I recently got an enquiry from a company in the Netherlands, looking to license one of my images to use in their new office kitchen.

As I mostly do commissions (for small businesses, non-profits and families) and some assignment work (for publications), stock enquiries like this are rare, and most of my images aren’t suitable for stock use.

But I have a few images posted, and they’d come across one of mine that they liked. Since they’re based in Rotterdam (one of the largest container ports in the world) and focus on trade with Asia, they were looking for an image of containers on an Evergreen shipping lines vessel.

A quick Google image search later, they’d found one of my images in my small stock library hosted as a quiet part of one of my sites.

They found it because I’d captioned and tagged the images accurately (and because there aren’t that many good Evergreen container ship images around apparently), and they got in touch and asked about fees to license the image.

We sorted out a price and I worked with them on a new version of the image that fit the exact proportion and size they needed.

They printed the file locally, and as you can see the image now adorns their hip-looking kitchen (thanks to Richard Vredenburg for the image).

I’m chuffed that there’s one of my images on the wall in an office in Rotterdam, and it’s amazing that this digitally-connected world allowed this small miracle to happen. Twenty years ago there is no way an image I took at the start of a family cruise could have ended up being looked by Dutch people making coffee, and now we take it for granted.

Here’s the original image (in its custom Rotterdam crop version):

Santa Fe is a town that loves its dogs. Half the cars you pass have canine passengers, and the love for the Humane Society and the dog park (not to mention the unofficial dog club that meets in Patrick Smith Park for illicit off-leash adventures) underline how important our pooches are to us here.

And to me, nothing says this more than the number of us who bring our dogs to work. I’m going to start on a photography project documenting dogs and their owners in the workplace. I’ll shoot some photographs, and then interview the owners about what its like having their pets around.

Corrie (our own dog pictured above) is right:  We’re looking to photograph all sorts of dogs and all sorts of workplaces in Santa Fe – law offices, schools, stores, architecture firms, artists’ studios, non-profits, auto repair shops . . . you name it.

Why Dogs in the Office?

Workplaces are both public and private – in theory we’re supposed to leave our personalities at the door, but since we spend so much of our waking lives in them, our private lives tend to creep in round the edges.

And nothing shows this more than bringing our dogs with us to work – here’s a part of the family hanging out with us in a professional environment. I’ll look at how the relationship between the owner and dog changes in the office, and also how the office is changed by the presence of a dog. And it’s such a Santa Fe thing, I think the rest of the world would be interested in this too.

What happens to the Photos and Interviews?

I see the project as having several components – one is the still images, which I’d like to put together into a show. Another component is the audio interviews which would be used to build a video piece in conjunction with the stills. Finally there’ll be a book made out of this, with the stills and some written text based on the interviews.

If you feature in the project, you’ll get a limited edition print of yourself and/or your dog.

Want to get involved?

Drop me an email david@moore-consulting.net or leave a comment here, and I’ll be in touch. Corrie and I thank you.

National medical magazine PracticeLink has just published a photo assignment I shot for them in February.

The job was to shoot an editorial portrait of Dr James Melisi, a surgeon who had recently moved to Santa Fe from the Washington DC area.

The article the photo would accompany was about his move and how he’s enjoying the history and landscape of northern New Mexico. An amateur photographer, the good doctor has already had a show of his work in a local cafe.

The brief was to photograph him in a distinctive historical Santa Fe, and including his camera to show the new enthusiasm he’s found for photography.

I gave them a good range of images and as you can see from the tear sheet above, they used one full-page to accompany the piece.

I’m not much of a manifesto guy, but the last week has made me want to jump up on the barricades and take a stand for a particular type of photography.

I’ve just finished the Documentary Storytelling workshop with Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Deanne Fitzmaurice at the Santa Fe Photography workshops. Over four days (that included class time), I shot and edited a story about French chef Jean-Luc Salles, who’s given up running high-end restaurants to cook excellent food from scratch that he serves out of a 1960s Airstream trailer called Le Pod that sits in a parking lot here in Santa Fe. (I’ll write a post about him and show more of the photos later).

I learned a great deal, met lots of good people, and the experience enhanced my love of documentary photography as the most powerful and compelling type of shooting (not to mention the hardest to do well).

