At the beginning of April I had a great opportunity to be in Birmingham for Bryan Johnson’s workshop. Bryan is a photographer whose work I admire and I love the way he runs his business, the brand he has built, and his philosophy about photography. I took the workshop hoping to fine-tune some of my own ideas about photography and see first hand what goes on in his studio. It was everything I hoped it would be.

I shot a few rolls of film while I was there and once I get the film back, I’ll post a few of those images and write a little bit more about the specific things that made an impact while I was in Alabama.

In the mean time, enjoy these two images that were made during our afternoon shooting sessions.

Here’s the website for A Bryan Photo.

Ideally, I’d have my camera with me at all times. But that’s not always the case. Like, at church, for example. Who takes a camera to church? So that’s why I’m so darn glad I have a camera on my phone, because I take that sucker with me everywhere I go (including church). Oh, sure, it can’t solve all my artistic problems (or hardly any of them) but when I’m in a pinch, it will do the trick.

Sometimes I use it just to take a picture of something I want to remember later, like the giant banner at the fabric store stating “Not going out of business” (hilarious) and sometimes I use it to see things differently than I would if I was looking through my regular camera’s viewfinder.

So here you go. All of these were taken with my camera phone and this slide show is just a bit longer than 2 minutes. Enjoy!

Good pictures are made in the head and the heart, not in the camera. If you are interested in improving your camera skills but just aren’t sure how to go about that, or if you’re already making pictures you like, but know there’s room for improvement, or if you just want to shake up what you’re currently doing, then you may be interested in taking an online class I’m teaching on March 27, 2012 called “10 photo workouts to make you a better photographer” as part of the Alt Design Summit’s online channel. You can read more and sign up here. Space is limited.

ONLINE PHOTOGRAPHY CLASSES
From the Alt Design Summit website: We want to make Alt Summit available to everyone, everywhere, all year long. So we’ve created the Alt Summit Channel.

This week I’m teaching a couple online photography classes for the Alt Summit Channel, but there’s lots of other great classes, too. You can check out all the options and sign up here. And they’re only 15 bucks each. Wowza!

The two classes I’m teaching are Beginning DSLR, which I’ve taught several times and each time it gets better and better and more refined and the other class I’m teaching is 10 Photo Workouts To Make You a Better Photographer. The beginning DSLR class is for beginners (of course) and the Photo Workouts is for anyone at any skill-level.

It’s going to be great fun and I hope you can join us.

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30 STRANGERS 2012
In other news, plans are cooking up for 30 Strangers 2012. This will be the fifth year I’ve done this project. I have secured a location for the exhibit, which I’ll mention in more detail at a later time. And by later, I don’t mean around 11:30pm, I mean, later on in a month or so. For the past 3 years I’ve photographed the participants in the month of April, but I’m moving it to June this year so I can shoot outside more often. Last year it seemed like it was about 100 below zero every day of the month in April. Not my style. I like it HOT, see. So, in about a month or so, I’ll be making an full announcement about the exhibit/project and how you can be in the running to be a 30 Stranger. I’m so excited to do it again.

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WPPI PHOTOGRAPHY CONVENTION
This weekend I’m going to hit the road and head to Vegas. I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “Vegas? That town is so gross and fake and just a cheap copy of some place else.” Or maybe that’s just what I was thinking. In any regard, I’m headed to Vegas to go to WPPI, a trade show I’ve been attending for the past few years. All the vendors I use to run my business are there, so I get to talk to them and see what’s new and chat with photographers I always enjoy seeing. Plus, there’s an Eiffel Tower in that town! An honest-to-goodness, real-life, fake Eiffel Tower!

“…We see a haystack by Monet, an iris by Van Gogh, or an asparagus spear by Manet and marvel at their presence and spirit and think that these works were about haystacks, irises, and asparagus. Not at all! Monet, Van Gogh, Manet employed haystacks, irises, asparagus to speak of the symphonies of light, the glory of God’s creations, the life force residing in all forms. We care about those paintings more than we care about stacks of hay, flowers, and vegetables because we care more about light, God and life than we do about any of their particular manifestations. Meaning, not beauty, is what we are after. Big, deep, wide meaning.”

