A reader has posted a question on one of my earlier blog posts,

TJ Swafford Says:
Question: I’m currently involved in a speeeeeeeeeendy photography degree at SCAD, Do I even NEED this degree to be successful? Or would I be better served by hooking up with an established photographer and glean what I can from him/her?

TJ,

Do you stay in school and get a degree or leave art school to learn from a photographer?

University of Pennsylvania graduation.

There is no easy answer to your question. I am a big believer in education. Yet a Bachelor’s degree in Art is no guarantee of anything. For that matter, a Bachelor’s degree in many fields is no guarantee of anything.

Yes, education is expensive. Developing your mind and expanding your thinking is very valuable.

Everyone’s path is different. If you want to be a commercial or fine artist there is no straight path for your career. Unlike becoming a lawyer or doctor there is not a prescribed way to become an artist. The most successful artists have always blazed their own unique paths.

I know a corporate lawyer who told me that when he was in high school, his father said to him, “You can be a lawyer or a doctor. You choose.” He has ultimately pursued one of the two options dictated by his father.

You do have the power to choose your own path, wherever it may lead. Just by choosing to go to art school you have picked a path off the main stream.

To be an artist, you will need to have a passion and perseverance. You will need to figure out how to pay your bills.

Clients have never asked to see my diploma when they were considering hiring me. Instead they want to see my photographs. But my degree in History of Art and an education in the liberal arts have given me a conceptual framework to see and understand the world. I can discuss architecture with architects. I know what a cap rate is when I talk with a commercial realtor.

It is important to learn how to learn. I do feel that my liberal arts education boosted my ability to learn things on my own, which is an important skill in our dynamic changing world.

I did not take a digital photograph until 2001. Since then I have taught myself many things about digital photography, software and computers.

In the beginning of the digital photography revolution, I imagined I was climbing a mountain of knowledge, learning new technology. Yet as I hiked upward towards the acquisition of more knowledge, the mountain has kept growing and changing. The goal of reaching the top and completely mastering digital photo technology feels perpetually out of reach because the mountain of knowledge is always growing and morphing.

I also feel this way with using and understanding the internet and social media. There will be more changes in the future. So learning how to learn is important.

You will have to make your own decision as far as whether to continue and finish your degree. I don’t know your financial circumstances. If you are piling up student loan debt and school is a huge financial burden, it could make sense to take time off to work in your field and get the perspective of working with a real world photographer.

There are limited opportunities for paid work with photographers. Many commercial photographers are operating with fewer paid staff than before. The freelance model of hiring people is common. And unpaid internships are common, too.

If you leave school and enter the marketplace to find work with a photographer, you will be competing with people who do have degrees in your field. That’s not to say you won’t succeed, it’s just that if fifty people apply for a job, having a degree and experience could move your resume higher up the stack.

Good luck. Whether or not you ultimately finish school–keep learning and keep taking photos.

Keep in mind, one upside to getting a degree, especially a graduate degree, is that you get to wear a crazy hat.

Princeton University graduation.

Princeton Theological Seminary graduation.

Princeton Theological Seminary graduation.

Princeton graduation ceremony.

Penn graduation.

The blog, The Achilles Effect, has a post showing the frequency of words that are used in TV ads for toys marketed to boys vs. those  for girls.

The author, Crystal Smith, took the word frequency lists and ran them through Wordle, a web site and app that makes a graphic out of a word frequency list.

Most frequent words in girl toy ads.

Link to Wordle page for this graphic.

Most frequent words in boy toy ads.

Link to Wordle page for this graphic.

The debate over nature vs nurture when it comes to raising boys and girls will never be settled completely. There are obvious differences between the genders, and society steers each gender in different ways.

When I played with GI Joe figures as a kid, was I playing with dolls, or acting out the power struggles of war? Probably both.

Snow on April Fool's Day, view from my yard in Havertown, PA

This week I have been trying to dream up a humorous and believable April Fool’s Day blog post, but I haven’t come up with one. Instead Mother Nature has provided the perfect April Fool’s event, snow. Here it is April and it’s snowing in Philadelphia. The snow isn’t sticking but it is keeping Spring at bay.

As a kid I always loved April Fool’s Day pranks. One year when I was about ten years old, I woke up early and switched the contents of the sugar bowl and the salt shaker. My dad proceeded to put salt in his coffee and sugar on his eggs. My younger brother spooned salt onto his cereal. Salty coffee and cereal taste terrible. My parents were not amused, but I sure was.

It has been barely more than a full year since we migrated our blog from Blogger to WordPress. The experience has been overall positive (with the expected growing pains and hiccups in between). I think it is appropriate to celebrate with a quick tip about how to streamline the workflow of adding images to your own blog entries.

Luc Renambot’s plugin Dossier de Presse works by giving Lightroom the ability to automatically upload exported images to your WordPress blog. Lightroom has an excellent Export function that allows for saving presets and the real power comes in combining the power of these presets with the Dossier de Presse plugin.

Lightroom Export dialogue using Dossier de Presse plugin

Once Dossier de Presse is installed in Lightroom you can create a new Export Preset using the plugin. First set the “Export To” dropdown to “Dossier de Presse” and then fill out the rest of the export parameters to set the size, compression, and sharpening of the image to export. The final panel requires entering the address of the blog and then a valid login and password.

