creativeLIVE wrap up

Posted by David
This is where I talk about the most important part of my creativeLIVE experience. Unfortunately for you, those parts happened off camera. Thankfully, you've got me here to tell you about them.
So what was it? The rooftop shoot? The critique? The test where I botched my shutter speed? Nope, none of those.

The most important part didn't come until after the cameras were turned off on Sunday. We gathered around Zack and Chase and just absorbed everything they had to say about making it. I half listened and half watched in awe as Chase spoke. The man embodies diplomacy and enthusiasm like no other. Frankly, watching him on the internet is nothing like meeting him in person. He has this energy about him that is infectious. When he leaves the room you feel like you can jump off of the building and fly.
Zack even asked us while Chase spoke, "Now when he talks, do you doubt anything he says?" The answer was a unanimous "No."

Fear as a Constant:
The thing that both Zack and Chase bring to any situation is the illusion of confidence. Sure, they know their gear, they know their reciprocals, they have the experience, but when it comes right down to it, they're still running scared just like all the rest of us. There is no guarantee in the business of art. And as it has been said time and before, you're only as good as your last shoot.

Before creativeLIVE, I was basically afraid to be afraid. We assume that those ahead of us on the food chain don't have fears, that they've somehow moved beyond them. It's not that they don't have fear; it's that they have different fears.

Chase told us that every time he cuts a huge check for a new venture in his business he's looking fear straight in the eyes. At dinner on Sunday night, Zack told us about how he was consumed by fear before his first appearance on creativeLIVE. Throughout the weekend he referred to how he wrestles with fear all the time. I mean think about it, imagine being up on the roof of the creativeLIVE building trying to capture the shot, and the sun is just hanging there, not doing what it does in Georgia. What's running through your head at that moment even if you've done that shot as many times as Zack has? "Ah crap!" is what I'd be thinking.

I Fear, but I Move Forward:
There came a point either Friday or Saturday night when all my fears and apprehensions settled. There was no great epiphany, nothing that I can reproduce for you. I simply realized that I was meant to be there. I could go into all the reasons why I felt that way, but they don't really matter to you. It is only necessary that they matter to me.

As soon as we stop telling ourselves that we don't belong where we are, that we're hacks, uncle Bob's with camera's or AMWACs ruining the party for everyone else, a powerful thing happens: we accept that we are there and that it is up to us to get the job done.

As I'm writing this, a track is playing, completely by happenstance on Pandora: Hayling, by FC Kahuna. I've never heard it before. It's a sort of mellow, deep bass, techno mix. The kind you can zone out to while working. The main line that runs throughout the track goes like this, "Don't think about all those things you fear, just be glad to be here." That sums up my feelings at the end of creativeLIVE perfectly.

Comfortable is Cubicle Work:
Of course I did have help settling some fears. Zack definitely settled some of them for me. I no longer fear our portfolio. I don't fear my ability to interact with a client. I especially don't fear my knowledge of my gear. I've come home freed of those fears but with a far more important lesson: it never gets easier. If it does, then you're doing it wrong. Comfortable is cubicle work. Art is always pushing boundaries, both society's and your own. If this is the life you choose, be prepared to wake up every morning and face the crooked toothed little hobgoblin that sits on your shoulder, his eyes aglow with the desire to undo you. You can either choose to run and hide, or give him a Chase Jarvis sized smile and with the smoothness of Zack Arias say, "Let's go to work."

Speaking of which, here are some shots from my last day:

In closing, I'd like to say a big thank you to everyone at creativeLIVE and the Arias family. To Meg for tackling her fear of the camera to come up and give us honest critiques and even more so for her candid look at the stress that can be created by having two creatives in a relationship. To Susan for reminding us that we were chosen to be there. To Kenna for keeping things so fun. To Craig, Celeste and the crew for the amazing work they do. To Todd for chatting and Kate for her help. To Chase for hanging out and giving us some insight. To Zack for being so real. Your candidness is more inspiring than any other photog's use of fancy modifiers, gizmos or gadgets. And finally, and most importantly, to my wife and son without whom I wouldn't have even made a video.

