent to the company for review by the following morning. All of them worked out except one of the subjects wasn’t wild about their photo because they didn’t want to be smiling. I sent an alternative photo which wasn’t the one that they had initially picked but had been my favorite out of her images. That one didn’t go over well either so I said that I was happy to have her come out here and I would redo the photo for her at no extra charge. I was able to get the two remaining sessions lined up on the same day and they went very well.
There was something that I learned from this whole experience though. I was much better doing headshots for the guys, but the easiest one was one of the last ones that I did on location which appears here in this blog. There are just some people that can automatically go into pose mode and make it look effortless. This particular person was going to come into work just for the photo to be taken and was only going to have 30 minutes to be there due to other commitments. That put the pressure on me for sure since I was running around 30 minutes for each person with some going longer. When she came in, I think I shot four frames with one of them being to test the lights. It was just that easy! The hardest part was choosing which one she liked the best. Even I was torn on which one was best…including the test shot. That was another valuable lesson for me. There are just some people that are naturals in front of the camera, and others that have to be coached to appear that way. In either case, if a photograph failed, it was due to the photographer.
Something else that I learned from the experience was how to make a white background go gray. Why not just use a gray background? well, the gray background that I had was textured and that wasn’t what was wanted. They were wanting to have a smooth background, which I only had white and black with no texture. I had ordered a plain gray background, but it didn’t get delivered in time. Fortunately, I had enough room to get the subject far enough away from the background so that the light falloff would grossly underexpose the white background. It worked great, and with the follow up shoot I did, I even stayed with the same white background even though I had the plain gray one in my studio by the point.
Early on in the month, I was contacted by the Sandhills Photography Club which I had done a presentation for in 2020 on the topic of decay. They weren’t asking for another presentation this time though. They were reaching out to me to see if I would be willing to judge a photo competition for them that was scheduled for the Summer. The topic of the competition, and the reason they were reaching out to me was based on the presentation that I had previously done for them. I was honored and humbled all at the same time. There was no other answer other than I would be happy to judge the competition. They said that they would get the information to me at a later time and give me access to all of the entries when they were compiled. I will say this about them, they are on top of things and were able to give me a schedule of events clear through to the date of my presentation of the awards. I really do love dealing with the Sandhills Photography Club!
Remember that workshop request from the WAG I had been asked to put together in January? Well, it was already time to do that workshop. I had been putting in some long hours getting the presentation done to my liking. I was really proud of how it all came together and was ready to do the workshop. Much to my surprise, there were seven participants in attendance, and several of them were veterans from previous workshops I had offered. To put this in context, the maximum number that I was able to handle in the space was ten, so it was nearly a sellout event. The workshop went off without a hitch unless you count going a little longer than expected. It was probably my most satisfying classroom experience and I would love to do this same class again sometime. Even better was that it gave me the chance to start working with a few folks that would become very important to me over the coming months. My opinion of the WAG greatly changed during this workshop, and I was truly happy to have been given the opportunity to make this one happen. It didn’t even bother me that I had to rush to put it all together.
To round out the month of February, I finally got a box from Nick that contained the ties for my first ever product shoot. The irony that my only experience in this type of photography had been my foray into badge photography with a tie as a background didn’t escape me when I had been considering how to set this up. I went through the content of the box and found that there were 15 individual ties present. We had agreed that I would be shooting them in the same way that they were in the catalog for consistency which meant that my early test shoots were no longer valid. I had to reverse engineer the lighting on these subjects to get it all looking the same. I had to learn how to position the different types of ties to look the same and have the same framing. I ended up using a V-Flat on my posing table as the background while the camera was perched well above on the horizontal arm of a tripod. I had two soft boxes lighting the table for even light with a hint of a shadow. Once I got everything figured out from the camera distance to the focal length, to the lighting, the routine ran something like this. Remove tie from the package, flatten out any creases, fold in the same way, place over the faint markers that I had added to the V-Flat and take two shots just to have a safety image. I shot a total of 30 frames for the 15 items and spent a bit over four hours actively shooting before I did another two hours editing. I put together the bill which represented the full cost of the project along with the needed license for use. It was all sent digitally to Nick the day after I had received the package. I am all about quick turnaround!
My plan had been to discount the shoot depending on exactly who was asking me to do this. Had it been the head honcho wanting a product shoot, I would have discounted it slightly, if it was primarily Nick asking, I would go much lower. The end result was the price was not well received but was commiserate with the work and the quality of the images. I asked Nick if this was a request from him, or if he was relaying a request from the Masons. He said that it was a favor for him, which changed things significantly. After all of the work that he had done on the website, I was happy to do the shoot for free as a trade. It helped that the website was running smoothly at this point, but the end result was I had gained the experience of doing a product shoot and reverse engineering somebody else’s work to create a similar image. I missed out on some significant income, but it was the right thing to do, and I would do it again should the opportunity arise.
When March rolled around, world events were starting to have a huge impact on everyone. At the end of February, Russia invaded the Ukraine which has gone about as opposite from expectations as you could imagine. However, the gas prices that were already creeping up hit a crescendo to about $4.50/gallon almost overnight. That effectively slowed my trekking down and my 4Runner didn’t move much at all during month of March. In fact, I only did three treks in the last part of the month, and they were all close to home to try and save gas. My one other trek was down in the studio where I did some new smoke photography. It was a chance to get some fresh images and to scratch my creative itch a little bit.
