How to Stay Motivated in Photography

Lesson 1: Steal
Published: October 2015 with Rick Sammon

Duration: 1 hour 28 minutes

About Course

We all need motivation from time to time, because if you're not motivated you're not going to get out to get the picture. Join Rick Sammon to get motivated and stay inspired. In this class Rick shares his top ten techniques for getting inspired and staying motivated. From finding new sources of inspiration to staying healthy and seeing the world, Rick provides and engaging set of tasks and resources you can start using today. This presentation was given in front of a live studio audience and includes a question and answer session at the end.

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Hey everyone, thank you so much for coming to my presentation today on how to get motivated and how to stay inspired. You know I have 11 classes on Kelby One, they are all technical classes. But this is a motivational class, because I think we all need and that includes me, we all need motivation from time to time. So before we got going here, I did ask some people in the audience, so why are you here? And some people said they were stuck. So I what I said is, you've come to the right place. I've been teaching photography for a long time, actually I think I am one of the oldest Kelby instructors. So what I try to do at this point in my life, is I try to give back. I try to inspire people, I try to motivate people. So, I think when you leave here, you'll be a little more motivated, you'll be a little more inspired, and the viewers at home or in the office or in the airplane wherever they are watching this, I hope they are inspired too. And this is why I put together this presentation. You could have the best gear on the planet. You could have like all the lenses. All the expensive lenses, the highest definition cameras. You could be more skilled at Photoshop than Scott Kelby, which would be a little hard to do or Julian Cass, but you could have all this knowledge where you could take a snap shot like this and make some adjustments, so I'm using a camera RAW here, turn it into a much more creative picture. You could have all this knowledge. But if you are not motivated, and I feel this about myself, if I'm not motivated, if I'm not inspired, I'm not going to get up at all dark thirty, which is like 3:30 in the morning in Tanzania, a drive an hour and a half just to get this picture of the sunrise, where the sun is just peaking over the horizon. I really wanted to get this picture. And I think as a photographer, we have to to fall, as photographers, we have to fall in love with the subjects. Now I don't say that romantically. I say that artistically and emotionally. I love this picture. It's one of my favorite pictures. It's a pretty simple shot, but it has emotion. And I am going to talk about that in this presentation. That's really for me, the most important thing when it comes to a photograph. It's not about the F stop, right. I teach workshops. I hear this question I get asked all the time. Hey Rick, what's your F stop? And what I say is, I say what's your creative vision? What do you want to say? We're talking with our C about this before we got going. What do you want to say with your pictures, what emotion do you want to be, convey? So that's what I go for in my pictures. And if we're not inspired, we're not going to travel like almost two days to go to a place like Mongolia and get a shot like this. This is kind of cool actually. Once a year, 500 soldiers from the real Mongolian Army, put on this show. This is Genghis Khan revival show, and they come charging over the field, talk about emotion. So it was nice and dusty here, we saw the kiss and that created the mood of this scene. And when it comes down to it, again it's the mood, it's the feeling, it's the emotion, that's the most important part of a photograph. And wildlife pictures can have emotion too and you have to be motivated and you have to be inspired. Here's this lioness and her cute cubs. If you want interesting wildlife pictures by the way, back light is beautiful. You have to expose for the highlights, but we track this lioness and the cubs across the Masai Mara, in the early morning for maybe 45 minutes, until I got the right shot. And while I'm in the vehicle and the guide in the safari vehicle driver kept moving the car, so these guys were coming at us for 45 minutes. So it's a passion. You have to have a lot of patience. You have to say, I'll do anything to get the shot. And here's another shot from this same trip. Just a quick tip here. When you see, I know I said it's not going to be a technical seminar, but when you see eye to eye, and when you shoot eye to eye, the person looking at the photograph can relate more towards the subject. So I'm getting down as low as possible, so I'm seeing eye to eye. Separation is also important and cropping. I crop almost all my pictures, and when I send the pictures or fold it to one of my book publishers, this is what I say. I say, crop my pictures and you're a dead man, even if it's a woman, with a little happy face there after it meaning, I don't want anyone to touch the cropping on my pictures. And I think you really want to feel the same way, because cropping does give us an extra chance and a second chance at composition. And why I have boring to stuff up here and why I have boring stuff down on the bottom. Some people are against cropping, I crop that all the time. So let's get to my top 10 techniques for getting inspired, they're lessons. And they are steal, share, search, join, learn, change, travel, enjoy, look and walk. So I went through this kind of fast, but I'm going to go through these in detail. Because these are things that I found that really help me stay motivated and get inspired. When I show this slide, when I'm giving a presentation, people usually laugh. Steal, like Rick, you're talking about stealing? Well, when I say steal, I say borrow. It's really borrowing, but steal it's a little more attractive, right, it's a little more noble, right? You want steal like an artist. And if we study the work of the master painters, man oh man can we learn a lot from the master painters. Because what were they masters of? Masters a lot of things composition, but they were masters of light. They were masters of composition. So here's Vermeer's painting, the girl with the pearl earring. I am sure some of you guys have seen the movie the girl with the pearl earring. May be some of you have seen the painting, it's been on exhibit, throughout the the United States recently touring. And there's a great movie that you may want to check out, it's called Tim's Vermeer. Tim's Vermeer is produced actually by Penn and Teller, and this guy Tim had a few bucks. He figured out how Vermeer, was able to create paintings like no