Photographer’s Diary – Come Together!

Posted by Matt Lange on Nov 29, 2009 in Commercial, Fun, Graphic Design, Photographer's Diary, video | 2 comments

**update** Before you read this post I want to state that it is not meant that you should NOT do YOUR work.  This post is simply saying to stop shunning other photographers and start working together sometimes.

image property of duckduck collective

Creative people, especially photographers, that’s right, I’m talking to you….put down your ego!  Why am I saying that?  In the world of photography, as Chase Jarvis has posted on his site many many many many many many times, photographers very much do NOT like to share their work.  Share their secrets.  They share nothing.  Work together?  Hardly.  I, myself, know only a couple photographers who have, or would, work together on projects.  Why?  What’s the problem? As Chase said, and myself and Henry McCoy have talked about in person, if photographers start working together and sharing ideas, the work will be SO much better.

Take Ruston, LA for example.  There was some talk of the photographers that live there, the photographers moving back to Ruston and the photographers moving away from Ruston (North Louisiana as a whole).  Someone said that some photographers were moving back to Ruston and the surrounding area.  The photographer who this was told too was CLEARLY uncomfortable with this situation.  Competition competition competition, was all I heard after this.  Why competition?  If you can’t adapted to who is around you and make your work stand out from the rest, should you be a full time creative?  I meant to say ‘creative’ there, because this applies to all aspects of creativity.  Why would you be scared to have someone in the same city or region as you?  You should embrace that and let it push you to the limit of your imagination.  Anyway, I stray…

…with all this being said I want to talk about something I found this morning online.  I found a group of photographers and videographers (creatives) online that not only share their work with each other…..THEY WORK TOGETHER!  **queue brain melt**.  The group calls themselves the ‘DuckDuck Collective‘ and they, from what I can tell, are out of Virginia.  When I was digging through their site, I was simply blown away.  The photography, video work and even design work is simply amazing.  They shoot everything from high end video ads and other videos, to photography for ads and even weddings.  That’s right, weddings.   I want everyone to look at this work.  All of it.  Look at how amazing it is and then think about what it would be like if you got together with some of your creative friends and colleagues and teamed up.   Stop whining about competition and who is around you and maybe reach out to them.  Reach out to the world around you and make better work instead of YOUR work.  Just an idea.  Get off your pedestal.

Short Film – Levi’s “Go Forth” from John Carl on Vimeo.

I apologize is this came off rude, but I figured the blunt approach would be the best approach.

Photographer’s Diary – Stand Still

Posted by Matt Lange on Nov 4, 2009 in Photographer's Diary | 0 comments

**RANDOM THOUGHT**
This morning I was looking for some work to blog and it hit me, that I don’t have any. Sort of. I have a lot of work that I have done for Louisiana Tech Athletics that I simply can’t show yet. SEC rules prevent me from blogging my LSU games and I have some other work for publication that simply hasn’t been, well, published yet. So it’s a surreal feeling. I guess that means I need to go out there and create some personal work to show.

To do this week: Finish editing secret project, help shoot 2 music videos, potentially edit 3 music videos and prepare for about 2-3 weeks of straight shooting and editing. Seems like things are picking up steam.

Photographer’s Diary – NYC

Posted by Matt Lange on Oct 26, 2009 in Photographer's Diary, Uncategorized | 3 comments

The whole time I was in New York, I was trying to think of this blog post.  How would I write it?   How could I describe all of the ‘new’ I was experiencing.  Everything in my ‘photography’ life, and eventually my day to day life is going to be different.  I have to take everything seriously from this point on.  People are paying a lot more attention to my site, to my blog…this is a business.  What do I do?  How do I handle this?  So on the flight from New York to Memphis, I took out the day planner and started writing.  Trying to remember everything that had happened in the last 24 hours.  I think I did a farely good job of recollecting, but now it’s time to actually write it.  So I’m going to go with a little bit of a different format.  I’m going to just list the events, in no particular order.  I think this is the best way:

- Alarm goes off.  It’s 4:30am.  I hadn’t been up this early since college that I can recall, and that was probably just because I hadn’t been to sleep yet.  Two a days working for Tech comes close, but I don’t think I ever woke up this early.  Luckily I set the coffee pot the night before. At this point I couldn’t even think.  I crawled to the Explorer and headed east on I-10.  Flight to DC was in my near future and I could hardly stand it.

