In this episode, I talk about how much the photography world has changed in regards to what is required of photographers in the modern era.
013 Asteroid City and Bad Photography Trends
In this episode of the podcast, I talk about some concerns I have with the color palette of Wes Anderson’s new movie Asteroid City, and how I’m already seeing photographers emulate it in their work.
Subscribe to the Youtube Channel! You can also always listen to the audio version of Will of the Future on your favorite podcast app!
012 Apple Vision Pro isn't going to make photographer's jobs easier
In this episode, I talk about the Apple Vision Pro and how even though technological advancement seems to make 2D photography more obsolete by the day, we still need to do what works for us rather than just go along with it all.
Subscribe to my Youtube Channel!
011 UNSCRIPTED! Outrunning Ourselves, Finding Our Voice, and What I learned from the series finale of Barry
Trying something different in this episode! Let me know what you think!
010 Ten Things Photographers Don't Have To Do
In this episode, I’ve made a list of 10 things you feel like you have to do as a photographer, but don’t. Maybe some of this stuff can apply to other types of artists in other fields as well.
Number 1-
You don’t have to follow trends or attempt algorithm tricks. There’s really no creativity in trends, which is obviously a problem since it makes social media all feel predictable and boring. It doesn’t tell a story, it just means that you’re motivated by this desire to go viral. The desire to get views often overshadows any other work that needs to get done and de-prioritizes all of it. Getting views or traffic may be useful in the short term, but if you’re in this for the long term this strategy totally collapses. Basically, if the motivation is views and attention and “going viral” you’re more subject to changes in how these platforms work more than anything. After a few months, you can kind of forget what you’re doing and why you’re doing it in the first place. Those who follow trends will almost always burn out, or just fade away after a while. But, in the short term it feels really good.
Number 2-
You don’t have to appeal to everyone. If I look at the top 100 podcasts or top 100 Youtube videos, it’s stuff I would personally never be interested in watching or listening to. I have my own tastes, and the expectation that we should all be pursuing a Joe Rogan level or ceiling-less growth is insane. Not only are we not all able to do that, but not all of us have the tastes that can reach those heights. Maybe we are into some weird sub-genres of photography that can only reach 5,000-10,000 followers. We need to pay attention to what our tastes are and be okay with the fact that they may not match most people.
Number 3-
You don’t have to use social media platforms all the time. The demands of being active on all social media is basically a full-time job. Pick focusing on the one that fits you best. Your content isn’t going to be good if you aren’t feeling it. There’s plenty of successful people that don’t post regularly everywhere, and that’s because, they spend more time focusing on the work itself. In fact, maybe it’s better to focus on the work itself anyway. People don’t listen as much to those that talk alot (I wouldn’t know what that’s like), but a quiet person’s words have far more impact.
Number 4-
You don’t have to chase perfection. There’s no such thing as perfect. Perfect comes from comparison. Maybe you see what other people are doing, and you see it as some definition of “perfect”, and you won’t be happy until you reach that level. Then you end up being really hard on yourself because you’re never quite able to attain your self-imposed definition of “perfection”. That’s usually what it comes down to: ingratitude or dissatisfaction with what is. The quest for perfection is very different from desire to be better. The desire to be better is attainable. Even if we don’t know it, we are getting better every single day. The quest for perfection is a chase for Bigfoot. Perfection doesn’t exist. Truthfully, no one really wants to look at “perfect” work anyway. We want to relate to other humans and see flaws, because everyone has flaws. It’s just a fact of life.
Number 5-
You don’t have to specialize. Specializing is great for a certain segment of photographers, but most photographers will shoot a general selection of stuff AND THAT’S FINE. Those photographers probably will end up being more well rounded and have more technical skills than those who focus only on one thing. The key is to just get really good at being who you are. Every time I try to focus too heavily on portrait photography, maybe I start craving landscape photography. It’s okay to be well-rounded and do different things. My tastes around what I shoot changes with the seasons. A good photographer is curious more than anything, and it’s possible to be curious about a whole range of things.
Number 6-
You don’t have to shoot a photo every day. Shooting a photo every day will make you crazy. I’ve done 9 365 projects now, and I’ll probably never do one again. It’s just not always the best way to work. Sometimes, it’s helpful to go out even if you don’t feel like it, but after doing it day in and day out, you can really start to really get burned out over it. I love photography more than anything, but I’d rather do it fresh instead of it feeling forced. Out of a daily photo project, you may have 100 photos or less that you’re actually happy with, and that’s just because we aren’t machines. I’ve always been driven by this desire to be a machine, but my best photos usually come after a long break of photo taking. Now, there is a benefit to practicing every day FOR SURE, but the need to get a photo every day AND post it isn’t necessarily the healthiest way to live. Also, letting images breathe is always good.
Number 7-
You don’t have to make money doing what you love. Since social media became a thing, I feel like everyone acts like they need a side-hustle of some kind. You don’t! It’s allowed for you to just do things for enjoyment rather than having to justify it to people. I grew up feeling the need to justify everything to everyone for whatever reason. But it’s great to spend money on doing something you love without it paying you back. Maybe I want to travel somewhere just to take photos that I want to take. Great. Money ruins everything. We are allowed to have fun and we don’t have to explain ourselves all the time.
Number 8-
You don’t have to take criticism from everyone you know. Maybe you shot a series of photos, but your family or friends think…it’s weird. Boy, we all love to hear that. We can’t take in criticism from everyone, but for some reason we think everyone we know is entitled to give us an opinion on our work. They aren’t. Make what you make and only care about the opinions of those around you who will only have valuable feedback. I only have a couple people I go to who really actually understand what I’m doing and will give me good feedback. I love being told ways I need to improve, it makes me better at what I do, but not everyone has the right to offer that. Opening my self up to opinions of people who have no idea what they are talking about is just masochism. That goes for family, friends, or people in comment sections. Have a good circle of people around where you all want to help each other grow and don’t take notes outside that.
Number 9-
You don’t have to be super invested in the photo world. In fact, photographers are observers of the world, so it’s maybe better for the work itself that you don’t live in the photo specific world constantly. It’s great to have a community of those you trust, but that’s a quality game, not quantity. I used to work in a print shop where I interacted with photographers all the time, and they all had the same photo-related insecurities because they hung out with other photographers who imposed a set of photography rules on them. There are no rules, but if you’re part of a community of people like photographers, rules for how you need to do things get made up all the time. When you don’t steep yourself in the photography world, you don’t absorb those rules, so you’re more free creatively in my view. Again, it’s great to have friends who have similar interests, but if that’s the bubble you live in exclusively, it’s going to limit the work you put out.
Number 10-
This one is more true than ever: You don’t need to buy expensive gear to take great photos. In fact, as time goes on, cheaper gear goes a lot farther. Somehow, my photography gear has gotten smaller and cheaper as time goes on because I now have a deeper understanding of what I actually need and what is total overkill. My best photos come from cameras that aren’t a distraction because they are more simple and have limited features. Less is more.
We could get more specific in this list for sure like: You don’t have to shoot RAW, you don’t have to shoot with your lens wide open, when you shoot film you don’t only have to shoot 90s cars and gas stations. But I feel like there are larger pressures in the modern day photography world that take up a lot of space in our brains that really affect the work more than anything. The other stuff is just menial details that don’t really matter in the long run.
I see people arguing about whether it’s crazy to shoot JPEGs or Nikon or whatever, and that stuff can be fun nerd stuff for a moment, but I’m more interested in larger concepts around this art form that I love so much. Photography opened up my entire way of thinking about creativity and changed how I see the world, and I’m immensely grateful for it. I just try to keep it all in perspective.