If you skimmed that last blog entry, you will have seen something else that I had done earlier in the month as well. While gas prices were expensive, I couldn’t afford to pass up a chance to earn a little money when the opportunity arose. I had the privilege of meeting and talking with Dave Russo, who was a poet and author, as well as a photographer. He contacted me by phone out of the blue and asked about doing headshots with me. I found out that he had been following my work for quite some time and he also subscribed to the ideals of Wabi-Sabi. The similarities of how we viewed the world were hard to ignore. The shoot went fantastic, and it confirmed that photographing men was just easier than photographing women, at least for me. The wonderful part about this session it that it turned into a mentorship session as well as Dave attending two of my workshops later in the year. He also played a valuable part in a big first for me that I’ll talk about later on in this entry. For now, I’ll just say that I was starting to really feel like a portrait photographer because I was seeing a good bit of business coming in for that type of photography. As you might have read in that last linked blog entry, I had already started growing my lens collection so that I had some portrait specific glass to work with. The EF 85mm f/1.4L was my first venture into portrait glass and would not be my last.
One last bit of news from March was in reference to the Photographers of Ashe County book that McFarland Books was putting together. Well, I guess this is a lack of news more than news. As you will recall from the end of 2021, I had entered several of my photographs for review to be included in this book project. The initial project plan was to have notifications sent out to those who had been selected by March of 2022. Instead of getting any notification, I got an email that said that due to a high volume of submissions, they were running behind and would make the announcements as soon as they could. I wasn’t happy with the delay because I was really hoping to be included in the book, but I guess a delay was better than a rejection. I would just have to sit back and wait some more time to learn whether or not I would be included. There was a big part of me that was sure that I would get passed over even though with them selecting 100 photographers my chances had to be pretty good. Time would tell…
With the first of April comes a lot of practical jokes and tricks. The first big news of the month was something that almost sounded like a trick. I was again contacted by Dave about another photo shoot idea. This was going to be something a little more involved than his headshot session. As it turned out, he was the project manager for a book project that was in the works. It was a biography about Joe Gaither who was a very popular coach for youth sports in Roanoke, VA. The book had started from an idea and had grown into a very large project with two different authors. Dave had been brought in to help with the mechanics of putting it all together. Where I came in was with the cover photography. The idea had been passed around to use an existing photo in their collection for the cover, but the vision was for a different look with a full color image set to capture the tone of the book. Dave thought that I was the right guy for the job. Sometimes I question his faith in me, but I was certainly open to the possibility of doing this book shoot. I’ll save the details of how it all worked out since I did a full blog entry talking about the whole process right up to the release of the book in July. It was a whirlwind of planning and activity, but it was so worth it and I’m proud to have been a part of the team to create that book.
If it seems that I haven’t done a lot of talking about my landscape and decay photography, you aren’t missing anything. Gas prices were still very high and getting worse. I didn’t feel like going out to do my exploring like I have in years past. That just meant that I wasn’t getting inspired to create new images, but I was getting out a little bit in preparation for my upcoming Spring workshop. That was really about the only trek that I did during the month. Just because I wasn’t out finding new locations to shoot, or adding new photos to my portfolio doesn’t mean that I was not engaged in photography. Quite the contrary as a matter of fact. I was still working very hard on learning my portrait skills and I was doing some test shoots here and there as the opportunities arose.
One of those test shoots turned into a bodyscape session with Toni. This was something that I had always wanted to try with her, but never really had the right gear. Thanks to my recent GAS (Gear Acquisition Syndrome), I had managed to source the bare minimum that I would need for doing bodyscapes. This was a totally fun and exciting session, and I learned so much about lighting from doing this. The end result was something that I never expected would happen. Toni was thrilled with the photos and thought that they looked amazing. Yes, she is supposed to support me and say nice things about my photography but the truth of the matter is she hates seeing herself in photos, no matter what they look like. For her to have liked how these turned out was something beyond amazing. She shared them with some of her friends and got rave reviews of them as well. Something else that was kind of unexpected was that she had a certain strut to her step after we were done. She was a little more full of herself than normal and that high continued for several days after the session was over.
The more we talked about it, the more she started to push for me to do boudoir photography as part of my portraiture offerings. There is a plot twist that nobody saw coming, but I didn’t reject the idea. We discussed it and started to put things in place for that to be a legit offering from the studio. It was going to mean a little more investment, and a lot more research into how to create the photographs. It was this one test shoot that was more or less playing around with light that turned into a major focus of the Summer as I started to learn more about this kind of photography. I studied a bunch of new books that were purchased on the subject of boudoir and figure photography as well as fine art nude work. None of this was necessarily foreign to me as I have always appreciated the human form. I’ve just never really tried to capture it in a photograph before now. With Toni’s blessing and prodding, I was starting to learn how to capture the lines and curves of the human body in several different ways. This was exhilarating to learn because it was going to open up a lot of new doors for creativity for me and bring in a whole new element to the studio which was still being put together piece by piece.
Even though a lot of my focus at this point was aimed at a specific form of portrait photography, I was reminded in a very large scale that my dominant photographic expression was in the form of landscape work. This reminder came in the form of a simple email from Hampton House Art and Framing which is a gallery I have now worked with for almost five years now. The email was similar to others that I have gotten from them, but they had been few and far between for the last year or so. As I started to read the request for prints, I had to pause on the list of titles that were being asked for. The list just kept going and going for a total of 29 pieces that were needed for one of their clients in Wilmington, NC. This was just the boost to my sales that I needed. I got settled into the process of prepping the images for delivery and had them put together by the end of the night. Again, I try to be efficient with my product delivery. This was single handedly the largest print order I had ever done, and it was the most lucrative as well. In a year that had been kind of stagnant in new landscape photography it was nice to see earnings on images from previous years.