- I arrive at the airport an hour early, catch a seat, wait and think.  Then I see James Carville.  This is my first ‘celebrity’ sighting of the trip.  Not counting famous photographers, this is the only celebrity I see the whole time.

- I want to sleep incredibly bad, but I am too excited.  I strike up a brief conversation with the woman next to me.  She is a Vascular Surgeon from New Orleans.  She is very nice.  We are both displeased with the small child who apparently had no parents on the plane with him.  He claimed the entire isle as his own and ran the entire flight.  Good times.

- We decend into Washington DC. I’ve never seen trees these colors before.  It was incredibly beautiful.  Then I see DC.  WOW.

- After a brief layover in DC, I catch the ’shuttle’ to NYC on a plane that smelled like what could only be described as tamales.  Once I got over my new craving for Taco Bell, I looked out of my window to see this:

Wow, New York.  Live in living color.  No longer on tv, but all around me now.

So enough of the story intro.  Things that stood out to me.

- The Jacob Javits Center was absolutely the coolest convention center I’d ever been in.  Just the lobby blew my mind.

- Traffic in NYC is redunkulous.  They say no one there owns a car.  Clearly.  Every single person takes their own cab it seems.  And why even have traffic lights?  Apparently it’s not ticketed to just park at the intersection of 5th Ave and E 15th St.

- Everyone in New York is trendy.  Whatever your style of dress is, it seemed as if everyone in Manhattan wore the best of that style of clothing.  It was really impressive

- Scott Kelby and his goons, Dave, RC and Matt (not to mention the entire Peachpit group) couldn’t have been nicer.  Seriously, you guys were super cool from the moment I met you all.  I know we are just photographers, but you guys are famous in our industry, yet never acted like it.  It’s too bad Matt is prejudice toward people with bald heads. It’s ok Matt, I forgive you.  I’m sure Dave does too.  And RC, thanks for the invite to the coolest play I’ve ever seen.  Speaking of…

-RC invited us to a play Thursday night, yet refused to tell us what it was about. I was apprehensive to say the least.  But after watching it, my mind was completely blown.  It was a play called Fuerza Bruta.  If you are going to New York in the near future or live there, go see this play immediately.  I can only describe it as an interactive Cirque Du Soleil.  Brilliant.

- I realized at one point that I had Jeremy Cowart on my left and Joey L on my right.  For those of you not familiar with their work, you really need to check them out. Jeremy does a lot of work for networks like Fox and E!  Joey is the one responsible for the Twilight promotional photography.  Amazing photographers.  I was in big company.

- Also in attendance were Zack Arias and his wife Meghan.  Zack was definitely someone I’d hoped to meet while in town, but he was busy talking to Scott and I never want to be the guy who interrupts.  Zack looked thrilled to be at the play.  He was running back and forth and snapping pictures right and left.  He and his wife seemed very nice.  If you didn’t know, his wife makes amazazing music. You should really give it a listen.

- Food – Well, I’m still on the fence.  Not to say that NYC doesn’t have amazing food.  I’m sure it does.  I just didnt have any of it.  Correction, I ate twice.  I loved it.  The rest was sort of snack food for me.  I had Ray’s Pizza and Lindy’s cheese cake.  Delicious.

- The majority of the trip was spent meeting and greeting people.  Scott told me he would introduce me to people I needed to know and boy was he not lying.  A few of the amazing people I met were Steve Inglima, who runs Canon’s ‘Explorers of Light’ and Tyler Stableford. AMAZING photographer.

- At the Canon stage I watched Vincent Laforet do his presentation and it absolutely blew my mind.  Everything in the 24 hours I was there was awe inspiring but Vincent was the first thing I watched and first person I heard speak that had me ready to get on a plane back to Louisiana and get back to creating amazing work.  Please please look at his stuff.

- I had the absolute pleasure of meeting one of my heroes, Joe McNally.  He is a good friend of Scott’s, so Scott introduced me to him.  It’s at this moment I would like to make a statement.  I am not tall enough to be an amazing photographer.  Aside from Zack Arias, everyone I met seemed to be at least 3 inches taller than me.  But that’s beside the point. Joe is an icon and a wizard with light.  Meeting him was truly and honor and I’ll never forget it. I hope we meet again.  Joe, I’ll buy you a beer.  Or you can buy me one.  After all, I did catch your laptop outside of your presentation room before it fell to the ground.  Oh…you didn’t know that happened? .