——
In this week’s recommendations I want to recommend a book titled Traffic by Ben Smith. It’s kind of depressing, but it’s a great history of the age of new media we lived in from 2006 to now. Ben Smith used to work for Buzzfeed and this is basically their story of their rise and fall. Buzzfeed and Gawker and publications like it were all built on this addiction to traffic. Basically, the goal was to tailor content that piqued all of our most lizard brain curiosities. Gawker grew by posting sex tapes, Buzzfeed grew with quizzes like “Which Disney Character Are You?” And more. At the end of the day, it’s all kind of junk and wasn’t built to last.
Buzzfeed specifically, relied so heavily on Facebook driving traffic to their site that once Facebook changed the algorithm it threatened to devastate their entire business.
The blogging era was where I come from on the internet. The blog style of the early 2000s is what has informed my writing and everything I do on the internet. I remember when alot of the events in Traffic happened because I was pretty deep into all that stuff at a pretty young age. I remember this excitement about everything: a phone you didn’t need a stylus to use, that was also a browser and and iPod, a platform where you could post something and tons of people all over the world can see it, and the idea that news can just travel faster and be made quicker than ever before. But it’s 2023 now and all that stuff has reached maturity, and maybe…a lot of what we were excited about ended up being…not so great for society.
The problem with a quest for a following or numbers is that it drives a sort of nihilism, which causes them to create content, not because they believe in it, but because they believe it will drive traffic. And that gets pretty gross.
And that’s it, thanks for listening and/or watching! See you next week.
009 What small businesses aren't doing (but need to IMMEDIATELY)
Having a huge archive of documented material is the BIGGEST money saver in all of marketing for a business. And barely anyone is doing it. And that’s great news for photographers and videographers going forward.
Back when I was mostly just a freelance photographer, I’d get paid to shoot photos for a small business, and then see that they’d never really put them to use. It was kind of frustrating, because I kept seeing it over and over, businesses spending money on a photographer or for video but never really doing anything with any of it. There’s so much waste in that. One single image can be used in a ton of different ways for a business: website, print, social media, square, black and white, with a graphic, however. And it sounds expensive to hire people to help create media around your business, ad infinitum, but a little bit can go a long way. Make a long video, cut it into clips! Shoot a bunch of photos, put them in a video, use them for all kinds of stuff.
I see a future where most major businesses or businesses that want to become major have their own in-house video and photo team. In-house marketing feels like the future. The future is about personalization, and it’s tough to outsource that to an agency of people that don’t know you or your business intimately. They can make a good ad about your business, but they can’t tell your story as well as you can.
Photography or making video, used to be a real, employed job. Now it’s basically gig economy work largely. There are almost no truly “employed” photographers left aside from remnants of the old world. But I think that could possibly change. I think it has to change as our consumption habits change.
Remember what I said in Photography is Dead? Social media content is now competing with Succession and Game of Thrones because we have a finite amount of time to spend consuming things. If you make something good and engaging, you can take eyeballs from something that has a multi-million dollar budget.
We avoid ads like the plague. We pay extra on our streaming subscriptions, we hit the skip 30 seconds button on our podcast apps, and we scroll right past ads on Instagram. We have been such an ad saturated society for so long now, that we have a sixth sense for when something is an ad or not. We stop scrolling, however, when we sense some authenticity in something, whether it looks like a lower quality video that your friend shot on your phone, or if there’s a good hook that seeks to actually offer you something in exchange for your time.
I’ve been dipping into a creative consulting of sorts since early this year, and it’s going pretty well. I have a few clients that I help to craft interesting content using my taste and technical skills. But also, I spend a ton of time with these businesses and know them very well. You know what makes that easier? When they’ve recorded their history. When they have a pile of real stuff around their business, not just pristine “ad content”. Because the stuff people want to see is real.
Every business needs their own photography or video library around what they do. Businesses that don’t get stuck using impersonal, sterile “stock” media that really has nothing to do with them and makes them blend in with everyone else.
This is good news for people who specialize in use of these “documenting tools” like photography and videography: You’re going to be super important for years to come. I believe entrepreneurs and business owners are beginning to see the importance in an archive of photos and videos about them and their business. Because it actually saves them money in the long run. Ads only get more expensive as time goes on, but if you’re putting out your story organically, momentum builds, and even if you still have ad spend, your advertising gets cheaper because you have all that organic reach.
Maybe product photography is being replaced by AI, but AI can’t really document a person’s real, actual life and experience. AI can make the documenting process easier and lower cost for sure, but those who can document aren’t going anywhere.
——
For the 15 years I’ve been a photographer, I’ve been building an archive. Now, in my videos and any project I work on, I have years and years of work to pull from. It’s crazy, actually, I can even insert flashbacks of sorts in these videos…Like back when I was traveling for the Small Town Photo Project…or even farther back when I worked at Art Warehouse.
Back when I worked at Art Warehouse, we built a “stock photography” library of our own that could be used to sell commercial prints to hospitals, hotels, and other commercial spaces. That stock image library gave us enormous power AND value.
Then when I went out on my own starting the Small Town Photo Project (insert flashback of the Small Town Photo Project), I realized that there was a ton of value in building a library of images for specific places. That was the goal: Make it easier for people to get images for their town, not just to hang in offices, but also for web and branding use. That has now transformed into Anderson Views, a website that has a growing bank of images just for my town of Anderson, SC.
Fortunately, during the Small Town Photo Project process (which was a pretty grueling time of driving miles and miles to capture photos in these growing places) I had the foresight to document much of it with a vlog. That helped people understand the story of what I was doing, but now, I can use it for stuff like this very podcast, after the fact. I can cut it all up and use it for whatever, at any time. Not only was I building a library of images to sell in various ways, but I was creating content for myself for the future.
The fact is, I could stop making things now, and I would have plenty of stuff to post on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and Youtube Shorts for the next few years.
——
During the early iteration of this podcast, Photography is Dead, I talked about how important it is to tell a story with our cameras in order to create value in our work and take them a step above what you see on Adobe Stock or places like that. A picture of a waterfall is cool, but why did you take a photo of a waterfall? Why were you there? What was the journey to the waterfall like? We’ve all see plenty of waterfall photos, and I can find some cool ones for free on Pexels, so why is yours valuable?
But the fact is, every business should be thinking this way as well, no matter if you have a deli, a coffee shop, or an insurance agency. One way to tell your story would be to simply show them, by documenting the process of how you got there in the first place.
I live in a small town. Small towns are often…let’s just say…behind bigger locales in a lot of ways, but eventually time catches up. Eventually, everything comes to a small town that was in a bigger city years ago. Not just products, but also, ideas. Many businesses that start are focused on the work of starting a business itself (as it should be, by the way). It’s a frenzy of chaos and stress, so it’s not on top of mind to have someone there with a camera making sure to document it all. Also, it can be expensive.
2 episodes ago I talked about how it’s about to be the golden age of photography and creativity: We are going to need photographers more than ever. BECAUSE, what’s happening now is entrepreneurs in bigger cities are making the investment of documenting the process along the way. Gary Vaynerchuk has 33 full-time employees filming him and packaging the content they film for him which is being used to get his story and message out there EVERY SINGLE DAY. Oh, and organically, I might add. He’s a client of his own business, VaynerMedia, and then his content is also helping grow his businesses. He has an enormous archive and proof of everything he does, which only helps to build tons of trust in him and value in what he’s saying.