Peter London, from the book No More Secondhand Art

This could be one of my favorite photographs I’ve ever taken. It was taken in 1999 (1998?) just outside New Orleans on a cross-country trip with my friend Brooke. There’s a long story about what we were doing there in the first place and Brooke and I both count our lucky stars that we are alive to tell about it, and that’s part of why I connect emotionally to the picture. But the reason it just be my favorite picture of all time is because there’s some mystery in this picture. What is he pointing at? What could her expression mean and why is she looking at him like that? What happened in the few seconds before this picture was taken and what is going to happen after the shutter has clicked? And why is he wearing baseball pants? Those are the kind of questions that may instinctively run through your head when you look at this picture.

When I talk to people about ways to improve their photography, I suggest adding an element of mystery as one way to do that. By purposely not answering all the questions within the image, you add visual interest which causes the viewer to spend more time looking at the picture. For me, that’s what makes this image successful.

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Interesting side-note from 12 years later. Last month, Brooke, who was with me in the boat, was watching a show on the History Chanel called Swamp People about swamps in Louisiana, and this fellow, this exact same guy, was profiled in their piece. How fun, that she happened to come across that.

Last week I went on Studio 5 to talk about three exercises you can do to improve your photography. Amy came with me to make sure they powdered my bald head so it wasn’t too shiny.

I met Brooke and Darin before the show started and they were so very pleasant. Everyone there was very friendly, and everything seemed so calm and casual — very different from what I pictured happened behind the scenes, an idea that comes from everything I’ve seen on TV about TV. I thought there would be shouting (“We’re on in five minutes people!!!”) and people running up and down corridors with stacks of paper flying this way and that, and maybe there would even be a guy with his pants on fire. None of that happened. I was probably at the wrong show for that sort of behavior. On Studio 5 they talk about cooking and weight loss and how to get better at photography. Calm. Casual. And friendly.

Camera phone picture seconds before I went on

Here’s how things went on the show:

The other day I saw an ad for a posing guide. You know, it lists different ways photographers should have your subject stand, place their hands just so, and the right angle for them to have their head. It got me thinking about how using a posing guide will ruin your portrait photography.

Now I get the idea of a posing guide–that is, that you want to flatter your subject, and there are certain ways to shape their body that is more flattering than others. I get that, and in theory, it’s smart. But there are at least two problems with those guides. First, all your pictures will start to look the exact same from person to person and what’s worse, they’ll start to look exactly like the dude that sold you the posing guide.

For me, I want to make a portrait that suggests something about the person I’m photographing. The key to making pictures like that is to pay attention to gestures and expressions. There’s some nuance with that method, so being observant and picking up on subtle details is a good skill to develop. When I’m working, I want to let my subjects sit or stand they way they normally would whether I was there or not. If that happens, then a little bit of that person is revealed in the pictures I take. And that’s the other problem with a posing guide. You start paying attention to whether or not their arm is how you remembered it from a picture that someone else said your pictures should look like, instead of paying attention to what the person’s body language is revealing to you.

Learning a handful of standard poses is the easy way. It’s the factory versus hand-crafted. Trying to make something surprising and unique to each subject is the hard way, but for my money, the road to making portraits that are memorable and meaningful. You think Irving Penn ever bought a posing guide?

Salvador Dalí portrait by Irving Penn

So that’s my approach. If you have a different opinion, feel free to share it.

The value of a life cannot be assessed chronologically, sequentially. If that were the case then the only bit that matters – like the closing instants of a race – would be how you felt in the seconds before your death. The moments or phases that make a life worthwhile can come early or late. For athletes, and women dependent solely on their beauty, they always come early. For writers, artists and everyone else they can come at any time. If you are unlucky they do not come at all.

Sometimes these moments are preserved in photographs.

From the book The Ongoing Moment, by Geoff Dyer

When I was a kid, I’d get out boxes of old photographs. I’d stare at the pictures of my parents when they were younger and thinner and I’d try to learn something that I didn’t already know from those pictures. I tried to peer into the images and wanted desperately for them to reveal some hidden truth about my folks and about my life.

