Thanks!

Cheers,
Zack

And the winner of our NYC shoot-out last week is… Jason Groupp.

NOT only did he whoop me on single image votes but he also won most votes overall for his five images against mine. He won 1,451 votes against my 1,242 votes. His single best image won with 867 votes. I came in second place with 509 votes with this image…

In the original post Jason’s photos were 1, 3, 4, 7, & 9. Mine were 2, 5, 6, 8, 10.

It’s always fun to go out and shoot with another photographer you admire and respect. It’s even more fun to go out and shoot with a photographer you admire and respect and make it a competition. Then it is interesting to see how the public views the outcome of the images when it goes to a vote. The big take away from this is… None of y’all know great photography when you see it!!!  :) I’m just kidding.

Jason… Congratulations. Enjoy your sucksess for the next year. Maybe you should even start placing “Photographer of the year” in your bio and on your website. Know this… I’m coming back next year to this light fight as Iniogo Montoya…

We’ll have the BTS video that Jason’s crew shot online this week AS WELL as a post about the “light saber” I was using for this shoot-out. There’s a new modifier in town and it’s pretty awesome. But evidently not awesome enough for me to win this shoot-out.

Cheers,
Zack

Today my good friend and collegue, Jason Groupp, and I had a shoot-out in the streets of NYC. We have been talking smack for two weeks about this on Twitter and we now have the results of our bravado.

******* Voting is now closed. Results here. *******

Click “more” to see the rest of the original post and photos…

Here is how it worked. Jason booked Amanda and Sean to be our subjects. Jason set up the first shot and he had five frames to execute it. Then I had to use the same location and execute a shot in five frames. I then chose the next location, shot five frames, and then Jason would shoot five frames. We piggy backed like that for six locations. At the sixth and final location I challenged Jason to tape his LCD screen. I did the same. We had five frames to shoot, with lights, without meters, and no chimping. It was a blast!

We have now picked our top five images and you are going to vote on who won best image of the shoot-out. This will be like a presidential election. One image will be the top photo of the day and then we will tally the votes of each image and see who received more total votes than the other and they will be crowed “President of Light” or something stupid. I have a feeling this might just be an annual thing.

So here are the images. Vote at the bottom of the page. Voting will continue through PhotoPlus this weekend and we will announce the results at the first of next week along with a behind the scenes video of the shoot and some of our out takes.

Thanks for voting!

Cheers,
Zack

We had another one of our GOYA shootouts today! This time we have visitors to the studio. David Jackson and Trevor Nackers joined us today on the shootout. Here’s the set up.

We decide to do these things at a moment’s notice. Today’s challenge was that each of us would head out with a 12″ square mirror and we had to incorporate that mirror into a photograph. We had just under two hours to complete the challenge and we could post one single image to the blog. You decide who did the best job. Meaning, you vote on the photo you like the best. The winner gets something. We never know what.

Today’s crew consists of Dan Depew, Robin Shetler, David Jackson, Trevor Nackers, and myself. Sherri left the studio with full intentions of participating but she decided to play the LAME “it’s my birthday and I have better things to do.” card. Whatever. Loser. (Actually, she won the last shootout.) What is GOYA? It’s a term we use around here meaning “Get Off Your Ass.” … and go shoot.

Here are our images.

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To refresh your memory, here are the slices and who they correspond with…

Cheers,
Zack

Want a sneak peak into the life of a successfull commercial photographer?

I made this for a few reasons. I’ll go into that later.

Want some more?

HQ QT version of the video here.

Cheers,
Zack Arias. Sucksessfull Commercial Photographer

PS – In addition to thanking the academy I would also like to recognize Jeremy Cowart, Chase Jarvis, and Joe Effing McNally.

Our business manager, Sherri, just beat the ever living snot out of all of us in our third GOYA shootout. I’m 1 for 3. I should have used this other image. There I go, wanting to do something different and it didn’t pan out for me. Probably wouldn’t have helped. Sherri did a great job. The thrift store item in her shot is the gold dress that her sister, Jamie, is wearing.

Our intern, Robin, came in second with this kick ass image…

Dan the studio man came in third and Meg and I held hands walking into the sunset of 4th and 5th place.

Meg wants us to do a songwriting contest next time we do this. I’m glad none of us are competitive.

ETA – Do note that Meg had baby Hawke Danger with her during her shooting time and she was in a graveyard, in the rain, with a crying baby Hawke Danger. She had the toughest time of us all.

Cheers,
Zack

PS – GOYA stands for Get Off Your Ass… And shoot!

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We are back with another GOYA shootout for the crew. Here was the challenge set before us today.

We had to go to a thrift store and spend no more than five dollars on whatever we wanted. We then had to incorporate whatever we purchased into a photo. We had 2.5 hours to complete the challenge.

Today we had myself, business manager Sherri, studio manager Dan, intern Robin, and the ever so lovely and talented Meghan.

….. ETA ……

The contest is now over. Sherri won!