——
This strategy of just being everywhere isn’t a new one. Lawyers use this strategy all the time. Personal injury lawyers are trying to cast the absolute widest net they can, so they just make commercials, put up billboards, create radio jingles, so that they are the first name that pops into your head when you get into a car wreck or need to take legal action in some way. When you think about “entrepreneurship” you now think GaryVee and Alex Hormozi because they are carpet bombing the internet with their points of view all the time.
This is just one strategy. Honestly, probably the most maximalist strategy. These are super extreme, BUT if you’re capturing tons of photos and video of what you do and documenting, it gives you a lot of options.
——
recommendations:
-Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom- I play maybe one or two video games a year, and this was the move this year. Video games are an enormous time suck, but I feel like every once in a while devoting the time to solve puzzles opens new pathways to thinking or creativity. It’s problem solving, but in a different way. Most of the problems I’m solving day to day are work related, so fun problems to solve can be quite useful. Also, this game is amazing. There’s so much to explore that it will offer tons of to do for months to come. I’m pretty addicted to this game at the moment.
-Summer movie season- We haven’t had a real summer movie season since 2019, but 2023 is popping off. I love the movies, and used to go multiple times a month in the before times, but for the past couple years there just hasn’t been that much to see. I kicked it off with Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 which was great (I’ve liked it the more time goes on. I think I liked it more than the first Guardians if I’m being honest.) And there’s something worth seeing coming out now every week or two for the summer. Many of these movies may not work or may even be bad, but the spirit of summer movie season reminds me of a simpler time in my life. Highly recommend spending the summer at the movies.
That’s it for this week! Thanks for listening and/or watching, and I’ll see you next week!
008 A Double Exposure Experiment
Just a quick note before we get started: Stick around to the end of this episode for a brand new uh..unamed segment that I’m going to start doing weekly where I recommend a new something, whether be a book, movie, TV, or something else every week.
I love double exposure photography.
Why?
Double exposure often feels like a hack to create a loaded image. They live at the intersection of FORM and NARRATIVE. Mixing two images from two different moments at two different times basically automatically adds double the meaning to a photo no matter what, since photography is often just about a singular moment. But that’s a pretty clinical and oversimplified definition. The fact is, it’s harder to tell a story with a single image successfully, but a double exposure often can be a useful boost.
The double-exposure technique also is cool and leads to very unpredictable results much of the time. It’s experimental: with each image, you never really know how they will interact with each other. There’s a sort of randomness to it depending on what particular double-exposure technique you are using.
In my 2.5D printing video, I mentioned how the “heads with flowers in them” double-exposures are the lowest of the low creatively. I think those types of photos are an example of the most common usage of the double exposure technique, which feels like it’s purely about form rather than a story we are trying to tell. When an artist has a really great reason for a double-exposure, I find it super interesting.
Of course, I’m really only interested in making them “in-camera”. I like the chaos of it. Double exposures made in Photoshop seems pretty uninteresting to me as they are super clean and not recording actual moments. It’s creating meaning “after the fact” with two moments that may have no connection to each other other than looking aesthetically pleasing.
What a lot of people don’t realize is that some modern digital cameras have an in-camera double exposure feature. I’m most familiar with the Nikon one, as I’ve used Nikon my whole career until last year. Nowadays, I use the feature in my Fujifilm camera, and I kind of like it more than the Nikon feature. It’s at least easier to use. Sony, since it’s a boring PC of a camera, has no creative feature like this because it’s a boring camera made for boring people, of which I guess I’m one since I own one of them. (I’m recording this video on a Sony A7IV right now)
I have a Nikon N65 which is a film camera, but it also has an in-camera feature that feels very similar to the digital Nikon in-camera double exposure feature. Big fan of a film camera that has a double exposure feature built in, otherwise I feel like I’m breaking the camera when I have to trick the film to not advance.
In order for an in-camera double exposure to work, we have to get good at figuring out where the subjects lay in the frame and how we want them to interact with each other. Maybe the first image is your subject and the second image is your subject again but upside down. Maybe it’s your subject again but out of focus. My Fujifilm helps make it easier by showing me where things will fit, but my Nikon or Polaroid camera doesn’t have such a luxurious feature.
——
Recently, however, I decided to experiment. I have a Nikon point and shoot camera called a Nikon L35AF, which is a fun and extremely frustrating camera to use. It’s astoundingly sharp for a point and shoot, and I often use it to take photos of family events and stuff. But…the battery compartment likes to bust open which keeps me from being able to hit the shutter. I have to tape it shut or else the camera just doesn’t work randomly. But…I noticed that when I finished a roll, it leaves a little tab of film out. So a few years ago, I decided to just pull that tab out and shoot over the roll again. The results were pretty cool in some cases, but there was no line between frames. It was just kind of a visual mess aside from a few lucky shots.
Not only that, but the problem with the in-camera double exposure features I’m used to is that they time-out, which means I only have a limited amount of time between images. So…I thought, what if I could shoot a double exposure in two different places?
So I had an idea that if I marked exactly where I loaded each roll of film, it would make sure the frames line up instead of just being a long negative strip with no delineation between photos. That way, I could shoot 36 or 24 shots (depending on the roll of film) in one place, then hop on a plane, reload the roll of film making sure to line it up where I marked it, and then I could shoot over it again, wherever.
I’m pretty excited how this set of photos turned out. So much so that I’m planning my next batch. To me, they tell a story about my life over the past few years. At the end of 2018, we moved from Chattanooga to basically, the woods in South Carolina. After a year, COVID happened and I entrenched myself in the small town world, stopped getting on planes and only driving around to smaller locales. My world shrank, and this year I’ve started to break out of that a little bit. We went to New York (on my first plane ride in 3 years) and I’ll be going to LA and some other places here soon as well.
Over these 3 years, I’ve changed a lot as a person and a photographer. I also realized that I got a little skittish of the outside world a bit as well. There was a safety in my smaller, quieter world, but I started 2023 realizing I needed to break myself of that feeling. New York really helped shake me out of it.
To me, these images look really awesome, but they are more than that. They are a document of a transition point. The woods that I mostly photographed are woods that I’ve spent a lot of time in during the pandemic. Despite breaking out of my tiny world I’ve been living in, I now carry around everything I learned and experienced during the Small Town Photo Project era. All that stuff has now been added to the stew of who Will Malone is.
Maybe that’s why I love Double Exposure photography so much: It’s because I see experiences as all stacked on each other. We are the combinations of our experiences and the world around us. Everything gets mushed together and forms who we are. These types of photos kind of embody that idea.
More on this series and maybe more series-es in the future! I am now just making a video/podcast every week for the Summer of ’23 around creativity and art and stuff that gets me excited. These are always kind of anchored by photography since that’s where I come from and continue to live.
But I’m adding a new segment to these where I recommend a thing- I’m gonna call it Will’s Thrills- just kidding I’m not going to call it that. Here’s what Chat GPT said I should call it:
Here are some title ideas for your podcast segment:
Will's Pick of the Week
Malone's Media Must-Haves
The Malone Method: Recommends
Will's Wonderful World of Media
Media with Malone
Malone's Must-See/Must-Read/Must-Listen
Will's Spotlight
Malone's Media Minute
The Malone Recommends Show
The Malone Manifesto: Media Edition
These are pretty bad. I think I’m just going to call it RECOMMENDATIONS.
So, in this week’s recommendations, I have 2 books for you since I was planning to start this segment last week and ran out of time.
The first book is Good to Great by Jim Collins. This is a book I read a while back and have some friends who have been talking about it recently. Decided to re-read it, and while many of the business examples about businesses like Wells Fargo and Circuit City are outdated, it’s a worthwhile book that uses to data to boil down attributes of how a company goes from middling to great, as the title states.
