Mark Johnson talks with his photojournalism class at the University of Georgia.

Yesterday I talked to Mark Johnson’s Photojournalism class at The Grady College of Journalism and Multimedia on the campus of the University of Georgia.  I shared with them business practices and marketing concepts for the photographer.

If I had more time I would have told them to also about the importance of a personal project. If you ever hear a successful photojournalist speak about their work you will most likely hear about the “personal project.”

Today I want to talk about why I think this is a key to the success of the visual storyteller

I have hit the delete key way too much here to capture how important having an “inner drive” is to the success of your career. You have to be excited about a project that it consumes you enough that you are excited about thinking about the possibilities that it motivates you to act.

You need to have a passion about something so that when you pick up the camera to capture the subject emotions are driving your compositions and not a formula.

You need a support system, because going something all alone is difficult.

My faith community talks about the individual call and the corporate call. While a person may feel they are called to do something it is the corporate call of the community that must confirm the call.

By sharing your ideas with some close friends they can help encourage you and challenge you in the process.

Mark is more than just their teacher, he can serve as their coach or mentor, but they must make that decision

You really need someone who has been where you want to go or at least has taken on a personal project and succeeded.

Your coach will talk to you before you start. They should ask questions and help you to articulate why you have chosen an approach.

As you shoot your project you should be taking it to them to review. This is when you will discover with their help you have some holes in the coverage. You then will reshoot and show the results again to your coach.

Sometimes you will discover that the project you tried to cover just doesn’t work for one reason or another. This is when your coach might suggest taking on something else that might be better match for your heart and abilities to capture.

 
When you are done with your project you will know it because you have achieved your goal.

Sometimes your long-term goal may take years to achieve, but due to your efforts people have hired you to shoot some of their projects. Sometimes you may have a very successful career and still not achieve your goal for a long time.

Just the other night my wife Dorie helped me to see I had achieved some of my goal.

I had been asked to curate the art exhibit on missions for our church. It has been up now for a couple of weeks. Some people had come to tell me how much they loved the photos. “They are so real and we just love them.” Soon I had a couple folks talking to us. Then I overhead my wife telling a couple that this was not just Stanley’s profession this is the essence of what he is all about.

You see my goal was not to be published only, I have wanted to know that my photos were having impact on people’s lives. I hope that because of the art exhibit people feel called to give, go and/or pray for missions. If this happens then this personal project met the objective.

Students listen to Mark as he introduces me to the class

What is your personal project?

I assumed everyone knows about getting the lowest rates when traveling. On some recent trips I realized many are paying top dollar for things like hotel, rental cars and airfare.

By booking with Hotwire you still get to use your hotel chains reward points.  So I have joined Priority Rewards, Hilton Honors and Marriott Rewards.  Sometimes I must weigh the travel time between the hotel and the events or airport and the choice is not just based on the lowest price but how much time I will be spending to and from those locations.

Chick-fil-A Roswell Town Center

Jim Waddle called me a couple years ago and asked if I could get a good photo of his Chick-fil-A and I assured him I could. 

Just a couple years later, which is this year, Jim asked if we could update that photo. The first photo was so successful in his ad campaign that he wanted to update it since he had done some landscaping and wanted a recent photo.

Now for those of you who only have one Chick-fil-A in your town you might not see why this is important for Jim.  Here in Atlanta you can almost reach out and touch a Chick-fil-A anywhere you turn. 

Each restaurant does their own promotions in addition to working with the market.  The problem through the years is his promotions were not always driving people to his restaurant.  Jim likes working with the area market, but also wanted to have some special events. 

Not all the Chick-fil-A’s look alike so having a nice photo of his store helped his customers know which restaurant was doing a promotion or an event.

When you think about it many of the brick and mortar businesses in a town are remembered by their location and looks, so why not use a cool photo of the business to remind folks–it is called branding.

Poster designed to promote the display

Roswell Presbyterian Church is my home church.  A couple of years ago they started using a hall that we call “Main Street” for art shows of our members.

They asked me to coordinate a show on missions.  We photographed our mission partners around the world and this is the resulting show.

I am excited because we are putting up photos that met a few criteria.

Criteria for the show:

1. Photo had to be a large enough file size to make a 20″x30″ print.
2. Photos had to be well exposed.
3. Photos had to be in focus.
4. The photo had to be story telling.  We needed photos that help people understand what they are looking at and not just a photo of people all smiling and looking at the camera.
5. The photos needed to be action oriented rather than just a picture of an object.  So often people just take pictures of the buildings or the well they dug.  We wanted to see the people these projects were all about.

Laying out the prints along the hall for the display

The show will hang for 6 weeks.  During this time the ministers sermons will revolve around the them of “Windows to the Soul” that will be about each person’s individual calling into missions.

