Tag Archives: photography

07/9/12

The Clatter about Klamar

For those of you who aren’t big into the photo world, lately a particular group of pictures has created quite a buzz. Joe Klamar, a photographer with an incredibly successful 20 year career may have just taken the worst pictures of his life. So who cares, right? Photographers have off days and take bad shots every now and again. But when the job on the table is photographing the US Olympic Athletes, you don’t screw it up.

So I’ve been reading all the comments (and making plenty of my own) about the images. If you go to the guys website you can see, he doesn’t suck. But it looks like he sent an intern in to this gig, photographing some of the most accomplished Americans. What is blowing everyone’s minds is how could this photographer shoot people who have worked so hard their entire lives for this moment like bad senior portraits?

Here is the Kate Take: This is not what he shoots. If you go to Klamar’s website to view his award winning, internationally published, work you don’t see ANYTHING like this. To be well rounded in photography you have to shoot everything all the time. That is just not the way this industry works. What we are taught to do, conditioned by art buyers, agents, producers, etc, is to master one look. Make it synonymous with our names and success will come. So if you call a photographer at the top of his or her game, make sure you are calling because what you need is a shot that they take.

The AFP decided to send in one of their top guys to this. They thought, “hey! Let’s send Joe! He’s amazing!” they didn’t think, “which of our photographers is going to roll with the punches and be prepared for anything” since they clearly didn’t have the right idea of what this event was (as was made clear by Joe’s statements post-shoot, “I was under the impression that I was going to be photographing athletes on a stage or during press conference where I would take their head shots for our archives,” he explained. “I really had no idea that there would be a possibility for setting up a studio.” It was the first time AFP had been invited to participate in the U.S. Olympic Committee’s Media Summit) this is a miscommunication that destroyed a photographers reputation.

The article the AFP put out for their damage control made it even more clear, using the pitch “we love these photos…. they are just what we wanted… yup! We’re very happy!!” I hate to be Debbie Downer here but no, I’m sure the AFP isn’t happy. But I’m sure Joe is even more upset. As a photographer, we know when we take crap pictures. Joe is the one who has to live with this. I didn’t know who he was until I saw these shots, many others are in the same boat. We only know him as the photographer who took the worst portraits of Olympians ever. He knows that is what we are all thinking.

Joe is a master of his shot, which now, I have to wonder, is he just getting lucky? Because of these images, a photographer I otherwise would have thought had a great eye I know think gets lucky. I think he puts the biggest CF card he has in that camera and holds the shutter down taking as many pictures as he can before the camera has to process it. One must be good, right? How else can we excuse the way he doesn’t look through the lens and see how horrid the angles he is shooting are? That there is ZERO connection between subject and photographer?

In my imagination, I see a photographer showing up unprepared and trying to fake it till he makes it. Jumping around, making a big production about how he is shooting and paying no attention to what he is shooting. Bravo for taking risks but if the angles don’t work, try another!

So form your own thoughts… take a look at these images and let me know, do you think this is just breaking the mold brilliance or are they crap pictures? This is the first page Google Images search…

JoeK



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05/4/11

Wallpaper Wednesday

Welcome to the inaugural post of Wallpaper Wednesdays.  Each week I’ll post a new image as wallpaper for your desktop, tablet or phone.  The image will be from a body of work currently underway or a classic from the archives. Right click the image below and click ‘save image as.’  Then set it to your desktop and voila!

All images are available for purchase as fine art prints.  Just shoot me an email and I’ll send one over!

01

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01/13/11

Fine Art Photography Commision | Key West (part 1)

This week started with a three and a half hour drive over blue oceans, through chains of islands and finishing in Key West. My little sister has been visiting me and hasn’t been there since we were kids. With a furious snow storm heading to her home of New Hampshire we decided to get as far south as possible to end her trip with an adventure. But, January is a very busy month for photographers in Miami and inevitably work was booked to be shot during our adventure.

A fine art commission is always a blast. It gives me a chance to think outside the box and creates opportunity for intentions (and hopefully not expectations which are artistic suicide). So we knew we wanted night photography, and we new we wanted architectural & time-laps elements. Other than that it was open for interpretation.

The results did not disappoint. Getting home and editing the images left me impressed over and over. Now the exciting part starts as the commissioner selects which images will be printed between 3-4 feet and hung as a triptych all hopefully within the next week and half before the restaurant opens. I’ll keep you posted!

At work~

At work~

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08/30/10

Great Camera App for smartphones.