The next book is legendary music producer Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act: A Way of Being. It’s a great examination of the creative process by someone who has worked with and observed the most creative minds in human history. Every time I cracked it open, I had to make sure I was ready to take notes, because it is packed with tons of great reminders of the trials and tribulations of a creative life.
That’s it for today. Thanks for watching and/or listening, and I’ll seeya next week.
007 The Coming Golden Age of Photography and Creativity
WILL OF THE FUTURE IS NOW AVAILABLE AS A VIDEO AS WELL! Go subscribe to the Youtube Channel in order to get the video version every week.
I believe we are about to enter the Golden Age of Photography and Creativity.
Disappointment with the status quo is in the air. The status quo of creative being that there’s just not that much amazing stuff being made now. Movies are focused on cinematic universes and franchising rather than telling a great story. Television is really the epicenter of the best entertainment right now, but many do feel algorithmic and designed to keep you watching without really giving you anything in return. Social media has become extremely bland due to the growth hacking epidemic, so now many people’s social media all looks the same whether it’s photography or anything else. Not only that, but the content that seems to grow the most is content ABOUT making content. And I get it, there’s a pressure to follow the algorithms to a T or else all this be for nothing.
Many of us have lost sight of what or why we are even making things on the internet. The idea that we won’t make things unless we get good numbers makes sense for a business trying to move products, but not necessarily for creatives or artists who should be in this for one thing: Making the best thing they can make.
For the past 10-12 years, I’m going to be honest: I’ve felt like kind of a loser. On March 11, 2011 I started my first 365 project. It was so fun. The photos are terrible, but taking a picture every day and making sure to post it on time was almost more of a thrill than the photo itself. I loved it. Each day was a new experiment. Only people at my college really payed attention and a small group of people followed along and wanted to be in it. It was just super cool. I didn’t care about hashtags or know anything about algorithms or anything like that. I just focused on making something and posting it. That’s it.
I’ve never really been able to shake that impulse. The impulse to make and not worry too much where it goes or where it ends up. Over time though, I’ll be honest, that impulse has kind of made me feel like a little bit of a loser. I knew photographers and other creative people who were surpassing me in followers and growing all around me, and yet I was just focused on trying to get better and honing in on what I should be making. I get asked all the time “Why don’t you have more followers?” Or people giving me tips on how to grow in this or that way.
In my heart of hearts, however, there’s really only one way to grow: Make stuff that’s real. Make things that are a reflection of how much you care about something. You’ll fire stuff off and send stuff out into the world with no response a lot of the time, but eventually, if you’re saying something at the time people are listening, you may eventually reach that intersection of people’s attention. (But it’s not a guarantee)
One may not grow much or fast, but making the best thing we can possibly make and focusing our efforts on that will help us sleep more soundly at night. We don’t have long on this earth, so do we want to spend our time focusing on numbers of followers? 4 followers, 400 followers, or 4000 followers, the game should be the same. There’s no joy in only pursuing “what works”.
———
I think people misunderstand what AI is doing to creativity. I’ve heard many comments about how AI is coming for creatives, and the fact is…it’s not. It’s coming for menial tasks that creatives do.
On the local podcast I work on called Electric City Buzz, we just interviewed one of the top local realtors in the area. She talked about how she sees her job, and I think she’s looking at it the right way: Basically, it’s her job to curate and give her clients actual useful information for who they actually are. That means, she has to listen to their needs and signals in conversations about who they actually are. Then, she takes all that information she gathers and only shows them the properties that would be relevant to their situation. She doesn’t just take them to random houses on the market, she pays attention to their wants and needs (that go deeper than price). Zillow and services like it are replacing the need for realtors (kind of like AI is supposedly doing for creatives, basically democratizing the tools), and a good realtor now has to go a step above what Zillow can offer in order to be successful. A lot of realtors are still operating under the belief that their selling point is their gate-keeping the house-buying process, despite the gate being busted open.
Photographers and videographers are struggling with the same thing: Many think “the camera” and their skill with it is what separates them from everyone else. The fact is, the camera has been co-opted by everyone now, so the camera itself doesn’t matter. This has been happening for years now, but AI is accelerating it.
What matters is ideas. What matters is creative process. What matters are the stories we are able to communicate with the tools.
Knowing how to use the tools or staying up to date with them is always beneficial, sure. The perfect marriage for the future is to have great ideas AND know how to put the pieces together. That means maybe even taking advantage of AI tools to learn how to be a photographer, a filmmaker, a writer, podcaster, all of it! Because a mic is no different from a camera now. They are just tools with which we express ideas.
——
Like I said, the awareness of the mediocrity of the moment is in the air. I’ve felt it, maybe you’ve felt it, but when COVID hit, it feels like we all hit a slump. I think we’re getting fed up with it a bit. Those who are creative are trying to solve the problem at the moment, so when everyone starts feeling the same thing, that’s when you know something is about to shift.
Take comedies for example: Movies like Knocked Up and The Hangover started this boom of raunchy comedies that really took over the movies from about 2009 to 2014 or so. Over the past few years, we’ve had almost no comedies AT ALL. Whether you can attribute that to some political correctness or something else, doesn’t matter. Over the past couple years, I’ve started to hear movie goers, critics, and comedians observe this fact. Suddenly, this year, I’ve now heard announcements and trailers for a new string of comedies and raunchy comedies again. Bert Kreicher’s The Machine, the Jennifer Lawrence movie No Hard Feelings, and Joy Ride, just to name a couple. Because there was a void, people noticed it, and now it’s getting addressed.
Everything moves in seasons. There’s just so much dissatisfaction in the air right now in the creative world, then someone or many someones will come along, add something new, change the way we think about everything, and then we will live through a Golden Age without realizing it only to notice it when it ends. Casey Niestat started a Golden Age in vlogging, Marvel Studios started a Golden Age in story-telling in movies, Tony Robbins started a Golden Age in self-help and motivational speaking, Apple started a Golden Age in…a lot of stuff. Technology. Exciting revolutions take place, then they become the norm and then we begin to look for new influential freshness.
——
AI is bringing the discussion of “Everyone is a Photographer” or “Everyone is a filmmaker” or “Everyone is a podcaster” to its logical conclusion. I think the age of that particular gripe is ending, and I’m ready for it. Going from black and white to color, film to digital, DSLR to iPhone, all of the advancement we’ve seen that makes photography easier to the masses all leads to this.
Adobe Firefly has been announced (I’m waiting for my invite), and it’s really changing the game.
I’ve always been dissatisfied with my video editing skills and now AI is able to bridge that gap for me and make it easier. Which means, the real time needs to be spent developing the ideas I’m looking to communicate. Basically, to me, it’s all about the fun part now.
I believe, now, more than ever, there’s a huge value to experimenting and taking creative risks. Use AI, make weird stuff, play around. Curiosity is the fuel. Those who are curious and focused on trying to make their work better are the ones that win in the end. It feels like a Sisiphian task most days, and I think real creative people will never really have their curiosity satisfied. But I think the pieces are moving into place in order to really reward people who think that way.
This Game-Changing Texture Printing Tech Will Revolutionize Your Art & Photos
Check out Art Warehouse: https://www.artwarehouse.biz
Follow Will Malone on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/willmalone/
006 Bringing Art into Real Life with Mark and Mitch Lakey of Art Warehouse
I’m thankful to be close friends with the crew at Art Warehouse in Chattanooga, TN. If you know me personally, you’ve definitely heard me talk about them, because they mean so much to me. I’m excited to have brothers Mark and Mitch Lakey on the podcast today to talk about their business and the state of printing.