April also saw my first location workshop of the year which was at Stone Mountain. This was a new workshop format for me as I was trying to cover a lot of different aspects of landscape photography from waterfalls to grand landscapes. It was an ambitious concept that would have us hiking over a good portion of the park. There were four in attendance for the day, and it went better than I could have expected. The weather cooperated, we didn’t have too many problems with the crowds, and I was able to get us all the places that I had hoped to see. The workshop was attended by two workshop veterans, Dave who we had met earlier in the year, and a newcomer to my workshop experience. Everyone gelled together wonderfully for a great experience that left us all exhausted by the end of the day.
The last bit of April was all about the books. In the closing days of the month, I finally did the session for the Joe Gaither Book which I have already detailed in a blog entry. While I was still on a high from a very successful shoot, I got word from McFarland Books about entry into their project. After an extra month of waiting, I got word that I had been selected for entry among the photographers along with all five of the images that I had submitted. It was official, I was going to be published as a photographer with a bit of a biography about me and my work. It was going to be an ensemble cast of photographers, but to be selected was an honor. In about a week’s time, I had cemented a book cover and inclusion into a book about photographers in the area. I couldn’t have been happier!
I had to admit, I was full of Spring fever this year. Too many good things were happening, and I was just in a good mood in general. I had been building up my studio pretty heavily over the previous months and I was ready to do an actual boudoir shoot with Toni to see if some of the sets that I had would work out. I had added things like a faux window since I didn’t have a real window in the studio but wanted the ability to do partial silhouettes with light coming through curtains and sheers. I had added a small seat that would give me more posing options as well as some new light modifiers. At the conclusion of this session, I started to tease the idea of doing boudoir sessions in a blog entry. Over the next several blogs, I would causally mention that I was offering boudoir sessions and was looking for some more test shoots. To be honest, it was a little scary for me to put myself out there like this. No matter what the image is that I shoot, it is a part of me, and I feel very exposed with every photo that I shoot. This was the first time that I was asking somebody to be just as exposed in front of my camera and I didn’t take that lightly at all. I had to put it out there though if I hoped to incorporate boudoir into my repertoire. I figured that gradually getting folks that were used to my landscape and decay work accustomed to this new venture would avoid the culture shock in styles.
It was in the early part of May that I went out to McFarland Books to do my interview with them for the book project. That was a very fun process, and they were nice enough to prepare me for the questions that I was going to be asked. Of course, anyone that knows me, knows that I can yammer on and on about photography and related topics until the cows come home (I live in Wilkes and actually know what that means now). It was an exciting experience to know that somebody else was going to be writing about me and my work as that just doesn’t usually happen. I think I was there about an hour and really enjoyed meeting the team that was working on the book. I saw a book on painters that was similar to the how they were going to be doing this book and it is going to be a very high-quality book which I will be proud to be included in. The book is scheduled for publication and release sometime in 2023, so by the time you are reading the next yearly wrap-up, I’ll have a link to the book for you all to see.
If you are getting the idea that things are starting to really move quickly for me, you would be right. The year wasn’t even half over, and it seemed like I was moving in more directions than ever before. At the end of last year, I had released a new mentorship program to replace my more basic one-on-one instruction sessions. The idea was to make it a little easier to determine what to choose and to give a long-term option to save money for more intensive learning. I really didn’t expect the advanced mentorship to be a big seller, but I’ve come to realize that I don’t always have accurate expectations. This was one of those times. It was there just in case the opportunity came up, but here I was already involved with one advanced mentorship that was a distance learning arrangement to help with culling and editing images through Lightroom. By the end of the month, I would be talking with another one of my repeat hourly clients about the benefits of the advanced mentorship. Once he got signed up, I realized that I could only take two advanced mentorships on at a time in order not to shortchange the client. This has become my most active year in terms of mentorships and I have remained quite busy with different clients learning different things. I even had a session bought as a gift for a birthday present for her son later in the Fall. I get a lot of fulfillment out of the mentorship sessions because I get the opportunity to see a photographer grow and get better.
With Spring in full swing by this point, my workshop schedule was heating up. I had two different workshops scheduled for May. One of them was through the Wilkes Art Gallery which was going to be a photowalk through North Wilkesboro looking for shapes and textures on the buildings. This workshop had no participants sign up and was ultimately canceled. This was a huge letdown after an almost full house for the Exposure Workshop that I had done just a few months before. The other workshop was one I was doing based on my Composition workshop I had done the previous year for the WAG. This was a half day workshop based at Doughton Park on the Blue Ridge Parkway. I think I had eight slots open for the workshop and ended up filling six of them. On the day of the workshop, I had one back out due to medical issues which left me with five. Even with some rain early on in the workshop it went very well. The crew was fantastic and included several workshop veterans as well as two of my mentorship clients. It was a unique experience being a half day workshop, but I have to admit I like the format and plan on doing more of these during 2023. They are less time intensive, more accessible, and cheaper to sign up for. I had a lot of positive feedback from those in attendance about the length and the fact that a full day workshop might be a little too much for folks.