This is geeky. Aren’t photographers supposed to be though? I don’t have an iPhone, I don’t even like the iPhone. But it’s because I LOVE Google Voice (so if you ever call me and are prompted to say your name you are calling my Google Voice number) and the iPhone doesn’t support Google Voice. So I will never buy an iPhone. That’s okay though, because in June Sprint released the HTC EVO and everyday my husband or I find something new and fun that this phone does. But I’m not trying to sell you the phone, I want you to check out this app and whether you like the iPhone, the HTC EVO, or any other smartphone this app is too much fun not to recommend!

http://www.appstorehq.com/retrocamera-android-240837/app it’s a free app that applies filters to your photographs so that they look like different types of Polaroids, a pinhole camera exposure onto film, or other really cool effects. I’m in love with it. My only negative thought is that the images produced are teeny weeny tiny files and my phone has an 8 megapixel camera on it. So while these images will never do anything more than live in cyberspace, I will keep using this app because it is so neat.

Here’s a few to check out, there will be many more Retro Camera App posts… oh yes, this is way too fun.

Retro Camera photograph of I95 somewhere between Orlando and Miami

Retro Camera photograph of I95 somewhere between Orlando and Miami

Retro Camera photography of powerlines at sunset off the highway

Retro Camera photography of powerlines at sunset off the highway

Retro Camera photography using the pinhole camera in b&w

Retro Camera photography using the pinhole camera in b&w

Retro Camera photography using the polaroid camera, buildings on I95

Retro Camera photography using the polaroid camera, buildings on I95

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04/29/10

Visiting in Miami

I was really excited and lucky to have my sister Jacquelyn Benson (she’s an amazing writer) and her boyfriend Dan visiting this week. Besides hitting the beach and BBQing almost every day we also took a fishing trip, visited Tobacco Road, and had many more adventures. Naturally I was sad to see them go back to their home in Maine but I look forward to heading up north sometime this summer to play with them again.

To start you off, a little love shot from Sam of him and I!

Sam and I

Fishing Trip

Miami Beach Polaroid Transfer

Smooches

Tobacco Road

Hope I have been able to temp some of my family and friend in far away lands to come visit too!

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11/18/09

Pruf Reed UR werek.

Remember junior high? How you had to hit spell check after you wrote an essay? How about when you were doing your math homework and gave it that little once over to catch any mistakes? Although we would all LOVE to repress those memories a little longer there is an important lesson in them: proof read your work. Just because we graduated junior high, high school and some of us even college doesn’t get us off the hook for double checking what we do.

Sometimes it’s a little easier. For example if your sending out your resume of COURSE you’ll check your spelling. But do you take it any further than that? Do you actually read it out loud to hear how it is going to sound to someone reading it? If you recognize the importance of sounding intelligent in a resume than wouldn’t you also recognize that any email there after to that client is equally important. Take the time, read your email out loud. Most email hosts have a check spelling option but if you hit the wrong key and managed to still spell an actual work (although not the word you wanted) spell check is not going to catch it. Reading it back to yourself is.

Then there are harder places to double check, like your images. If you are creating a series of pictures you need to make sure any retouching you’ve done stays consistent throughout all of them. Don’t saturate the crap out of you sky in one shot and then leave it be in the next if they are part of the same story. If it’s personal work for yourself or work for a client, this is a very good habit to develop. If possible, use a program that let’s you open all the images in one window and see how they flow together. I love using Bridge for this. You can hold down the command key and select multiple images to be viewed at once. I do this for all my editorials. This also creates an amazing editing tool. Often I take a photograph out and replace it with another to see if the story is stronger that way. I’ve even gotten into the habit of taking screen shots of the edit and sending it to the editor I’m working with. It’s fairly normal to have 6 or 7 different takes on the story before we settle on the strongest layout.

Yet, if the images weren’t edited to look like they fit together this process wouldn’t work. Of course an image that doesn’t match the others in color and tone is going to create a stumble in the story. All the shots we consider putting into the fashion spread are given a quick retouch so we can edit fairly. See this example,

When you haven't retouched both images.

When you haven't retouched both images.

When you have retouched both images.

When you have retouched both images.

If your deadline/due date for an assignment isn’t due right away, finish it early and come back to it a few days later. Check to see if you still like the edits you made in post production. There are a lot of times I will get excited about something and then realize two days later it just doesn’t work.

Even when you have a client and you’ve shots 500 images for their website, go back and check. Although at the end of shooting, loading, and retouching 500 photo’s the last thing you want to do is see any more of it, force yourself to do it. You don’t want your clients thinking you are sloppy and there’s the chance that someone else isn’t going to catch your mistake either (if they are doing anything with your images odds are they are sick of them too). Worse case scenario, your careless mistake ends up published somewhere for the world to see.

So take a few extra minutes, a half an hour late without any mistakes is going to save your client more time in the end and will help you build a better reputation as a professional.

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