Not only that, but I filmed about video about their new product, 2.5D Printing, basically, they have the ability to print TEXTURE on photographs and artwork now. That video comes out TOMORROW on my Youtube Channel.
I’m really excited for you to hear this episode of the podcast. Mark and Mitch are truly the best at what they do, and I’ve been lucky enough to be part of the incredible business they’ve built for a big chunk of my 20s.
You can get Will of the Future on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, and more.
005 Minimalist Travel as a Photographer to NYC
The first ever Will of the Future VIDEO PODCAST! In this episode, we go to New York City, but challenge ourselves to only travel with one single bag each. As a photographer, this is an interesting challenge.
Give it a watch (or listen) to see how it goes!
Thanks for watching! Make sure to hit "like" button and Subscribe for more!
004 Substance over Style
This past week I finished filming my first full video in a very long time.
Honestly, I’ve had a lot of practice making videos over the years, but it’s still tough for me because I have ZERO faith in myself to put the pieces together well for a prolonged period of time. A short reel or TikTok is easy because no one is paying attention to that long, but for a more longform video, I have to trust that the writing and structure is a solid enough base for the footage to work.
But a big part of what I hate about filming videos these days is that Adobe Premiere sucks hard. My laptop will barely run it anymore. So, I’m just going to use this video to learn an entirely new video editing software, and everyone is telling me to go with Da Vinci Resolve. We’ll see how that goes. It’s daunting to learn something new when I at least have serviceable knowledge of a different software, but shaking up our knowledge of the tools seems to be one of the absolute biggest needs today.
Here’s something I’ve observed: Those successful in marketing and social media have almost no knowledge of the Adobe suite. Many photographers have no idea how to use Photoshop. Many people bypass the need of a graphic designer with Canva. CapCut is an app that people are using to edit all their short form video. I’m over here with my decades long use of all these legacy tools which often are over-complicating EVERYTHING I do. (Not that I’m all that skilled with any of them)
It’s obviously beneficial to have specific knowledge and command of deep tools. But it also can be a hinderance. Luminar AI and Luminar Neo are plugins I have in Photoshop that weirdly help me avoid having to spend a lot of time in Photoshop. I can clean up a headshot and remove power lines instantly rather than spending a ton of time healing stuff out.
Just like buying a ton of camera gear all the time, in most use cases, these deep tools are going to have diminishing returns. That’s because the future isn’t about the tools. It’s about the CONTENT.
And not the “content” but the content of the content. You know what I’m saying?
I think we look at deep knowledge of Photoshop and other tools like some sort of protective shield, we’re probably going to lose in the long run. I think someone who makes stuff with a phone and a couple apps but has really great ideas will end up winning every time.
It’s all about substance. And substance isn’t the same as style.
When I dreamed up my first video, I had a “look” in mind. It would be flashy, and kind of “over-edited”, honestly, as is the style of the times. But leaning on style over substance implies that I don’t have much faith in the actual meat of the video, so it will be doomed to suck.
And, I’m not really that flashy of a guy. The more I sat down to hone the video to what it needed to be, the more I realized the “effects” don’t really matter at all.
I think because of our brief time spent watching videos and photos in our feeds we are forgetting what substance even is, and replacing substance with flash. Flash has kind of become substance to a lot of people now. Photography on TikTok for instance, is about “photo tricks” where the meaning of the photo is the trick itself.
Maybe that’s why I’m so obsessed with podcasts as a medium: it’s depth and substance’s LAST STAND. It’s the last place where going deep is encouraged. Where else could I write essays that anyone would pay attention to? Medium? Linkedin? Those places aren’t my scene, man. I’m a long winded guy, so I don’t really like being put in a tight minute and a half box all the time.
Joe Rogan makes 3 hour+ podcasts, and he’s the biggest podcaster in the world. He built an empire off of taking clips from those mega-long podcasts and posting them. Sometimes they are 5 minutes, and sometimes they are 15-20, and all those clips are about something. I know people who only watch his clips and never the actual episodes. There’s almost a formula to how his podcasts work: they are fluff then substance then fluff, fluff, some more fluff, then substance again. And it kind of goes on like that for hours, almost like a “normal conversation”
But I think people believe: Oh if I have a really long conversation with someone, I’ll have clips and all that just like Rogan. And no, turns out he’s a conversation artist. He keeps it moving, but is always talking about some sort of topic. Most people don’t have the conversation skill he has, out of the box. His really old first episodes, by the way, are TERRIBLE. But at the time, no one was really doing the podcast thing like that, so he managed to build an audience. Over time, he’s gotten thousands of episodes of practice so now, he’s gotten his whole “thing” down pat. He’s really great at being Joe Rogan.
If you start thinking about conversations, you’ll realize that most conversations we have are about nothing. A good conversation is a give and take where two people are working together, but sometimes one or both parties isn’t on the same page on that. Imagine being at a networking event and trying to talk to a scientist. You know how hard it is to get a super smart person to have a good conversation? They live in their own heads often, and yet Rogan can pull a conversation out of a Mushroom Behavioral Psychologist that is worth listening to.
As far as style: his style is almost that he has NONE. His set up is super simple and almost ugly to watch. TikTok is full of podcast clips from way better looking podcast set ups, and yet, the substance doesn’t exist like it does with Rogan.
So that’s awesome! We can make a crappy looking product and it could grow despite looking crappy, right? No! The substance and visual crappiness cannot be equal. The substance has to far outweigh the visual crap to work at all. We are taught to hold style and substance in equal regard, which I think, is TOTALLY WRONG.
The minimum requirement for what will be good almost never comes from the “look” of the thing. It’s ALWAYS the substance of a thing.
Style should only exist to help boost the substance. In our “case study” of Joe Rogan, his barebones visual style simply exists to get clips of his marathon podcast out there. Podcasts are next to impossible to promote because there’s a barrier to find them, so video is a really great way to promote the content of each episode.
This past week I posted a Reel/TikTok/Short of my simple podcast set up. It’s the set up I’m using right this second for this very podcast. It’s an Audio-Technica Mic, a Zoom H6 recorder, and a table top stand. Why is it so simple? Well, for one, I can set it up and tear it down easily. But mostly, it’s not distracting to me or my guests. It allows a conversation or thought to flow without the intrusion of making sure all this dumb technology isn’t crapping the bed. I’m a photographer: when a camera is on, I’m thinking about what’s going on with the camera. It’s just my nature. That’s why my podcast set up is basically a recorder and a mic. Press one button, then talk. Almost nothing can go wrong, and the ideas are unimpeded by visual flare and nonsense. Hence why I’m struggling to make this a video podcast- I’m realizing that it could totally ruin it if I do it with 3 cameras and a studio. It has to be organic.
But again, people have to actually know it exists, so there’s a balance. But again, we put style ahead of everything because it makes promotion easier in the short term.
If I were to make a formula, I’d say Style cannot be equal to Substance. Substance cannot be less than Style. Substance has to 10x Style in order to make something work.
Why do we want to make podcasts or videos or photos or sharable content in this current and future climate? Is it because we are told it’s what we should be doing? Is it because everyone else is doing it? Is it because we perceive that whoever is successful because they have a video in a cool podcast studio or a perfect life on instagram?
Or is it because we have something to say? And a medium of choice with which to say it?
Just ask Werner Herzog: ‘If you do not have an absolutely clear vision of something, where you can follow the light to the end of the tunnel, then it doesn’t matter whether you’re bold or cowardly, or whether you’re stupid or intelligent. Doesn’t get you anywhere.’
