Professional Applications Within Photography

For my latest assignment at university I've been set a project called Professional Applications. The brief entails becoming a professional practitioner within the photography industry in some form or shape. The requirements for the brief are:

• A portfolio on line or printed containing at least TWO examples of submission to a live brief and/ or competition.
• A research journal/ folder containing evidence of research in to possible appropriate live briefs
• A ten minute illustrated presentation outlining your engagement and feedback with live briefs and/ or competitions during the year.

Stock Imaging

To start I'm looking at the live briefs, as open as this is I'm going to start off by doing research into stock imaging. So, where do I begin? Who's the best? What will be the best route to go?

So after doing my research by reading blogs and looking at online sales figures I've found six sites which I'm willing to submit my work to. As far as I can trust doing business with people online these are the most recommended sites.

Alamy.com

istockphoto.com

 shutterstock.com

 jupiterimages.co.uk

 fotolia.com

 123rf.com

I'm not submitting work to these sites just for the project but I also want to do it to see if I have what it takes as a stock photographer. It's always been something I've wanted to try out, I'd love to be able to quit my bar job and live off my photographs but let's not get ahead of ourselves just yet. 

So what kind of images do stock libraries want? 

After searching the internet endlessly, reading blogs and articles I've found that the biggest selling images are a mixture between photographs of people, specifically those in a business environment or still life photography specifically images of food. So to start off my career as a stock photographer I'm going to start out by uploading images of fruit. 

The images of fruit are nothing special, however they meet the submission criteria of all the image libraries. The images are exposed according to a professional light meter so the lighting and exposure is as close to perfect as possible. The images are all in focus this is a strong requirement from all the websites because you can't expect to sell a blurry image or one with camera shake. So I'm going to upload these images to all six websites and then report back to them later on in this blog post after the images have had time to fail or succeed. I will also keep trying to upload more photographs to the stock websites to try and generate some form of income or publicity for my university assignment. 

Competitions

The next action I'm going to take is to look for a photography competition to enter. Yet again...back to the internet.
Conveniently as soon as I started looking I received an email from one of the stock imaging websites (Alamy) promoting a competition that the company is supporting and associated with.

The theme of this competition is the concept of circles. This is a very open subject and could mean absolutely anything. Circles appear everywhere when you start looking, however, for this competition I thought that I would upload an image I took a few years ago due to the vibrancy of it, it's a little bit more eye catching then most of my normal images.

I think this image could stand a good chance in this competition as it's good to look at and there's no real concept to it. The lack of concept I feel will work better in this competition as it's open to everyone, so the majority of entries will come from amateur photographers and those who don't really have much of a background within reading images (without being offensive).

I also entered into another photography contest on this website (photocrowd.com)

I entered the same photograph from the Alamy circles competition into this competition. I know that these competitions are nothing special, however, if I manage to do well in them then maybe that will lead on to bigger and better things. 

Nothing really happened with the Alamy competition.

However I checked on the light painting contest every other day and this is what happened. I noticed that I had actually placed within the top 50 only after a couple of days, I think I was 47th, that's when I thought I might I actually stand a chance in this competition. So after a lot of social networking these are the results.

So there's one day left of this competition and I'm currently sat in first place, admittedly not by much and it could still change but I'm going to hold out hope that I can win this! 

There's 7 hours left of the competition and it's starting to become more and more nerve wrecking every minute.

So I won the competition. I don't really feel like it was worth the hours of Facebook messaging and text messages trying to get people to vote for me. However, a win is a win.

I'm rather annoyed with how the competition was advertised as there was no mention of a judges vote. It appears that I didn't win the full competition as I only won the Crowd Vote and not the Experts Decision. All I ended up winning was a DVD with photoshop lessons on it and I'm really grateful to everyone who managed to find time to vote for me but it just wasn't worth the stress. In the prize description they also mentioned huge publicity for your work but still no one has contacted me to ask for any additional images or interviews for the magazine. The fact that I had to email several different people in order to just get the photoshop DVD was quite disappointing as well.

So it's nearly been two weeks and I got an email today from the magazine.

It turns out that my image will be used in the magazine and I was just being impatient. However, I'm really excited to see what comes of this. Hopefully future work from a business or company.

Self Promotion

Logo

To start to promote myself I thought for a start I need a logo if I'm going to try and make a name for myself in the photographic industry. Luckily I have a friend who is a professional graphic design artist who didn't mind helping me out. My friend Claire is doing very well for herself within the graphic design industry, she's made logos, websites and branding.

www.cestech-creative.com

Here's what she managed to design for me and only in a couple of days as well.