Towards the end of the month, I had some time to head out to West Jefferson to look at the Catchlight Gallery which was recommended by Kim Hadley with McFarland Books. As I’m sure you all know at this point, I have toyed with having my work displayed and sold in a gallery for many years now. The problem is that most galleries treat photography like red headed step children and don’t give it the respect that it necessarily deserves. Catchlight, on the other hand is run by photographers and only deals in photography. As with the Dan River Art Market I was a member of years ago, it is a co-op where the artists that display also work there on a limited basis. This isn’t something that is foreign to me, and I’m more than happy to put a little labor into a project that will result in some sales for me. I was really happy to finally make it out there and talk with the owner of the place. I learned about displaying there and how much it would cost. I also found out that there were no openings until the beginning of 2023. I visited for about an hour and talked with some of the photographers as well as a few of the customers. I got some rough information on how much it would cost to show there and what I would have to price my work at to make it worth my while. I asked for information to be sent to my email so that I could read through the agreements and look at the fine print. It was something that I was entertaining for sure. However, I never did receive any of the information or any further contact from the gallery. I could have reached back out to them, but I took it as a sign that I didn’t need to get involved with them at this time.
By the end of the month, I had stepped up to a different ledge and had jumped in head first. This was the ledge that represented a decision that I had been fighting for a year or more. As you have noticed by most of this yearly account, I have been doing a lot of work with portraiture and that has represented a large chunk of my income. Because that was now a valid moneymaker for me, I had to look at how efficient I was with the process. My DSLR camera was holding me back in terms of speed and consistency, although it was not the camera’s fault as much as it was just my own slowness with the camera. I could have drilled skills into my hands until I had a better flow to the techniques involved, or I could make a decision to embrace some new technology that would ultimately get me even more accuracy and consistency with my photos. I chose the latter because I was going to have to eventually make the jump to mirrorless. I had started to collect new prime lenses for my 5DS R but found that I couldn’t use them to their full advantage because I would keep missing the focus due to slight movement of me or the subject. Instead of throwing more money towards technology that didn’t help me, I decided to put my money and effort into the new EOS R5 body that would make my life easier and allow me to be more efficient and effective as a portrait photographer. That opened the flood gates for a whole new camera kit that was going to be used exclusively for portrait work. It was an investment into my business for something that was hopefully going to become sustainable income. I expect that this gear will have paid for itself by this Summer, but I’m happy to say that I’ve already paid off 2/3 of the entry price into the new camera system.
By Summer, it was time to judge the Decay and Abandoned photo contest held by the Sandhills Photography Club. I’m not sure what I was thinking when I signed up for this, but it was much harder than I thought it would be. There were almost 60 entries among three different classifications. My judging was not just to select winners but to give feedback on each photo. There was a grading rubric that was provided that covered the different criteria that each photo was to be graded on. I had a scale of 1-5 to arrive at a final score. Not only did I have to assign a point value for each photo, I had to support my findings. As you look back over the 6850 words (as of this draft) that I have written about the year so far, you will see that I can get quite wordy (shut up Toni, I hear you agreeing loudly). Well, my critiques of the images turned out to be about a page in length each. Doing the math, you can see that I was talking about 60 pages of information on these photos along with suggestions for improvement. It took the better part of three days to put it together. In the middle of the whole process, the septic tank backed up and I had started a bucket brigade to keep the overflow of water from entering the studio, but it was a good thing that I was down here writing reviews on that Sunday, or I would have missed the fact that the washing machine was chucking water into the studio bathroom quicker than I could sop it up in paper towels and a bucket. Outside of that little interruption, the judging process went very well. Sadly, there was not enough time to talk about all the photos like I wanted to on the night of the judging since I only had an hour to present.
The other news that came out of June was my first official boudoir test shoot with somebody other than Toni. The subject was a volunteer that had expressed a willingness during the composition workshop the previous month. She also had connections with a couple of others who might be willing to be models for a test shoot. Things were getting real at this point, and I had to get my mind wrapped around providing a wonderful session and great photographs. As I was going through the ideas for the different shots with her, I realized that I was going to be very limited with what I could do compared to what she was wanting from the session. I needed to have a bed for boudoir photography, but I had been putting that off until now. I went ahead and sourced a nice inflatable mattress and picked out some sheets that would work with a variety of looks and repurposed a blanket for a bed spread. The result was nothing special, but I could make it look much more impressive with the photography. The main thing was it filled a void that I had, and it didn’t break the bank which was the goal until I started to earn more income through this type of photography.
The test shoot went well, and I finally had some sample images to share to help get the boudoir business off the ground. It was going to take some getting used to for me to really get comfortable with this type of photography, but I really do enjoy the process behind it from the storyboarding to the set design, to the actual photography and editing. I wish that it was something that I could just wake up and decide to do like a landscape, but this is just not that kind of photography. In fact, I have kind of learned through the remainder of the year that finding subjects to photograph is not all that easy to do when you don’t have a lot of friends. The one thing that I really didn’t consider when I set out on this venture to do boudoir and figure studies was that in order for me to shoot and try new things, I was going to have to hire models which would put even more of a financial burden on the business investment that I had already started. This is something that I am still struggling with and having to wait until I get caught up from my gear expenses before I can even think about hiring models to come in. That being said, if you would like to volunteer for a boudoir or figure study session where you get the photos for free, let me know. I’m would enjoy the collaboration.
Even though I kind of hit a roadblock in my boudoir photography, I have been finding a lot of work with my other portrait photography. You might recall this blog entry from July when I did my first ever engagement session with April and Kevin. April is a friend of Toni’s and when Kevin asked for her hand, she wanted me to photograph the engagement photos. It wasn’t anything that I had done before, but I agreed to it as long as everyone was fully aware that I was going to be winging the whole thing. By the end of the session, I had more photos that I had ever shot at one time and ended up with 85 photographs to deliver to my clients. Those 85 photos represented around 16 hours’ worth of work, not to mention travel and planning time. They were unlike anything that I had ever created, and the editing style was something that they requested, which I had to learn how to do. It was one of those times in my photographic career that I felt like I could do anything. That might have been a bad thing though because by the time the last photo was delivered, I had all but agreed to shoot their wedding. Since that point, Toni and April have been after me to do the wedding photography and as if I had a choice in the matter, I’ve agreed. I’m still not going to be a wedding photographer, but I will be theirs it would appear. At least it is a small ceremony with about 10 people in attendance. I should be able to muddle through that easy enough. At least I know that both her and Kevin are very photogenic, and I won’t have any issues with them which takes a lot of the stress away. Now, if we could just get a bridal boudoir session scheduled before the wedding???