Substance only comes from a clear vision. An intent. A goal. Joe Rogan has questions and he wants them answered. Satisfying his curiosities is his ultimate goal, I believe. Otherwise, how could he pull off having such a wide selection of guests in this world that requires everyone to stay in their particular niche lane?
People like substance, whether they realize it or not. There’s just not very much of it out there right now. People will listen to a 10 minute podcast or a 3 hour podcast, it doesn’t matter. It’s about the quality of content. Late Night with Jimmy Fallon has low ratings now because there’s no substance to it. Nothing to really connect to other than a few chuckles and an advertisement for a celebrity’s next movie or whatever. A photographer who sells prints will probably sell the same print or prints over and over again, the ones with the most story attached to it. The ones that people feel connected to the most, despite there maybe being 20 others available to buy on your website.
I don’t think this is a bad thing though. It actually makes life easier. Posting just to post, or making just to make, is officially, a huge waste of time. Don’t do it! But if you have a good idea and you want to try it out, try it out!
I’ve brought him up before, but I’ll bring up my buddy Greg Steele. He’s a family lawyer here in town (we actually went to college together), but he was struggling with social media so we decided to collaborate to try and up his game a bit. It’s hard to make the social media of a family lawyer fun to anyone, because, the stuff he has to deal with by nature, is sad and depressing. So we decided to start by making it a resource. We just make videos with Greg clarifying legal terms like “Guardian Ad Litem” or answering questions like “How long do I have to wait to get divorced in SC?” After making a bunch of those, we decided to throw some fun ones in the middle that are called “Weird Laws with Greg” where he just talks about weird laws he found like playing pinball being illegal until you’re 18. (Yes, that’s a real law in SC)
I really love these videos, because they are extremely unique to Greg. Only Greg can do them this way. They are generating some great word of mouth because of who Greg is, but they are also filling in blanks and providing knowledge to people. They are simple, shot on a phone with a wireless mic, and that’s it. He’s not distracted by a ton of gear in his face, and he just does his thing.
Making stuff is hard. Some people can do it more easily than others, but creating media in this world feels like a next to impossible challenge sometimes. At the end of the day, we just have to make what is true to us, not what is true to everyone else. I think the rules of the algorithm are a great starting point for at least giving us some creative constraints and rules, but it can’t be all about that. We have to make stuff that actually connects with people. The thing about us that connects to people is often the thing that we brush off about ourselves that we think is un-interesting. The opportunity social media gives us, however, is that we can experiment out in the open and find what people connect to the most. Maybe I make a podcast about website “about pages” and it ends up being my least listened to podcast ever. I really like that episode, but most people just didn’t connect to it as much. Maybe it was some other reason, who knows? The solution is that I can take what I learned from that and just post something better the next day, and the next day, and the next day until I find a stride and hone in on something that people find valuable.
There’s just so much out there. We all have limited time on this earth to consume everything. The new episode of Succession competes for that time. The podcasts I subscribe to compete for that time. Making my own work competes for that time. What we make has to no only be worth everyone else’s time, but our own time as well. We don’t have the time for just creating “noise” just for the sake of it, BUT we also have to be okay with something maybe not working out like we hoped. Doesn’t necessarily mean it was bad, it just didn’t connect for whatever reason.
Having a vision for what we are looking for is KEY. If we are throwing stuff out there with vague goals and no vision, then yeah, we will be super disappointed because we have no way to measure any sort of results. We have to be moving somewhere, in some direction. And hopefully, that’s forward.
003 How Artists Can Survive The AI Tsunami
Commercial product and portrait photography has a had a rough couple weeks. I’m not sure if it’s a real collab, but on TikTok there’s this video with images from a Jeep x North Face collab completely generated with AI. Also, Levi’s is experimenting with AI models to advertise their clothing.
We all knew it was coming. But it was pretty easy to brush off as “the future’s” problem.
But, I have to ask: is it Levi’s job to keep the photography/modeling industry afloat? Not really, it’s their job to sell jeans. If they have a better, more cost-effective way to do that than hiring a bunch of people in a studio for hours, then they are probably going to choose the cheaper faster one. That’s life. That’s business.
In order to survive as a photographer, we need some complexity and uniqueness. If anyone can make close to the same thing that we make without much work and effort, then maybe we need to rethink what we are doing. Basically, all the photography we are seeing get replaced with AI are formulaic. If we want to create images, or even, AI images with any sort of depth it still requires the very human skill of critical thought.
That’s the secret I think: We have to take photography a step further conceptually to make our work immune to the devastation of AI.
Weirdly enough, I think leaning on photography as art is an increasingly appealing route. Using photography to communicate a concept or experience or inspiration is more valuable than ever.
I’ve been back and forth on this over the years, but AI has really forced me to settle on the necessity for printing. Printing photography is becoming more niche: printing knowledge is slipping away from photography culture largely, but I think that’s a mistake. The more photography is limited to digital, the more malleable it is to things like AI.
How’s the NFT thing going? I keep tabs on it, and there still seem to be those passionate about it, but the excitement has seemed to die down. That makes sense: it’s not super accessible to the masses, but also, block-chain technology (so far) isn’t as secure as we all thought. If you can change or steal NFT art or crypto from someone through hacking or whatever, then the whole promise of digital “one-offs” is kinda defeated.
Prints are still undefeated. I could be wrong about the NFT thing, but I think it has a long way to go still.
If we are mad at how the digital world is going, maybe we need to go back to the physical world in some way. AI hasn’t gotten rid of walls to hang things on yet.
We have the tools. We just need to think deeper about what we make.
Imagine Levi’s had an in-house photographer or someone they contracted with regularly who’s out of the job now- how will they recoup that lost income? Maybe they quit photography, or maybe they start working on the personal projects they haven’t had time for. Maybe, those personal projects are a gateway to a way more satisfying photography career. Some of the best photographers now and throughout history who make interesting work started out or also worked in the commercial photography world and took the leap to follow their creative curiosities and interests instead of the sterile but lucrative world of commercial photography.
We need to go deep. Deep into our minds, into our souls, and really think about why we are photographers. We often start photography as a job because we love photography, but then we get caught up in it as a job. I’ve always been back and forth on that: I need photography to be a successful business venture to make money, but every time I lean on photography as art, my opportunities grow. We have to trust our creative instincts- it feels irresponsible because wedding photography or real estate photography is tried and true, but that’s what risk is.
Photographers have been watching the photography business get dismantled for years. AI is a new wrinkle that seemed to pop up somewhat quickly and suddenly, but are we surprised?
Obviously, the need for more focused and unique images still exists for small businesses and other places, but a lot of those jobs have been replaced by iPhones before AI started being a discussion.
I think the future of photography is conceptual. I think it’s art. When we make art, we can do whatever we want, there are no limits. Maybe we can even use AI to our advantage. Art is about the human experience. Art can’t be killed as long as humans exist.
So really, we just get down to the same problem many people with creative curiosities have had forever: How do we create art AND make a living? Before, we could lean on mechanical, commercial type stuff. But what if we can’t?
We’re just going to have to get really clever.
But there’s a lot of hype with new things, and I’m starting to feel like AI is one of those slightly overhyped things. It’s amazing and cool, and even scary at times, but the term “AI” is being used the same way as the term “algorithm”- it’s a blobby term to describe a thing that no one actually understands. AI in photo editing isn’t the same as ChatGPT. In fact, I would argue, that it’s a marketing term more than anything else, meant to evoke ideas that we’ve gotten from movies. Or the idea that humans created a consciousness that wasn’t human. But really, at least for now, it’s pattern recognition. Really really good pattern recognition. (I’m a moron so I could be wrong. Maybe it conscious and I’m totally off on this)
It couldn’t have existed 10 years ago to this level because there wouldn’t be enough data to pattern recognize, and now there is. Topaz Denoise couldn’t remove digital noise if it didn’t understand over years how digital noise worked across cameras and files. ChatGPT couldn’t give you an example of a stock photography contract if such a thing didn’t exist on the internet. Midjourney couldn’t spit you out a photograph or a piece of art if it didn’t have the pieces from other art to pull together.
