Photography – Page 10

Is a photo worth 1000 words…or just $43,000?

They say a picture is worth a 1000 words, but in this case is a $43,000 picture worth a 1000 new Navy recuits? The Herald Sun had an article about a new recruiting campaign photo commissioned by the Royal Australian Navy using up to 100 sailors in the shape of a warship. And this is costing you, the taxpayer, $43,000 for the photographer’s services, another $11,000 for the accompanying behind-the-scenes video, and there would be unspecified expenses for updating the website, not to mention the $20,000 or so to pay for the sailors 2 days of wages that the shoot occupied.

Here’s the article, and the video and website.

I actually think it’s a novel campaign and a pretty cool photo. But what I found most interesting is that we get to find out how much the “top fashion and advertising photographer” Andreas Smetana charges for a shoot. I wish snowboard photographers made 40 grand a shoot!

But really, why don’t we? Obviously market forces come into play, and the Australian Government has millions to spend on Defence Force recruiting. But from a technical point of view, snowboard photographers work probably harder than anyone else in the world to get a shot. Yep, big call, but think about it. To get a photo to be used in a snowboard ad, we have to fly to either North America or Europe (Aussie photos don’t really cut it anymore, plus the new gear isn’t ready the previous Aussie season), get to a location (either deep in the backcountry via sled, or hike, or some sketchy urban location in the middle of the night, dodging potential trespassing convictions), set up lighting, compose the scene, get the shot (which you might just get one attempt at before the landing is bombed), check that the rider’s style is acceptable and that the gear is visible, then photoshop the end result if needed (for colour correction or dust on the camera sensor).

Take for example this shot I took of Darragh Walsh, which was bought by Destyn Via for their advertising campaign. We had shot on this chimney feature already, and showed Destyn Via a preview, but partly because Darragh had forgotten to wear his jacket, we had to go back and shoot it (and also so that I could try to get the dark glow of dusk sky to show the distant trees, instead of a big bob of black in the original). As Destyn Via wanted us to reshoot the image to be expressly used in an advertising campaign, it’s not alot different to a commercial photographer’s assignment…except in what we get paid.

By comparison, Smetana has come up with the unique concept, probably hired the cool white warhouse (or perhaps it is a Defence Force loaner?), executed the shots and Photoshopped the end result. And as far as I can gather, fashion photogs organise the whole shoot, paying for models, makeup artists, assistants and have to get to the location (usually some overseas exotic beach), and they charge an all-encompassing fee to proved Armani (or whoever) a series of finished photos. I wish I knew how much they charged! (Check my previous post about Terry Richardson and his Pirelli 2010 Calendar shoot to get an idea of how it works in fashion).

Unfortunately, in Australia, the market rate for a 12 month unlimited licence for a photo to be used in snowboarding advertising, posters, point-of-sale etc seems to be in the range ot $1000 to $1500. And it’s about half that if the image is bought for just a “once off” use. The situation is even more dire with magazines, who pay $130 for a full page shot! Yep, think of how few shots actually get run full page, and you can start to imagine the level of work you all have to undertake (photog and rider) to get a shot worthy of full, or double-page-spread. And it’s not much better overseas. I was sent the payment rates for Transworld Snowboarding a couple of years ago: Cover – US$900, Double page spread – $250, Full page – $200, and a sequence – 1.5x the listed (size) rate. And of course, you get proportionally less if the shots are smaller than full page.

So if you are an up-and-coming snow photographer, and you’ve sold a photo to a company for less than $1000 you are undervaluing yourself. But worse, you are also undervaluing the whole photographic industry – companies will expect that they can pay a couple hundred bucks for a photo, plus some free gear- you might be stoked to see you shot in print or on a poster, but by underselling yourself you are costing the rest of us who want to do this as a real career and charge higher prices accordingly.

While I inderstand that companies like Destyn Via can’t afford to pay $43,000 for a photo (but Billabong probably could), I’d like to see all the rates (for both private advertising sales and magazine publication) be at least double. Then maybe more photographers could justify the travelling expenses for a season overseas again. This year unfortunately I was just about the only Australian snowboard photographer who spent any length of time overseas to take photos of riders. As far as I can gather, it just got too expensive without the right level of financial return for all the other core photogs. And when companies can fork out $2 G’s for a piece of paper (ie just a bit of blank space in a magazine to put their logo and photo – it costs on average around $2000 for a advertising spot in a snowboard mag), they should be able to pay more to the guys (and girls) that actually go out and get the shots for them: the rider who risks injury just to wear/use their gear, and the photog who gives them a commercial-grade advertising photo.

