The Nikon Coolpix P310 is another point and shoot—except it’s completely gorgeous. The boxy design is a matte slate of black perfection. Everyone line is clean, every centimeter accounted for, every button well-placed. Make more things like this.

Inside, the P310 is no dinky shooter: 16 megapixel stills, 1080p video recording, an assignable front function button, full manual controls, image stabilization, and a swank f/1.8 zoom NIKKOR lens. By my god—it’s so small! What you’re looking at is only 4.1 x 2.3 x 1.3 inches—easily pocketable. But I don’t want to keep it in any pocket. I want to look at it. Boxy is beautiful. More angles. Cameras shouldn’t resemble spaceships. Check for it next month at $330. [Nikon]

Not much info to go off of here, but the French publication Responses Photo published some shots of what might be the Nikon D4. If this is in fact accurate, Nikon’s new flagship DSLR could be right around the corner.

Technically, it doesn’t exist, but has been recently rumored for a release. As far as specs go, the article merely says that it has an a 16 megapixel FX sensor, 51 point autofocus, 1080p video recording, an ISO range of 100-12,800, weighs 1.34 kilograms and will sell for 5800 Euros. Not sure about you, but I’m definitely excited to see what Nikon has up their sleeve. [Nikon Rumors] ]]> http://blog.aftercapture.com/2012/01/06/can-the-nikon-d4-soon-become-the-latest-and-greatest-dslr/feed/ 1 http://blog.aftercapture.com/2011/04/07/eye-opening-insights-from-gail-mooney-a-still-video-hybrid-movie-trailer-goes-viral/ http://blog.aftercapture.com/2011/04/07/eye-opening-insights-from-gail-mooney-a-still-video-hybrid-movie-trailer-goes-viral/#comments Thu, 07 Apr 2011 19:07:23 +0000 Ethan G. Salwen http://blog.aftercapture.com/?p=4392

“Working on this trailer was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done,” Gail Mooney told me yesterday. “The shorter the piece, the harder it is for me to edit, and it probably is for most people. I needed to cut to the essence of the story yet not give away too much. I needed to create interest by what I didn’t tell the viewer.”

One thing this wonderful, interest-grabbing trailer doesn’t tell the viewer is incredible passion, energy and innovation Mooney has put into transforming her personal movie project, “Opening Our Eyes,” from the tiny tickle of an idea into a massive, tangible reality.

Created in partnership with her daughter, Erin Kelly, Mooney shares much of her passion — behind the scenes triumphs, frustrations and the technical and creative nuts and bolts of making a movie  — through her blogging on the “Opening Our Eyes” website, as well as on Journeys of a Hybrid, where for two years Mooney has been dishing up practical advice and motivation for photographers moving into motion.

Thanks to Mooney’s enthusiastic, adept use of social media, as of yesterday, a week after she posted it, Mooney’s trailer has already been viewed by 1,142 people in 62 countries.

“I realize in the YouTube playing field — of babies biting fingers and cats playing pianos — these type of stats are nothing in the viral world,” Mooney observed. “But they are amazing when you consider what it is.”

Indeed. What it is, at least in part, is a passionate visual communicator — who started her career long before the advent of digital imaging and the Web — sharing a personal project with more than a thousand eager viewers in 62 countries.

Boy with eggs at Camino Abierto, Carlos Keen, Argentina.

The Possibilities in Passion

In a Hybrids blog post last week, Mooney wrote, “When you are convinced that you have the ability to make the impossible possible, then you will put your dreams into action. You will take that chance, and by doing so you are creating your own reality instead of reacting to what others have created for you, which may not be in your best interests.”

There are many people who share this kind of positive sentiment: make your dreams happen with positive thinking. It’s a sentiment that often rubs me the wrong way. It often feels hollow, oversimplifying the immense challenges we all face in life. Regardless of what a Nike ad campaign might say, many of us can’t “Just Do It.” Desire is not enough.

What makes Mooney’s “make the impossible possible” sentiment attractive is that it is grounded in the example of how she lives her life. She struggles, she strives, she overcomes. Yes, she does it. But she never “just” does it.