Making it hard for yourself

When you’re shooting a portrait, your first instinct is to clean up the background, get in tight to the subject and show only their face (or perhaps show a full-length portrait against a neutral non-distracting background).

A portrait photographer might well control also the light, give instructions on how the subject should pose, and take their time to get the shot they’re looking for. There’s nothing wrong with this, and the results can be great, but it’s largely about the photographer exercising control of the situation – the classic example of this being the white seamless: shoot someone who’s following for your instructions against a giant roll of white paper and your job of lighting and composition just got a lot easier.

But how much information does that really tell you about the person you’re photographing? It speaks to your craft, and shows us what the subject looks like, but often it doesn’t do much more than that.

In contrast, the documentary shooter will put someone in their real context by deliberately including the subject’s surroundings and using the light that’s available (which is part of the story).

This doesn’t mean that clutter is somehow approved of, however. Your job is still to compose elegantly, draw the eye in to the right place, and minimize irrelevant distractions, but it’s just got a lot harder, because now you’re looking at not just one plane of content but several, and all need to be appropriate and artfully arranged. And since you’re shooting someone moving in a real place rather than someone standing still in a studio, you’ve got to be quick about your decision-making too. Oh, and you’re likely not directing the subject either.

A successful image made under these circumstances (as well as being something of a miracle) gives the eye more to move around in, and expands our sense of the subject.

Truthfulness

So the role of the documentary photographer is to observe and create images, not to direct or intervene.

For press photographers, these rules are sacrosanct and breaking them can be a firing offence. No moving stuff out of the way to create a cleaner shot, or posing subjects or getting them to hold still (unless it’s clearly an environment portrait – where the expectation of the viewer of the image is that the subject is aware of the photographer and following instructions).

The same goes for processing – you can crop, burn, dodge and turn to black and white, but you can’t clone things out, paste things in, or in any other way manipulate the image to create a scene that wasn’t actually there.

Making Art out of Real Life

This is why I love the documentary approach – because you’re trying to capture and explain real life in an attractive way that is still true.

You’re not staging a shot, controlling all the lighting and the posing – you’re showing it as it really was but still making art out of it rather than just snapshots.

To me, it’s partly the challenge that is so appealing, but it’s mainly that I find the end result much more rewarding – shooting models in front of a perfect light set-up doesn’t communicate very much that’s real to me. I find the whole thing artificial, however beautiful.

Being Human

As if the technical challenge wasn’t hard enough, the documentary photographer has to decide what’s important and what images are worth making – and this requires an emotional involvement on their part.

To tell a good story, you have to understand the subject and empathize with them to a degree. If you don’t grasp what’s important to them, and what they feel strongly about, then you won’t be focussing on the right things.

While an important part of a studio photograph involves making the subject feel comfortable, this is so much more the case in documentary photography, when you’re likely entering people’s homes or places of work for a much longer time. For the workshop, I followed my subject Jean-Luc around for days, ending up at his home on a Friday night. This is weird behavior, but if you can’t put people at their ease in the midst of this, then you’ll never get anything good.

For a press photographer, you need good people skills even to get the access you want. Often people in the news for whatever reasons have people around them whose job is to protect them from photographers, or the subjects themselves just don’t want the invasion of privacy that comes with coverage. But Deanne made the point that if you’re honest about what you’re trying to do, and why, and you’re respectful about it, you can turn that ‘no’ into a ‘yes’.

Why it matters

Telling people’s stories in a visual medium such as photography can highlight things that are often ignored, shine a light on people’s struggles or triumphs and connect people in a remarkable way.

These needn’t be very important tales that win people Pulitzers, it could just be a family hanging out at home, or a skilled and passionate chef making great food in an Airstream trailer in a Santa Fe parking lot, but it’s still stuff that shows humanity in all its fantastic richness.

It might sound trite or overblown, but other folks can do the posed studio portraits, I’m going all in on the documentary side of things.

Families probably don’t need another staged portrait against a dodgy background, but a thoughtful series of photographs that shows the small joys of their daily life is a valuable thing.

And as organizations switch their marketing from cheesy slogans and big-budget spends to connecting with people more authentically, they need work that shows how they really do things.

It’s time to get real, and documentary photography does that like nothing else.