I guess all the Aussie snow companies will cry poor (we’re such a small industry, last year was so bad for us, blah blah blah) – but until things start to change, the quality of ads and photos in print will drop away as photographers stop bothering to travel and make the effort to get shots.

Please drop some comments if you have anything to say on this topic. Oh, in case you haven’t seen it yet – here’s the finished advertisement for DV. It came out pretty cool, I reckon.

Melbourne: Get some culture up ya!

It’s been a change for me being back in Melbourne for Easter, catching the last heat of summer and seeing the pre-autumn city the way I haven’t seen it for more than 5 years. With the first tinges of brown on the leaves and the water still warm down on the Surf Coast, I’m starting to again see some of the attractions of this city. And with a couple of interesting exhibits on, I thought it was time I headed into town and took a look at my city through the eyes, and lens of a tourist…

First up was a trip to the NGV International to see the inspirational work by Ron Mueck, with a handy free-entry pass from a school friend Caterina, who now works at NGV. Mueck is an amazing artist, with an ability to capture “life” of a figure in his sculptures not seen since Michaelangelo. It is absolutely mind blowing what he is able to do with some resin, fiberglass, paint and synthetic hair. If it wasn’t for the hyper- and micro- scale of his sculpures you could think that real humans are right in front of you, and their nudity is so life-like and confronting, sometimes you don’t know where to look. His ability to capture the sponginess and detail of skin, complete with moles, wrinkles, goosebumps and hair is a true wonder. It reminded me of the ‘lightness” and deftness of touch Michaelangelo achieved with his Pieta. Yes, the old master was carving out of marble 500 years ago, but I reckon if he was around today he might take inspiration from Mueck and try the equally as solid fiberglass as a medium for his statue to celebrate the city of Florence. Don’t you think that in black and white, and if you added some horns, this face could almost be Moses?

And the great thing about the exhibit is that Mueck wants viewers to be able to take photos of the work. It was great seeing so many people enjoying the sculptures and so amazed by them that they just had to capture a likeness on their iPhone. But from this article in The Age, I guess Myf Warhurst doesn’t share my enthusiasm. Take a look at the detail of these feet – this photo could be of a real person, as you can’t tell they are at least two-times scale.

Unfortunately the NGV Ron Mueck exhibition just ended, but for more information about him click here and here. And here’s an article which goes into Mueck’s actual production of his artworks, showing some photos from start to finish.

Next on the culture hit was my first visit to ACMI, the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, for Dennis Hopper and the New Hollywood. ACMI is hidden amongst Federation Square and overshadowed by the amazing NGV Australia. ACMI is all about film and TV, and so I wasn’t all that interested in the permanent display, although there are a few cool interactive exhibits, and it might be just about the only place in the world where video games (which you can play on big screens) are heralded as a true artform. Dennis Hopper, as I found out, was much more than the pretentious Hollywood actor who is now warding off life-ending cancer whilst embroiled in a bitter divorce and child custody battle (check out this creepy photo of him and his daughter – Yes! Daughter!) Hopper was part of the LA art scene in the 60’s and onwards, producing some notable photos, assemblages and paintings, as well as writing, directing and starring in Easy Rider, and being a west coast champion for the artworks of Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol.

Unfortunately this exhibition didn’t allow cameras, but I did like Hopper’s super-sized painting reproductions of his photos, as well as his 60’s and 70’s Hollywood photos and large photos of grafitti detail. ACMI is a strangely laid out exhibition space, and with the emphasis on “moving image” the static artworks by Hopper and others was interrupted by video walls playing snippets from Hopper’s movies. So it wasn’t as impressive an exhibition as Ron Mueck, but I certainly learned more about a very interesting Hollywood character and may have even picked up some more inspiration of my own. While I wasn’t fully impressed with Hopper’s work and the collection in general, I don’t think I fully agree with this other article from The Age: I’m glad that Hopper didn’t just stick to his day job and managed to record Hollywood through a lens, and expressed himselves in other way than film. But perhaps the notoriety of his art has had more to do with the clique of famous artists he hung out with, and then with his Hollywood cache, rather than the actual finished works?

Here’s some info on Dennis Hopper’s various artworks and photography, if you are interested. Otherwise, enjoy my photos from in and around the city and from inside the NGV.

