Kris D'Amico Photography

September 21st, 2010 by Kris

We aways have good clients and we usually get to do good work. Every now and again, we get the chance to go out on a limb and do whatever we want to. I know, that’s dangerous.

We’ve had a great relationship with Solutions Consulting here in Franklin. They do training and training collateral material for companies in and around the deli industry. They approached us with a quick flip project for Smithfield Hams, four appetite appeal images that showcase four flavor injected hams in a non-cold cut manner. They gave us two recipes and had the chance to come up with two. All these images were shot in the evening in my kitchen with two lights. For you who are curious, I posted up a lighting diagram a few weeks ago here. Enjoy!

We called this “ham butter,” thanks for the inspiration, Paula Dean!

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August 23rd, 2010 by Kris

I’m working on a post about shooting black products on a jet black background. I did a little job for Energy Logic, who build waste oil heaters and we shot their black products on black. Now, we couldn’t go as minimal as a european sports car add, but we used very similar lighting techniques. Stay tuned.

August 20th, 2010 by Kris

So, I saw this on my twitter feed this morning and I thought it was too good not to share. Thank you “Johnston on Photography!” Here’s a few of my favorites, link to the full article follows:

• Use either a very big camera, or a very small camera. People seldom feel threatened by a tiny camera the size of the Sigma DP-1 or Panasonic LX3, but they also don’t feel very threatened by a giant, clumsy view camera on a tripod (they are also seldom aware of “the moment it clicks” with a big view camera, since you’re not looking through the camera when you take the picture). I suspect that setting up a big camera makes you less of a threat because it immobilizes you; you can’t go sneaking about with one of those. You’re also given an opportunity to confidently pretend that you have every right to be doing what you’re doing. Of course, you’re subject to tripod restrictions in very public places such as crowded city sidewalks and tourist attractions, so do your homework ahead of time and be sure you have a permit if you need one.
• Carry a business card and give it away freely. If you’re stopped or threatened, a card goes a long way toward explaining who you are and implies that you have nothing to hide.
• Ask them for help. Asking someone for help changes your relationship to them. This works with potential thieves—you turn yourself from their prey into their beneficiary, and them from predators into good Samaritans—and it works with cops and guards too, whose job it often is to help people, after all. Have a question ready to go for when someone approaches you or hassles you.
• Work on your camera skills! Good shooters work fast. Cartier-Bresson could reportedly get his Leica to his eye and back almost literally faster than people could notice. If you want to avoid attracting attention, don’t stand there like a big dork futzing endlessly with your camera controls and staring through the viewfinder for minutes on end. Waist-level finders help with this too, because when you look through an eye-level finder, people feel like you’re looking at them, whereas when you look down at some device you’re apparently fiddling with, people assume you’re looking at the device and not at them.
• Adjust the camera while looking in a different direction. Then take the picture you want to take as though it were an afterthought, and do it quickly. A bored bouncer at a bar doesn’t have an excuse to stride across the street and hassle you if you’re pointing the camera down the street and not at his bar; and if you take one shot in his direction and then turn and leave, you remove his opportunity to challenge you.

You can read the rest of the article here.

Have a great Friday!!

May 9th, 2010 by Kris

Here’s a little note from Seth Godin blog, from about a week ago. And yes I am that behind on my blog roll… deal with it. It’s after the break.

We’ll be on location this week, so have a good week and if you haven’t already go volunteer or help in your community. If it’s an unprecedented oil spills, 1000 year floods, or just a bad economy, take 20 minutes out of your week and help someone else out. It doesn’t matter who, neighbor, friend, or complete stranger. You never know when you’ll need the favor returned.

KD

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May 4th, 2010 by Kris

If your living depends on video in ANYWAY, you’ll want to read this.

Excerpt from the article:

“You see, there is something very important, that the vast majority of both consumers and video professionals don’t know: ALL modern video cameras and camcorders that shoot in h.264 or mpeg2, come with a license agreement that says that you can only use that camera to shoot video for “personal use and non-commercial” purposes (go on, read your manuals). I was first made aware of such a restriction when someone mentioned that in a forum, about the Canon 7D dSLR. I thought it didn’t apply to me, since I had bought the double-the-price, professional (or at least prosumer), Canon 5D Mark II. But looking at its license agreement last night (page 241), I found out that even my $3000 camera comes with such a basic license. So, I downloaded the manual for the Canon 1D Mark IV, a camera that costs $5000, and where Canon consistently used the word “professional” and “video” on the same sentence on their press release for that camera. Nope! Same restriction: you can only use your professional video dSLR camera (professional, according to Canon’s press release), for non-professional reasons. And going even further, I found that even their truly professional video camcorder, the $8000 Canon XL-H1A that uses mpeg2, also comes with a similar restriction. You can only use your professional camera for non-commercial purposes. For any other purpose, you must get a license from MPEG-LA and pay them royalties for each copy sold. I personally find this utterly unacceptable.”

Seriously, you need to read the rest.

Original Post by Eugenia Loli-Queru.

March 9th, 2010 by Kris

Not my thoughts, I got this from Seth Goddin’s blog last year and I think it’s worth repeating!!