(This blog post is cross-posted from my other website, Clearing the Vision, which focuses on my documentary-style family and children work, and posts of interest in keen photographers. But I thought it deserved a spot here too, as it addresses my approach to photography and multimedia production for organizations)

I don’t know enough to know the full motivations of its creators (which have been widely discussed), but the video has been a social media triumph, so let’s break down some of the keys to its massive success (and not spend too long on the sad follow-up to the triumph):

 1) Make it personal and passionate

The video wraps the cause in a personal story involving the film maker Jason Russell, his son and a survivor from the LRA the family befriends. They could have given many more facts about the case (and some have criticized the video for not going into the details), but telling a more personal story makes the audience (of regular people not journalists or historians) identify more strongly with the campaign. Especially when Russell’s passion and commitment are so apparent.

It’s worth noticing that for all the high production values, Russell did the voiceover himself, rather than get a Hollywood star to voice the story. That works well because we get the feeling that he’s telling his story in his own words. (Of course, you hope the person at the centre of your piece won’t then do something that reflects badly on the organization, but that’s a different sort of story.)

2) Invisible Children had already done years of groundwork

It took them years to become overnight successes. They run programs in Africa, they have tens of thousands of people already committed to their cause in the US and around the world. They had already cultivated a responsive and energized audience through all their previous efforts, So when they launched this video, there was a huge group of people ready to share and spread the video.

So all the legwork you put in building your community, posting useful resources and doing a good job in a quiet way isn’t wasted – it can be crucial to nurturing that audience of committed folks who will start the snowball rolling for you.

3) The video is expertly produced and moves its audience

The film is a great piece of work. It’s well shot, with nice pacing, good music and great production values. Invisible Children has also been criticized in some circles for the amount of money it spends on awareness projects rather than programs on the ground, but there are 2 issues here:

• is it better to spend, say x dollars and reach y people with it, or spend 10x dollars and reach 1,000,000y people. You’ve spent ten times as much, but reached a million times more people – different organizations will have to weigh what’s that worth to them, but there’s no inherent virtue in a cheap production if it has no effect.
•  their plan partly aims to get people to pressure governments and organizations into doing things that Invisible Children couldn’t do themselves (such as tracking down a murderous war criminal). Whether or not this pressure on the powers that be will lead to the capture of Joseph Kony is another question, but if that’s your aim then spending money to do that seems legitimate.

4) There are clear calls to action around the video

There are immediate steps viewers are invited to take on watching the piece, in increasing levels of commitment. You can just share the piece (crucial by itself), or you can go further: signing a pledge (which builds Invisible Chidren’s database of supporters), getting a physical kit to use in furthering the publicity campaign, or donating some money. Depending on how strong your reaction is as a viewer, you can pick the level of response you’re comfortable with.

What do you want people to do after they’ve seen your video? Can you offer different levels of commitment?

Another key point is that the video drives involvement around an invidividual day of action. Like the physical stuff you can get (see below), this moves an internet campaign into the real world – getting people to show up somewhere and actually do something. You want to beware of ‘slacktivism’, as it’s been called – the practice of liking or retweeting causes online and thinking that you’ve done enough. It’s the 21st-century cousin of Billy Bragg’s comment that ‘wearing badges is no enough, in days like these’.

5) Give people stuff

Signing up for the kit of posters and stickers and the like works well. It helps spread the word, of course, but it also works because people like getting stuff, especially well-designed stuff (there’s the added value of quality production again). You’re not just part of something, you’re part of something cool – a smart approach when you’re aiming particularly at younger people.

What could you give away to encourage involvement in your campaign?

6) Put your video campaign in a broader context

The Kony 2012 video’s explanation of how social media is changing the world is compelling, and makes a case for why you should bother to get involved. You might think you couldn’t make a difference to what happened in Africa, but the video explains why this plucky underdog plan can work. I think its account of the changing dynamics of media production and consumption is broadly correct (and exciting) – otherwise I wouldn’t be doing my job – and of course the success of the video shows that it really is a new world for activism.

7) Bringing Joseph Kony to justice is a worthwhile cause with incredibly broad appeal

Not many people would argue that it’s not worth trying to save children from a monstrous warlord, so the appeal of the campaign is global. If you’re trying to save the silvery minnow in your small river or promoting your neighborhood cafe, you shouldn’t expect several million views and international press coverage no matter how brilliant your video package is. Of course, that’s not to say that well-produced video, or high quality writing or photography won’t make a real difference to your organization, just that the impact might add up to less than 70 million views.