- Finally – Tim Mantoani.  I met Tim via email about a month ago, so I was really excited to meet him in person at PPE.  Tim, essentially, is at the level I aspire to be at.  Both success wise and in what he shoots.  He is truly truly a nice guy and very humble.  I had the pleasure of watching him work on his project ‘Behind Photographs’.  What an experience that was.  I didn’t get to hangout with Tim too much, but I would love to if time allowed.

New York was an amazing experience.  I will admit, when I got in the cab I said, ‘This looks just like New Orleans’, man was I wrong.  I loved NYC.  I left with a whole new outlook on what it is that I do.  I new feeling of motivation.  Tim said it best while we were there, he said that the world doesn’t need more photographers.  True.  The world needs more photographers willing to be bold and push the limits. Create new work.  Be imaginative.

I can’t wait to go back next year.  I’ve already told my wife and family that I am going.  I’d love to make a trip out of it.  Maybe a week.  Between now and that time, I have to make mind blowing work.  I sort of woke up this week and realized that I’m in a whole new level of photographer, socially. I need to be at that level skill wise.   Business wise.  Creativity wise.  I can’t wait for this year to start….oh wait….it just did.

Gallery of Iphone/G10 shots from NYC (sorry for some sideways shots. Wordpress and my Iphone seem to not get along):

Photographer’s Diary – Anticipation

Posted by Matt Lange on Oct 25, 2009 in Photographer's Diary | 2 comments

I wanted to write this post before I left for New York, and PPE, but I simply did not have any spare time whatsoever.  But I’m going to dig in and write my thoughts about what was to come, before it happened.  Here goes…..

I’ve already blogged about Scott Kelby, his trip to Ruston and just how downright cool the guy is.  But I don’t recall if I posted about him twisting my arm into going to NYC for PPE.  Let’s think about what my life was prior to Kelby’s visit.  I was simply a local photographer (not to say I’m more now) that shot LSU sports, Louisiana Tech sports and various portrait/editorial assignments.  I averaged 20-30 hits on my blog daily, and I was cool with that.  Well, Scott comes to Ruston and while we are eating after the game, he says basically, ‘come to New York’.  After some back and forth about how I wasn’t sure, money, and how no one ever just said come to New York, he stood firm….’come to New York’.   Keep in mind that the trip to NYC was a mere 4 days after this meal.  Once I decided to go, my stomach was in knots for a week.

Going to New York, itself, was a huge deal for me.  I’d been to some big cities, but this would be one of the biggest cities, on a whim, by myself and possibly life changing.  I ran through my head all the things that could possibly change from simply going.  Then Scott posted on his blog, about his trip to Ruston. Suddenly I had nearly 3,000 hits to my blog alone.  I was getting email from all over the country and everything started changing.  This only made me more nervous about the trip.  Just think about the situation and apply it to yourself.  You’ve been struggling to create any sort of buzz you could possibly generate, in your field.  Your money is starting to run stressfully low and then this happens and you are immediately popular in whatever it is that you do.  I was ill prepared for this.  Don’t get me wrong, I love it and am excited now.  But it stressed me out.

Then I started to think about the trip to NY in this new attitude.  I started trying to think who I would meet in NYC.  I followed Twitter and various blog posts and once it was clear who was there, and who I’d meet, my mind exploded.  These guys are the cream of the crop.  So it was going to be an amazing experience to be able to meet these guys with Scott and rub elbows with the industry insiders.  I knew my life would be different when I returned.  So I basically couldn’t sleep, or eat…..then I lost my debit card.  My life was a mess.  It was a good mess, but I simply couldn’t pull it together for the life of me.  The next thing I knew it was 4:30 am Thursday morning and I was walking out the door to the airport.  And I was right.  Thing wouldn’t be the same anymore….

Photographer’s Diary – This Business Is Tough

Posted by Matt Lange on Oct 13, 2009 in Information, Photographer's Diary | 7 comments

It’s not secret that my ultimate goal in this photography game, is to be a sports portrait/editorial photographer. That would be the best thing, to make my soul happy. So today, as I do from time to time, I emailed a photographer that shoots REGULARLY for Sports Illustrated and simply asked: A) is it possible to be purely a portrait photographer for SI? B) if so, who do I contact? I got this as a response:

Matt,

No one is getting work right now- there is none.

Your best bet is to fly to New York and meet them in person.