There’s a picture of me and Brad Edwards, sitting in the dirt, playing with a couple of trucks. I can’t be entirely certain if I can actually remember that day, or just remember looking at a picture of that day.

Another image: my father standing by a motorcycle he no longer had. He was skinny and his hair was dark brown, not gray. He must have been about 27. I was a little baby and sat on the seat of the bike. My sister, just a couple years older than me, sat there, too.

Sometimes I hear people say they don’t want to be photographed. They don’t like how they look, they tell me. They want to wait until they loose a few pounds, they say. That always makes me sad. Don’t they see, the pictures aren’t for them. They are for their children, for their families, who will look at those pictures and be so glad someone had the foresight to take them.

The 30 Strangers exhibit is this Friday. July 2nd. It’s going to be great fun. I hope to see you there.

I thought I’d share with you the process of selecting the images that will go in the show.

I estimate that over the course of the month of April, I shot 6,000 – 8,000 images for this project. That got narrowed down pretty quickly to 2,267. Those are the images I showed the clients when the came back to see their pictures. Anywhere from 60 – 120 images per session.

I took those 2,000 images and selected 118 that were possible candidates for the show. I made 4×6 prints of those 118 pictures, drove to Salt Lake, and got Kent Miles to help me make the final selection.

On Friday, if you come to the show, you’ll see the 30 images we selected.

I asked Kent to help me for a few reasons. Kent has had more photography exhibits than any other photographer in the state. He has such a broad understanding of taking multiple pieces, and combing them to make a single piece, which is to say, the exhibit.  Not only is he a excellent photographer, but he’s an excellent artist, and a skill separate from that of a photographer, a gallery curator. Also, he’s looking at the images with fresh eyes. I’d spend quite a bit of time looking at these pictures that it’s helpful to have someone with new perspective.

Selecting 30 from 118 isn’t just a matter of picking the best picture from each session. To make an interesting exhibit, you want to create some rhythm from piece to piece. There’s got to be some variety, not just in size and orientation (square, vertical, horizontal) but also in the tone and message and feeling from each picture. So you lay them all out and see how one picture will look next to another. You ask, do any others that look the same as this one. How should this one be cropped. On and on.

The cropping makes a huge difference. As we’d look at each image, Kent would spend time coming up with different variations on how each one should be cropped. He’s always said that the most important line you draw in your pictures is the line you draw around the edge of the frame. You can see that different parts of the image become emphasized more or less, depending on where you put the edge of the frame. Often times, radically altering the way you respond to the original image.

Here are some things to think about when you come to the exhibit on Friday that may help you enjoy the show a little more. Questions to consider–

1. Why is this image (whatever one you’re looking at) placed next to this image? Do they strengthen each other by being placed next to each other?
2. Why would he crop it like this? Would the impact of the picture be improved if it was cropped more? Less?
3. How do these pictures make me feel?
4. What do these pictures say about the relationships between mothers and daughters?
5. Is it the photographer’s responsibility to tell the truth about these people’s relationship or is it ok to just make them look good?
6. If the pictures move you in any way, can you describe why? If the pictures don’t do anything for you, can you describe why?
7. How does the way they are presented (how they are framed, placement in the gallery) effect the way you feel about the collection as a whole?

And here’s Kent, hard at work:

See you Friday, July 2nd – 6-9pm.

And remember, if you can’t make it on Friday night, we’ll have the following additional gallery hours:
July 3 & 5 12pm – 8pm
July 6-9 2pm – 5pm

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Justin Hackworth Photography. We’re not just making pictures, we’re making history.

Yesterday a group of photography and design students from BYU-Idaho came to Utah to visit a few businesses in Utah and see how things are done on a daily basis. They stopped at The Mandate Press (smart move) in Salt Lake and came by my studio in the afternoon. It was great fun to host them. Thanks for coming, you crazy kids–what, with your desire for learning and your high hopes and your full head of hair.

When their adviser called, he suggested I talk to them about some things I wish I had known before I started my business and then show them what I do around here on a daily basis.