Now let's get back to making art.

creativeLIVE Day Two

What’s the biggest lesson I’ve learned after two days of creativeLIVE? I suppose it would be that Zack Arias can read my freaking mind!

Okay, so maybe he’s not reading my mind, maybe he’s reading my blog!

Okay, so it’s probably not that either. Maybe it’s more like everyone, even someone that has been doing this for as long as Zack, deals with fear. His openness about it, his willingness to share and show all, even the shots he’d never deliver to a client, is refreshing. It’s an open invitation to be honest with yourself and to take a chance with whatever comes your way.

Something else I’ve learned is that you just have to do what you know how to do, and then build on it. On day one I tried to snap some behind the scenes shots and quickly gave up. Today started out a lot like yesterday when it came to taking pictures. I took a few shots of break dancing and was about to throw in the towel when I thought about the above and Zack’s mantra, “Know the limitations of your gear.”

Rather than trying to duplicate what Zack was doing, I realized that I needed to create my own shots. Hence today’s photos. I hope they turn out alright on your screen. I’m working off of my laptop which is usually used as a video player for our son.

Day three is going to be chalk full of business and branding, and it’s also going to be test day for the students gulp, and critiques (double gulp). Watching Zack and Meg pick us apart should be more than worth the $99 to download the entire course.

These ladies are hard at work monitoring the chat rooms. ;o) 

Producer Celeste should really be in front of the camera more often.

Head in a clean spot.

Framing.

Quality lens care.

Okay, seriously, Celeste should be in front of the camera more. She has an open invitation to shoot with us in California if she's ever down our way.

I have no clue. An iPhone photo of and iPhone photo? iPhone users do strange things. 

The challenge. Who can fold the monster diffuser?

Not Zack. Which is why he's not the assistant. (Unfortunately I could, so I guess that means that I'm on the wrong side of the camera). 

This lady is way too much fun. 

CreativeLIVE Arias: Day Zero

Posted by: Nervous Wreck
Approved by: No One


This is going to be a quick and dirty blog. No editing, no filtering, just raw, straight out of my head writing (Mel’s going to kill me).

For those who didn’t catch the post a few days back, I’m in Seattle and will be appearing in a live webcast for the next three days. Frankly, I’m nervous. Really nervous. But more on that in a bit. First let’s do the CreativeLIVE rundown.

I talked a lot about Zack in my last post (the instructor for the weekend) and in this one I’d like to introduce you to CreativeLIVE, our hosts. CreativeLIVE is built on the pay-it-forward principle. The idea is that those that really need education usually can’t afford it and that information should not be held hostage. They broadcast, for free, over the web, a weekend seminar that would run most people into the thousands to attend in person. In this model all you have to do is set aside the time to dedicate to the broadcast and you can see it all for F-R-E-E.

If you miss something, or wish to have the information to go back over at a later date, (and trust me, you’ll want to, they go over a LOT) you can order the entire three days for something like $99 if you purchase it before the live broadcast concludes. Pretty sweet deal, huh?

What about after the broadcast? Do they jack the price way up? Yeah, by $50. (I know, that’s not really jacking it up at all is it?) Mel and I have purchased three courses, Zack’s first CreativeLIVE appearance, Tamara Lackey’s, and Bambi Cantrell’s even though we sat through all of the live feed. There’s just so much information that you can’t possibly remember it all. So do yourself a favor and purchase it now while it’s even cheaper.

We go live at 10 a.m. west coast time. Check it out.

Hobgoblins
It’s late and I really need to get to bed and rest up for tomorrow, but I’m also a little restless. You see, this entire trip, from start to finish, is a huge step for me. If Dr. Phil were here he’d be patting me on the back. (This is where you can tune out if you get bored with wishy washy emotion type things, cause from here on out it’s coming straight from the heart).

