What drives photographers and creatives
Posted by Tim Gruber | Filed under creative
Why do we do what we do as photographers and creatives?
Psychology Today has a nice article on what they call The Creative Personality and the ten paradoxical traits of the creative personality.
Perhaps the most important quality, the one that is most consistently present in all creative individuals, is the ability to enjoy the process of creation for its own sake. Without this trait, poets would give up striving for perfection and would write commercial jingles, economists would work for banks where they would earn at least twice as much as they do at universities, and physicists would stop doing basic research and join industrial laboratories where the conditions are better and the expectations more predictable.
I guess this is why we’re not all shooting events and weddings full-time.
Tags: creative, mind, psychology
Excerpt From A Magnum Meeting
Posted by Tim Gruber | Filed under interview, quotes, video
A YouTube clip from a Magnum meeting.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhhAZ9va4B0&feature=related[/youtube]
Fast forward to the end for this quote:
I think that the kind of photographers that we need in the future are the photographers that are doing cutting edge work instead of traditional photojournalism….I’ve been looking for something to describe what I like to do. I call it personal documentary. It’s serious work it is making a statement about the world, but it’s making a statement with a very personal point of view.
It’s becoming more and more clear to me everyday that there’s such a saturation of photography in our world today that if you want your work to shine it better showcase who you are as a person and how you see things.
Just one more reason to be shooting for yourself.
Tags: interview, magnum, quotes, youtube
Do you have faith in the story you tell? - part II
Posted by Tim Gruber | Filed under inspiration, storytelling
Here’s part II of my post on Do you have faith in the story you tell? You can find Part I here.
They will only have faith in a story that has become real for them personally. Once people make your story, their story, you have tapped into the powerful force of faith.
Make me laugh. Make me cry. Put a bit of yourself in every photo you take. Most importantly make me feel and I’ll have faith in your story.
Before anyone allows you to influence them, they want to know, “Who are you and why are you here?” If you don’t take the time to give a positive answer to that question, they will make up their own answers—usually negative.
How can we expect people to trust us, to be influenced by us, when we don’t let them know who we are?
I believe photography is a give and take relationship. You give something of yourself and your subjects are likely to give you something in return. Odds are what you receive might be even greater than the pictures you take. Don’t always take. Remember to give.
If a group believes most consultants are more interested in billable days than client success, they don’t hear a thing until they decide for themselves that “this” consultant is different. A minister who is not seen as a compassionate man cannot successfully deliver a message of love and forgiveness.
Meaning don’t BS your subjects. They laid out a welcome mat for you to be there. Respect them with nothing but honesty and compassion.
Let people see who you are, help them to feel like they know you personally, and your trust ratio automatically triples?
Sure I know you’re a photographer and you’re there to take pictures, but don’t forget to put your camera down at times. Remove that shield we call the camera from your face and heart and allow yourself to experience what your subjects feel. Your subjects will thank you.
Her story is laced with the shared humanity of love, humor, and risk and when she told it to an auditorium of 800 listeners there wasn’t a person there that wasn’t engaged.
Know your camera so well the mechanics are just a function of what you do. Invest your thoughts, energy, and heart into lacing your story with humanity and compassion.
My grandfather said to me ‘give the world the best you have and the best will come back to you.’ Then his grandfather said, ‘I have asked myself—what if every day I had refused to accept yesterday’s definition of my best?
Make like a sponge and absorb all you can from those around you. Their love. Their knowledge. Absorb the good and wring out the bad. Remember the only person you truly compete against is yourself. Set and continue to raise your own bar and hold yourself to it day after day.
Thank you Grandma. You give me the faith and strength to believe in my story.
What footprint will you leave?
Tags: advice, inspiration, quotes, storytelling
Do you have faith in the story you tell? Part I
Posted by Tim Gruber | Filed under inspiration, storytelling
I was working on posting this back in the spring right before my Grandma passed away and only now peeked at it. It’s probably a little on the sappy side, but here it is anyways.
I’ll post part II later on when I have time to get a few more thoughts on paper.
Do you have faith in the story you tell?
Found this article on site that deals with storytelling and it touches on a lot of important things for a storyteller of any form. Just replace the word faith with photography where it applies.
People don’t want more information. They are up to their eyeballs in information. They want faith—faith in you, your goals, your success, in the story you tell. It is faith that moves mountains, not facts. Facts do not give birth to faith.
Faith needs a story to sustain it—a meaningful story that inspires belief in you and renews hope that your ideas, do indeed, offer what you promise.
