You’ve got to get feedback, otherwise you never know how much you suck or what you need to do to improve.

The other day I submitted my portfolio to The Creative Book, yet another networking site for photographers and other creatives. I did it on a whim because it looked like a useful resource; I didn’t really look at the work that was already up there. Which is good, in a way, because I probably wouldn’t have submitted my work had I actually known what kind of talent the people at The Creative Book were used to working with.

After a few hours’ waiting, I got this response:

Thanks for taking the time to sign up for The Creative Book. We’ve taken a look at the work you sent over and we’re really sorry to say that it’s not quite hitting the spot.

It wasn’t an easy decision to make but we don’t feel you’re quite right for the site just yet. If at some point you’d like to send over some other pieces, we’d love to take a second look and hopefully welcome you on board.

It stung – of course it did. But I knew that I needed to know more, so I sent them an email asking for more feedback. This is what they replied with:

Feedback, feedback, feedback…

The main thing is that you need to be careful about who you work with. Pick and choose the right people to test with when it comes to producing work. Some of the make up artist you worked with seemed to have just gone over the top with their kit.*

FInd some soul. Right now there’s a lack of life in your work, can’t tell whether it’s because some of your work is a bit flat, but it doesn’t excite us. The technical stuff isn’t something we’re concerned with. We want work to evoke something you know.

That doesn’t mean that all your work is bad. But if we edited your portfolio you’d only be left with a couple of images if we we’re being realistic. You’ve got a fewimages that are actually quite nice. Just not enough stuff to make us overlook some of the stuff we wouldn’t touch with a barge pole.

Does that help? it’s about being really honest with yourself..

When someone critiques your work there’s a strong temptation to defend it. You want to fight for what you’ve made, because it took a little bit of your soul to make it; if the process of making your own portfolio is like choosing which of your children to shoot the having someone else critique it is like trying to dive in front of a machine gun to save your kids from harm.

But there are rules. When you get critique you can’t argue. You can’t complain. You don’t get to explain your motivations for a photograph, or tell the funny story about what happened on the day. You just take it, say thank you, and learn from it (even if what you learn is that you don’t agree with that particular critic).

Looking at my fashion / beauty portfolio with fresh eyes, I can see what the folks over at The Creative Book meant. It does lack life, somehow. And there are beauty shots in there that, whilst they looked good to my eyes when they were shot, no longer fit with what I’m trying to do.

So I’m going to pull the images. In fact I’m going to pull the whole portfolio for now; it needs reworking and it needs new life breathing into it. There is good work in there, work I’m proud of doing, and I don’t regret a single one of those shots. Thinking about it, every single image in that portfolio bar one is more than a year old. That’s too long a time for a portfolio to sit still, so it’s way past time to update it. And so I shall.

Dynamism, life, emotion, energy. Those are the adjectives I’m going to strive for (I know this because I’ve just written them down now; they may change). I need to work harder to find those things in my work, stop worrying about the technical stuff – I’ve got the technical stuff down for now; it’s time to start working on connecting with my audience.

And yes, it hurt to read this. Dear sweet muses it hurt. It hits right to the core of you, and you wonder whether you should carry on.

And then you do.

*To be clear: any makeup artist I’ve ever worked with has done what they’ve done either because I directed them to or because I didn’t direct them enough. They’re all awesome and any fault with the images is mine not theirs.

Sometimes you find yourself reaching for a particular look in your images, only to find that no matter what you do, you can’t find it. And then something in you tells you to let go and just try something a bit different, and lo and behold you suddenly get exactly what you want.

Case in point: the image above. It was a horrible windy day in Lancashire that I shot Katy Pickles – whose self-titled debut E.P is available for download on Bandcamp now. I knew exactly what I wanted with this shot. I was reaching for that Vanity Fair, Annie Leibowitz, painterly feel to things, though I didn’t know what that actually meant. My normal approach to an outdoor image is to expose for the sky and light for the subject – particularly at sunset. On this day, though, the sky was utterly boring – an even, featureless pale grey to go with the horrendous wind. So instead of exposing for the sky, which I knew I’d fix later with something from my sky library, I exposed for the rest of the scene: the greens, the greys, the yellows of a windswept hillside. And then once that was done I’d a light for Katy, who was far too dark in the frame.