For those few kind souls that used to read my blog about writing, you know that I’ve long battled my own self destruction. You see, I have a real fear of success.

Sounds stupid, right? Who fears succeeding? Well, if you look into it at all, a lot of people do. You might even be one of them. Every time you don’t try, you’re letting your fear of success win. Personally, I’ve conquered a lot of fears to be where I am right now, both in my development as a photographer and artist, and even in forcing myself to come to Seattle. The old me would have never made the video, never entered a contest at all. Why? Because not trying might mean you won’t succeed, but it also means you won’t fail. You can live your entire life talking about, “If only.” “If only I would have tried I would have succeeded.” You know you know someone like that. Always talking about what could have been. And you know what? No one can deny that you could have succeeded because it will forever be an unknown.

That’s exactly who I’ve been most of my life. Mr. Coulda-been.

I play it safe and frankly, this trip is not safe. This is so far outside my comfort zone, you have no idea. I’m the kind of guy that comes off as smug because I keep my mouth shut, but in reality I’m just terrified of being found out. I, like every other artist in the world, fear that I’ll be found out as being nothing more than a hack. It’s the sick game we play with ourselves.

And that’s the little hobgoblin that will be sitting on my shoulder this weekend. I’ve contained him thus far and I can only hope that the courage I borrow from Mel and our son holds out.

The hobgoblin is whispering in my ear again. He says that I’ve been too honest, that it’s in my own best interest to delete everything but the CreativeLIVE bit. “It’s safe,” he says. “Just play it safe.”

Some shots from around Seattle today:

I've been captivated by Vivian Maier's work as of late. A woman with such amazing talent that no one ever knew about. I wonder what hobgoblins she wrestled with to keep such amazing work hidden. These self portraits are my digital homage to her.

Stay tuned. I’m planning on blogging each day. They’ll be raw, but there’s a time crunch here and I don’t have my proofreader sitting in the other room waiting to look things over. She’s busy watching after our son. Miss you guys.

Zack Arias: An introduction

Posted by David
Approved by Melody

For those that missed my momentary twittered shout of joy, I won a contest! I’ll be heading up north to Seattle, Washington where I’ll be one of five in-house students for the CreativeLive event with Zack Arias that will be webcast to the entire world.

Now I know what you’re thinking, “Webcast? Pft. I can webcast to the entire world.” Well CreativeLive events reach tens of thousands of viewers and their reach grows with each seminar. So for me, it’s sort of a big deal.

When I sat down to write this blog I wanted to talk about my fears, and why this is so important to me. Then I realized that in order for you to really appreciate why it’s so important, you kind of need some back story. So let’s do this creative writing style and start from the start.

The Emperor Wears No Clothes:
So who is Zack Arias? Just the preeminent guru of lighting! Okay, so maybe that’s debatable when you’ve got so many lighting courses out there, but he has been pretty important when it comes to the existence of Melody and David Photography.

He is a champion of the art that is slowly being leached out of photography, a father, a husband, a lover of music and of good beer. He knows what film is and how to shoot it, was classically trained but adapted with digital. He also has a guru beard, so that’s gotta count for something, right? (Photo at left is from a web search. It's the most often seen image of Zack and I've never seen a photo credit for it, so I can only assume it was a self portrait done for promotional reasons since he used it in his guest blog for Scott Kelby. I hope he doesn't mind my using it.)

Zack is a guy who went to school for photography, busted his butt, got a good job doing boring work shooting for catalogs, spent a lot of borrowed money trying to go big and then went bust. Life went to crap, he got a boring job outside of photography and decided to forgo his dreams. (Don’t worry, I’m not outing him; he’s very open about this.) Then, by happenstance, a friend got him back into photography.

With a borrowed camera and truck load of determination, he built himself up with a cash-on-hand business, taking baby step by baby step until he got to the point where people started flying him to places like Dubai and paying him good money to do three-day workshops.