“As a client, your job isn’t to be innovative. Your job is to foster innovation. Big difference.

Fostering innovation is a discipline, a profession in fact. It involves making difficult choices and causing important things to get shipped out the door. Here are a few thoughts to get you started.

• Before engaging with the innovator, foster discipline among yourself and your team. Be honest about what success looks like and what your resources actually are.
• If you can’t write down clear ground rules about which rules are firm and which can be broken on the path to a creative solution, how can you expect the innovator to figure it out?
• Simplify the problem relentlessly, and be prepared to accept an elegant solution that satisfies the simplest problem you can describe.
• After you write down the ground rules, revise them to eliminate constraints that are only on the list because they’ve always been on the list.
• Hire the right person. Don’t ask a mason to paint your house. Part of your job is to find someone who is already in the sweet spot you’re looking for, or someone who is eager and able to get there.
• Demand thrashing early in the process. Force innovations and decisions to be made near the beginning of the project, not in a crazy charrette at the end.
• Be honest about resources. While false resource constraints may help you once or twice, the people you’re working with demand your respect, which includes telling them the truth.
• Pay as much as you need to solve the problem, which might be more than you want to. If you pay less than that, you’ll end up wasting all your money. Why would a great innovator work cheap?
• Cede all issues of irrelevant personal taste to the innovator. I don’t care if you hate the curves on the new logo. Just because you write the check doesn’t mean your personal aesthetic sense is relevant.
• Run interference. While innovation sometimes never arrives, more often it’s there but someone in your office killed it.
• Raise the bar. Over and over again, raise the bar. Impossible a week ago is not good enough. You want stuff that is impossible today, because as they say at Yoyodyne, the future begins tomorrow.
• When you find a faux innovator, run. Don’t stick with someone who doesn’t deserve the hard work you’re doing to clear a path.
• Celebrate the innovator. Sure, you deserve a ton of credit. But you’ll attract more innovators and do even better work next time if innovators understand how much they benefit from working with you.”

Thanks Seth.

February 4th, 2010 by Kris

This article was reposted from: http://www.brandingstrategyinsider.com. Despite the fact that I do disagree with a few of their “pop-predictions” about 2010, it seems that many of these trends have already come to pass, and like most major trends in the market, trends just take time for most folks to grab a hold of them.

1. Facebook replaces personal email
2. Open source software starts making proper money, thanks to the cloud
3. Mobile Commerce – the promise that has never delivered, yet.
4. Fewer registrations – one sign-in fits all
5. Disruption vs. Continuity – Alternatives to the “Big Idea”
6. Self-Sufficiency – The Continuing Evolution of Web-Driven, Open Source DIY Culture
7. Info-Art
8. Crowd Sourcing
9. More Flash, Not Less

Here’s the article:

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February 2nd, 2010 by Kris

So the formatting of this article was so bad that I decided to repost it here on my blog:

By Scott Tillitt
Publication: Photo District News
Date: Wednesday, December 1 2004

“We asked some of the leading creatives in the county to talk about current and future trends in advertising photography, and what they would like to see both more of and less of in 2005. We certainly got some interesting answers: covering everything from photographs of parking lots at noon to Juergen Teller; from a discussion of plagiarism to a rejection (by one creative) of any more photographs of people over the age of 80. Warning: This is essential reading for anyone with an interest in advertising photography.

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January 12th, 2010 by Kris

For those of us who do not have an MBA, these can be nagging questions. What does all this stuff mean? Why does it matter? Well, recently I’ve been working with a few startup companies that have been struggling with these questions, so I decided to turn it in on my studio. So, here’s a few exercises that you can use to flesh out, refresh, or like many of us small biz owners, establish a written mission statement and define values and goals.

So, here we go step one: Core Values.

You can google core values and get a list 3 miles long of what that means and the corporate definition, blah, blah, blah. Here it is boiled down to a sentience:

Core values are 3 to 5 words that define your approach to business on a daily basis.

For example the values that I came up with for Kris D’Amico Photography:

• Inspire
• Serve/ Contribute
• Invent/ Set Standards
• Experiment
• Embody Excellence

So, what do these mean, well you can break them down as much or as little as you like, but for me these can be put into one line. I want this studio, my studio, to inspire, while serving the community and helping to invent new methods thru experimentation, all while giving our clients a level of excellence that makes them raise up over their competition. Get all that? Alright, I know there’s a lot here, but the best advice that I read was from some Ph.D. at Harvard. He said, if your industry changed, your core values would not, if your management changed, your core values would not, you get the idea.

So, step two: The Mission Statement

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December 23rd, 2009 by Kris

So, I’m adding social networking icons to my home page and soon the blog. Has anyone had a good response to a call to action when using these icons? Email me if you’ve got any success stories and I may post them up here! Thanks and have a great holiday.

Oh, new eblast here. You need to sign up if you’re not already getting my emails. The new series that’ll be starting in January will have 2 parts, one for you art director, writers, and photogs and the other for you business owners and general creative folk who could care less about f-stops and more about a cool picture.

Thanks!!

KD