The rest of July was pretty much uneventful with the exception of the Joe Gaither Story being released for sale. I was one of the first to get a copy and I found it a very good read. While the designer did some cropping to my images which I didn’t care for, I thought that the overall impact of the photos that were used for the book was right where we wanted them to be. It was nice to see a book of this caliber being produced with some images of mine. It was a very nice departure from my first foray into book covers where the book was full of bad grammar, and errors. This was a much higher end experience, and I was happy to be a part of it.
By August, I was getting tired of the heat and was happy to stay inside doing studio sessions. One of which was so much fun because it was a chance to go a fashion inspired theme which I had not done since my first portrait test shoot in 2021. I’ll be honest, I overextended myself with this one, but that was a good thing actually. I learned what I was capable of as far as the duration of a shoot. This one went for about four hours, and we were both feeling it by the end. There were three outfit changes, along with three complete sets that had to be built. It was the first time that I had two different sets going at the same time on different ends of the studio. We did everything from high key images like you see here, to low key, dramatic lighting at the end. There was even a more formal portion in the middle that was done with a brand-new concept for a background that included a single drape for a splash of color and a different texture. It was a great learning experience for me and allowed me the chance to see where I needed to grow as a photographer. I also learned how much time was really invested in a shoot of this magnitude. It really put into perspective how much I needed to be charging. That four-hour session pretty much filled two complete days’ worth of work between getting the sets built and then editing the images after the fact. I’m not a cookie cutter photographer which means it takes me longer to work through a session than your typical photo studio.
With all the portrait sessions building up, I decided to kind of lean on social media to help get the word out. While I have a portion of this website dedicated to portraits and boudoir, I didn’t want to dilute what I had created here around my landscape and decay work. In order to avoid that and give me a place to post the photos that I was creating around this genre, I turned back to Facebook once again. I created Greg Kiser Portraits to go alongside my Greg Kiser Photography page and started to dump most of the photos that I had shot where I had model releases signed. I’m sure Nick appreciates me for keeping that many new files off of the website for storage concerns. I try to behave when it comes to keeping the website efficient. The return to Facebook was not something that I was overly happy with though. It meant building a new audience for a new page which is always a slow process. The idea was to bring more potential clients around to looking at my work and hopefully booking me in the future.
By the end of August, I got an all too familiar email from one of the new directors at the Wilkes Art Gallery. I was being asked to judge the Blue Ridge Overview once again. I’m sure you will remember how that went last year when I decided that it was going to be too expensive for me to justify with the very real possibility that I would be saddled with more than 20 large prints to store and try to sell on my own after the fact. My gut told me to just go with the same answer that I had given them the previous year because that came with a lot of thought. The fact that this was a new person gave me hope that I might get some different answers to my concerns. There was a good deal of back and forth and I was actually considering doing it with my existing work which was smaller than they ideally wanted. However, it would allow me to avoid extra costs with the exception of adding just a few new pieces to my collection. The money spent would not be terrible, although at the time, I was still about $14,000 in the hole from building the portrait end of the business which caused me pause to commit to another grand or so in investment. There was no guarantee that any of my pieces would sell, and while I was OK with that, I had a hard time stomaching what I would have to price the pieces at to sell since the gallery was going to get a 40% commission on the sales. I’m already expensive enough when it comes to prints, especially prints ready to hang, but with that kind of commission, I would lose the actual cost to make the pieces unless I almost doubled the prices.
To put that into perspective, the 13×19″ prints that I have on hand as inventory would typically sell at $500.00. The framing alone runs about $175-250 depending on options selected. Then the actual print cost is factored in with paper and ink used. This is before you factor in my time to go and get the print framed and then pick it up. At some point, I do expect to get paid for my creativity behind the actual photograph. A 40% cut off of that $500 price would leave me with $300.00 to bring home to pay for everything. Essentially, I would be giving it away at that point because remember I am in this to make money from my craft. The more I thought about it, the more I just couldn’t do it. I offered some alternative plans since I really did want to be a juror for the event, I just couldn’t afford to do a showing. It would also make the house look very bare for about two months while the pieces were in the custody of the gallery. I talked with several folks with knowledge of how these things go and not a one of them said it would be a good idea to go forward with it. The decision was made to decline the gracious offer once again. As of November 4th, they still don’t have a juror lined up for the Overview which happens in late January.
After going around and around with the WAG judging for another year, I was not feeling all that great about things. I was actually feeling rather defeated in a lot of ways. I knew exactly what this would lead to, so I needed to get ahead of it before it turned into a funk. Part of the problem was I was seeing a huge decline in website activity because I had been focusing on doing portraits for so long at this point that the content wasn’t being updated as it once was. I needed to do something to get things rolling again, and the easiest thing to do was to turn to social media once again. I was looking at the images stored on my phone that I had been keeping there since leaving social last year and saw that I had 243 photos unshared on either Facebook or Instagram. I had no real reason to keep them on the phone except that was the pattern that I had developed for sharing and had just kept putting them on my phone after the edits were done.