Selecting multiple images in Lightroom for WordPress Export

Selecting multiple images and then choosing the correct Export Preset makes very quick work of uploading images directly to the WordPress Media Library. You can skip the steps of exporting the images to some temporary folder, navigating through the WordPress web interface to the Media Library, finding the export folder through the upload dialogue, etc. With Dossier de Presse the images will be comfortably waiting in the Media Library ready to be inserted into your next blog entry.

This weekend I am attending ASMP’s Strictly Business 3 series of talks and seminars for professional photographers. In this time of immense change in technology and in the economics of the photography industry, these events have been a positive catalyst for me. It is clear that the world needs images.  While there are forces at work that are reducing prices at the low end of the photography market (think micro stock and cell phone news photos), there is still a need for experienced commercial image makers.

Greg Benson, tagged.

This weekend I have met many other photographers, both younger and older. I’m 52. While it has been fun to engage in nostalgic reminiscences with photographers my age, I am energized by the enthusiasm of many of the younger photographers. It is encouraging to see people in their twenties starting their photo businesses. It has always been a leap of faith to start a photography business–I started my full time business in 1982.

Yesterday one of the four workshops I ended up in was called the Artist Lost and Found taught by Sean Kernan. I entered the wrong hotel meeting room and ended up in Sean’s session by accident. The previous sessions during the day on licensing, web sites and marketing were helpful and informative, but by after lunch my brain was filled to the top with prescriptive things I should start doing. Sean focused  on having working commercial photographers re-connect with the wonder and thrill with photography that animated them when they were new photographers.

Sean had the group of about sixteen people do group exercises to open up perception and let go of inhibition. I felt like I was in a theater class.

We stood in a circle and Sean tossed an imaginary potato to someone across the circle. That person mimed tossing to another person and then the imaginary potato became a basketball and then an orange. While doing a child like game the brain had to move into another sphere of imagining and reacting instead of rational thinking. We played another circle game with changing music. One person would move across the circle to touch the next player. Each person had to move to the type of music being played. A formal minuet, hip hop, monks chanting, tribal drum music followed in quick succession as each person improvised movement to that music.

What’s the connection with photography? Every creative endeavor needs to tap into intuition and gut decision making. Being open to the new is a crucial part of being creative.

ASMP members getting *their* photo taken by Sean Henry.

Backlit by the sun, taken with an iPhone.

Sitting at breakfast I noticed the backlit bottles on our window sill, seen through the window blind. The sun is the supreme light source. As a pinpoint spotlight it’s unrivaled. Sunlight moves quickly. Five minutes later this light had moved on.

The New York Times’ Bits blog ran an entry showcasing a recent finding by Jakob Nielsen that web users completely ignore “generic” looking images. Nielsen, a Danish researcher, has been studying usability on the web since before anyone seemed to care or have noticed that the user experience affects the success of a website.

Ted Abel (foreground), and Ted Huang (background). Researchers at University of Pennsylvania.

Using eye tracking technology to measure the amount of time the user spends looking at various parts of the screen, Nielsen has managed to show that stock images go largely ignored. The Times concentrates on what this means to e-commerce sellers like Amazon and Pottery Barn, but it affects the impact and value of images on any website.

"Female Scientific Research Team Using Microscopes in a Laboratory," from iStockPhoto.com

Nielsen sums up his findings simply:

“Invest in good photo shoots: a great photographer can add a fortune to your Web site’s business value.”

Stock photography carries a very low cost, but it also brings a very low value. And THIS is a scientifically proven fact.

Benson Photo Promotional Package

We market to our prospective and existing client base in a variety of ways. A combination of a web presence, mailers, and phone calls helps us accomplish our marketing goals. We advertise daily on the web, make phone calls and send customized portfolio pieces on a weekly basis, send e-promos on a monthly basis, and mail postcards of our work four times a year.

We continually evolve our marketing strategies to tweak the techniques work for us. Some months we don’t have any new clients from our efforts, and some we have several, but the key to success is persistence.

Our persistent efforts are managed with a cloud computing program called Salesforce.com. We can set up everything from phone appointments, scheduled tasks, and view a history of communication with each contact. A program called Maildrop allows us to save emails into each contact’s folder. Salesforce.com allows us to generate customized reports and fields specific to our marketing needs.

I love my iPhone that I started using in July 2009. As a location photographer, having email and the web in my pocket is a big plus. However, checking email on an iPhone and a desktop meant weeding through as many as 50 spams per day on each device.

Email I don't Miss

Enter Google Apps for domain names. I was able to configure my email with Google’s gmail servers and still keep my gregbenson.com domain name in my email. I set up my iPhone, my desktop and laptop computers for IMAP email. Now I see virtually no spam and if I read an email on my desktop, my mobile phone shows it as already being read. Not having to scroll and delete interminable spam emails saves me time and aggravation.

To use Google Apps you can sign up here.

New Jersey State Taxation Building

Today, Tax Day, April 15 found me in the capital of New Jersey, Trenton, photographing an office building. As coincidence would have it, the state Taxation Building was nearby.

Down the street at the New Jersey State House, tea party protesters gathered to protest taxes.

I don’t know anyone who loves taxes, but as Ben Franklin said, “In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes.”

Tea Party Protesters in Trenton, NJ

Protest at New Jersey State House.

Protest at New Jersey State House