In her blogging over the past two years Mooney has become increasingly open and honest, sharing her personal struggles. She never complains of simply vents, but she lets us see that a great deal of her making the (seemingly) impossible possible depends on her never given up, even when the (seemingly) possible feels impossible.

In wonderful posts related to her experiences with “Opening Our Eyes,” Mooney shows us how she gets deeply inspired but then has serious doubts but that she still takes big chances anyway. She remains open to learning from diverse sources as she struggles with technical and creative challenges. And although she experiences many moments of sasisfied success, she also  experiences extreme let downs. The common thread — what’s truly important — is that she keeps on going and actively makes things happen.

Viola Majewska with horse at her hippotherapy stable located outside Warsaw, Poland.

Positive Change From and Beyond Technology

When “Opening our Eyes” is completed, I have no doubt that many will hold it up as an example of the amazing possibilities of DSLR movie making.

The trailer alone — created from still, video and audio captured by a two-member team working in six continents while traveling to 17 countries in three months on a shoestring budget — is testament to the possibilities of DSLR video. But Mooney makes it clear it’s not about the technology; it’s about the story, and the drive to tell the story.

In this case of “Opening Our Eyes,” more than ever before in her three-decade career of making images, Mooney’s desire to tell the story is fueled by her desire to make a difference. Her goal for the film is to inspire viewers to create positive change in their own communities by highlighting the impact that her subjects are making in theirs.

Although Mooney makes it clear that “Opening Our Eyes” is not about the technology, there’s no getting around the fact that the project also is very much about the. One clear example is in how Mooney used technology to help her refine this trailer for “Opening Our Eyes.” First, she shared an earlier version with select colleagues on Vimeo, using password protection to keep it private. After receiving feedback, she refined.

This was possible thanks to the affordable cost of the digital editing process (basically the only cost is time) plus the incredible possibilities of international distribution technology (free). These advances in technology allowed Mooney to create this trailer in way that simply was not possible when she began video production a decade ago.

Woman in remote village in northern Thailand. She waits to see Dr. David Marnaw at his makeshift clinic.

Collaboration Goes Viral

The technology also allows Mooney involve her audience in an ongoing editing process that is interactive and fluid. The trailer is not an afterthought to an already-created movie, but rather part of Mooney’s evolving vision of a story that is still coming together.

“At a certain point in the process, I wanted to share the trailer with others to get feedback,” Mooney explains. “We live in an age when this is possible, so I uploaded a couple of variations of the trailer to Vimeo and sent out links to a small circle of people that I knew.” More polished and not password protected, these trailers are the ones that have gone viral.

“My ‘contacts’ on Vimeo also get access and notification to videos when I upload them,” Mooney says. “The people who received the link were a diverse group; I didn’t want to just solicit the opinions of other filmmakers, but hear from all sorts of people from different demographics.” These people shared the trailer links and Mooney notes that because of the “power of sharing and social media it spread all over the world.”

Mooney told me that, as the mechanisms of social media churn invisibly to distribute her movie trailer all over the world, the positive comments she is receiving are giving her a profoundly deep sense of satisfaction. However, she added that “I have a feeling that this will continue to bring rewards to me and a lot of other people. I believe that with all my heart.”

Evening prayers at the Kopila Valley Childrens Home, Surkhet, Nepal.

Being On Purpose in a World of Frictionless Delivery

This is a theme that Mooney has shared with me many times, since before leaving on her trip to after her return, and when I had the chance to interview her in Buenos Aires during the trip. She has repeatedly talked about the amazing, surprising value that has already come from her project. One of the most profound rewards, she says, is that she has reconnected with the roots of why she became a photographer. She is feeling a greater sense of what she calls “being on purpose.”

“The response to publishing my trailer,” Mooney said yesterday, “has also reinforced the notion that we all have access to incredible tools now that enable us to create our own films, books, music CDs and that we do not have to rely on others to validate our ideas and dreams.”