I debated for several days before sitting down in the studio and working out a gameplan for how I was going to do social once again. I decided to start posting images in clumps on Facebook and Instagram starting where I had left off. I would continue posting each day by sharing 3-6 images until I got to around 30 or so in the que. Then I would reduce the posting to one a day which should allow for a regular daily posting across both platforms. I wouldn’t share to the groups, as I had once done, because I saw no value in that since all the group rules prevented offering things for sale. I had no interest in sharing for the sake of likes and comments. I was sharing to boost traffic to the website and to make potential sales.
The initial boost was good, and I saw some immediate benefits in terms of workshop admissions based on a presence on social media. I was still rewarding people for visiting the website because they would get to see the newest photos quicker through the blogs, and each older photo that was posted on social would link back to that particular blog entry. That boosted exposure for the blogs which had not seen nearly as much activity in the past. I didn’t want to fall back into the routine of feeding the machine like I had done up until last year, but this limited presence on social seemed to be working and accomplishing the goals that I had in mind for it. As long as it remained a supporting player to the website and not a primary focus, I was happy.
The rest of the month was spent concentrating on an advanced mentorship that I had been working with since May. Now that the temperatures were cooling, we were able to get out in the field and put things to work that we had been talking about for most of the Summer. It was great to focus on the teaching aspect of photography because I didn’t have to feel overly creative or motivated to help others that did have that drive. Even when I don’t want to create personally, I see ways of improving images and can move right into teaching mode. That usually has the side benefit of getting my own creative juices flowing which resulted in the photo of the barn above.
On the teaching front, I was excited about getting back into my workshops once again. I try not to do them during the Summer because I just don’t like the heat, and there are generally more crowds in the places that I like to instruct at. I was looking forward to the Fall Landscape Workshop which had been in the works since Spring. I had two participants signed up for this workshop and I was pushing to get more added. As I typically do a month beforehand, I sent out a long email with information about the workshop and how I expected the day to go. There were handouts included as well as a basic questionnaire so that I had a good idea what I needed to concentrate on for the workshop in terms of topics. Within a couple of days after sending that email out, I got word that both participants needed to cancel for different reasons. Well, I was a month out from a workshop that was going to be a lot of effort on my part, and I had nobody signed up. I considered leaving it open and trying to get folks to sign up to salvage the day, but there just wasn’t enough time or interest to justify it. The worst-case scenario was that I would get just a single person to sign up which would be a lot of effort for very little pay. More than likely, I would end up canceling the workshop at the last minute due to nobody signing up. I decided to pull the plug on the whole thing to save the stress.
On the other hand, I was getting very good news from the upcoming Waterfall Workshop and filled the last slot during the month of September which was still over two months ahead of the workshop. The Waterfall Workshop is one of my favorites simply because it was the first workshop that I put on in 2018 and it has been a favorite among participants through the years. I’ve had to cancel it once due to no interest, but I’ve routinely been able to fill between two and five slots for this one. I now had six lined up for the workshop and that was as many as I could safely take due to the space and hazards present.
When October rolled around, I should have been all over getting out and photographing the changing leaves, but there was something that just wasn’t clicking with me on that front. I was enjoying seeing the colors, but I had very little interest in photographing them which was odd. It occupied so much of my mind that I decided to write about it in the Behind the Camera series. I really only went out a single time to get the Fall colors specifically, and that was more because the weather was right for a mentorship session talking about composition.
I was also back to my portrait work during the month of October as a fellow photographer friend of mine, Bob Roffman, wanted to memorialize his time working as an Equine Physical Therapist before he retired from it. Bob is a veteran of two of my workshops and has done mentorship sessions with me in the past as well. I submit this photo of Bob to prove that even though I happened to lose him while at Linville Falls, he is safe and well. The rescue effort was minimal to locate him, and he is no worse for the wear. In all seriousness, it was totally my fault that we got separated and I learned my lesson from that experience, so I don’t suspect I’ll lose anyone again. The portrait shoot with him was a new experience for me and one that I learned a lot from. It was a fast-moving session and I had about two days’ worth of editing to do from the four hours we were together thanks to the nearly 1000 frames I shot. He was so happy with the results that we are talking about doing it again maybe this year.
If you will remember back to the beginning of the year, I was having some issues with the website that were all worked out by February. For most of the year things had been working smoothly and there had been no accessibility issues. I had kind of forgot about the whole troubleshooting game with the website until October hit. I realized that the email notifications weren’t going out with my blog posts. This was rather problematic because I was actually doing multi-part entries during this time due to so many new photographs being added from each trek I went on. It was kind of disheartening to write several 6000-word entries and have nobody know that they were there. Sure, I posted on social media, but the way that the algorithms went posts sharing a link weren’t pushed out to those that were following the page. These link shares were getting about a dozen views out of nearly 15,000 followers.
That email snag went on for about a month. The odd thing was an email would occasionally go out a week after the publishing date. There were emails to the vendor to try and figure out what was going on, and Nick was back at work trying to fix in on our end. The end result was the website was so big that it was locking up the backup program which was affecting the email subscriber lists. I suspect that at some point I’m going to have to address the size of this website and the content that is here. I just don’t want to lose the old blog entries which need the photos to go along with them. This part of my photography has been a labor of love because the time spent doing these blogs is something that I never get paid for, and it represents months out of the year that I am locked into typing on this keyboard. Unlike your favorite YouTuber, I have not monetized this blog and I don’t get paid by clicks. These blogs are my gift to you.