Conclusion

You don’t need the budget or the global ambition of the Kony 2012 campaign to borrow something of their approach. And its amazing success shows that a skilled piece of digital storytelling told in a personal and passionate way really can capture people’s imagination and drive them to action.

(For more information on the criticisms of the campaign, see this Guardian piece, and this opinion from the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof. And it’s worth watching Charlie Brooker’s cynical, NSFW but well-informed take on the story).

Book of Deer (public domain, courtesy of wikipedia)

Back in the early 1990s I spent a lot of time studying medieval manuscripts, and what I learned has proved to be a valuable way of thinking about social media. Unlikely

My undergraduate degree was in Dark Age languages and history, and  I spent hours in the libraries of Cambridge poring over manuscripts written over a millennium ago with a quill pen in a freezing scriptorium on cow hide by monks writing in a language that wasn’t their own. Those illuminated texts were almost impossibly hard to produce, but they are beautiful works of art that changed lives at the time, and have since survived centuries of age and abuse.

Interestingly, the monks who copied these texts also wrote little notes about more day to day stuff in the margins of these beautiful books. These marginalia (often written in the monks’ vernacular languages, rather than the Latin of the main texts) commented on the weather, or complained about their colleagues. There were the social media posts of their time – ephemeral but personal and revealing.

So there was the long-form, well-produced and considered work, and the looser and shorter marginalia. We need both too, to present a rounded picture of our organizations.

Long form first

We don’t have to strive to create anything as lasting as the Book of Kells, but we absolutely need to make content that’s hard to create,  takes skill, time and effort. Work that not everyone could produce, but that lots of people can appreciate.

If you’re an organization looking to use social media effectively, you might be thinking that you have to reduce all your thoughts and messages down to the smallest form you can. The assumption might be that since you want to tweet and post to Facebook, you don’t need a blog or videos or good photography. That might seem fine, but what are you actually going to tweet about?

If you look at how people use their social media accounts effectively, it’s very often to link to longer-form work – a video, a good article or a strong image. This might not always be produced by the person tweeting – linking to other’s work is not just good karma, it can build your reputation as a resource for valuable information – but whoever made it, it’s often the more considered work that lives a longer life online, and generates more of an emotional response from people.

Social media might be seen as replacing old media models, but the irony is that we spend a lot of of our time tweeting and facebooking about things produced by ‘old’ media. We share a link to a New York Times article, live-tweet the Oscar Ceremony, or get excited about a Lady Gaga video. Without the expensive and skillfully produced longer-form media, we’d end up only taking about the weather or what we had for breakfast.

Following this model, when we’re looking to make an impact in social media, we can’t do it if all we produce is 140 characters long and takes just a couple of minutes to throw together. We need to create things of value, that others will find moving, entertaining or at least useful – and that takes time.

As I said, there’s room for passing on other people’s information of course, but consider the difference between just linking to a story about the release of a new camera, and putting together a detailed review with sample images, comparisons and your own expert conclusion. Sure, it’s harder, but the time (plus the expertise) creates a much more valuable piece of work. It makes you look better, and it’s much more likely to get passed around, shared and re-tweeted.

Simply put, if you don’t have anything to tweet or Facebook about, what kind of reputation can you build? I’m not saying you have to go for massive Hollywood production values for each video, or writing 50,000 word treatises for every blog post.

But I am saying that you need both the illuminated manuscript and the marginalia – the long-form content and the social media posts.

A piece I wrote and photographed for New Mexico Magazine has appeared in the December issue.

Back in March, I went up to Brazos Pass in northern New Mexico to talk to Stuart Penny, who teaches snowkiting – a fast-growing and exciting winter sport. I also photographed him in action.

I really enjoy the combination of writing and shooting a story – it lends a coherence to the finished work, as you can make sure to communicate in both media the key points you’re trying to get across, and use one type to illuminate the other.

In the past, I’ve written for New Mexico Magazine (like when they sent me on a cattle drive), or photographed for them (like this photograph of the Santa Fe International Folk Art Market), but this is the first time they’ve run a ‘words and pictures by’ story from me.

You can read the story on the magazine’s site.

And here’s more detail on how I got the shots (from my photography blog).