The light was a Bowens Gemini 400 in a 4-foot octabank. Normally I don’t reach for that modifier immediately – I prefer to go for something a bit more wieldy like a small softbox or an umbrella – but as it happened I’d forgotten to bring any suitable mounts with me to the shoot – all I had that fitted on the light was the octa and some grids. I didn’t want grids for this – too dramatic – so the octa it had to be. Placed slightly in front of Katy and firing directly across her it acted a bit like window light, wrapping around her to the far side of her face and giving that soft, well balanced, even fill light. Because it was to one side, it also brought the textures out in the wood on which she was sitting (I learned from Drew Gardner that lighting textures from the side is what makes them look so cool).

So there you go: a combination of accidents and a willingness to do things differently and let go of preconceptions, and I’ve now worked out how to achieve a look that I really like. That’s how it goes sometimes. In fact, that’s how it goes at the best of times.

There are two strands to putting a print portfolio together, as far as I can tell. Strand one is that about which I’ve already spoken: picking the images that should go in your book (and more importantly excluding the images that shouldn’t go in your book). Strand two is all about the presentation of your work once you’ve picked it. I see no reason not to have both strands of thinking running at the same time. After all, where’s the fun in picking your images if you can’t get the book together once you’re done picking? (And I know myself well enough to know that if I didn’t have something to put the images in at the end of it all I’d likely just keep tweaking the selection and wanting to shoot new stuff for it forever).

Everyone’s seen the black leather portfolio book. It’s standard, you can get one in just about any size you like, and as a result it’s relatively cheap. To me it’s as dull as hell. I want something that will stand out when it’s in a pile with other portfolio books stacked up on a photo editor’s desk.

So that option’s out. What else is there?

Well, the short version is: tonnes. Take a look at No Plastic Sleeves. Pretty much anything you can think of can be made, as far as portfolio books go. Custom book cloths, aluminium or stainless steel covers, bamboo or some hardwood or… well, the list goes on and on. I shan’t waste time repeating them all here.

Myself, I’ve been torn between three different options, each of which has it’s own merits. In short, they are:

• A Pina Zangaro (or some other manufacturer) portfolio screw-post book, either with polythene sleeves or adhesive hinges; images printed on a paper of my choice.
  • Pros: Solid, eye-catching (for the most part) and allows laser-etching of a logo onto the cover. A nice way to make a statement about your brand. I’m a big fan of Fuji Museum Rough paper for fine art prints, too.
  • Cons: Price. The covers on their own will set you back ~£80 for an 11×14″ portrait book. And the prints – because I don’t own a large-format printer – will cost ~£10 apiece from Loxley Colour, my preferred printers*; I want a minimum of 20 images in the book, so that’s ~£300 per portfolio. Finally, the plastic sleeves look awful. They add glare to the images and the anti-glare ones look terrible, from what I’ve seen. The flexible hinges look fine, but it means sticking things to your prints that you can’t later take off easily.
• A Blurb print-on-demand book, using their ProLine Pearl or ProLine Uncoated paper
  • Pros: Blurb make great photobooks; I’ve bought a few in my time. I did a test book of some of the headshots I’d done for Canonical (on which more in another post) and the quality is fantastic; reasonably heavy paper at 190gsm, no noticeable bleed-through between double-sided prints, and very reasonable prices. Oh, and you can have ImageWrap covers, too, which means that you can use whatever design you like on the cover.
  • Cons: Well, I’m not sure. The prints in the test book that I ordered seem slightly desaturated compared to version on my screen, but I haven’t yet had a chance to view them in good, balanced daylight (because good daylight is hard to find at the moment. It’s March, people, and it’s like living in the arctic). More importantly, I’ve read mixed reviews about Blurb’s quality control… But I’ve got no actual evidence of problems there.
• A custom book; paper of my choice, cover materials of my choice… Everything of my choice.
  • Well, yeah, this would be lovely, but honestly the problem here is that there are just too many choices and nowhere to start. Maybe, in a couple of years, I’ll engage a designer and put together some custom books that blow everything I’ve done before out of the water. But not today.

With all that in mind, I’m currently leaning towards Blurb books. 11×13″ Landscape – almost A3-sized – good prints on very good paper; not a terrible place to start. Three copies of the book will cost less than £200 including shipping, which is excellent value for money. But there’s something very lovely about the much more expensive – but far higher quality – idea of individual prints on fine art paper in between cool covers that’s also very, very tempting.

The point, ultimately, is to have something that makes a photo editor or art buyer sit up and take notice when it lands on their desk. Will a Blurb book do that? With the right cover design, well, maybe. Would a customised Pina Zangaro cover do it? Again, maybe. But I have to remember that right now the point is to be getting something together that I can put out in the world, and that actually what will make the most people sit up and take notice is, well, me. Meeting people, networking, and getting the introductions that I need to the people I need to meet.