Ouch, none? I laughed. There is no possible way that there can be NO work at all. And, I’m sure it helps to see people face to face, you should not have to fly to New York to get a job. Further more, who are ‘them’? Look everybody, this is a tough tough business. It’s extremely cut throat for the most part, but I think that’s fun. That’s the challenge. As Tim Mantoani said, “The rollercoaster is more fun than the merry-go-round.” Hell yes it is. I want it to be easy, but then again I’m just starting off. If there were no challenge to this I would be bored out of my mind in less than a year. In the past week, I have landed 3, yes 3, commercial photography gigs. That’s great for me. But shouldn’t I have not landed any? I mean, there is no work out there.

This has been a very strange week for me. When I started this week, I was ready to hang it up. I started on this adventure feeling bold and ready to take on the world. Well, thank you recession, but business was slow to come. Then I read Tim Mantoani’s post on Scott Kelby’s blog and I instantly perked up. He said it best when he said, ‘this is not a dress rehearsal’ when referring to life. It’s not. Screw it, it will get tough but I dont want to do anything else. So this will work. Since then, I got the commercial clients, but then I got something else, people asked me for advice on how to break in and what to do, etc. And of course, ‘there is no work’. So I just want to type this out in blog form. That way it’s here to stay and people can come back to read it whenever they want. So here goes:

This business is tough. But this business is also what you make of it. By all means, there is work out there. Never let someone tell you there is NO work. It may not be exactly what you want to do, but there is work. Sometimes you have to do what you have to do to keep the lights on. Other times you have to diversify. Challenge yourself and surprise clients. Myself, for example, I’m a graphic designer and video editor by trade. Some of you may have known that. That gives me the ability to offer things that most other photographers dont. Are there other photographers with the same skill as I have? Absolutely, but there in lies the fun. It’s up to me to set myself apart from not only those in my area, but those everywhere with my skill set. Someone told me today, when I mentioned to them about the ‘no work’ email. He said to shoot your own work, but shoot it like someone paid you. No brainer. I’ve already been doing this. Guys, shoot what you want and the work you want will come to you. The football player on the white background is a friend of mine that I shot purely for fun. And with that shoot, I have jumped so far ahead with potential clients that I want. Challenge yourself. You may be surprised.

Also, don’t be afraid to email people. I’m an email junkie. If you emailed me right now, you’d probably have a response in 5 minutes. I’m also not afraid to email anyone whose work I admire or who has made it to the point I want to be at. What is the worst thing they can possibly do? Not respond? OH NO!!! Again, you’d be surprised what will happen when you just try. I go, again, back to what Tim said. This is not a dress rehearsal. If you don’t just go out there and do it, or try to do it, you’ll regret it forever. You’ll wake up one day when you’re 89, realize the time is near and you never did what you love.

There are going to be tough times. There are going to be times when you might have to pick up a part time job to keep the lights on. So what? Do it! It’s part time and it’s temporary. I’m doing it right now. I make $7.50 an hour. When the photography is low, it’s scary. But, when the photography is good, I’ve never been happier. There will come a day when I can support myself fully off of photos. That will be the greatest day of my life. But I’m being patient. There will be a day when I can be the Chase Jarvis of the South. Then when I reach that point, there will be times when I will have around $800 in my account and be nervous again. But I don’t care.

Get out there and make something happen with photography. Dont be scared of money. Dont let people tell you there is no work. Create work. If you shoot sports and it’s not giving, step back and think of a way to shoot it differently than the 80 photographers next to you at that LSU vs Florida game. ‘What can I shoot that these guys are missing?’. ‘What commercial job do I want to shoot that I can’t find an example of anywhere?’ Create that shoot. Get out there. Bang the shutter as Chase says. Don’t make excuses or listen to any negativity. It’s what you make of it.

Sorry for my ramble.

-Matt

Hire Me

Posted by Matt Lange on Aug 30, 2009 in Basketball, Behind The Scenes, Commercial, ESPN, Engagements, Fashion, Fun, Graphic Design, Information, LSU, Louisiana Tech, Movies, Music, Photo of the Day, Photographer's Diary, Portraits, SI, Senior Portraits, Sports, Tuesday Inspiration, Uncategorized, Weddings, video | 0 comments

With web traffic where it is, I want to take this time to do a quick shameless plug for myself. Hire me for your commercial, sports and portrait photography needs. Even graphic design. As Chase Jarvis says, I’m born and bred to create art, and I would like nothing more than to do it for you. So feel free to contact me at info@mattlange.com for any licensing, pricing or availability questions. And as always, thank you for stopping by and viewing my work and reading my thoughts.

Matt