Good photography is crucial for school websites and other communications, but having worked with several schools on website projects, a common mistake I see is for the schools to think that any kind of photographs will work, so long as they include children.

Often there’s a big difference between what the images shows, and what the image says. It might show some students having fun on a project, but if it’s a poor quality image what it might actually say is more cluttered and confusing.

People are bombarded by mediocre images all the time, but the rarer good images still make an impact. The day in the life project (the link goes to my other site) I shot at Gentle Nudge preschool shows this well.

So when Rio Grande School in Santa Fe asked me to take some photographs for a mailer advertising a 7th Grade options evening, I was pleased to help. Even something as apparently simple as a postcard can communicate quality and trustworthiness if it’s done correctly, and communicate lack of care if it’s not.

The brief was to show some of the older children at work at Rio Grande (an elementary school), as these would be the kids whose futures would be explored at the meeting. The room where I was shooting was pretty dark and a little cramped, but I was pleased to deliver some high-quality shots, including the one the school and designer selected for the card that shows a couple of the children engaged and committed in their learning.

The visual busyness in the background is downplayed by being out of focus, and the composition highlights the girl, who has attractive catchlights (the white twinkles) in her eyes. She’s placed to the right of the frame to give her eyes some room to look into, and the papers she’s holding give some balance to the framing.

The boy in the shot helps fill the middle ground, and the focus of his attention underlines the girl’s – they’re both looking in the same direction.

It would have been easy to take some bad images in this tight space (and believe me, I did), but I think this one works well, and does a good job on the finished card.

If you’re interested in photography for your organization, I’d love to talk to you.

Four years ago we worked on an earlier redesign of the site and we’ve maintained and updated the site in the meantime.

But with a new CEO and changing priorities, it was time for a major overhaul. Working with Eric Griego of Firestik Studio, we helped the NMCF identify their key audiences and objectives, and translate that into a structure for the new site that would be easy to navigate and expandable.

Firestik worked on the look and feel, with input from me on best-practice and practicalities, and I built out the infrastructure of the site, including a homepage slideshow, video and social media elements and online donations.

A key challenge was satisfying the different audiences for the site, including potential donors, professional advisors and potential grant-seekers working in other non-profits. Each group has different expectations, different levels of experience with non-profit processes, and uses different vocabulary.

Another key requirement was to show the excellent work the NMCF is involved in across the state, so the Impact section includes case studies and examples of the NMCF in action. Freelance writers Carmella Padilla and Megan Fleming worked on these stories and gathering and fine-tuning the rest of the content.

Excellent photography from Don Usner is used throughout the site.

This is an excellent example of the team approach that works well in larger projects, and underlines the importance of using high-quality writing and photography. Too often well-structured, well-designed sites are let down by poor photographs and hastily-written content.

The result of all our efforts is an attractive, well-written and easy to use site that elegantly satisfies a range of audiences, and drives involvement in the work of the Foundation in a number of ways.

Site address: http://www.nmcf.org

I was delighted to be booked to photograph an evening of the q-bio conference in Santa Fe this weekend.

Held at St John’s College, but organized by the Center for Non-Linear Studies at Los Alamos National Laboratory, the event explores cellular information processing and ‘is intended to advance predictive modeling of cellular regulation’ – (no, I don’t really know what that is either, but everyone there obviously did).

The organizers wanted photographs of the biologists enjoying pizza and beer after the daytime sessions, then heading in to take part in the evening events.

These included a brilliant talk (complete with songs) by iconoclastic Israeli scientist Uri Alon, who gave a compelling account of the need to acknowledge the subjective and emotional side to life as a researcher.

You don’t expect a guitar in a science lecture, but Uri Alon’s not the average scientist

And then the attendees broke out into the poster sessions, where their fellow delegates put up posters outlining their projects and then discuss them long into the night.

The organizers used the images as part of a slideshow at the banquet held on the final evening of the conference, and will use them in print and online publicity for next year’s event.

One of the joys of being a photographer is being invited into a world you’d normally never venture into to. This is what drew me to print journalism – just for a little while, you get to explore what other people’s lives are like, and try to understand things enough to tell an interesting and accurate story about it. The same is true with photography.

Attendees talking through and debating their projects with other delegates in ‘poster sessions’

• do you have an event you’d like photographed professionally? I’d love to talk to you about it.