*Someone’s going to suggest using ProAm for printing, so I’ll head this off now: ProAm are great, they really are. They’re reliable and very reasonably priced because they expect you to do the work of colour-correcting your images. However, they don’t do prints on fine-art papers like Loxley do and their 11×14″ and A3 prints are printed on 12″ wide paper; you have to trim it manually.

Model Erin Ochoa, as shot in Austin in January

One of the things I find most irritating about myself is my tendency to get stuck in a sort of inertia of ideas – that phase of thinking about doing something and thinking about how cool it would be to do that something without, you know, actually getting off your arse and doing it. Procrastination is involved, yes, and a large degree of wanting to wait til the Right Moment (which is in itself a nonsensical thing to do; there are no Right Moments, there is only Now). But in truth, the joy of dreaming about doing a thing is that you can get a whiff of how joyous it would be to have done it without having to put any of the effort in and – here’s the key bit – without having to take the risk that you might screw it all up.

One thing-that-has-been-on-my-todo-list-for-ages-now is a print portfolio. I talked about it last year when I started reading No Plastic Sleeves and then I did very little about it, save for starting to print my images out in a large format (18×12″, which is annoyingly unequal to any of the off-the-shelf portfolio books that I’d like to use) just to see what they looked like. They looked gorgeous, and that meant that I just had to start thinking about making a print book again. (For reference here, book = portfolio; I’m not talking about doing a monograph… at least not here).

But now that I’ve really decided to start putting my book together in earnest I thought that putting my thoughts down here would help, both in a Create, Share, Sustain fashion and as a means of keeping myself honest.

Photo über-guru and Atlantan Buddha Zack Arias has a great post about the process of editing your portfolio, and I’m going to start by following his workflow:

1. Create a Big Edit folder for the best of the best of your work.
2. Go through all your shoots and copy the original RAW files into the Big Edit folder. Don’t hesitate to go back to images that you didn’t use in the end; you never know how your tastes have changed since you shot that job. Using the RAW files is important because it means that your images are free of any edits that you did – which may now be out-of-date and frankly sucky.
3. Kill your darlings. Whittle the images down to maybe ~100 or so.
4. Start to pick pairs of images that can work together on facing pages*.
5. Print the images, cheaply (say on A4, 4 to a page). Invite your trusted friends and family to come and mess with your selections, move things around, add new images, remove images.
6. Get Off Your Arse And Get It Made – after a while, you’re just going in circles. You’ll know where the holes are in your work, but don’t wait until you’ve filled them to get the book printed. Get it printed and get it out there, then start working to fill the holes.

So that’s my plan. I also need to think about other things like the size of the portfolio (will it be 11×14″ portrait? A3 Landscape? A 13″x11″ Landscape Blurb book…?), the materials it’s made from, the branding of it (and I’ve already had some conversations about this, but with each day I re-think it a bit).

So here you are, watching the beginning of the journey. I’d love to share more of it with you – and don’t hesitate to share your journeys, too; but be sure to share wherever you can so that we can all slide along the learning curve with you.

* If that’s how your portfolio is going to be laid out. It might be that you only have one image per pair of pages.

I have a long-standing fascination with tattoos. I don’t have any of my own, but I’ve long loved the idea of being able to customise your own skin, that your physical identity is something that can be modified by more than just clothing.

Tattoos to me are an expression of individuality (though I know that they’re sometimes used as an expression of conformity; I’d love to delve into that some more some time).

My friend Julia told me about her backpiece a couple of years ago. It was partially inspired by Man Ray‘s photograph Le Violon d’Ingres. I’d been talking about photographing it for a while but we could never get our diaries co-ordinated enough for us to actually shoot it. Luckily we found time recently and in a very simple home-studio setup we managed to shoot a few frames.

The lighting was really, really simple: one Bowens GM400 head in a beauty dish to camera right. For the last few shots, where Julia was facing left, I added a gridded SB-26 on very low power to add a bit of rim light.

For those that are interested, the final setup looked something like this:

I know that everyone and their dog these days has a tattoo portrait project running, so maybe I won’t make a project out of this kind of work, but still: there are an awful lot of interestingly-inked people out there…

“Why?” you ask. Well, for a number of reasons. A lot of things have happened this year that have made my personal life, and by extension my photographic life, somewhat difficult. I’m still working through some of the aftershocks to varying degrees and it’s taking me a little while to get back on track.

For a while I considered giving all this up (and one day I might talk more about that, but not today). But in the end I realised that being a photographer has become such a huge part of my self-identity that giving it up would be like trying to cut off my own arm – possible, but messy, and with the possibility of fainting.