My message to them wasn’t about photography at all. It was about business. I told them if they planned on working for themselves they’d be wise to spend at least 50% of their time developing their business skills and 50% of their time developing their craft. There’s my golden nugget of truth for those kids. If you’re working for yourself, you must be as good at business as you are at your craft. That’s something that took me a while to figure out.

And just for fun, I sent out a Tweet and asked others what I should mention to the students. My favorite bit of advice came from Victoria Smith who writes the blog sfgirlbybay.com. She said, “It’s harder than you think to make a good picture, but worth every minute trying.” So true.

After we talked a bit, I wanted to show them my process of making a portrait. Nic and Bridgette volunteered to be photographed. So, it works like this. People come to the studio, we chat a bit, I ask them questions, we get to know each other, and then I start taking some pictures. Then I get something like this:

The students asked some questions, I gave the right answers (of course). Then I gave them all a print. They had about 15 different images to choose from, including one of my all time favorite pictures, taken in New Orleans in 2006:

Yesterday was a great day. I love being a photographer and I love talking about photography. I sure don’t have all the answers, but I have some answers and I love to share what I know. If you are a photographer interested in refining you skills or making improvements in what you’re currently doing, I offer mentoring sessions that are tailored to what you’d like to learn. Send me an email if you’d like more information. Alternatively, at this site you can ask me anything.

Don’t wait up. I’m headed to Vegas. Every year, there is a trade show and convention for wedding and portrait photographers. It’s called WPPI. I love being there and meeting other photographers doing great work and meeting with vendors that can help us make our business better and increase our service to our clients. This year, the keynote speaker is Gregory Heisler. This year, WPPI is legit.

Suitcases are packed. I just need to put them in the car, right after I make this post. Then, I’m hitting the road.

Update on the 30 Strangers. If you haven’t already put your name on the list, you have until midnight tonight. Tomorrow morning we’ll randomly select the participants and send an email to confirm the date we’d like to photograph you. Thanks to everyone that expressed an interest.

And now, Vegas, baby.

The Salt Lake Seven is a group of photographers that meet each month to show and talk about their work. It started in 1996 when I asked Kent Miles to be a private instructor for me. He suggested that instead, I find some other like-minded photographers, who also wanted to improve their craft, and that we meet all together, rather than one-on-one. Fourteen years later, I’m still going and I’m still learning and I’m still inspired by Kent and the rest of the group every time I attend.

No matter what level you are, if you care about getting better at photography, I’d suggest that being a part of an artists’ group will play a big part in your learning process. And it also helps when you have Utah’s finest documentary and portrait photographer, Kent Miles leading the group.

Kent Miles

It’s always good to carry your camera with you. That way, when you show up and your friends haven’t arrived yet, you can spend your time making pictures. And that’s just what happened here. This photograph was made a few days ago while I was waiting for my friends. Pretty good way to pass the time, if you ask me.

Giving specific advice on what to photograph would not be appreciated even if it was possible. The answer is provided by a question: What are you really interested in? In other words: What is it that can sustain your enthusiasm for a long time?

Bill Jay, Occam’s Razor
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Rexburg, Idaho on New Years Day - 2010

Here are the photography books I got for my birthday. I’m so excited!

You cannot be a photographer by aspiring to be one, or by learning everything there is to be known about photography. Photographers produce photographs. And many of them. Like every other skill, photography is learned by continuous and dedicated practice.

Bill Jay, Occam’s Razor

Young photographers are often pressured into an emphasis on individual style, a search for distinction, a quest for newness and differentness. Yet the truth of the matter is that a unique style is a by-product of visual exploration, not its goal. Personal vision only comes from not aiming for it. In dim light, objects emerge from the gloom when not looking at them. It is the same with style; paradoxically, it is a natural, inevitable result of emphasizing subject, not self.

Bill Jay, Occam’s Razor

Thanks to everyone that came to the Art Seminar lecture at BYU Idaho last Thursday. I really did have the time of my life. It was great to meet everyone that came up after and I really appreciate what Kelly Burgener, dean of the art school said. “That was as good as any Art Seminar we’ve ever had”. A sincere thanks to you for having me.