I wanted something that would be personal to me, something that described myself a little bit and something that was a bit more creative than the usual boring logos that pop up everywhere. This logo is now going to be the face and front of any work I do.


Networking

As much as I dislike the idea of Facebook and Twitter, I thought that it would be within my best interests to create a business page on each site to generate some form of online presence. Both websites were very easy to create profiles on.

Within a day I had gained over 100 followers as well as a message off someone who was enquiring about work. I think this means that creating a Facebook account was a good decision.

The next step I took was creating a business email address jjacksonphotography@outlook.com just to try and tick as many boxes in the online presence grading criteria so I'm publishing this whole assignment as a blog post as JJacksonPhotography on blogger.com. 

I've found that blogger is a great way of generating not so much a fan base but people who are more arts based and are willing to give good feedback with my own personal and live work.

Website Design, Development and Publishing

I thought the last key to the puzzle would be to create a business website where I could promote myself and services and also showcase my current work which I think would be acceptable to lure people in to wanting me to shoot for them as a 'Professional' Photographer. 

Seen as I know absolutely nothing about HTML coding I decided to use a website called wix.com where they have pre-made website templates meaning that all you have to do is choose which style of web design best suits your idea of how you want your website to look and then just edit it yourself. It's very easy to use as well as simple and efficient with no cost.

Deciding on which template you use was pretty straight forward. I went for a simple layout which is really user friendly. 

Editing the site to how I wanted it to look was really easy and straight forward. The things that were the most time consuming were deciding which images to use on the website and of corse the dreaded 'About' section (no one likes writing about themselves). 

So I started out with the home page. I've left it simple, less is more.

 I then moved on to my about section. It still needs a lot adding to it but for now it will do.

 The first gallery I have started with was the Portraits. Really easy to set up and seen as I have enough good portraits it was easy to decide which ones to use.

 Still Life was the second gallery I have decided to add. My still life photography is really strong at the moment so I thought that this would be good to include in my website.

 Music for gallery number 3. I really enjoy music photography as it's more of a relaxed atmosphere and you're just left to do what you feel is best, pursuing it as a career is something which I would like to do.

 My fourth gallery is dedicated to Skateboarding photography. Skateboard is my favourite hobby and I try to incorporate as much of a skateboarding vibe and feel into all my work no matter how professional the work is. I feel you should always stay true to your passions.

 The last sub-page I added to the gallery list was a Projects page, just so who ever is looking at my website can see what I'm currently working on. I want to be able to change this page frequently to try and showcase my productivity to potential clients.

 The last page to choose from is my contact page. It's really straight forward and includes all my contact details such as: email, facebook, twitter, phone number and instagram.

I really like my website and I hope it works out for the best, but trying to maintain it and get it up and running is challenging and expensive, but as they say. 'You have to spend money, to make money.'

I will be running the site through the domain name joejacksonphotography.co.uk and shall hopefully have it up and running as soon as funding lets me. 

I intend on getting business cards for myself, because you'll never know where or when you'll need them. I feel like this would be a good step for business.

Rationale 

I have enjoyed this assignment. I feel I have learnt a lot about the photographic industry and self promotion. Parts of the networking have been very mundane and boring like trying to get people to vote for you in competitions but it has all been worth while. I'm still waiting on the stock imaging websites for someone to buy my work but I'm sure if my work stays there someone will purchase it eventually. As for my own business and work I will always be looking to expand and search to work for and with people to create excellent quality work. I hope you've enjoyed my post.

Joe.

Video Installation

For my video project I wanted to do something that people would want to watch over again. I must have spend hours on youtube trying to get inspiration until I decided on what to do. I know I wanted to do something physical, something that would be a challenge, something funny, something awesome.
I came to the decision that I wanted to film a ping pong ball trick shot video, but not like the ones already on youtube. I was going to spice up the ping pong ball throwing world like never before.

For my inspiration I used these three videos:

I love all the videos that inspired my video project and have attempted to incoporate all of them into my video. The first video from dude perfect shows basketball and frisbee trick shots and a rather epic scale, there's nothing complex about them they're just straight up long shots that require a lot of skill... and time.  The video is awesome and very inspiring. The negative points of the video are that some of the shots are too similar and need to be more varied. I tried to use the same enthusiasm in my video and used a couple of long shots.
Billy's Balls at The Berrics: I have used this as an inspirational video because although it's the same concept as the dude perfect video the trick shots are more complex however just as impressive. The music works well with it giving it a comical feel. A lot of time and effort went into the making of this video and it has worked very well. The only bad point about this video is the lighting can sometimes be a little bit too dark so you can't properly see what's going on.
Jimmy Carlin's Battle Commander: Although this is a skateboarding video I have tried to use some of the elements from it within my video. I have used the fillers and taken my own approach to them (obviously not drawing on my face) but using ping pong balls. I love the energy in this video and have incorporated that into my video, the music is fast tempo dance music and I have used that within my it just gives the video more energy and will make people want to watch it over and over again.
The Pong-Tang video is obviously the main inspiration I used for my video. The use of ping pong balls was very appealing as they're small and easy to carry around (unlike a basketball). No matter how inspirational the video is, it isn't that entertaining. It's slow, not that eventful and there's not much that makes you want to go out and do it.

The idea of using ping pong balls over basketballs was a very one sided argument basketballs are heavy and you can't really throw them around inside unless you have a basketball court or somewhere where there isn't anything to break, as well as there are a lot of people who play basketballs so it would be quite hard to produce a video where people would be supprised at something that you've done. It's hard to break anything with a ping pong ball, they weigh less then a gram and don't co-operate with wind.

My target audience is youtube because I could see my video becoming a viral favourite. I don't think that it would be suitable for anywhere else as there isn't any comtemporary components within it, just fun.
I used fillers like in Jimmy Carlin's Battle Commander along with the intro and the fast tempo music. I tried to use complex trick shots like in Billy's Balls at The Berrics as well as simple ones like in Dude Perfect. The videos that inspired me played a massive role in my video and I wouldn't have had half the ideas I did without them.

I filmed the video on my Canon 5D Mark ii very simple to use when it comes to filming, I then edited it using Microsoft Movie maker, not most creative of all editing software but very simple to use, I had no problems using it and it didn't take me very long.

This is my end video:

I feel like my video went really well and i'm very happy with it however if I was going to do it again I would maby make the video long and include a lot more shots.

My Work Inspired By Yoon Sul

Yoon Sul is one of the skateboarding industry's best photographers. The work i'm looking to recreate are the shoots he does at The Berrics titled Yoonivision. Yoonivision is based on skateboarding reportage, taking photographs of people skateboarding whilst being filmed by videographers, capturing photographs of the landed tricks, the slips and trips and everything inbetween.
The Berrics currently run a series of videos called Shoot All Skaters where they interview the people behind the cameras whether it's photographers or videographers, They talk about how they got into the business what inspires them and what their favourite shoots were/are. In Yoon Sul's interview he talks about an accident that happened to him when he was young where he nearly lost his sight. He talks about this being a massive changing point in his life, looking at things from a different perspective and suddenly getting this new found motivation.

"Everyone wanted to be a superstar, I just wanted to be a photographer".

The photographs for Yoonivision are always black and white with a bit of grain, so the ISO is probably high around 1600. From the looks of the photos a flash set up is being used meaning a shutter speed of 1/200sec or slower to sync in with the flash lighting. This would also explain why there is a blur in photographs where skateboarders are moving at speed.

When I went to recreate the shoot I had to improvise with the scenery, lighting, skateboarders and viewpoints. I don't have my own personal skatepark so I had to do the shoot outside. It was a pretty cloudy day so the lighting wasn't good, the skateboarders are good friends of mine so I knew that their capabilities were more than good enough for the photographs I required and the viewpoints just come naturally, don't they?

Obviously skateboarding isn't the safest of all things but it's the adrenline that fuels it right?

For the health and safety of the shoot I tried to make to it as safe as you can make skateboarding. I made sure the ground that my friends were skateboarding on was stable (no loose paving flags), I made sure the ground was free from glass, grit, and most importantly midget gems (skateboarders' arch nemesis). I positioned myself so that I wasn't in the way to avoid injury to myself and my friends. Another important saftey factor was that I told my friends to skateboard within their ability and their comfort zone just to decrease the chances of accidents happening, however accidents do happen as you will see in the photographs but just to clarify no one was injured juring the shoot (maby a scuffed elbow or a grazed hand but nothing serious).

This was the end result:

I tried to get my photographs as close to looking like Yoon Sul's as possible. I used a flashgun to get the same effects, like in the last photograph I bounced it off the window to make it look like a spot light. I'm quite happy with how the shoot turned out. If I was going to do it again I would try to get access to a skatepark, where i'd be able to rig up studio lighting. I would try to pick a day where the weather conditions are good; sunny with little wind. I know you can't tell from the photographs but as soon as i took the last shot the heavens opened and it started to rain heavily.

All in all I very much enjoyed shooting these photographs and would love to do it again.