“It’s not just a powerful notion, it’s a real possibility,” Mooney said. “It takes away some of the fears that come from needing others to sanction what we do. As excited as I was when I first started shooting motion 12 years ago, I’m even more excited now about the possibilities in frictionless delivery of our creations — whether it be an e-book, a musical download or a trailer to a film.”

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NOTE: To be notified of when “Opening Our Eyes” is available for purchase (scheduled for Summer 2011), email Gail Mooney at gail@kellymooney.com with the subject line “Opening Our Eyes DVD”.

I really liked this sentiment from Burd, a wedding and portrait photographer, who was responding to my question: “Are you images fundamentally created in-camera with little technical fuss, or do they require painstaking control, either in-camera or in post-production?”

I absolutely love Burd’s images, which bear witness to the fact that she is achieving the photographic ideal she expressed in her comment.

Burd’s wedding, portrait, head shot, and family photography consistently exhibit two wonderful qualities that work beautifully in harmony with each other:

• On the one hand, Burd’s images feel utterly casual in the in-camera picture making sense. There seems to be little fuss. The comfort of her subjects is palpable, and many of her best images feel like casual snap shots.

• On the other hand, it is clear that Burd is carefully crafting her images in post-production, giving them a modern, compelling aesthetic. Her use of techniques such as black-and-white processing, vignetting, saturating colors and employing localized focus ensure that her no-fuss images become much more than snap shots.

The best part of Burd’s work is that she doesn’t go overboard in post-production. This ensures that her images retain what is best in casual snap shots — intimacy and approachability — while also meeting the standards of excellent professional photography.

It’s hard to discuss images that don’t call attention to themselves, but do exactly what they are supposed to do: call attention to the people they document. So here, to represent themselves — and the no fuss, carefully crafted work that the photographer put into them — are four of Burd’s images.

I featured these thoughts from Herrmann in “Judy Herrmann: Reinventing Creativity,” a recent profile for Rangefinder that focuses on Herrmann increasing efforts — through workshops, consulting and her new blog, 2 Good Things — to help creative professionals gain more satisfaction through their carriers, making more money doing more of what they truly love.

“Reinventing Creativity” is probably the most important article I wrote in 2010, but — dangit! — I probably gave it the worst name.

A much better, if less flowery, title (that would have really pissed off the design team) would have been:

“Judy Herrmann: How To Reinvent the Business and Creative Aspects of Your Photography Career in a Harmonious Manner, Over Time, In an Ongoing Process, To Earn More Money and Feel Profoundly More Satisfied In Life.”

That’s what Herrmann’s insights are all about, and there are a few things that make them particularly valuable.

One is that Herrmann is full-time working photographer, and has been for two decades, and her increased interest in supporting other photographers with the challenges of business-creative success comes from an honest passion to help. She says providing consulting services to photographers “is one of the few things in my professional life that actually gives me a deep sense of meaning.”

Another reason Herrmann’s guidance rings true is that she is deep in the reinvention trenches herself, and has been since she was 27-years-old. That’s when she forced herself, for the first time, to figure out how to make more money with more satisfaction through her photography. (I reported on this in “Triumph Over Fear” for Rangefinder a few years back.)

That’s right. I have been talking to Herrmann about this topic for years now, and distilling her insights into less than 2,000 words was painful. This woman has so many valuable insights to offer professional photographers that I’m just dying for you to be aware of her. And then — damn me! — I gave her article a crappy name.

Luckily, you can get in touch with Herrmanns’ ideas directly through her posts on ASMP’s Strictly Business Blog. Good stuff, like “‘If you don’t know where you’re going…you might not get there.’ – Yogi Berra” and “Looking Forward, Looking Back.”

Another reason Herrmann’s reinvention insights rock is because she is adamantly adverse to serving in a counseling capacity. “I make it clear that I am not a therapist,” she told me. “This is not psychiatry. What I’m really teaching people is problem solving. It is defining a problem very, very clearly and then brainstorming solutions.”

“What I’m trying to do is to give people an arsenal of tools,” Herrmann explained. “My goal is to make my client not need me any more.”

One place you can learn from Herrmann how to not need Herrmann is at the ASMP’s Strictly Business 3 conferences (Philadelphia, February 25–27; Chicago, April 1–3).

