Friday at PhotoPlus seemed even longer and more exhausting. Another full day of absorbing information, as well as a 20 block walk with 7x (8 foot by 2 foot) Styrofoam sheets for Halloween costumes – and that was before I even got to the convention centre…
So first up today was a talk about ‘Photographing the Presidential Campaign’. An open access ‘keynote’ talk – with a moderator and 4 contributors. Was an interesting talk – a lot for the pictures, and a lot for the changing point of view of the campaigns in terms of how access has to the candidates has diminished.
Next up was Jay Maisel (the link is actually to an interview with Jay Maisel, because his actual website seems to be constantly under construction). This guy was really fascinating. I’ve come across him after seeing a few of his photos, but also when I was looking for local photo workshops. Sadly his workshops don’t quite fall into my budget, but his reputation made me attend his presentation on Friday.
His talk was definitely not the regular photographer-presentation. It was more like a visual workout. The talk was called ‘Light, Gesture and Colour’… fine, ok – before I see all the comments, it was called ‘Light, Gesture and Color’. Anyway, he started off with showing us how there’s a picture in everything – almost like optical illusions. He demonstrated how the eye perceives things, how it can be tricked, and how to use that to make an interesting photo. The whole presentation really made people think, and showed how there’s a photo everywhere – he showed us a picture of a white arrow on a red background. Then he told us how it was on every FedEx van. Taught us how to notice things that some people might normally miss.
He’s also a huge fan of winging it – as in ‘take your camera everywhere’. Whilst I’m pretty sure I’d never keep up with that, I can see his point. There’s always something happening and for a lot of those things, it’ll only happen once. ‘Keep an open mind’ was another theme – if you go out to shoot one specific thing, you’ll probably miss something else amazing. I try to keep an open mind when shooting – like the picture at the top of this post – I actually went out to take photos of the sand/estuary/sunrise in the sky that day – but on the way back to the hotel after packing up all my stuff, I came across the rusty boat*.
Next up was Joe McNally. I know, I know, I’ve only just seen him, and I’m in danger of becoming a stalker, but this presentation sounded different, and it was. Even though there were (I think) more people than the Adorama talks, it somehow seemed more intimate. Gone was the walk-through of the photos, and In was the direct questions to all of us – right at the beginning of the 2 hours – asking what we’d like to hear / do. Was really a good way of starting a presentation, and we effectively ‘drove’ the presentation. Learned a bunch of new stories from him, and a load of detail about how the magazine world works. As usual he had everyone laughing out loud at some points, and his frankness and honesty with everyone was really refreshing in such a ‘public’ presentation.
That was the end of the single presentations, then at 5.45 I headed into ‘Double Exposure’ – with Elliott Erwitt and Alec Soth. To be honest, I’ve never really registered Elliott Erwitt’s name, so I had no clue what he’d done. At the end of the evening, I realised that his images were genius!! and I’d actually seen a number of them before. Do a google images search for ‘Elliott Erwitt’ and check out the jumping dog, and the ‘boots’ pictures that come up. How does he make dogs jump? He BARKS at them. Makes ‘em jump. Of course he does. Despite having the flu, and coming on stage wearing a surgical mask, his answers to the questions were insightful and a lot of them were pretty funny. Very dry guy…. (UPDATE… PDN have done an article on the talk here… worth a read to get a better view!)
Anyway… that was a long day two. Sorry about the long post!
*Yes, that is indeed the tenuous link between this post, and the picture at the top of the post. Glad you noticed!