Radman Cameo…

Our medium-to-slow speed internet has been out and running even slower for about 10 days now (and only just got changed over to super fast ADSL2+ with a different provider) so I haven’t had time to check out the video of our June Mountain trip. You’ve probably already seen it in your Facebook Newsfeed or on snowboardermag.com.au or transfermag.com. But if not, (and if you have fast internet) take a look…

The film is up on Vimeo thanks to Destyn Via, the Torquay-based outerwear company that both Darragh Walsh and Cohen Davies ride for.

Fellow Falls Creeker, Jeremy Richardson of Ollipop Films has put together a pretty rad edit of our day and a half riding there. He certainly got a lot of content filmed! And if you check it out, you’ll see me in the back and fore grounds snaking photos, and also getting a little riding cameo in the park. Yeeewwww!! haha.

And one funny thing I noticed about the vid is the angry, pissed-off look on Darragh’s face when he stomps his (final) switch frontside boardslide. Normally a rider is stoked, and pretty much “claims” with a joyous fist-pump when they stomp a tech trick, but because of the general annoying crowd, overall disorganisation, early painful slams and problems “getting the shot” on earlier stomps, by this stage Darragh had well and truly had enough. He just wanted to get it done and get the hell out of there. And I think he was taking some of his anger out on me. It’s all good though – we kissed and made up. And got a great photo to boot.

To see some photos from our trip, click the link here…or wait till issue 2 of Australian-New Zealand Snowboarder Magazine drops…

The magic (and disappointment) of film

The last few times I’ve travelled overseas I’ve taken along one or two small(ish) Minolta instamatic film cameras. Maybe I’ve been inspired by Terry Richardson, or maybe I just want to have that little bit of doubt every time I take the camera out and the little flutter I get from gambling with the expected outcome.

Film is certainly a gamble. It used to be pretty bloody hard to get decent snowboard shots when you were working with slide film and not given the lattitide for exposure correction that regular negative film has (ie, in the processing of “regular” film into photos the lab can correct most minor mistakes you made in over or under-exposing your shots). Digital has made things even easier, with mistakes being able to be corrected in Photoshop or Adobe Lightroom. (You may have noticed that ever since Himbrechts put me onto Lightroom I’ve used the preset colour/saturation/etc settings on many of my photos, just to make them a bit more interesting). But not only that, digital allows for the snowboard style police to instantly check a frame and make sure arms, body, head and grab are all the way they should be…and if not, it’s a hike up the hill for the rider and another attemt to “get the shot”.

So it’s nice to play around with film when the end result isn’t so important, like with my travel shots. And I’ve always liked to add an extra level of “gambling” on the outcome by putting in rolls of slide film and then getting it cross-processed in the chemicals normally used for regular negative film. Here you can see the outcome of only 2 rolls I shot on my travels. I thought I had snapped off more frames than a mere 72 in 9 weeks, but I guess digital is really taking over my life if the amount of shots taken on my little Sony Cybershot are anything to go by. You’ll probably recognise a fair bit of the same subject material from my previous posts – I often wanted to be able to compare the film to the digi shot.

If you are interested, the film I used here was Kodak Ektachrome 100VS, cross-processed and scanned lo-res at Vanbar Imaging in Carlton. And I’m not sure if the gamble paid off. I’m not so happy with all the end results – maybe I expected more? I dunno. Maybe next time I’ll take alond a Canon EOS5 film SLR with a cheap zoom lens and use that as my “Go-To” cross-process beast: it’s fairly compact (certainly much more so than my 2 EOS 1 bodies), it seemed to handle tricky exposures well, and I got a heap of published snowboard shots back in the day with it, so it has good memories.

Make love to the camera!

I was doing some general Facestalking a couple of days ago and came across this inspiring video in the Newsfeed. It’s 17 minutes long, but if you like fashion photography…and naked supermodels, then definitely check it out:

Here’s one of the shots from the 2010 Pirelli Calendar…one of the only 2 that actually has tyres in it, in case you were wondering what Pirelli actually sell!

Click here to see full Pirelli Calendar.

It’s interesting to see that there are three aussies in this calendar, one of whom I spied years ago at the Cox Plate when she was being heralded as the Next Big Thing. Abbey Lee Kershaw certainly stood out, tall, lanky and dolled-up, but blended into the bogan crowds of footy-head mates around her, all drinking Carlton Draught from plastic cups at the trashy main bar at Moonee Valley – she was striking, in a weird sort of way, but the bogan strine sort of killed it for me and it was impossible to imagine that she would one day become the face of Chanel.