I was able to end the month on a high note. I had another portrait shoot that had been in the works for a couple of months. I was going to be photographing a Pastor from Winston-Salem for a large photo that would be displayed in the new church when they located a suitable building. This was an interesting session because I had very little input as far as what was wanted from the photo. I was left with knowing the basics like the Pastor would be in a robe with purple trim and we wanted something from waist up. The rest was pretty much left up to me. I had about a week to figure out how I wanted to photograph him and decided that I wanted something with a lot of visual presence. I was picturing a dark image to go along with the robe and using purple in the background to compliment the robe. I had all the pieces put together in my head for how I wanted to light this photo, and the day before the shoot, I set the studio up like this. What you don’t see here was a fill flash that I added on the morning of the shoot right at the edge of the stage centered on the front edge, pointed up. Other than that detail, this is what my clients came in to see. I knew that I was going to surprise them with the visual effects I had in store because the background looks very blah with it being just gray seamless paper. I knew that the flash right in front of the paper held a trick that they were going to love. That trick was a gel which was designed to add color and a gradient to the background.
The Pastor got dressed and ready for the photo which was going to be a fairly simple pose that was suitable for hanging in the church. I double checked the flash exposures based on his height and took a test photo. I had his wife come over and look to see what the set looked like with the gel, and she was amazed. Knowing that I was on the right track, we moved our attention on the pose which went very quick. Once I had a photo that I thought he would like, I had him come and look at it. We were all in agreement that this was going to work great for the church. Now we were moving into the second part of the session which would be pictures of both of them, but before we did that, his wife wanted to get some more photos of him doing his thing. This was the part that I really enjoyed because we were able to get into the creative end of portraiture.
What you see here is pretty much right out of the camera. I think that this took the least amount of editing of any photo I’ve ever shot. It all just came together beautifully with the way that the lights were set up. You can see the effect of that gel on the background and how it completely changes the entire look of the scene. This is the kind of portrait that I love to make. I want all of the elements to work together from the color theme, to the composition, to the story. When I look back to my first attempt at this type of lighting from the previous year, I can tell how much I’ve grown as a photographer. This was one of those shoots that just left me feeling wonderful. Of course, we went on for about three hours, and there were 36 images delivered as proofs the following day. This was how I wanted my portrait sessions to go and will work to that end as best I can.
By the time that November rolled around, it seemed as though things were starting to calm down a bit. However, it was the start of my workshop season and while my Fall Landscape workshop fell through, the Decay workshop was in full swing. I had six signed up for this one and could only manage a total of eight, so I would say it was pretty full. Leading up to the workshop, the weather reports were showing partly cloudy skies with moderate temperatures. I could not have asked for better considering that I scheduled this back in the Summer, long before any forecasts were available. The morning of the workshop. I drove through thick fog all the way to East Bend and found that those conditions held where we were going to be spending the day. It was even more perfect conditions than I had thought we were going to have. The only damper came in the form of a last-minute cancellation which brought the group down to five. The remaining five were all veterans of previous workshops and we all gelled so well together through the day. This was the first workshop I have done that lasted from pretty much sun-up to sun-down with only a short break for lunch. We stayed so busy I didn’t even have time for getting any of my own photos either before or after the workshop. Having been inspired to create my own images with the conditions, I returned a few days later under similar weather patterns and spent a few hours capturing some of the new additions to the property.
Speaking of my educational offerings, I found myself in an interesting situation by mid-month. You will recall that around the end of 2021, I revamped my individual instruction programs and created a Mentorship Program. There were various levels to that, which culminated with the advanced level. I’ll be totally honest with you about this. It was designed as something that I offered, but really didn’t think that I would be doing because of the price point. For me, it just seemed a bit exorbitant, but fell in line with the pricing that I was seeing from other mentorships offering the same thing. Well, it wasn’t but a few months into the year that I was talking with a client about some hourly mentorship sessions and ended up selling her on the idea of the advanced one. I was floored that this was actually happening. By the time I got good and involved with her, I had another client that had been doing several of the hourly sessions and I approached him about the benefits of doing the advanced program. Just like that, I had two different advanced mentorships going which I found out was all that I could handle from a time and attention standpoint. Both of these clients opted to renew their mentorships at the conclusion of the allotted time which spoke volumes as to the value that I was offering through this program. By the end of the Decay Workshop, there were two other clients that were now wanting to do the advanced mentorship. I now had a waiting list for something that I really didn’t think was going to be anything more than just something that I offered. I wish I could adequately describe how humbling this is. I love teaching this craft, and I think that I’m pretty decent at it, but to have a waiting list for something at this price is beyond words.
November also saw more activity from Hampton House, which was now split into two different companies. There was a commercial framing side, and the art gallery side. Both of these entities were working with me which was wonderful. I picked up three orders from them during the month which added to the already record year for sales through them. Most of the sales had been of images in my coastal collection which I haven’t updated in a couple of years now. I keep meaning to get back to the coast for some more photography, but every time I consider that option, gas prices spike to where I get a little gun-shy about going. There have also been scheduling conflicts between portrait shoots and different mentoring obligations which have kept me closer to home. I’m hoping that in the early Spring before the crowds start to head that way that I can get back to the coast for some new images to add to the collection to add to the choices available.
