Jim Richardson

Best Advice for New Freelancers

The other day an old friend stopped by to talk about his new direction in photography. Which is to say, he's no longer a staff photographer (not his choice) and has now joined in the great fraternity of the permanently unemployed.  That is, he's becoming a freelancer.

Of all the advice I gave (some sage and some useless, probably) I forgot to give him the very best advice of all.  Advice that every new freelancer should get.

Buy a copy of FotoQuote.

I don't know what Kathy and I would have done without this essential software.  If you haven't already heard of it then let me introduce you.  This nifty software does one powerful thing:  it tells you how much your photo is worth out on the open market.  Got somebody on the phone who wants to use your wonderful image a quarter page, in a brochure run of 80,000, English language only for two years?  FotoQuote will tell you what to charge. (Actually it will give you a range of prices to consider, and even give you negotiating advice for when you call back with your quote.)

The new version just out adds a whole host of new usage categories that keep the product up to date with changing photo usage patterns and prices, including web usage.

It's the brainchild of Cradoc Bagshaw who brought it out in 1993.  Before that he brought his genius to us poor photographers with the original Cradoc Caption Writer, about the first way to print labels for slides, back in the day.  So if you want to keep on the good side of anybody who's anybody in the professional photo world you'll BUY Cradoc's software instead of pirating a copy.  (Don't jack around with Cradoc.  He's saved our bacon time and time again.)

Go here for all the goodies: cradocfotosoftware.com

Cradoc, you don't know me, but thanks.

Workshop in San Miguel de Allende

I get a fair number of questions about my teaching and learning experiences for photographers. So I thought I would go on and fill you in as well as possible about the workshops I'm involved in and which workshops are right for which photographers. Later I'll give you and assessment of the photographic opportunities on some of the cruises I travel on for National Geographic Expeditions.

San Miguel is pretty much what I always thought Old Mexico should be.  This is the second year I'll be going back to this colonial Mexican city for a National Geographic Expeditions photography workshop. Last year I had no idea what to expect but every day presented really great opportunities.  The very first day I fell in with a wedding party at La Parroquia, the church towering over the main plaza.  Another day I arrived at the church to find a pile of band instruments lying unattended outside the front door. Presently the musician came out of the mass, picked up their instruments and began leading a pilgrimage through the streets.  I followed them for miles.

Everyday seemed to have such surprises in store for me.  And the food isn't bad either.  Americans started coming here after WWII when GI's found they could study art here on the cheap. It's still a magnet for thousands of Americans.  Easy to understand why.  It's a great place to live. 

This National Geographic Expeditions workshop is great for anyone who wants to explore a new location with their camera, and get hands on instruction while they are at it.  Mornings are spent in the classroom for editing, teaching and critiques. Afternoons have planned photo sessions in and around San Miguel. Evenings are free for your exploration (and the great dining.  Did I mention the food!)  I'll give a lecture one evening at the main theater, an event open to the public.  

Photographer Raoul Touzon will join me on the faculty, bringing a wealth of knowledge to the mix. These workshops are great fun and are probably less intense that workshops aimed at full-time professionals.  Almost all levels of photographers can benefit from the experience.  Some familiarity with your digital SLR is a great benefit, and you should be comfortable downloading and editing pictures on your laptop before you get there.  Aspiring professionals can benefit, too.  It's a good place to build porfolio, but this is mainly a shooting workshop.  Don't come expecting in-depth digital workflow or high-end PhotoShop lessons.  

Right now safety is on everyone's mind and Mexico has it's problems. I've been doing some looking around and it seems that the situation is as I suspected. The problems we hear about are mostly along the border with the US.  That's not San Miguel which is in central Mexico. The US border is 500 miles from San Miguel at it appears that life in San Miguel is just as conspicuously safe now as it was when I was there last year. I felt safe wherever I went. Walking the streets at night was perfectly all right. And women in our workshop felt the same way. I'll keep an eye on it as time goes by but right now I've got no reservations, outside of the usual precautions that are always prudent when traveling in foreign countries.

You can find more details by going to the National Geographic Expeditions site here:  http://www.nationalgeographicexpeditions.com

I hope I see you there.