But we do the same thing as humans: we take patterns we like from everywhere and form them in our own way. Humans, however, can take these ideas a step farther because we can think deeper than AI can. AI is powered by human creativity, we give it the fuel it needs to get smarter. So if we are dumb enough to fully let it start replacing us, I think we are going to be disappointed. ChatGPT is wrong a lot, but what if it just starts learning from itself, learning from wrong information? I feel like if humans stop creating because the AI can do it for us, the AI will show its limits.
But then we get to the AI Art thing, which feels like more of my lane than ChatGPT. I play with Midjourney a lot and I’ve used assets it creates for different projects. The Photography is Dead skull was created in AI, the background of Will of the Future’s cover is a photo of mine that I uploaded to Midjourney that it morphed into something weird that made a good background.
In one of the first episodes of Photography is Dead I talked about AI Art being art, but without context. Artists that are freaking out about AI ruining art are really selling themselves short. Real art isn’t just about making pretty pictures. Art is deeper than a picture of recorded data, its context about the person that created it. It’s a story. It’s connection.
This was Andy Warhol’s whole thing: Brillo Boxes is just a painting of Brillo Boxes. It could have been created by any college level artist from a technical standpoint, but it wasn’t about that. (In fact he was kind of asking the same questions we ask about AI art) But the Brillo Boxes painting went beyond a picture of a Brillo Box, it was about a concept. It asked if a painting of a commercial product could even be considered art. And of course, it’s one of the most important works of art history.
I think we are a long way from AI being able to go that deep. AI can recreate a Brillo Box painting, but that’s kind of it. It has nothing to say about it.
Social media and the internet has exposed us to a lot of art and images over the years. And quite honestly, most of it is mediocre. I think the promise of all these distribution platforms that help share our creations convinced us that we would see amazing, transcendent work more often. We have seen stuff more often for sure, but are we necessarily seeing more really good work more often? I’d argue, no.
For some reason, we forgot about the questions being asked by the Brillo Boxes. We have more people than ever who can pick up a camera and take a technically good photo, or make a cool painting, but what is any of it about? Most of it, honestly, is just about making a technically good photo or artwork, and it stops there.
One of my favorite Youtube Channels is grainydays- Jason Kummerfeldt is a film photographer with a very specific sense of humor and an artistic mission. He’s an Edward Hopper stan. His goal with his photography is to basically create Realist paintings with his camera. What’s fun about his videos is that he’ll take multiple images and let you know which ones are “portfolio shots” and which ones he thinks suck. Often, I’m surprised by his choices. Sometimes my favorite image is one that he thinks doesn’t work based on his artistic goal. I don’t have the same artistic goals as he does, so my favorite photos of his don’t necessarily always align.
Watching his videos has gotten me to think deeper about my own work. I’ve taken thousands upon thousands of photos, but which ones actually meet my personal requirements for what I believe is a good photo?
So I’ve started created a portfolio, which I haven’t done since college. What are Will Malone’s absolute best photographs? Turns out, Only a percent of a percent of the images I have created really satisfy my requirements. It’s gotten me to think deeper about what I’m after with photography: There’s a common thread in there but I haven’t fully honed in on it yet. Even after 15 years of taking photos basically nonstop.
Before our podcast last week, Chad Dyar and I had coffee and we discussed the distinction between “art” and “decor”. The Small Town Photo Project is a series I made for years that is largely decor. A couple of them I think rise to my definition of art, but most of those images conceptually begin and end at the image you are looking at. There’s no real larger story in each image. Many of those images, straight up, could be recreated by AI. In my mind, decor is distinct from art in that it has no deeper concept than to merely fill space on a wall. So, many images from that very big project aren’t making it into my final portfolio. Actually, I think only one or two out of hundreds are going to make it in.
I’m not trying to undercut decor either, I just think it is distinct from transcendent art.
AI Art feels threatening because we are making a lot of mediocre stuff right now for the sake of the internet. This need to “produce” faster than before is causing us to thoughtlessly put out more work than before. Nothing really means that much these days. The internet needs content so we don’t really work too hard on anything before sending it out the door.
Lately, when I’m sitting around at night, I’ve been digging deeper into photography genres I’m curious about. It’s been pretty amazing actually, I’ve discovered artists that have made incredible photography work that I’m still thinking about. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt that way, mostly because I’m often just hanging out at the front door of the internet, like most people. I’m just looking at what is presented to my tastes rather than going deep.
I think we will get replaced AI if we abandon going deep. Depth feels like it’s being abandoned. If we are happy with just posting a photo we shot at a National Park, and yet we go out and call ourselves an artist, then yeah, I think AI will be an extinction-level event.
There are artists who make transcendent work that goes beyond “decor”, who are incredible thinkers and have a lot to say who are still posting paranoid thoughts about AI, which is has been confusing to me. The deep artists, the real artists, the ones that live, breathe, and sleep contemplating the nature of our reality are the artists that are safest from the future of AI. Much like Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, the world needs people who think deeper about things, more than ever.
002 Scaling a Photography Business with Chad Dyar
The first interview episode of the podcast! In this episode, I talk to my friend Chad Dyar, an architectural photographer from Charleston, SC. We talk about how to scale a photography business longterm, the future of photography, and the importance of personal projects!!
Follow Will Malone on Instagram
Thanks for listening!
001 Humans vs. Machines
Recently, on Colin and Samir’s podcast, they talked about how Youtube in 2017 was better than now. Youtube has matured, it’s a major business now. It’s a search engine. When things get big, they lose their edge. That’s just the natural state of things.
Posts that do really well across social media are posts that talk about how to succeed on that social media platform itself. If I started making content about how to make successful content, I’m sure it could potentially do pretty well if I build it within the framework of what the algorithm is looking for. Here’s what the algorithm (we say the algorithm despite there being a lot of different algorithms) is looking for: consistency, for one. Many of these platforms make all their money on ads, so the more people come back to look at content, they continue to hold valuable ad real estate. We, the people keep their business afloat. They have data from their users behaviors, so they want those who make content to adhere to the data of their users. That’s why the algorithm changes. We look at these platforms as some sort of capricious god, but really they are beholden to their own audience.
It’s the same reason you watch Fox News and you see commercials for buying gold or catheters. Fox News’ audience is a certain age, so they do everything they can to cater to that particular demographic.
But at the same time, creators are a great source of evangelism for these platforms, so they want to make sure to keep them at least minimally happy as well. Apparently, Kim Kardashian came after Instagram when they downgraded photos in the algorithm in service of TikTok-like reels. Those complaints seemed to work, as photo-carousel posts are supposedly more effective now. But that’ll probably change eventually too, because by nature, all of this is alive and moving based on the circumstances of the moment.
But in 2016 and 2017, there was some content on how to “optimize” our content making, but really, even Youtube and other platforms seemed to still be flying by the seat of their pants too. These mediums all seemed somewhat new and magical, like there was still all this untapped potential. Now, we look at “content creators” as brands and industries unto themselves.
And back in 2016, many of us were idealists about the future of content creation and how it would replace the establishment, but now, in 2023, it is the establishment. But some of us remember and long for the days where it was still the wild west.