Yet another reason Herrmann’s strategies are so valuable is that she is not formulaic in her approach for working with photographers. She says, “I don’t think there exists a one-size-fits-all answer to this kind of problem solving.”

Can you see why I think it’s so important to learn about Herrmann’s business reinvention processes?

So, poopy title aside, I urge you to download “Reinventing Creativity” and soak up Herrmann’s ideas.

To be clear, I am not concerned about drumming up consulting business for Herrmann (although, um, I do get a percentage of all fees she earns resulting from this post).

What makes Herrmann’s insights so invaluable is that they don’t depend on her or, for that matter, any other career consultant. Like all great ideas, Herrmann’s strategies are a distillation of other people’s great ideas. And like all great ideas, you can put them to use for yourself on your own.

Julian is a photographer, illustrator, sculptor and educator, and his website is a joy to view — especially if you compare the overlapping themes between his fine art photography and his commercial illustrations.

At any one time, Julian is engaged in so many projects using so many types of media for so many clients that I could understand why he apologized for “not being easy to define.” However, by the time I finished “Strange Beauty” it seemed clear to me that throughout Julian’s evolution as a visual artist and educator it is possible to identify a very clear, very consistent thread: his desire to understand himself and the world around him through a process — sometimes feverish, but always grounded — of constantly playing with new techniques and visual media.

“I can now work almost as fast as I can think,” Julian told me of his love of electronic imaging. A master of Photoshop compositing, glancing at Julian’s work is likely to make one think that he’s all about composting, in a modern, technical sense. But Julian has been compositing materials since early childhood, pasting newspaper clippings onto pieces of glass long before he picked up a camera. Yes, Julian continues to thrive with an exploratory use of layers in Photoshop. But ultimately, Julian is concerned about the ideas behind his composites — and his straight captures.

Julian’s idea-driven artistic exploration is clearly illustrated by “Taken From The Heart,” the body of fine art photography he produced in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Photographically, these are straight images. Intellectually and emotionally they are anything but straight.

My profile about Julian opens. . .

“What struck me was as I was walking through this wasteland is that of all of these things—these personal objects dangling in trees—were lost,” David Julian recalls. “They were all tied to people who could not reconnect to them.” It was December 2005, and Julian, a commercial and editorial photo illustrator, fine art photographer and educator, was making his way through the devastation Hurricane Katrina wrought upon New Orleans. Using his camera both to explore, and to try to understand a landscape that overwhelmed his senses, Julian remembers thinking, “whatever had once been outside was forced inside, and what had been inside was now swept outside.”

To continue learn more about the World of David Julian, continue reading “Strange Beauty” by downloading the PDF file.

New Year's Eve 2003 - Philadelphia. © Jill Waterman

Waterman also wrote the fantastic book Night and Low Light Photography, which is not only a remarkably broad and in-depth guide on the the how-tos of the topic, but also serves as as a wonderful introduction to many image makers who thrive capturing images in the night.

For a number of years, Waterman served as my editor for the magazine of the ASMP, and she always challenged with me fantastic assignments, pushing me to write timely, balanced and valuable articles for the professional community. For Waterman’s editorial guidance I will always be grateful.

As much as I have deeply respected Waterman as an editor of on topics of photography, I gained a much deeper respect for her when I reviewed Night and Low Light Photography. I was simply blown away by the feverish energy and scope of vision that was required to see such an ambitious task completed.

So, given the connection I hold among night photography, New Year’s and Jill Waterman, it didn’t surprise me that on this New Year’s Eve I found myself thinking of Waterman as I made a few nighttime exposures — just for the heck of it. After all, I had thought of Waterman when shooting the Big Dog in Mendoza, Argentina, earlier in the year.

It did come as a surprise — a very pleasant one — when I checked my email this morning and learned from Waterman that she had received some nice (and much deserved) press for her New Year’s Eve Project.