In the last few days of the month, I had the wild idea to go for a little photo walk through North Wilkesboro. I wasn’t going for any particular images, just for the experience of pushing my creative energy a little bit in a setting that I don’t often find myself. The nine new images that resulted from this simple walk were some that I really liked, but somehow didn’t really fit into my portfolio as it was situated. I liked the images quite a bit and wanted to have them easily located within my gallery but didn’t want them just jammed in with photos that they really didn’t share a quality with. After a night of sleeping on it, I decided that the best solution would be to open a new gallery room. I wasn’t really sure how to describe the photos that would be inside, so I just went with the obvious “Photo Walks” as a place to put images that I just stumbled upon that struck me as beautiful. These images didn’t have to fit a certain theme and could be quite a bit different from my normal images. As I was considering putting this gallery together, it made sense to absorb one of the other galleries that I started a while back. My Signs gallery is no more because I just don’t photograph enough signs to justify them having their own location within the gallery. They do, however, fit nicely in the new Photo Walks gallery and I have the opportunity to bring more of them into that gallery should I shoot them in the future.
As we started to close out the year, the last workshop of 2022 took place at Hanging Rock. The Winter Waterfall Workshop is the one that I did first back in 2018 to get my feet wet in the workshop world. I’ve done it a number of times over the years, but this is the first time that I have had every spot filled. Something else that makes this special is that five of the six participants were veterans of previous workshops which means I’m doing something right with these workshops. The weather could not have been any better with cool temperatures and completely overcast skies. It was the first workshop there where I had to bypass one of the waterfalls because we had been covering so much information on the early waterfalls we started to run out of time. The more I do these, the more information I tend to cram into the day which is a good and bad thing.
After the workshop, I was able to get back on track with capturing my own photos once again. My creativity slowly returned after several very fast paced months in the creativity department. The following day, I was back at it once again with John for another mentoring session taking advantage of some unique weather conditions. I actually thought that this was going to be the last trek for the year. It was far past time for me to get the truck cleaned up and Ton’s car was not in much better shape. The following two days I spent a total of eight hours outside in the low 40’s getting them all cleaned back up. Just a couple of days later, I paid the price for all the time I spent out in the cold with a cold that was harder hitting than any I can recall. It knocked me off my feet until pretty much, Christmas. With family in town and a blanket of extreme cold still in place, I didn’t venture out again for the following two weeks. However, on Friday, the 30th, I had decent weather and a desire to get out for that one last trek. I went back out to Jonesville and started work on a location that I had just found on that last trek with John. This was going to be my last trek of the year, but the last photos that I shot took place the following day on the last day of the year. It was a portrait shoot here in the studio that wrapped up the year. I can’t complain about it though, and it was quite fitting after how much energy I have put into developing my studio this year.
This has been a wild ride of a year. I’ve managed to run two different photography programs through most of the year which include different marketing, mindsets, and even equipment. I’ve managed to improve on both fronts and still create significant images from the year. From a business standpoint, I’ve had the highest grossing year to date with my primary income coming from education. Right at half of my yearly income has stemmed from various mentorship and workshop experiences that I have offered. About 20% of the income has come from portrait work which has really picked up over previous years. The surprise is the 10% that print sales made up. The vast majority of these have been through Hampton House as I have not had many direct sales at all in 2022. What I had designed as my largest source of income has become such a small part of what I do that it is insignificant these days. The thing with business is, you have to put the energy into what is working at the time. It would appear that I am more of an educator than anything at this point in my career which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I enjoy sharing what I have learned and seeing it help others. In that light, I have already released some of the early workshops for 2023 and have quite a few others that I am working on. There will be a difference this year as most of the workshops are going to be geared towards more rudimentary topics than before. I plan on looking at a lot of the basics in photography to bring photography to more and more people. These will largely be half day workshops, and I’ll have a couple of full day workshops added in for the more advanced photographers among us. I’m looking forward to seeing how this is going to go as the year gets rolling.
I’m also looking at a lot of what I do with the mentorships as I try to make those programs more beneficial to the participant. I have really found a love for this part of what I do. Workshops can be frustrating for me because I am trying to work with everyone on an individual basis while not neglecting anyone. I end up feeling like I leave so much on the table by doing this. The mentorships, on the other hand, allow me the ability to work one on one with the client and really go through the process of photography from start to finish. It is more rewarding for me as the instructor, and usually more effective for the student.
I’m thinking that this year, I am going to take on a personal project of some sort. I don’t know if it will be dealing with my landscape and decay work or if it will be a studio project yet. The idea appeals to me because it will give my work some direction and a purpose beyond just getting the photo. I’ve done the wake up, go out, get pictures, edit pictures, blog about them, and repeat cycle for far too many years now. I started it back in the AOL Hometown days, and that model has followed me all the way here, some 18 years later. I want to do something more meaningful with my work, and since I am not doing much in the way of print sales, I am not really pressed to add new images to my collection like I have been in the past.
I really do appreciate all of you who are still here reading along. I know that this has been a long entry, and it feels that way for me as well. I’ve been working on it for the last two months. There really has been a lot that has gone one behind the scenes which I think needs to be documented in some way since not everything is a trek. I think that for the first time ever, some of the biggest parts of my photographic journey have existed outside of the blog. I’m still very much a struggling artist at this point and while this year marks the highest gross income I’ve ever pulled in, it is also the biggest loss I’ve recorded thanks to building my portraiture business. I have every intention of turning a profit for the first time in 2023 because I think that I have everything in place to be able to do that.
Be sure to join me next month as I take you on a tour of the studio. It is by no means complete, but I finally have the ability to do a lot of different things in it, and I can do small tweaks as the jobs call for it now instead of trying to get a workable platform up and running as I have been doing. The studio has been a long time in development, and I am rather proud of how it has turned out and what i am able to accomplish in it. I do look forward to sharing it with you in February.
Until then….. Happy New Year!!!!
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