January 9th, 2012 by Kris
On January 1st of 2012, I made the first major website update in the last 18 months. If you’ve not seen it head on over to krisdamico.com and let me know what you think! As some of you may know, I spent close to 6 weeks going through images from the last 5-6 years. There were about 600,000 files on 8 hard drive with about of those 235,000 being images. So, needless to say that was a lot of looking at old work.
I used Zack Arias‘ process to get the ball rolling, here’s the post with an excerpt from his blog and link to his article. Then I met with Amanda Sosa Stone and she’s helping me sort out the details. Now, the hard part for me, as I’m sure it is for all creatives is cutting our work down into a meaningful creation of images. Given my own devices, I’d have a loose conflagration (is that a word?) of image that might or might not make any sense together. Which is why an outside edit is super helpful.
Here are few images that didn’t quite make the cut for the homepage, but are still some of my favorite images! Hope you enjoy them.
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December 20th, 2011 by Kris
I’m working with sharp objects today.
December 5th, 2011 by Kris
From Seth Godin’s blog Thursday, I think these are especially true when running your own shop. Enjoy.
“You don’t even realize there’s a game. (And any contest, market, project or engagement is at some level a game).
- You start getting involved and it feels like a matter of life or death. Every slight cuts deeply, every win feels permanent. “This is the most important meeting of my life…”
- You realize that it’s a game and you play it with strategy. There’s enough remove for you to realize that winning is important but that continuing to play is more important than that. And playing well is most important.
- You get bored with the game, because you’ve seen it before. Sometimes people at this stage quit, other times they sabotage their work merely to make the game feel the way it used to.
- And then a new, different game begins.”
November 9th, 2011 by Kris
It’s that time again. Actually, I’m long overdue. It’s been over 2 years since I’ve really updated my web site and I’m not even sure where my printed book is. And that’s a little sad. We all get busy, but this is something that we all need to put on our calendars at least once every six months. Take a day or two and go thru the work that we’ve been slaving over for the last 2 months! Regardless of medium, if you’re freelancing in the current economy you either have lots of little jobs mixed in with a few big ones. I bring this up to say this, don’t over look the little gigs, there are jewels in there that you’ll want to show off. Especially if you can tell a narrative that is loaded with drama, everyone loves a good story. Well, I found this article, “Editing Your Portfolio” by Zack Arias out of Atlanta. Cutting my teeth in the Atlanta market admittedly gives me a bit of a soft spot for any shooter carving out a niche there, but it’s a solid article with some great tips. Here’s an excerpt:
“The BIG Edit :: Brew 10 pots of coffee, grab all of your archive drives, kiss the wife and kids goodnight and start harvesting every photo that you like from all of your jobs. Grab the RAW untouched files where possible. Don’t get the processed JPGs. Get the originals whenever you can. You may think your post production skills three years ago were awesome but as you put your work together today you may not like those 14 crappy actions you dumped on your work back then. Trust me on this… harvest the RAW files every chance you can. Don’t think “is this going to be in my portfolio?” while you do this first step. You’re just looking for photos you like. Like you really like them. Maybe you shot five consecutive frames of someone laughing and you like all five. Copy all five of them to a BIG edit folder. Notice I said “copy” your photos into the BIG edit folder. Don’t move them out of their home in the job folder where they lived. Make a copy. You want ONE folder holding all of the images. You can then copy specific images into genre folders if you want but the main folder holds all of them.
Go through your edits and any other RAW files you may have from the job that you did not deliver to the client. It’s always amazing to go back into a shoot and find a gem of a shot that didn’t make the edit when you first shot and delivered that job. You not only grow as a photographer but you grow as a photo editor in your life. A shot you may have passed up three years ago suddenly jumps out at you now. That is why I never delete my unpicked files. I always keep them. I go through these old folders a few times a year.”
Alright, to read more click here. I’d love to see what you end up with! Alright off to go start my “big edit” folder!
KD
October 11th, 2011 by Kris
Recently, I read a quote from a photographer that I don’t know that said something to the extent of “I stopped making formal images, and just started shooting what’s infront of me.” This has been in the back of mind for the last 2 weeks and I’m still not sure what to do with it. What did he mean by formal? For me, someone who came up thru the “studio” track, it means white cards, seamless sheets of paper, big softboxes, you know what I’m talking about, the “studio” thing. What would it look like if I stopped worrying about incident angles, perfectly exposed mid-tone with a 95% white point? I shot something the other day and got some pretty cool stuff, but I’m not convinced that it’s “better” or “worse.” It’s different. I’ve got a few more shoots coming up where I think I’m just going to try to not be so formal, still not sure what that means for me, but I hope it will come to me as I shoot.
October 10th, 2011 by Kris
I’m in the middle of a few big projects so I thought I’d just post up some food photos from a job last year with Columbus Salami out of San Francisco. Enjoy!!
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September 28th, 2011 by Kris
So, this past shoot we shot on a RED Mysterium X. I’ve got some thoughts and feelings about this “new” media but overall it was a positive experience. Like many of the reviews I have read, there are just some things that are a little janky about it. For example, our DIT told me that if we changed the ISO lower or higher than the chipset’s ISO800 default that we’d get noise. Furthermore, if we really wanted to change the ISO, we could do it in REDCINE post program… Really guys? That makes me think you don’t know what ISO means. But, other than a few of those things, the picture is beautiful and huge. And shooting video in RAW puts me back in a very comfortable place where I can play with color and curves before I leave the set, much like Lightroom. Anyway, I’ll post up a few clips from the shoot as we get into editing and exporting, but I will leave you with this little beauty from the first day of test shooting, thanks Chad.
September 19th, 2011 by Kris
Not so fresh from the garden.
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September 14th, 2011 by Kris
In two weeks we’ll be shooting a fairly high profile internet piece for a large client on a RED camera. I’ve got my head burred in everything I can find on this camera, but I’d love anything you can send my way that will help me on this journey! Thanks.
-KD
August 29th, 2011 by Kris
Quick post today about exclusivity.
What do you do well? Where are your weak spots?
I believe strongly that we should all play to our strengths, not our weaknesses. In your brain, you are literally “hard wired” to do somethings better than others. The more that we push into our areas of strength, the more that area of our brain grows. Guess what? When we work on our weak spots, there is still growth, but not the exponential growth that happens with strengths.
Now, I’m not saying abandon your weaknesses. I still need to work on my timeliness, I still need to work on fiscal fastidiousness. But, where I excel, now that’s where I can expect real growth. Keep this in mind this week as you run into your daily challenges!
With this in mind, think about that one thing that you shoot, that one thing that you design, that one thing that’s not work, it just flows out of you. Is your business built on this? Can it be? It probably should be. It might be something completely esoteric.
Meditate on the things that bring you joy and the things you look forward to and your gifts will shine thru. Try working on something where you are already a rock star and see what happens! Good luck! We’re all looking forward to the results.
KD
