Creativity Stops and Starts

So the funny thing about photography is that I spend a lot more time not using a camera than using one. It's a big transition from creating, sending, and following up on promotions to devising, setting up, and shooting personal work. I mean, doing the promotion stuff requires creativity, but it's "manage-ment creativity" not "artistic creativity". Sometimes I want to jump from one mindset to the other, and it's pretty jarring.

Last week, after taking care of a few loose ends with the shoes promo, I looked through my book of ideas, and found nothing funny, but I felt like doing something funny. Well, you know, funny like I do anyway. So I hunkered down and did some brainstorming and...nothing. Huh. I reached down, poked around, dug in, pushed a little harder, strained a bit more, grabbed my creativity by the neck and shook it.

Nothing.

It's easy, in a moment like that, to worry that it's broken, since the fear that your last big idea was your last big idea is pretty common.

But I was approaching my creative activities the way I'd had to approach my self-promotion activities, and they don't work the same way. Self-promotion is about order, discipline, polish, and being bombproof, whereas creativity is about emergence, perception, formation, and vulnerability.

So I relaxed. Kind of looked sideways at my creativity instead, let it come, listened. And shortly the first little idea appeared, and soon grew into a flood of material.

As a friend said, "Gotta let the wind whip the crinkles out of your freak flag".

Ingenuity

One of the attributes that's necessary for both photographers and assistants is ingenuity. Around this time last year, I helped out Adam Moore from Sugar Digital on a shoot he was doing for Whale Wars. The banner on Whale Wars Facebook page is the result. You may have noticed a little photoshop's been done on that image.

Those crewmembers you see are actual crewmembers, and they were actually in the studio for the shoot, and they are actually really cool*. But what they weren't, actually, was piloting a Zodiac boat around the studio. It needed to be faked.

I know from experience that the closer you can get a subject to doing what they're supposed to be faking, the better it's going to look. And I know that standing on a wood floor on the third story of a photostudio and holding your hands out like they're gripping a wheel is not very close at all.

So, after we set up the lighting, and the subjects were dressed and ready, I suggested that we build them a boat, and everybody looked at me like I'm crazy.

I took a furniture pad, rolled it pretty tight, and stabilized it with gaffers tape, and put that on the mark. I placed a spare magliner shelf on top of that, et voilà, a rolling deck. I had ridden my bicycle, so I pulled off my front wheel, and rigged it on a C Stand arm in front of the new deck, et voici, a steering wheel.

The first subject hopped up on the deck, gripped the wheel, and started hollering. My little boat worked really well, and helped bring a little bit of authenticity to the poses.

You can see it at the Whale Wars Album on Facebook.

*I think there's something about death-defying activities that makes people end up cool; or maybe cool people do death-defying things. Chicken. Egg.

Well Oiled Self-Promotion Machine. This Time.

I appear to have hit my self-promotion stride, on this go round anyway. Since email's dead* as a self-promotion tool, I needed to do something different. I decided to build my own three-fold mailer, using the "Make Shoes Move" demo campaign that Adam Weisman and Brad Soulas built around my running shoes photographs.

Using Adbase, I built a short list of companies and agencies that have something to do with athletic shoes, and rounded that out with a few reps I've been promoting to, for a total of about 40.

I used Moab Lasal doublesided, the same paper I'll be using in my new portfolio.

After finally surmounting some bizarre mental block, I managed to figure out how to insert the paper to get the proper orientation.

I printed these on my Epson, so the print quality is stunning, but inkjet prints scratch real easily, so I ordered some glassine envelopes. I've also heard that buyers would rather not have to open something before they decide to bin it, so the transparency's polite.

I included my new tag line, "Making good ideas beautiful, and bad ideas interesting", as well as the concepts for the iPhone apps.

I included a personal note with each promo seemed like a good idea. Took forever though, with this many promos.

Although email's dead, I still sent an email promo for the project, just to a much broader audience. Both the mailer and the email point to the Minisite I put together.

So, I sent the mailer, waited about a week, and sent the email. The following morning, I started calling all the people to whom I'd sent the mailer. I have been alarmingly bad at calls such as these, but this time around, it went really well.

It helps that:

• the demo campaign looks killer, and the mailer is real nice
• the target list is really narrow - I know they'll have some interest in the subject
• volunteering for the political campaign last year seems to have given me some sort of rapid-dial muscle memory
• the first guy I called answered the phone and said "Oh yeah it's right here on my desk it looks great!"

I got a lot of good feedback from the people I actually got to talk to, and a nice email back from one of the reps. Overall, I made 8 solid contacts, a response of 24% of the calls I made, and 18% of the mailers. Even the email did alright: I got a 14% clickthrough on that.

*Everybody's saying so. Plus, Adbase indicates whether the buyer wishes to receive email promos or not, and anecdotally, I now regularly see the entire staff of a company set to "does not wish to receive". More reliably, when I output a list, half of the buyers don't want email, where it used to be like 15%.

Starting at the End Versus Starting at the Beginning

Starting at the end is defining a vision for a photograph before I start, which includes a look, an idea, a message, and a goal. Starting at the beginning is getting some objects and starting to photograph them.

Design can be defined as thinking, looking, and doing. Starting at the end requires a lot of looking and thinking up-front, whereas starting at the beginning requires mainly doing at the outset.

That's what I'm doing with all these packing materials. In an earlier post, I wondered about themes, such as waste, and overuse, but it's pretty clear we're not headed in that direction. And I'm not really thinking about it very much, just moving stuff around and taking a picture.

Working this way is appealing in that I'm free to wander around, and can take tangents as they come up, and I don't have to adhere to any sort of guidelines. But at the same time, it can be frustrating because I can't really track progress, because there's no goalpost.

And that's the main thing about starting at the beginning: while it's an interesting trip, I'm not sure if I get there, because I never defined where I was going.

Wells Fargo Bank Archive

I recently shot a job for Wells Fargo Bank Historical Services. They're publishing a book to document their incredible archive of historical artifacts from the last 200 years or so. It was rapid-fire photography all day for five days, but the Wells Fargo people and my crew (well, Emily Polar) were really great, and we had a lot of fun. I managed to geek out on objects as much as their archivists did. Here's a selection of the 90 plus objects we photographed:

Back before there was a consistent national currency.

Emperor Norton money. I love Emperor Norton. That San Francisco not only accepted Norton, but let him print his own currency makes it my kind of town.

The original Articles of Incorporation for Wells Fargo, signed by Henry Wells and William Fargo.

After I shot this coin, I kind of wanted to redo it, so I asked if we could leave it in the library (we were shooting in the library in their building) overnight. They said "No." and returned it to the vault. Later I found out it's worth two million dollars.

I love this thing. It's a Fire Grenade. It's loaded with chemicals, and you were to keep a set of them outside your house. If it caught fire, you'd toss these inside and they'd hopefully starve out the flames. I wished I'd had an hour with this piece, instead of 20 minutes.

This. This is hard to describe, but that's uh, San Francisco. Apparently back then it was a hollow hill, with a beach. I think that might be a jet-black whale on the right. Somehow, this painting managed to creep into the future and inform that whole late 90's Mission School thing.

The archive contains a number of mascot costumes, from much more recent times. The shoes and gloves, that is. The shirt is mine.