Category Archives: Tutorials

Working in the nightlife industry as a photographer can be a lot of fun, but it can also be unnecessarily stressful and difficult dealing with the business side of things. I’ve talked about the technical difficulties of shooting bars and nightclubs before but I’ve never really touched on the logistic side of things. Of all the different types of photography gigs I’ve had, dealing with bars and clubs has been my biggest challenge as a business.

A lot of this applies to any kind of event photography, but shooting clubs and bars has it’s own subset of quirks and problems. It’s chaotic, fast paced and extremely unorganized. The turnover rate on of employees from bouncers right up to management is so fast that the people you dealt with last week may not be there this week. As soon as you develop a relationship with someone it seems they’re out the door and you have to start all over.

There’s always one person you officially work for; this could be yourself as a freelancer, a 3rd party promotions magazine or website, the venue owner, the venue manager, the promoter for that nights event and possibly the manager of some performer or celebrity if there’s one attending. The easiest situation is for you to shoot as a freelancer and then sell the shots to one or all of these people. By shooting for yourself you retain the commercial rights to the shots and can sell them to whoever you want. Sounds easy enough but this could mean a lot of leg work getting invites, press-passes, photo permissions etc. and freelancers are usually on the bottom of the list when it comes to getting any of these things done. It can take a lot of time and effort to build up the reputation and connections to grease the wheels and get yourself into an event worth shooting by yourself, and afterwards you still have to worry about turning those photos into a paycheck. If an event is big enough that people want pictures they’re probably going to send their own photog instead of hoping a freelancer shows up and gets the shots they want.  Continue reading →

Sooner or later every photographer, or really anyone who makes a hobby out of what someone else calls a career, has to figure out exactly where they stand with their trade and ask themselves the question,
“Is my work good enough to get paid for, and is that something I want to pursue?”

How do you transition from hobbyist to getting paid? Everyone needs to gain exposure, get out there, get their work seen. I’ve given away my fair share of work, but at some point it turns from gaining exposure, to losing out on a paycheck. Where is this magical turning point, you may ask. Well… it’s a very, very fuzzy line.

One big trap a lot of beginning photogs fall into, myself included, is the “pics for exposure” trade. In my experience, as soon as you hear the words “it will be great exposure for you” a big red warning light should go off in your head, along with a suitably loud siren… I find something in the “AWWWOOOOOOGAAAA” family works quite well. Pics for exposure, ninety percent of the time means “we’re too cheap to pay for a photographer”. Continue reading →

So last time I went over the basics of what happens when you develop film, if you missed it, take a look at the previous tutorial: Film Developing Basics. Go on, I’ll wait… read it? Good! Now we’ll take a look at stand development, my personal favorite. Stand development goes against the grain of a lot of photographers, especially those that have worked in or with professional developing labs because it thumbs its nose at most of the standard practices and gives the finger to the rest. Film should be developed at a tightly controlled, exact temperature… stand development doesn’t care. You should have a stop watch on hand to precisely schedule each inversion cycle and total development time… nope, don’t care. Under no circumstances should two different brands or two different ISO rolls be developed in the same tank… well, maybe… nah don’t care. Normal developing methods are more or less an exact science, every photographer might have their own tweak on the manufacturers recommended times, but it’s just their own exact science. Stand development is grounded in some good science, but it’s much more an art form. Ask any two photographers how long you soup Tri-X in D76 and you’ll get pretty much the same answer every time, but everyone I’ve talked to about stand development has given me wildly different magic formulas for the perfect soup… and they all work.
Continue reading →

One of the things I get asked about the most is my developing methods, especially my use of Rodinal in stand development. Rodinal has become my go to developer for almost all my souping needs. It’s flexible, economical, produces negatives that are great for scanning and almost idiot proof when used in stand development. But before going through my workflow, it’s helpful to know a bit about what’s going on when you develop film.

In traditional developing methods the goal is to immerse your film in a fairly concentrated developing agent for a specific time and temperature indicated by the manufacturers (or garnered from experience and experimentation) for the given combination of film and developer. Agitation performed semi regularly throughout the development period refreshes exhausted developer next to the film as exposed areas leech out the active chemicals as they develop. With this method time, temperature and agitation all play very active rolls in how the end product will turn out. Development time, which is usually between 3-12min needs to be extremely precise, especially with times down around the 3-5 minute mark, which makes sense if you think about it. If your development time is only 3 minutes a change of +/- 30 seconds means your film is roughly 17% lighter or darker than you wanted, assuming a fairly constant rate of development over the souping time. The amount you’re off by has a diminishing affect the longer your overall development time is; this is going to be key later on.

Continue reading →