Thanks for watching!
photography isn't fun anymore
5 things that suck the fun out of photography ^
Why film is better than digital
Basically a “photo dump” in a video of all the stuff I’ve been making with my Nikon FE lately.
Thanks for watching!
How big can you print a 35mm negative?
I was curious about this because I like printing my images huge and I’ve never really tried to push a 35mm negative to see how it would do. Watch the video for the results!
The Key Ingredient for a GREAT Photo Series
In this episode, I talk about my ongoing 13 year photo series where I’ve been photographing the same spot. Looking through these images made me realize what makes a photo series really work, because often, I find myself trying WAY TOO HARD.
Thanks for watching!
I turned my truck into a pinhole camera
So…this was a pain. Did it work as imagined? No. Was it super fun? Also no. BUT I enjoyed going for it to see if this weird idea could work. Turns out, it kind of can, but would take far more work and customizations to get it just right. Anyway, hope you enjoy the video! (You can peep some of the photos below)
Shooting Day and Night in One Photo on 35mm Film (Cinestill 800T)
This was a super interesting experiment! I decided to mix up this multi-location Double Exposure series I’ve been working on by shooting 2 exposures at different times of day AND different locations. Overall, I liked most of the results.
The frequency of the videos will increase as I get a handle on this workflow. Thanks for watching!
Travel Photography is Boring
Everyone Uses The Same Camera (digging deeper for ideas and my new Nikon FE)
Hey! In this episode, I talk about how everyone uses the same film cameras, my new Nikon FE, and how we need to dig deeper for ideas.
New video coming soon!
You can watch my 2.5D Printing video here
Thanks for listening!
2 Years of Photographing Small Towns FULL TIME
This is it. The culmination of full time traveling in order to photograph small towns for The Small Town Photo Project.
The Small Town Photo Project era is over, and it was quite a ride. Thank you to everyone who supported it!
Double Negative (a photography podcast by will malone)
As a follow-up to Photography is Dead, Will of the Future is a podcast where Will Malone looks to what’s next in the world of photography and creativity. BUT then I let it get too general and unfocused as like many things in my life. So we are back with the final name of this podcast: Double Negative (a photography podcast by will malone) where I talk about issues revolving around the photography world today and explore this new era of my own photography work. Topics to include: film in the modern day, AI, selling prints, and much much more.
Episode 1 is out! In this episode, I talk about keeping my eye on the ball of what my actual artistic goals vs. spending time promoting what I’m doing on social media. In this episode, I talk about the balance of that.
Also, we’re back to audio-only which I much prefer. Enjoy as I finally find some momentum in podcasting and photography again.
014 The Photographer Song and Dance
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!
the leica challenge
a new YouTube series where I document the process of creating a new photo series and selling them as prints!
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”.
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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.
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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.
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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.