We have so much information now. How to eat, how to be productive, how to stay active, how to protect our mental health, how to succeed in business, how to effectively sell things, how to dress, and so on and so forth. We have all the tools we could possibly ever want, and yet, are we happier? Are we more creative? Have we self-actualized? Or, does having a treasure trove of information on how to perform and do everything perfectly just attempted to turn us flawed human beings, as emotional and unpredictable as we are, into machines?
I fall into this trap all the time, and I seem to never learn my lesson. 365 projects, podcast episodes twice a week, and posting every day. Nothing is wrong with all that, and sometimes I’ve even managed to do it well, but consistency can have costs. Maybe I avoid creative risks because that might take too long to make, maybe I don’t want to miss a day out of fear of some kind. My goal has always kind of been to optimize creativity so that I can be producing ALL THE TIME.
There are benefits to that, and I’m not opposed to consistency. But, I started questioning myself: Is my goal to just put something out so I can check the box? Or is my goal to make something good above all else?
Sometimes, consistency and something good can work hand in hand, but that takes a toll over the long haul. Casey Niestat made a vlog a day for like, 800 days. He’s been on record about how that almost destroyed his life and family. Dang, I did 300 vlogs for 300 days and I totally went insane. And mine were terrible!
The algorithm rewards working under those extreme conditions. But maybe, I’m not looking to live under extreme conditions like that anymore- if we don’t want to be machines, what is left?
Patrick Tomasso’s philosophy is make what you want to make, when you want to make it. I’m increasingly of the mind that this is right. We need to balance overthinking something so much that we don’t just put it out with not just putting stuff out just for the sake of filling the internet pipes.
What is the end game?
A lot of my favorite creators do things the way they do things, meaning, they have a style. They’ve been imprinted on from various life experiences, successes, and failures, and what they make is a reflection of that. I can’t make a Mr Beast video. I don’t have the guts to run up to people in the street and ask to tour their apartment. But, my life is it’s own soup that informs what I do. And it can take time to find it. That’s the only thing I’m interested in this social media game.
As machines, we have no interests. We aren’t able to love. We only serve the users.
As humans though, we have our own interests. Our love of those things is a more powerful and exciting force than getting promoted in the algorithm.
The pressure to produce degrades often degrades what we make, very few can achieve the level of quality AND quantity, if any. The Marvel movies have really taken a dive due to this very same thing, they’ve had to work on so many movies at a time that Ant Man and the Wasp compromised on VFX because Wakanda Forever needed more VFX artists to get finished on time.
We want to be like machines, and yet, we just aren’t able to maintain a machine like output of creativity. Think about the burnout often amongst Youtubers: they are big for a while and upload multiple times a week, and then they just kind of disappear after a while. The ones who stick around end up having an inconsistent upload schedule.
I’ve always been a big producer, I’ve fully completed 8 or so 365 Projects, and can do something with regularity for a long time. But there always comes that moment when I start asking “Why am I putting myself through this again?” Once I start asking that too much is when I end up taking an overlong break afterwards. But since I’m in this for the long haul, I don’t want to get so burned out that I need a year off.
Photography is Dead, the previous version of this podcast, came out twice a week. I had a great system for making sure that happened: I’d write an episode every Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday morning, so then I’d build up a bunch of episodes. Some made it to recording and some didn’t, but then after a couple weeks I’d record 6 to 9 episodes. I’d always stay ahead so that I never had to scramble to put an episode together. That worked for 48 episodes. In fact, it worked too well.
Producing a show like that made it feel like brushing my teeth, and it was starting to get a little too scientific. I was also starting to want to spend more time on each one to really polish it up. But, I didn’t want to just suddenly change the format of the show, so I’ve turned it into a new show with different expectations. Also, the ethos around Photography is Dead where I look at the photography world in the present day, was getting stale to me as I was starting to think about what’s coming next.
My philosophy around creating things is changing for me. I’ve spent so many years posting and creating daily that now, I’m hungry to spend some real time on something.
I do some social media management and creative consulting for clients that need content or content ideas, and what I’ve found is that many business owners I work with don’t post anything to social media, because they want it to be perfect. And social media, really benefits from being more relaxed and not perfect. We gravitate toward more human content as consumers. We don’t want it to feel too polished like an advertisement. I’ve always had the opposite problem: I’ve never been afraid to post no matter how half-baked. Its social media, not an art gallery. Everything we post ends up being kind of disposable. And in a few days, it’ll be buried.
But now that I’m able to consistently produce, because I’ve built my life on creativity, I want to turn the tables a bit on my self and spend more time on a project.
When I decided to make a run at Youtube and video-making again I went to a few friends who are more experienced with it. A lot of the recommendations were the same: you need to post a couple times a week and it has to fit in this or that box. In the past, I would try to adhere to the rules of the algorithm, but quality will always end up falling by the wayside. So, since making Youtube videos has never been a successful endeavor for me, I’m going to do things the opposite of how I normally do them.
First, I want to make all the content I make fit together better. The podcast has to be a good companion to the videos and the videos and podcasts can trickle down to all the other social media platforms. Photography is Dead was built as an audio-only project, so it wasn’t really possible to translate that format and frequency into video. Basically, I’m re-orienting everything around what I do around adding a video component.
Second, I want to take more time on each upload. I’m only doing one podcast a week now as opposed to two. In the main videos that I’m making for Youtube, however, I want to work really hard on doing one at a time. My normal problem is that I start thinking about multiple episodes or projects at once and work on them simultaneously, never giving enough time to one. So, this time, I’m going to fight this ADD impulse or whatever it is and only work on video at a time for as long as it takes to be good.
Third, I only want to make what I’m excited about. If you’re a Photography is Dead listener, you’re familiar with my Kurt Russell Theory. It’s essentially we love watching Kurt Russell in everything he’s in because he always looks like he’s having a blast. If we aren’t having fun, whatever we make isn’t going to be good.
Sitting around talking about what “I’m gonna do” is kinda lame, but really I just wanted to say that I have a plan. Making a YouTube channel that I’m happy with has always been an aspiration of mine, and I’ve never quite gotten there because I’ve never put enough focus on it. I’m working on a series on videos, and I’ve almost fully written the first one. I’m super excited about this upcoming series. It’s daunting, and not going to be easy, but I’m very excited about it. I think you’ll at least find the topic of the first one pretty interesting. And with each video, there will be a companion podcast episode.
At the core of all this though, there’s really a love for one thing: Photography. That’s it man. That’s really what I do this all for. That’s my first love. Everything I talk about and create touches photography in some way. It’s something, that no matter how much I do it, I never get burned out. I’ve had seasons where I slowed down, but in 15 years, I haven’t stopped taking photos.
As I spent 48 episodes talking about, photography is in a weird place right now, so I want to explore the future of what that looks like. What’s its value going to be in the future? Obviously, images are more important than ever, but as a result, they’ve become cheaper, whether one can create an image themselves or just download a free stock image on Pexels or Unsplash. Then of course, photography is getting easier to produce via AI. You can still kind of mostly tell the difference between an AI photo and a real one, but in months or weeks, it may be impossible at the rate that AI advancement is moving.
My theory though, is that those truly dedicated to the craft of photography will continue to survive as long as we focus on context. AI art may be cool and technically impressive, but it is art without context. As humans, we need context and story in the art we consume. In fact, one could argue that art is simply a vehicle by which we can experience another human’s context or life experience. Those who mostly focus on just making technically perfect images without a ton of context might be on the chopping block, but I believe if we really focus on expressing everything that has made us we still have a chance in this uncertain future.
Or
Skynet goes live and we’re all doomed. But if that happens, we don’t have to really worry about the future of creativity much anyway.