You shoot in parks? So did he. Parking garages? The man practically invented the concept. Nikon? Yup. Canon? Yup. A real business on a real budget with four kids to feed. He was so dedicated to the new concept of frugality that his original workshops were all about how you could get by with just one light. You have heard of the One Light Workshop, haven’t you?




Melody found him very early on in our adventure into photography. We started trying to figure out how we could round up the cash to visit my Noni back in Atlanta so that we could sneak out to one of his One Light Workshops. Unfortunately, we were on the same budget that he was on when he started out. It wasn’t going to happen. But we continued to follow his blog, watched his critiques, and mused about someday making it to Georgia.

Along Came a Spider:
In the meantime, as Mel and I went from $50 sessions to $100 ones and signed wedding contracts that probably cost us more money than they made, Chase Jarvis brought Zack a proposal. Take your concept of free information and go BIG with it. (If you don’t know Chase, look him up. He’s an important character in the storyline but due to the fact that the majority of the population in this country hates reading, I can’t go into his story here as well.)

A three-day workshop, going over everything Zack knew about starting a studio, broadcast live to the entire world via the web all for the price of . . . FREE fifty FREE. Despite having a keen business sense, he signed on anyway. ;o)

I remember that at the time of the first seminar, Melody and I were busy with something. I think I was in the middle of cleaning out a warehouse space that would eventually become our studio, and we had a shoot or something that weekend. As such, we took shifts watching the broadcast. Between the two of us, we watched the entire three day seminar more than once. Mel watched during the day, then I stayed up through the night to watch the rebroadcast for the other side of the world. When we were asked to go out and do something, we said, “Sorry, attending a seminar this weekend.”

If I’m not mistaken, during that seminar he talked briefly about how if you want to do something, you set it up and do it; you don’t wait for it to come along.
A month later we had our first shoot in the studio with my hand-crafted fifteen foot high cyc-wall on rollers. I’d found a handful of amateur models, paired them up with makeup artists, and we had a huge boudoir portfolio building session over two days. It was a lot of hard work and sleepless nights, but we did it.

The above shots were from our first two sessions in the studio and were based on the concepts taught in Zack's first CreativeLive course. We used rented lighting and a whole lot of muffled curse words. Now we actually own our own lighting and don't owe anything on it.

That shoot would not have happened without Zack’s inspiration. Throughout our journey, his insight and own tribulations have helped us along. So yeah, while I’ve seen a lot of instructors, gotten to meet McNally and Hobby when I was a “VAL” in San Jose -- Joe even hand-delivered orange juice to us VALS (Squeeeeee!!) and Mel was half-coerced into going up front as a demo model (Eeeeek, from Melody -- but Joe, if you’re reading this, we’re still waiting on that portrait) none of that really compares to getting to hang out for three days with the guy who was instrumental in shaping so much of our photography and how we look at running a business.

The Golden Ticket:
So how’d I win? I submitted a crap video that I’ll now share with you.


I told you it was a crap video. How I won is pretty much beyond me. I like the theory that our friend Tina proposed: it came from the heart. That leads to what I really wanted to talk about, my fears heading into this trip. But like I said, few people reading this were English majors, so I’ll save that for another post.

Next Up: A Pleasanton hills wedding of Jill and Al, then we’ll get back to facing fears and taking every opportunity presented. We'll also talk a little about CreativeLive for those of you who are still wondering how a free service generates revenue.

House Keeping: Please excuse the changes in the blog and site you'll be seeing over the coming days. If you know of Zack at all, you know that he does website critiques and I'm terrified that part of the 3 days is going to be spent tearing to shreds all the online portfolios of the attendees. Hence, it has prompted me to do some serious overhauling before I get there. Hopefully, our website won't be publicly flogged, but if it is I'll have at least been able to sneak on a few extra pairs of underwear and maybe a couple Christmas sweaters before I get there. ;o)