Make a Real Donation, Volunteer Your Time

Earlier this week I was complaining a bit about the load of pro-bono work I'd been doing lately. Looking back, volunteering, once all the work is edited and uploaded, feels pretty darn good. And as people that enjoy photography, let's be honest, its just plain fun to be able to offer our services. Here's a quick run down of the pros and cons of volunteer work:

Pros

1. You're getting out and shooting; if you want to be at the top of your game, you should always be working!
2. You build new contacts; it never hurts to have more folks that know of you.
3. You might get new business; these relationships can be some of the strongest, and may profit for you in the end.
4. You have free promotional material (you know, for your blog *wink*).

Cons

1. You're out some time and, hopefully not, money.
2. These new found contacts may wish to get more free work from you; it happens from time to time, but being clear of your intentions from the start usually prevents this.

Personally, the risk of the pros by far outweighs the risk of the cons. In the digital age where everyone  that owns a camera is a potential photographer, we professionals need a way to stand out in our local market. Let's look at a few real-world examples, shall we?

Some kitties love strobes, some hate 'em. "Cats for Xmas" Project

Last November, on "Black Friday" when I was done fighting off other men of size 32 waist for marked down pants at Express, I entered the food court to a sea of local causes that wanted Xmas donations. "Uh oh," I thought, "I'll never make it outta here without feeling guilt-ridden into the few dollars left in my bank account." But as I was walking past a not-so-well-laid-out booth by a local cat shelter, Paws and Whiskers, an epiphany hit me. "Damn, these guys would adopt out a bunch more cats if they didn't look so red-eyed, out of focus, and unhappy." So, I did what any other empathetic, broke photographer would do, I offered to take photos of the residents at Paws and Whiskers Cat Shelter.

In doing so, I learned a few important side notes about rescue shelter cats:

1. If the cat has a name like "Fluffy" or "Muffin", chances are that it's not adorable, and wants to tear into your throat until you cease living.
2. Cats don't necessarily like strobes in close proximity to them; also, Westcott umbrellas + nervous cats = umbrella fabric + scrap metal + blood.
3. Cats that look adorable, act adorable, and have an adorable name that are in a shelter probably come with a tragic story or equally tragic medical history. See "Tilts".

Meet Tilts, he looks cute, but that's b/c of a tragic accident leaving his spine permanently curved. :(So how did the shelter shoot go? After I'd successfully treated all of my and my assistant's wounds, filled up a pet hair roller, and washed up, it was decided that it was overall a fun time. The director of the shelter was elated, and soon after the site was updated, they couldn't keep those fancily photographed felines on the shelves. By the time the Toledo Area Cat Show, on Feb. 14th, was in town, they were down to only 5 of the 40+ residents I'd photographed. If you look at the Paws and Whiskers website today, you'll notice only two of said residents remain. From a shelter that was overloaded during the holiday season with a retention of rate of over a year, it's more than just a hunch that better pictures had something to do with it.

Don't think you have the time for a larger-scale project like this one? Let's try an easier one.

Nicholas Powell, proud owner of a new profile pic."Free Facebook Profiles" Project

One of my more recent volunteer efforts took place last Sunday during the University of Findlay's Fine Arts Festival. I was 1 of 20 local artists present, 5 of which were photographers. With everyone there trying to get their cut by selling prints and original works, I thought it would be cool to offer passers by something for free. Facebook using patrons who were interested were treated to complimentary profile picture to be used at their leisure on Facebook. Providing this free service offered me several benefits in return:

1. I get a few more Facebook friends. Never hurts to have more people watching you.
2. These new contacts may like /use their picture, and might even know to contact me for further photographic needs.
3. Again, I have more content to work with, instead of wasting away in the summer heat trying to sell strangers prints at prices I'm not exactly happy about.

I got all of this, for 2 min. of shooting, 5 min. processing, and 2 min. uploading. Now if you consider this a lot of work, maybe you should be a little more worried about your overall work ethic than volunteering. :p

Volunteer work not only gives you more chances to get out there shooting, it also provides you more free promotion than simply leaving a stack of business cards at a coffee shop. Haven't tried volunteering? Go out, give it a try; it only takes a few minutes of internet searching and maybe a few phone calls to get started. And hey, you might even have *gasp* fun!