Cheers,
Zack

The Setup ::

Last week we assembled a crew to help us on a three day shoot in an old abandoned mansion. I set one day aside for everyone on set to have time to grab some gear, grab a model, and shoot for themselves as payment for helping me on the other two days of shooting.  Knowing that competition can bring the best out in a person I decided we should have a shootout. I posted the images here on the blog and had you all vote.

Before shooting we decided to pick one word that we all had to shoot an image for. The first word that came up was “pain” but then someone said “fear” and we decided that would be a good one and off we went.  Each photographer could interpret that any way they wanted and what happened in the comments of the original blog post has been an interesting conversation of whether any of us actually shot an image that communicated fear.  I feel that some of you wanted far too literal of an interpretation. Fear can go a lot of ways. I think we all gravitated toward the “horror’ish” route based on the location we had to use but it doesn’t have to be the ONLY way to interpret it. More in the discussion.

The Results ::

The winner is… (after the jump)

Photographer B, Dave Martinez, won the GOYA shootout! He spanked us all with a total of 1,148 votes (45% of the total votes calculated). Dave wins a $50 gift certificate to B&H Photo!

When Dave emailed the image to me to put on the blog I knew immediately that his was going to be the winning shot. Dave said he worked on a number of different interpretations with the models but he felt that he wasn’t getting the emotions out of them that he wanted. Part of this, Dave says, was his inexperience directing. Keep in mind that Dave was part of this crew because I met him at our Photo 101 course about six months ago. He’s new to photography. It’s a great example of the student kicking the teacher’s ass! Great job Dave!

During one of his first attempts of the day he turned around and saw that panel of glass and wondered what it would look like lit from behind. Since he didn’t really feel he was getting the emotion he wanted from the models he turned to a more simplistic interpretation of the theme. He says he felt like he was copping out by going this route but at the end of the day, he felt it was a lot stronger than his other attempts. He shot a number of variations of this scene and felt the pulled back, wider shot worked best. Yes, the image is a cliché but it has a good spin on it by NOT cropping in tight to the hand. Again, when he emailed it to me my thought was it was the winner. It’s just so simple and effective.

I really appreciate the fact that Dave recognized he was struggling with the direction of the models so he went a different route, kept it simple, and beat us all by a large margin.

The Discussion ::

2,500 votes have come in for the contest so, to some viewers, each photographer interpreted the word enough to illicit a vote. Some folks commented that they could not vote for any of them because they felt the word was never interpreted correctly. Let’s talk about that.

What is fear to you? There is the fear of death, pain, disease, etc. There is also the fear of not being smart enough, good enough, pretty enough, wealthy enough. Fear of taxes, kids getting in trouble, pregnancy, etc, etc, etc. Fear can go in a lot of directions. Here is what we were all thinking as we were shooting for this assignment.

I was really impressed with Luanne Dietz’s interpretation.  She is Photographer A. Her image is this one…

Luanne approached this theme by asking her subject, Mych, what he was fearful of. Mych responded that he is afraid of death so Luanne ran with that idea. Her approach was to create an image for the subject. She thought the rectangle box in the carpet on the landing could represent a casket. Add to that the creative framing of the broken spindle on the bannister as an implement of pain or destruction and I thought her interpretation was successful for what she was trying to achieve. I would like to see a little more direction given to Mych to create a pose that says “death” more than “sleep” but overall, good job.

Luanne says that if she had to do it again she would stay with the same concept but put more time into directing the subject to convey more of an emotion from him. She showed the image to Mych on the back of her camera and he couldn’t even look at it so in that way Luanne was very successful in interpreting her subject’s fear as a photo.  She also feels that she would have worked with lighting a bit more instead of going with the available light.

Luanne’s thought was to create something that wasn’t completely obvious. She wanted to find a different way to convey fear than what you may stereotypically go to first as an idea of “fear”.

In speaking with Luanne after the results have been tallied she made an excellent point that all of us forgot to think about the viewer in some ways.  You see, all of us had three days in this place and it was very creepy and strange. There were strange sights, sounds, smells, things, rooms, etc. Our experience being inside of the place for a number of days probably insulated us from thinking about how viewers who have never been in this old mansion might feel.  Good point Luanne.

Photographer D is Megan Case. She shot this image…

Megan says that anytime she has a nightmare it is of someone chasing her trying to harm her. She decided it would be kind of funny to go with a B Movie poster idea. What’s interesting is that some folks commented that they didn’t like this image because it looked like a B Movie poster. So in some ways, she was totally successful with her idea.  I would like to see the model only casting one shadow on the wall. That would mean spending more time feathering the light creating the shadow off of her enough to get rid of the second shadow but still cast the shadow of the arm. That arm belongs to her super awesome husband, Rob (AKA Scrim Bitch).

Megan says that if she had this assignment to do again she would have made an image that was more vague in context and subject so that it could have more of an open interpretation by viewers of the photo. That’s probably an aspect to Dave’s winning shot that helped him win this contest.

Photographer E was our business manager, Sherri.