Back to my interest in fashion photography. A few years ago, when I was just forming the thought in my mind to try to make a living from snowboard photography I was killing time in Paris at the Virgin Megastore underneath the Louvre and came across a photography book called TerryWorld emblazoned with a weird-looking bespectacled and tatooed naked dude lying across its cover. I had no idea who this guy was, but was blown away by the crazy life he tried to capture in his book: lots of naked (male and female) models and pornstars…and unfortunately, lots of photos of him naked too. I couldn’t believe this freak was a fashion photographer. Intrigued, I wanted to find out more about Terry Richardson.

Like what Helmut Newton started doing in the 60’s and 70’s, Richardson really pushes the boundaries of what is considered art and what is considered pornography, while still managing to sell clothes and luxury products. But whereas Newton took on a more Hugh Hefner/Monaco aesthetic, Richardson is all about Hustler/Vice Magazine-style trash. I guess from a photography point of view, they are not technically amazingly constructed photos, but I think it’s his ability to capture a moment of the model’s spontaneity, and bring a huge amount of sexiness to help sell a product which sets him apart from the rest. He has an amazing ability to get his models to throw aside their inhibitions in front of the camera, even getting a New York Magazine reporter to do so while she was doing an article about him. Read it here and here.

What I like about Richardson’s work (besides all the naked girls) is the simplicity of his photos. Whilst fashion photographers (and snowboard photogs too) get more and more complicated with elaborate lighting setups, Richardson “keeps it real” and spontaneous, letting the model show some life and character. He was known for just using simple instamatic film cameras to take all his shots, and so for me it was interesting to see in the Pirelli video that he had a phanlanx of assistants around him, yet still only used a simple Nikon DSLR with either a hotshoe-mounted flash, or the flash jig-mounted close to the lens to replicate the look of his old instamatics.

To see more of Terry Richardson’s commercial and editorial work check out this site. (Mario Testino is another worth checking out on the ArtPartner page.)

Some of the influence Richardson has can be seen in the blatant style rip-off by American Apparel’s ads. Check out the rest of that crappy brand here.

On my last trip to New York before this year (I think back in 2007) I actually saw Terry Richardson walking his dog and chatting to locals out the front of the Starbucks in SoHo. I had one of those “star-dazzled” moments – I wanted to go and chat to him, but had no idea what to say without sounding like a dork.

While on the topic of fashion photography, check out this scene with the supermodel Veruschka from Michaelangelo Antonioni’s epic movie about the Swinging 60’s in London, Blow Up. I guess even back in 1966 photographers were asking the models to make love to the camera…

But maybe Richardson has been taking this all too far, as a month ago a series of models came out and accused Richardson of sexually harassing them and pressuring them into performing various sex acts while on photo shoots and surrounded by assistants. I know that Richardson will often get nude himself and give the camera to the model to shoot him nude in order to lighten the atmosphere, but it’s a bit like sexual harassment in the workplace, or the old Hollywood casting couch. While some may argue it comes with the territory of nudity and cameras, or it’s just the way Richardson works, clearly some models feel pressured to do whatever he says because of his importance within the fashion industry, much like a secretary might feel obliged to sleep with the boss to get a promotion out of the typing pool, a la Mad Men. That sort of stuff went out with the 80’s.

So there’s a big of a debate going on now as to whether Richardson has either broken the law, merely done something wrong, or done nothing wrong at all and everyone has just always known he is pretty creepy. But no matter the actual outcome, I’ve lost a fair bit of respect for him.

Check out some articles and blogs (with comments by those affected) here and here.

Maybe Richardson had been influenced too much by this other scene from Blow Up ? (Just to set up what happens here, the wannabe models are hassling David Hemmings to be let into his studio and they force their way through the door – you can watch what happens next – then afterwards he kicks them out, and when they ask about getting their photos taken, he says “Come back tomorrow. Maybe.” – What a Classic!)

But getting back to Richardson, maybe it’s as my bogan mate Abbey Lee says: “Terry doesn’t force girls to do anything they don’t want to. He puts you in a G-string in a pile of mud because you want to do it. You touch yourself because you want to. For me, that shoot (for Purple Magazine) was the truth about how things were between us both, and I felt good doing it. I’m not ashamed of it — why should I be?”

And on that note…“Look! I’m not even shooting you. It’s crazy…And I’m spent.”