For those already interested in doing some volunteer work, here's some great resources:

http://www.volunteermatch.org/

http://www.serve.gov/

http://www.redcross.org/

http://www.humanesociety.org/



Where the Hell Have I Been? The 52 Project, and More.

Right, so, the past month hasn't exactly been the kindest to me, stress-wise, but now I feel a little more on-track, focused, and ready to get back out doing what I do best. What happened? Employers, wishy-washy clients, and an overload of "pro bono" work finally got the best of me when it came to working up some blog posts. And though they may not have the same tech-junkie tone to them, I assure you they're still coming from the same overly-opinionated guy. ^_^

So what's new? No I'm not talking about photography news, there's plenty of other outlets for that; this post is going to be fairly egocentric, so let's get to it. New in my life this past month: more individual freedoms as to Mat Marrash Photography, the purchase of a film camera, and the considerable slowing-down of my photographic processes. Yes, that's right, a film camera; and not just any film camera, the medium format legend, the Hasselblad 500C.

My "New" Hasselblad 500C, Fantastic Camera, Stunning Imagery!For starters, yes, this camera is old. It is, in fact, six years older than my mother (and probably better condition since it hasn't had two kids :p ). Why would any rational, tech-minded person do such a thing? Simple reasoning, there's nothing I can find for less than $10k in the digital world that comes close to the feeling I get when I see the big, beautiful 2 1/4" negatives that come out of this camera. So what does this new addition to my photo lineup mean to you, the readers? It means two things, firstly that yes, I will be talking about how much film is aiding my lifelong study of photography, and secondly, that the photos you see from now on will be a mix of film and digital, with a stronger emphasis on quality over quantity. This baby only gets 12 shots per roll of 120 film, and with two film backs, I've got 24 shots to get something good before a 2-3 minute down period of speed reloading. Quite a drastic change from the 1D Mark II which doesn't even fill it's buffer until 26 frames have gone through, a 3.25 second process.

A random but adorable Pembroke Welsh Corgi at Findlay's Riverside ParkNow onto the processing aspects of film, or total lack-there-of. The image you see to your right has had NO processing, only cropped from how it was scanned; hell, there's even some scratches and dust because I was too excited to get these things online! Why should I care that there's no processing involved? The past two years of my photographic life have been spent worrying about a suitable editing workflow. JPEGs and RAWs out of camera just have no chance of looking like this! Even with the help of some store-bought presets, there's a good chance this look can't be achieved without considerable effort, time, and extra money. And as of lately, these are things I'm finding I have less and less of. It's relieving and equally terrifying that all I have to do is finish a roll, mark it, and send it off to the lab, (now if I can find a lab that doesn't terrify me with the consistency of their results).

So film is slower, not instantaneous, and every single aspect of the camera is manual, what is there to like about film? Exactly that, slowing down is the key. I thought it would take longer to happen, but I'm sick of going to a sporting event with reasonable expectations of coming back with several hundred images, only to cull down to the first hundred. It feels cold, sloppy, and frankly, unprofessional. I've always liked to be more deliberate with my images, and 12 shots to get a keeper or two sounded right up my alley. Little did I know my keeper rate would be much higher than the 10-20% I've been used to with digital. Here's some examples from my first two rolls of film through the Hasselblad 500C. 11/24 isn't bad, especially considering that the first roll was improperly wound, resulting in another 3 keepers that just wouldn't scan properly due to inadequate negative spacing >__<.

What good can come from slowing down, spending less time on digital, and more time on film? To be honest, I'm not entirely sure, but I hope that with a good year of consistently trying it, something cool is bound to happen. Enter "The 52 Project"

Over the next 52 weeks, I plan on:

1. Shooting at least 1 roll of 120 film per week.
2. Processing the film at a lab for the first 10 weeks, then by hand.
3. Scanning and uploading at least 3 images from each roll to Flickr.
4. Updating the Blog on my progress of The 52 Project.

It's a hefty order, but I'm up to the challenge and will start with the postings next week! Technically, I've already got enough finished rolls to cover me for the next 2 weeks, but I'll be fair and try to have genuinely new stuff for each week. Personally, I like the idea of a 365 challenge, but with the nature of film, processing, scanning, etc., it seems a little more reasonable to have results for once a week rather than every day.