Jim

Travel Photography at the Summit

For photographers who are ready to take the next step in their photography there is simply no better way than getting up close and personal with photographers who have been there before.  That’s the basic formula of Rich Clarkson’s Travel Photography at the Summit.  For 27 years Rich has been following this formula, producing his famous series of workshops by pulling together a  faculty of experienced photographers and mixing them up with dedicated students.  It’s a very effective recipe.

This July I’ll be joining Rich in Santa Barbara for his brand new travel photography workshop, along with old friends including Dave Black, Jay Maisel, George Olson, Rick Rickman, and Bob Smith.  (I’m a lucky guy to be able to call these legendary professionals “old friends.”) Students will get hands on shooting experience, critiques, classroom lessons, and personal guidance. This format really gives you a chance to rub elbows and pick brains. 

For my part I’ll be laying out the process of shooting stories for National Geographic Traveler on assignment, from writing proposals, doing research, field techniques and editing workflow.  When I teach I try my best to follow the no BS principal of telling it like it is. You want to know how the travel photography business works, then come to Santa Barbara.

You can get all the detail here.  See you there.

Jim

Ethics and Whisky Photography

Some years ago Tom Kennedy, then director of photography at National Geographic Magazine, gave me my first assignment in Scotland. What a gift. I've returned to Scotland over and over, and relished every minute of it.

Out of a profound sense of journalistic duty during that first assignment I gave myself the task of learning all I could about the whisky industry.  That led me, by and by, to the Lagavulin distillery warehouse on the Isle of Islay, a heavenly job if ever there was one. The "angel's share" waft heavily over us as we stepped into the musty warehouse, lined with rows upon rows of whisky casks, quietly and patiently biding their time till the whisky was just right for bottling.  In the case of Lagavulin that would be 16 years.  (And nothing less.)

After getting the shot all lined up and the lighting set and tested the stillman pulled out a hefty sample of the aging single malt and took a wee sip, noting that all was well and it could go back to sleep. Then he turned to me and asked if I'd like a sample my self!  Well, yes, actually I would. It was wonderful, even if it was only 15 years old.  Then the sample, germs and all went back into the cask (where the alcohol would have another year to make sure it was all quite sterile and safe.) 

But I'm haunted, all these years later,  by the journalistic ethics of taking that wee dram. Should I have refused?  Should I have payed?  Was I corrupted? (Actually I had been corrupted long before that.) These are the things I ponder as I sit here tonight, dreaming of the distilleries of Islay, nursing a wee dram of the Lagavulin, and trying in vain to muster up a healthy dose of guilt.

The Environmental Photographer's Holy Grail

Photographing environmental issues has never been easy.  Now, it's a little easier.

As someone who spends a fair part of his life photographing environmental issues I am constantly confronted with problem of finding relevant sources of worthwhile information.  It's a big world out there (did you notice?) and there are lots of problems.  For the photographer seeking inspiration or direction it is no easy task.  Waiting till an issue makes it to the pages of Time or Newsweek simply means the issue is already mainstream.

Well, the master of ferreting the threats to our life on earth that we all should be concerned about has gathered much of his network of sources together in one place.  You can find it all at Signs from Earth.

Dennis Dimick at National Geographic has made it his business to get ahead of the curve for a long time.  And I suppose, for the sake of full disclosure, I should point out that I have been working with him for nearly two decades now. So I know his story intimately and I am not unbiased. (And I'm not unbiased when it comes to the environment either: I'm for it.) 

Dennis' efforts have resulted in National Geographic consistently being at the leading edge of emerging environmental concerns.  In some cases it has been so far out in front on important issues that by the time the general media catches on everyone has forgotten that they saw it first in National Geographic. (Think back to when the phrase "carbon footprint" came into currency, then look back to when National Geographic did their carbon cycle story.) Now he has put a huge store of his sources out there for one and all.  It's a gold mine.  

Besides that he posts regularly on the latest and most interesting. Having Dennis distill it for us is a great leg up on the competition. 

