I’m always interested in reading about folk that are successful doing creative things that they love to do (as opposed to punching a well-paid but tedious, soul destroying time card just for the $$$) – a couple of my favourites are David Hobby’s Strobist site, Chase Jarvis’ blog and John Keatley’s blog (yes, they’re all photographers – funny that!).
Apart from the inspiration (if an idea looks good, nick it!) and the education these sites offer, it’s also incredibly reassuring and encouraging to read their personal thoughts. As with all creative success stories, it’s rare, if ever, that you see the work that failed – no photographer puts the blurry, underexposed, badly framed photos online, right? And so it’s easy to wade through the work of someone like Chase and think, “F***, this dude rocks, every frame is priceless, how am I ever going to compete?”.
The thing is that these blogs take you beyond their priceless perfect shots and tell you more about who they are and how they work, and the ones I stick with are the ones that give it you warts and all. Chase recently Facebooked and Twittered throughout a commercial shoot, giving everyone that read the site a very transparent look at the scheduling and logistics of the shoot. Everything from what they had for breakfast to how they packed the trucks, to when each team arrived on location, to how they lit it and set up the camera, to how he shot once everything was up. He even replied to questions Twittered at him, so long as it didn’t compromise the corporate secrecy of the shoot’s subject matter. There were lots of interesting points but the stand out “Burn this to memory” point for me was that he made sure he got the absolute basic “The Client Wants This Shot” image out of the way first, and then they really went to work trying anything that came to mind, and the client loved it.
Anyway, what I’m getting to is this: I just got linked to book cover artist Henry Sene Yee’s blog, mainly to read the “How To Design Book Covers” blurb in the sidebar, quoted below:
HOW DO YOU DESIGN A BOOK COVER?
First you start with a blank page, stare and think really hard, drink lots of coffee, take lots of breaks, fix the copier jam, update your Facebook page, get over the fears that this project is the one that will finally expose you as the hack that you are, and then just trust to do what you feel is right from what you’ve read, present your ideas to find out how they live outside of your head, listen to feedback, try to leave work at a decent hour, have a life, floss, get enough sleep, have a good breakfast and come back the next day to redo it all over again. It’s that simple and fun. And if it isn’t, then get another blank page and start all over again.
There’s one phrase that stands out, for me. I see it all over the place. Chase Jarvis has used it, as has David Hobby on numerous occasions. It’s the phrase that gives me the most encouragement because it’s the phrase I say to myself before practically every single job:
this project is the one that will finally expose you as the hack that you are
Get over your fears! 🙂
With that in mind I got over some of my own personal fears this afternoon by going out on the street to literally walk up to total strangers and ask if I could take their picture using my new Lumiquest Softbox III.
I was terrified. I fear rejection!
Guess what percentage turned me down?
😉
Occasionally I submit an entry to Photofriday – depends on the subject matter and if I have anything which is worthy! Last week the subject was ‘Grandmother’ so I submitted my favourite shot of my gran, Winnie. I shot it a few years ago with a borrowed Jessops flash, top-mounted (this was before the days of reading Strobist!), bounced off the wall behind me, then converted to B&W in Photoshop. I was just firing test shots off and missed a whole bunch of her pulling funny faces, but this is still a lovely shot of her so thank you to everyone that nominated! 🙂
Haven’t done much in the way of photography recently, but I have been tinkering with my site again! 
So that leaves the 404 error pages, which you get if you follow a bad link to a page on my site that doesn’t exist any more, or you type in a wrong address or something. I have no idea how often that happens really but all the same I whipped up a 404 page by using the front page as a template and cutting back the navigation to the bare minimum. Then I made some custom 404 images and used some Javascript to randomly call one of the images whenever the page is reloaded.