For those wondering if I'll still have other content besides The 52 Project, of course I will! It may not be as frequent, but there's already some blog posts on the back burner and I plan on having a lot of nicely spaced content throughout the next month or so. So stay tuned, things are going to get VERY interesting!

Adobe CS5 Wizardry Part 1: Photoshop's New Content Aware Fill

I was given the opportunity yesterday to play around with Adobe's brand-spanking-new CS5 Creative Suite, and man, is it sweet. Was it $600 to upgrade, $1300 to buy sweet? I'll let you know once I download the 30-day trial ^_^.

Immediately upon opening Photoshop CS5, there was only one thing I wanted do: see if Content Aware Fill was all it had been hyped up to be. Let's face it, after watching the viral YouTube teaser video, it's fair to have doubts. In case any of you Adobe junkies didn't get a chance to check it out, here it is:

Pretty sweet, eh?

Ok, marketing magic aside, what can Content Aware Fill do for me, Mr. I only use Photoshop 2% of the time? Surprisingly, quite a lot in a very short amount of time.

To demonstrate my point, let's bring in my lovely, reluctant photo assisstant, (and girlfriend) Laura.

Laura before Content Aware CS5. Click for larger view.I chose this photo for Content Aware Fill because I felt it posed an interesting challenge for both myself and Photoshop CS5. Looking at this image and wanting to have anything removed from it while retaining a believable look would be nearly impossible for me for several reasons:

• Almost random patterning of stones
• Varying tones of both leaf and stone
• A deep shadow from the leaves in the area where Laura is about to be removed
• Deciding whether or not to keep the window and just drop out Laura, or throw it all out

Figuring it would be a supreme display of CS5's power, I decided on dropping the whole window, Laura included, out of the picture. Sure this would turn it into an old boring wall, but would Content Aware Fill make it look good?

Not wasting anymore time, I grabbed the smart select tool and track padded through my selection (like the n00b I am). Managing to also make use of Photoshop CS5's improved refine edge tool, I selected pretty tightly around the window and surounding stone and leaves. And as Bryan O'Neil Hughes would say, "We're just going to let Content Aware chew away at that," and apporximately 10 seconds later, I was greeted by the image you see below:

 Umm, where'd Laura go?

Content Aware CS5, you're awesome! Click for larger view.

 After picking my jaw up from off the floor, I quickly zoomed into full view of the 8Mp image to see just what exactly Content Aware Fill had done in, this seemingly effortless, 10 seconds of work. I'm about to get really nitpicky, so I suggest you also zoom into the image to your right (just click it ^_^). Wow, so Content Aware did an awesome job with the leaves. You can see it sampled from the less dense twigs from the top right corner and the larger out of focus leaves at the bottom; but other than that, the flow of the leaves seems to coincide with the rest of the image. Now let's move onto the stone. The right half of where Laura was looks outstanding! Good pattern continuity, variation of tones, and overall you can't tell there was the ridge of an open stone window there. The left half, however, is where we run into some problems. There's a lot of overly obvious sampling and discontinuous tones. My guess is it could have been brought about by three things:

• Shadow cast from the leaves above
• I didn't select enough of the leaves from the left side of the window frame
• Not enough stone was sampled from below the window frame

Overall, though, this image is definitely convincing, especially for internet resizing.

So, considering that I was able to do this in roughly 1 minute, start to finish, what does that mean for the rest of the Photoshop users out there? My guess, that things are about to get good with photo-retouching, scary good. What used to only be accomplished by paying an expert retoucher upwards of $100 per hour can be accomplished by an intern with a Bamboo tablet. Can/will this get out of control with what we are now able to effortlessly do to a photograph? In thinking this over, I'm reminded of an essay one of my art professors reccommended to me:

Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of its Technologically Reproducability"

I'm sure everyone will have their own opinion of how Adobe Photoshop CS5 is changing the game, please be sure to leave a comment expressing your own feelings towards it. If there are enough comments, I'd love to revisit this topic sometime in the near future.

Thanks for reading, and remember, if it looks too good to be true, it probably is, and it's probably photoshop'd. ^_^