Fear Amongst the Roman Ghosts

Down in the basement of the Treasurer’s House in York, England is a simple, bare room which has taken on great fame among those who are convinced that ghosts move amongst us. It was here, in 1953, that laborer Harry Martindale was working away when a whole platoon of Roman soldier ghosts marched through. Harry’s encounter is one of the most famous ghost sightings in this English city which prides itself on being the Ghost Capital of the World. That’s all well and good, except that I had to take a picture of the place for Traveler’s story on York. The truth is that, for all its fame, it’s just a bare room down in the basement. Not much there for a photograph. I thought my goose was cooked on this one. The smell of fear was everywhere and it was coming from me. 

St. Louis Arch: Compliments of a Low Ceiling

I had one simple strategy while I was shooting the light pollution story for National Geogaphic:  I would drive during the day and shoot at night.  If I ended up in a city I shot pictures of the urban lighting obliterating the night sky.  If I ended up in the dark stretches of the western United State I shot pictures of the glorious night sky.  Either way I had something to shoot every night for the month that I work on the story.

The St. Louis Arch image is a good example.  I had intended to drive to Chicago that day where I hoped to shoot the city from from the air.  But a quick check of weather enroute confirmed that the rain I was driving through blanketed much of the midwest, Chicago included.  So I elected to divert to St. Louis where I might have a shot at the Arch. 

The resulting image turned out to be one of my favorites, something I never expected to get.  And it’s gotten attention from other quarters, too.  National Geographic’s director of photography, David Griffin, wrote about it in his blog, as a stepping off place to discuss the ramifications of digital for the professional photojournalist.  Read David’s thoughts here.  

Farms Floating in the Clouds

Aerial photography always presents problems. Getting this picture for National Geographic’s soil story presented extra problems.  But the view was worth it.  Boy, was it worth it.

Here’s how shooting aerial pictures is often presented.  “Sweeping low over the clouds I shouted to my pilot ‘There’s the farm.’ Quickly I raised my Nikon to my eye and clicked the shutter.  I had my picture!”

Well, not quite. It makes a nice story but it hardly ever works out that way. Here’s how it really worked. 

My assignment for National Geographic was to photograph soil, that least honored of all resources, without which human life on earth would be impossible.  Telling its story in pictures, however, was no easy matter. One aspect I wanted to illustrate was that soil, so susceptible to erosion, can also be restored to health.  From a previous story I knew about the Coon Creek Watershed of southeast Wisconsin, the area where the then-new Soil Conservation Service first began efforts to halt and reverse the erosion that was, in the 1920’s, the worst in America.

Secrets of the Milky Way

It was a grand sight to see, the Milky Way stretching across the sky behind Owachomo Bridge.  It was a natural subject for the opening spread of National Geographic’s story Our Vanishing Night in the November issue.

First, let’s get this out of the way. This is a straight shot.  

That’s right.  No layers in PhotoShop.  No multi-image, bracketed-exposure HDR computer magic. No telescope-mounted clock-driven hours-long exposure. At National Geographic we really can’t use all those wonder weapons of the digital era.  Readers expect reality and we try to deliver.

This picture just involved a camera on a tripod in front of the right scene.  Well, almost.  Photographing the Milky Way and not ending up with a big blur requires several elements, one of which has only been available in the past couple of years. Here’s what you need to know.

The Milky Way is out there every night.  But you need a really, truly dark sky like what they have at Natural Bridges National Monument in southern Utah.  You probably can’t do this picture east of the Mississippi. I scouted this location during the day, looking for the right bridge that faced the right direction and that I could get to in the middle of the night.  Oh, and if you want a dark sky you can’t have any moon.  That’s part of the next step.

Seeing Fireflies in the Dark

We live in a new Golden Age of photography.  The new digital cameras have an uncanny knack for seeing in the dark. How else could I have gotten this picture of the fireflies for our story on the Flint Hills of Kansas?

The bare facts are these:  76 second exposure at f2.8, ISO 1600.  Problem is, the bare facts don’t usually tell you what you need to know.  

So let me go a bit deeper into what brought this picture about.  There are several key factors if you are going to photography fireflies.  The first is the fireflies (naturally.) If you are an entomologist you won’t be surprised if I tell you there are a whole lot of firefly species.  You’ll probably say, well, no duh!  And there are a corresponding range of mating behavior and flashing patterns.  If you are a firefly bent on mating tonight you kind of need to find one of your own species. And you want to avoid the various cannibalistic species that will home in on your flashing tailpipe and have you for dinner. (I’m not kidding.)