Sherri wanted to use the elements of some sort of disaster combined with loneliness. Fear of being alone. Fear of what ever crazy predicament is going on. Etc. Sherri says that if she were to do it again she would stay with the same concept but spend more time directing the subject in order to convey the feeling better. In Sherri’s defense, she was in charge of a lot of logistics and did not have much time to get something thrown together.

Photographer F is our new studio manager, Dan Depew. Dan is currently in Bangkok so I have not had a chance to talk to him about his shot. His shot was this one…

She’s holding a telephone handset FWIW if you didn’t pick up on that before.

Lastly, I was photographer C with this image…

I shot four specific set ups for the concept. Two of them involved screaming. One of them involved being trapped. And finally the image above. It started out as another “screaming” attempt but Bonnie, the model in the photo, was such a sweet girl that getting fear out of her was nearly impossible to do. She would scream and then start laughing. It was funny. So, I had to take it a different direction and I decided to go in a horror movie direction with fear being more of an emotion I would want the viewer to feel than the subject to convey. I had directed her through a number of emotions and this one translated as the most believable. I then liked more of a quiet solitude of the trapped mirror image. I’m still not sure if I made the right decision to lighten her eyes in the main part of the shot.

If I had to do it over again I would have gone darker and dirtier, and like Megan Case said, more vague as to subject matter so that it could be interpreted differently for different people.  I am happy with my image above and for all of the images I shot that day I feel this is my best one. To do it all over again I would go a different direction though yet I do stand by my photo and I do not regret my editing choice for this shootout.

The common thing that ALL of us struggled with… directing our subjects. As a photographer you are also a director. It’s a learned skill. If you don’t like working with people or if you find yourself to be very shy, then portrait photography is going to be a challenge for you.

So…

I figure there are three audiences to speak to with your photographs.

A) Your subject / client

B) Yourself

C) Anonymous viewers of your work

I specifically did not want to put interpretations into the original blog post. I suppose the most successful photographs out there are the ones that can speak to all three audiences at one time. The reason I did not want to explain any of these photos is to see how they ranked without interpretation. I feel as though a photograph should stand on it’s own without explanation. Explanations can also change the way the viewer sees the image. It can sway your idea or emotion of the image. We don’t always get the opportunity to explain our work so we have to work on making sure it stands on it’s own.

If you are still with us here, do any of these explanations sway the way you voted? If you didn’t think “fear” the first time around do you think that now? After all this talking do you have a different perspective on this set of images or does it support your original thoughts and emotions about the images?

Given an old abandoned mansion where do you think you may have taken this assignment?

Thanks for being a part of it everyone!

Cheers,
Zack

We had so much fun with the last GOYA shootout that we are back with another one!  Here’s the rundown…

We rented the Candler Mansion last week for three days of personal shooting. This personal project required a lot more resources than my old OneLight minimalist self could handle so we called on a number of people to come in and help with this project. We set one day aside for all of us to grab some gear and shoot anything we wanted. We had an amazing team assembled of photographers, models, hair, make-up, and wardrobe on hand. At the start of the day we chose one word that we had to shoot an image for. The word chosen was “fear”. Six photographers worked on their take of “Fear” and now you, our wonderful blog readers, are going to let us know who did the best job capturing the theme of “fear.”

Voting is open until midnight EST, Friday Feb. 5th. You can vote one time per day per IP address. The identities of the photographers and the photo they took will be revealed when we release the results on Saturday.

Here we go…

Here is a drill down of the images for easy reference…

Please use the following poll box to vote.

Feel free to critique us in the comments!

The winning photographer will receive a $50 gift certificate to B&H Photo and the winning model will receive a $50 gift certificate to Anthropologie. If I win (which I am fairly convinced I won’t) then the crew has to take me to lunch!

Cheers,
Zack

PS – GOYA = Get Off Your A$$!

As we get deeper into video production I know that one skill I really need to work on is audio capture and editing. I headed out this evening with a Sennheiser ME-67 and an Edirol audio recorder. Big thanks to Marc for letting me borrow the recorder. The recording comes after the story.

Meg was in Little Five Points to purchase some props and wardrobe for a shoot we have next week. I met her there and walked around recording sounds of cars, people, etc. Someone called out to me;

“What in the hell is that thing? Is that a gun or something?”

The ME-67 is about 14 inches long and is kind of menacing looking in the dark. Black Rob (as he’s known on the streets) was just making sure nothing crazy was about to go down. He started asking me about recording equipment and I started asking about his life.

I recorded Rob without the aid of headphones. I scurried out of the studio too quickly today and left my headphones behind. Always a great thing to do when trying to learn how to capture audio. Luckily the Edirol recorder has a nice level readout so I just kept my eye on that while recording.

I came home needing some music to lay under the recording I had made. Meg disappeared into Loretta (her recording studio) to create an original song just for me. She reappeared at 5am. I had cut all the parts out of the recording that I wanted and got to work in Apple’s Soundtrack Pro. This is the first time I’ve used the program and it was the first time Meg used ProTools.  We’ve both been sliding down a steep learning curve.  

I’m sure you audio guys and gals would have some opinions on this. I would love to hear them.

Listen to the final project for the day. 

Cheers,
Zack