Kris D'Amico Photography

January 30th, 2012 by Kris

Last week I had the opportunity to travel to Seattle for a few days. We drank some great coffee, ate some amazing cheese, and talked with a 30 year veteran of the chocolate business about  all things sweet. On this trip we had the chance to sit and talk with James Beard Award winner, Tom Douglas. This guy actually beat Chef Morimoto on Iron Chef. For you non-foodies, it just means he’s a ridiculous culinary bad ass. His strong feelings about sustainability and a number or restaurants that walk that talk make him one of the best chefs out there. Durring our interview, I asked him what was the single best piece of advice he had ever received. He said that no one had ever given it to him, but that to him, it was innate.

“Get your ass out of bed, promote your business, work hard… treat your employees like kings and they in turn will treat our customers like kings. It’s not so much advice as it is a standard.” -Tom Douglas

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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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

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.

June 13th, 2011 by Kris

We passed the Arizona wild fires on our way back from Anaheim, here are a few of the snaps from the plane.

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June 6th, 2011 by Kris

I had an intresting journey out to California over the last 24 hours. For what it’s worth here’s a little narrative from last night, I think I was writing this somewhere over Arizona.

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March 15th, 2011 by Kris

We’ll I’d start by taking a cue from designer/developer Matt Reed. All joking aside this guy’s a good friend and a great mind who’s always thinking outside of the box. Check out this video for his latest project, the Like Light:

Remember kids, this guy’s not a professional, so you need to try this at home.

November 9th, 2010 by Kris

Sometimes our egos get the best of us, right?

Sometimes that one guy, you know that guy (or gal), gets the gig. He under bids you, they out promote you, or just sweep the client off their feet. If you’ve been in business for, oh I don’t know, a day you’ve run across this. It stings a little, doesn’t it? Especially those of us shooting in small and medium size markets where it can be difficult, if not impossible to even get clients to give us a chance to re-bid, we need to be mindful of what our attitude says about our character. How are we walking through our day-to-day workflow? What is our relationship like with other creatives? How are we checking our attitudes about the gigs that got away?

I have found that when I am hitting wall after wall with my bids, my best bet is to take a step back and say what I am doing right?

In this current economic climate, where our resources are scant, we have to remember our clients are making tough decisions about money as well. So, look at what you are bringing to the table, if it’s just a few pretty pictures then, why would you get a call back? How many times have you surfed the internet and seen some kid, fresh out of school, who’s work is breathtaking? There will always be someone who has “prettier” work. We need to dig deep and find a way to present more than pretty work, right?

I recently tipped a few pints with 2 guys who I feel are true pioneers in the creative field here in Nashville, Blake Allen and Matt Reed. Now I posed a simple question to both of them:

How do you redefine your creative vision to keep on top of the pile?

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November 3rd, 2010 by Kris

So, recently my friend, Jeremy Mitchell, had this idea for iPhone app called, Gallerytopia. I tipped a pint with him at our local pub and he gave me this interview.*

Kris D’Amico: “Dude, so where did you come up with the idea for Gallerytopia?”

Jeremy Mitchell: “So, I had lunch one day with Chuck Norris, right? And you know he only eats uncooked red meat **, so we ate over at the butcher department at Sam’s Club, but I digress. He was telling me that since he has a flash website for his photography people cannot see his images on the iPhone or iPad. He proceeded to tell me how he thought that this is a travesty and might have to ‘take care of things’ over at Apple.”

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October 19th, 2010 by Kris

We’ve had a couple of crazy weeks over here at the studio. We’ve picked up a few new clients and that’s always exciting, but it just takes time. I did a little table top shoot with Lance Miller. He’s an illustrator/ designer who had a deck of cards that he designed picked up by Bicycle Playing Cards, we where shooting his pre-release promo decks.

In other news, I’m working with Jeremy Mitchell on his new baby Gallerytopia. I’ve got it up for my site now, check it out on your iPhone! If you’re a photog, you need this service. It’s not quite ready yet but pretty soon there’s going to be a Gallerytopia exclusive category with some never released images from the depths of the archives.

I plan on doing a full blog post on both of these topics soon, stay tuned!

KD