NPR’s The Picture Show blog ran “The New Year’s Eve Project: A Documentary Photo Essay” by Claire O’Neill, which features a gallery of some of Waterman’s great images. (The twelve samples prove that Waterman’s vision is focused on the soft and intimate rather than the garish and obvious.)

Waterman received more kudos for her work this year on December 31 when PDN’s Photo of the Day ran her Global Countdown — an image she captured at Scotland’s Edinburgh Castle in 1999, as one century shifted to the next and while Waterman was doing what she been driven to do for nearly three decades: photographically recording the international, nighttime festivities of New Year’s.

If you are not familiar with Jarvis’ blog, definitely take a thoughtful tour — even if Jarvis’ photography (or personality) don’t float your boat.

New Media Blogging?

I know. “New Media blogging” seems repetitive. After all, blogging is about as New Media as you can get, right? Actually, blogging is just a tool — a simple way to post content to the Web — and most of us Dead Tree Bloggers do not fully embrace the New Media spirit. Two critical ways Jarvis does is to:

• Constantly link out to peer content. Jarvis does much more than add SEO-friendly links to his posts; he features content from other creative professionals. This is good for him. In the blogosphere, the more you link out, the more people link back in.

• Makes the blogging experience interactive. This is no easy task: to make people feel involved in your blogging. One way Jarvis does so is by enticing people to comment on his posts, and then rewarding them with follow-up responses.

Popular in Flesh, Popular in the Blogosphere

Don’t try to imitate the way Jarvis blogs. Jarvis is Jarvis. You are You. The key to Jarvis’ blogging is that it is honest.

In person, Jarvis is more charismatic than most photographers will ever be (or would want to be). Jarvis once told me that in high school he was a popular jock but that he liked to hang with the nerds and outcasts — interested in trying to understand them, wanting to relate. Jarvis told me that he is utterly fascinated by popular culture.

Jarvis remains a popular center of gravity in most crowds, as well as a person interested in reaching out to others. He is also interested in the popular culture that a popular readership is interested in reading about. All of this is what makes him such a popular blogger — not his knowledge, interest or capabilities as a photographer.

Jarvis is a dedicated, feverish image maker and so most of his blogging content is about photography and, as he once told me, “the intersection of photography and popular culture.” But ultimately, photography is secondary to what makes Jarvis’ blogging about photography so enticing. What’s important is Jarvis’ natural ability to entice.

As I had not had an undergraduate science education I didn’t realise that animals were not supposed to have personalities, or to think, or to feel emotions or pain . . . Not knowing, I freely made use of all those forbidden terms and concepts in my initial attempts to describe, to the best of my ability, the amazing things I had observed at Gombe.

When I read this last night it made me think of the portrait of Goodall that Stewart Cohen made for his book Identity.

I was reading Matt Ridley’s The Agile Gene, in which Ridley notes that, “Goodall’s anthropomorphism had driven a stake through the heart of human exceptionalism.” This is important to Ridly’s notion, when comparing human beings to “lesser animals,” that:

There is no exact parallel to the human scheme. But in the animal kingdom, there is nothing exceptional in being unique. Every species is unique.

This made me think of another one of Cohen’s Identity subjects, Erik “Lizardman” Sprague, who in the book shares: “I generally find the claim of being unique to be rather trite since we are all by nature individuals and thus unique.” That’s nice sentiment coming from a guy who has filed his teeth to points and tattooed green scales on his face. It also seems to speak to perfectly to Cohen’s approach to Identity, and so I used it in the opening of my article reporting on his project.

Identity Beyond Symbolism

In his simple, black-and-white portrait of Goodall Cohen has included a blatant visual reference to the concept of evolution. There Goodall is, sitting in a the base of a tree whose trunks grow out in different directions: a visual metaphor for the moment when the common ancestor of earlier primates began to head their separate ways.

What I love about the image is that I didn’t notice this visual reference at first, blatant as it is. The visual symbolism does not overwhelm Cohen’s invitation to see Goodall as a soft, totally-approachable and gentle person, which is exactly how he described his experience of her.

Cohen’s soft photographic approach in his portrait of Goodall is ideally suited for sharing the identity of a woman with a decidedly soft approach to scientific research.