That line is especially powerful to me: Photography needs a story to sustain it - a meaningful story that inspires belief in you and renews hope that your ideas, do indeed, offer what you promise.
What do you bring to the table? It’s a safe assumption that most everything has been done in some way or form before, but that doesn’t mean you should not do it. How do you see it? What fresh angle can you bring to the story? Don’t worry so much about the news value focus on the human value.
Genuine influence goes deeper than getting people to do what you want them to do. It means people pick up where you left off because they believe. Faith can overcome any obstacle, achieve any goal. Money, power, authority, political advantage, and brute force have all, at one time or another, been overcome by faith.
Isn’t that one of our greatest goals as storytellers? That no matter the medium, to move people in ways that inspire action? While your work may not change the world it can act as a spark. First though the spark needs to start within your heart. When it does it’ll trickle into every photo you take. You need to care about your stories and subjects. Call upon your passion and when you find it anything is possible. Simply, if you don’t care I won’t care.
My family paid Jenn and I a visit here in KY a few weeks back and we
had a little cook-out.
Tags: advice, inspiration, quotes, storytelling
Gearheads don’t get it
Posted by Tim Gruber | Filed under gear
I’m preaching to the choir here, but this would be nice to print off and save for all those questions you get on assignment about how your camera must take good pictures.
It’s not the gear that matters. It’s you and your ideas that matter. Tone is in your fingers.
Thanks to Koci for the find.
Tags: gear, photography
Fear of failure
Posted by Tim Gruber | Filed under inspiration, quotes
I fear failure. I wish I didn’t, but I do.
I hate the way it tastes and the way it feels, but I’m learning to accept it as a part of my growth. A needed part of my growth. I just need to keep pushing myself towards that fear more often.
I guess it’s a result of my days as a catholic middle schooler and my desire to make everyone happy. As one of my professors at OU would say, “Dare to suck.”
These are a few quotes I’ve collected from places I can’t even remember, but they’ve proven useful in reminding myself to keep pushing.
The fastest way to succeed is to double your failure rate. - Thomas J. Watson Sr., founder of IBM
I honestly think it is better to be a failure at something you love than to be a success at something you hate. -George Burns
“I can accept failure, everyone fails at something. But I can’t accept not trying.” - Michael Jordan
“I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” - Michael Jordan
“Success is going from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm.” - Wiston Churchhill
Pablo Picasso was his own worst critic. When asked by others which of his paintings was his favorite he would typically reply “…the next one.”
“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up,” Edison once said.
Don’t stop failing.
Tags: inspiration, quotes
Making art is making your life
Posted by Tim Gruber | Filed under career, inspiration
A commencment speech by Sean Kernan.
Just remember what Sean says:
Making your art is making your life. It is identical to the process through which you continually become yourself. When your Art emerges from your consciousness, its bigger than your consciousness. It’s smarter and deeper than you.
Go looking for that anxious moment of not knowing where you’re going, and the thrill of getting there. Think of that moment in the cartoon when the coyote chases the roadrunner off the edge of the cliff, and runs out onto the air. That’s it, that’s your moment. Don’t look down. Keep running.
Always take photos for yourself. Enjoy the journey. Savor it. Hate it. Love it. Live it.
Don’t shoot for editors.
Don’t shoot for awards.
Shoot for who matters most. You and your subjects.
Ben at the Golden Gate from our on-going American Tourist project.
Lumix Festival for Young Photojournalism Presentations
Posted by Tim Gruber | Filed under interview, video
Videos of some of the best presenting their work at Lumix Festival for Young Photojournalism in Hanover, Germany.
Via: http://exposurecompensation.com/
Gone Fishin’
Posted by Tim Gruber | Filed under personal
Spent a relaxing night out on the lake with my Grandpa fishing. The fish weren’t really biting, but I didn’t mind.
Mother Nature and my Grandpa’s company were all I needed.
Unpaid internships
Posted by Tim Gruber | Filed under career, internship
Luckily I’ve never done an unpaid internship and most people I know go out of there way to avoid such endeavors, but either way I found this post to make for a light-hearted read.
I hope all the interns out there are having a good summer.
When all is said and done, the internship process serves the white community in many ways. First, it helps to train the next generation of freelance writers, museum curators, and director’s assistants. But more importantly, internships teach white children how to complain about being poor.
If all goes according to plan, an internship will end with an offer of a job that pays $24,000 per year and will consist entirely of the same tasks they were recently doing for free.
Tags: career, internship