So I’ll be back in 2013. It might take a little while longer. But it will be worth the wait.

There comes a time in every photographer’s life when they look at their body of work, and where they want to go next, and think “Oh crap, I guess I’d better put a print portfolio together. And then they start looking at all the possible options for doing that crazy thing, and they feel rather like they’ve opened one of the internet’s tubes and blasted it in their face (with apologies to Matthew Revell).

I could just throw something together, sure. Although it’s an expensive undertaking whichever way you cut it, I could quite happily go out and buy myself a Pina Zangaro portfolio book and fill it with 11×14″ prints of my best work. But my trouble is that I don’t like to take the easy route very often. And that means that I have to learn about other things besides what size is the industry standard for portfolios.

As you’ll all know well enough by now, one of my go-tos for pretty much anything to do with photography is the Atlantan Buddha himself, Mr Zack Arias. He’s been running an awesome Q&A tumblr for a couple of months now, and I’ve been watching it closely for useful titbits of information (because you never stop learning in this game). His advice was to take a look at No Plastic Sleeves (and then weep). Which I did. And bought the book, and started to read…

I have a lot to learn. But it’s going to be a wonderful, frustrating ride, and I’m raring to go.

You can expect some updates on this from time to time. I aim to get to something that I like by some time early next year. In the meantime, I’ll leave you with some images I shot of local music teacher James Walton whilst shooting some straightforward lifestyle / advertising images for his website.

Yes, clients, I love it when you let me play around.

1. Whine about how you can’t do the thing you really wanted to do, sulk and give up.
2. Realise that you’re an artist, damn it, so you need to Quit Whining and Make Something

Most of this month I’ve been stuck in stage one. Tonight, I think I’m finally breaking back into stage two.

I long since got to the point where I no longer wanted to work for free. Of course, most of us start out that way; we need a portfolio before we can start getting paying jobs and, anyway, working for free means that there’s less pressure on you to deliver a professional result.

But there are still times when I’ll work for free, even for a day-long shoot. Exhibit A: the shoot I did in April for Stephen James Hair Salon in Morecambe.

It was one of those shoots that comes about through networking. The salon is owned by Steve Warburton, whose son, Ben, I have shot a number of times over the last year or so. Whether Ben recommended me to him or asked me to give his dad a call, I don’t remember, but we came to the conclusion that we could both get something interesting out of working together: I could get some more hair and beauty work for my book (plus all the fun of retouching hair, which is always worth some practice) and the salon could get some promotional images to run on its website and maybe to hang on its walls, too.

So what do you do when you’re putting together a shoot like that, for next-to free? You call your friends and see if they’re interested in being involved, that’s what you do.

And so it was that my team for the shoot came together: stylists from the salon, marshalled by the tenacious Ailsa Edwards, makeup by the incomparable Donna Graham, with whom I’ve now worked several times, photo support from the brilliant Hannah Farrell and last but not least a great pair of models in the form of Amber Hazelton and Weronika Strug. Amber and I have, of course, worked together before. Weronika came on board after my sometime collaborator Rachel Hadley spread the word that I was looking for models.

We shot in the salon; since it’s closed on a Monday anyway turning it into a studio wasn’t hurting business at all. Since we were shooting with the idea of hung canvases in mind, I decided to keep everything very simple: one light in a beauty dish or a softbox, with a reflector to provide fill. We shot everything against a roll of white seamless, though we occasionally threw some gelled light on it to make things a little more interesting.

Using a large beauty dish slightly overhead meant that we could make the hair pop without having to add a hair light most of the time; the reflector added a bit of punch to the eyes and filled in the shadows that the overhead nature of the light gave us. I shot the whole thing tethered into Lightroom so that Donna and the stylists could see large versions the images and make adjustments to the hair and makeup accordingly.

The most important thing in a shoot like this, where the set up is very simple and straightforward, and you’re essentially shooting a modelled product – i.e. the stylists’ ability to come up with creative and interesting hairdos – is that everyone is relaxed and has a great time. Having two models meant that we were able to move from one setup to another relatively quickly, without having huge amounts of downtime for hair and makeup. Since we started fairly early in the day, Hannah and I were able to set up all the lights and get our settings dialed in before the models were finished in the makeup chair, which meant that all we needed to do was make minor adjustments for each look.

I really enjoyed the shoot, and I’m really proud of the finished results. Hopefully this won’t be the last time the SJHair folks and I work together – next time we’re going to do something a bit weird and wonderful.