Our goal for the project is that everyone will come to see that God can use their gifts, whatever they may be, for missions.  Everyone is called to be missionaries. 

Picked three photos for one wall in a major area of the building

I hope we dispel some of the myths around missions:

1. All missionaries are preachers
2. You must go to some other continent like Africa
3. You must give up everything you own
4. Missions isn’t fun

The show isn’t about photography. It is using photography as the medium for the message.  I hope the images call some into full time ministry.  But if all it does is change one person’s life and helps them discover their call in missions then it was a success.

In 2008 Seth Godin published his book Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us.  

One of the concepts in the book is creating a tighter tribe and/or “transforming the shared interest into a passionate goal and desire for change” usually leads to much more impact than trying to make a tribe bigger. I now see this as more about niche markets are where people are going today rather than the mass market communications.

Just today I visited with a missionary couple who are raising their first support to go into missions full time. They had been on staff of a missionary organization that helped “missionaries” with their presentations to churches and their supporters when they came home on furlough every few years.

While these “missionaries” were not doing what we might term mass communications they were mainly using the older mass communication model of communications done at certain times.  America would tune into the news on TV for a very long time at 6 pm and watch one of three networks before the Cable Networks came along.  While CNN was the first to give us round the clock new cast it for the most part was more of the same network news rebroadcast throughout the day.

Since the 1995 when Mosaic popularized the World Wide Web and helped what started out to be the instantaneous news cycle.  February 2004 Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook and then we were all able to create our communities with our “friends.” We could talk with and follow our friends. We shared tips and what we were finding on the web.

Two years later July 2006 Jack Dorsey launched Twitter. The tipping point for Twitter’s popularity was the 2007 South by Southwest (SXSW) festival. During the event, Twitter usage increased from 20,000 tweets per day to 60,000. “The Twitter people cleverly placed two 60-inch plasma screens in the conference hallways, exclusively streaming Twitter messages,” remarked Newsweek’s Steven Levy. “Hundreds of conference-goers kept tabs on each other via constant twitters. Panelists and speakers mentioned the service, and the bloggers in attendance touted it.”

Today the ability of any person to reach out and create content that others with similar interest might be interested in has created a new communications platform for not just the professional communications expert, but anyone who wants to get on a soapbox.

Today people want ongoing communications when they want it and where they are located.  The mobile devices like smartphones and tablets are now creating more demand.

While the mass communication channels are still working the audience for them has shrunk considerable. Meanwhile more specialized magazines exist today than ever.  Authors are self publishing because of e-Books. Bloggers are sitting in their bathrobes in their homes and connecting with the world.

If you are needing to communicate with a constituency, you need to be communicating more often.  Blogging three times a week, putting out a newsletter, tweeting are not something of a fad–this is how your audience is getting their messages daily with things they are interested in. For those missionaries who used to come home every four years and give a slide show to their church and sending out quarterly newsletters they snail mailed are finding their support dwindling.  Those who are connecting with their supporters on a regular basis are flourishing.

Business can do the same things as these missionaries I met with today–telling their stories to keep their customers.

The missionaries noticed something new they didn’t see years ago from their traditional communication–responses. Their supporters are responding immediately when they get an eNewsletter.  They mention what they are doing and the people are excited and want to know when they are doing something so they can pray for them right then.

Businesses are also discovering a raving fan. Their customers are creating blogs about their products and trying to get the scoop on what the company is doing next.

The bottom line is mass communication which was one way communication is being replaced by a dialogue.

Fabric on our patio chairs

Sometimes photographers suffer from a “visual block.”  It is very similar to the “writers block.”

What do you do to get some inspiration.  This is one of many techniques I use.

1. Pick a macro lens or use your point and shoot on the macro (flower) setting. 
2. Set the lens to the closest focus setting.  
3. Set the f/stop on f/8 or greater.  Very important if using a macro lens on DSLR
4. Get as close as you can without refocusing, but you getting the photo in focus by just getting closer or further back to keep the object in focus.

A screw in our deck

As you hunt for different things to photograph this close, you will notice you will often cast a shadow on the objects–be careful not to do that.  If you want to make this more fun then use a small compact mirror (ladies have them in their purses) and bounce some light where you are casting a shadow.  You can also just use a 3×5 white index card and that will work just as well.

Glaze finish on our kitchen cabinets

A photographer who needed to go back and get something and left his intern to watch the equipment at a photo shoot. They were in the middle of no where. Just a car there in the field.  When the photographer returned he asked the intern what he got and he said nothing–there is nothing to shoot.  The photographer then took the camera and shot about a dozen or so images in just a few moments and handed back to the intern.

They were all spectacular.  Jay Maisel was that photographer.  The intern got an incredible lesson that day, the images are all around you.  The creative photographer will find them.

Water on our deck where you can see the reflection of the sky