other paintings of that time. Paintings that captured the detail that we could see like in our RAW files, even our HDR files. So Tim's Vermeer. But anyway, what I wanted to do is, I wanted to see if I could take a similar type picture. So I don't have a studio. I just set up a Westcott Apollo softbox here, kind of speed light piece of 12 dollars a background painted to my bookshelf there, pinned at the top so my wife wouldn't get mad. So I created in my studio, my photograph of the girl with the pearl earring. And it's a one light photograph as you see here. My friend Frank Doorhof, a great KelbyOne instructor like all the instructors, has a great saying. It's kind of funny but it rings is true. And the same as this. If you think you need two lights, use one light. If you think you need three lights, use one light. So it's kind of funny, but you can do so much with one light. So what I try to do is a lot of things. I try to get the shadows similar to this Vermeer's painting, and I try to get the catch light in exactly the same position as Vermeer. Catch light is so important when it comes to portraits. It makes the subjects eyes come alive. There's something else about this photograph here and Vermeer's painting here. And it's called pupillometrics. Anyone here ever hear the term pupillometrics? My guess is no. What pupillometrics is, is this. And those of you are into portraiture, will find this interesting. Pupillometrics is the study of how, the size of the subject's pupil affects how we like the photograph. So you could say here, you could see better than the little painting, you could see how wide, how inviting, how opened her pupils are. That invites the subject, the viewer of the photograph, more into the scene than the pupil's closed down well. Which is why, studio photographers like to use speed lights, like to use strobes. Because they go off at like a ten thousandth of a second and the pupil doesn't have time to close down. If you're using constant lights, the pupil's going to close down. So it's the little things like this that can make the difference between a snapshot and a great shot. So anyway, I had a lot of fun doing this. So your assignment, I want everyone in this room and everyone at home to try this assignment. Try recreating the work of the masters. And I don't make a lot of promises on my workshops or in my seminars, but this is one of them. I promise you that'll make you a better photographer. Because you'll look at light differently. And when you think about it, light is the main element in every photograph. You break that down and what do we have? Shadows and highlights. So you have the main element, and you have the two sub elements. So we have to learn how to see the light. Light illuminates, shadows define. Shadows are the soul of the picture. Shadows are your friend. And as another great Kelby One instructor Joe McNally says, if you want an interesting portrait, don't light the whole subject. Now if you want a high key shot with no shadows, that's okay too. But I think what makes this picture and the painting beautiful is the shadows. So, I would like everyone everyone to download this book. It is a PDF book. You could read it in about 20 minutes, I see some people taking notes, that's cool. It is called Steal Like An Artist, which gave me the idea for stealing rather than just borrowing and looking at the work of the master painters. Steal Like An Artist. You can read in 20 minutes. It's my favorite book on getting motivated, because we can learn again so much, from these master painters. And check out this quote at bottom. It's in the book. There's a lot of great quotes in the book. And it's from Salvador Dali, those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing. So the idea is follow, I play guitar, I listen to Santana. I don't play the solos like Santana, but I try to emulate that, at least Eric Clapton, I try to play the solos like that. So if by learning from other people, same thing with cooking, same thing with any art, we try to do what other people are doing and this is a great way to get motivated and get inspired. Here is another example. This is Rembrandt. Rembrandt's old soldier, this is a painting, and this is my neighbour here, this is called a gorget, this is something that you are learning today, soldiers used to wear this, don't want to put it on my mic, to protect their necks. We got a beret, all this stuff online, got a feather, set it up in the same office and I gather a similar, of course it's not the same and maybe it doesn't have that exact Rembrandt lighting. True Rembrandt lighting it has this, not all these pictures have it by the way, but a lot do. This triangle of light on the dark side of the subject's face. So I don't have it there, but I had a lot of fun doing it. And here's another example, Monet's girl combing her hair, taken in my studio. So I was on this kick for a while trying to recreate the work of the masters, and let me tell you something, I learned a lot about lighting. And then we could also do this when it comes to landscape photography by following the work of the masters. Here's Ansel Adams picture taken in monument valley, of the two mittens. They call the two mittens by the way because, the rock formation looks like two mittens. So here's his shot, and I was definitely channeling him when I took my picture. His picture was taken in bright sunlight, I waited till after the sun went down for a softer picture. Before we were talking about critiques before we get going in here. And constructive criticism, and when it comes to your photography, it's all subjective. Like this is harsh light, that tells one story, the softer light tells a different story. So it's all about the light. So in addition to getting motivated and staying inspired in this talk, just remember that it's really all about the light, because light helps you tell your story. However, there's a big difference. There's a big difference between stealing and borrowing. If you're going to borrow, like I did here, you always want to give credit, where credit is due. If you don't do that, there's some people out there who take credit for, and I have a bunch of stories that I'm not going to share right now, but they take credit for the work of others, and you get caught like that on the web. That's not really why you should do it, you should do it because you shouldn't do it. Your mother told you, don't steal. But if you do borrow, definitely give credit where credit is due.

Rick Sammon

Canon Explorer of Light and award-winning photographer Rick Sammon loves his day job. A tireless, prolific and inspirational image-maker, Rick, called by some “The Godfather of Photography,” is one of the most active photographers on the planet – dividing his time between creating images, giving seminars, developing on-line classes for KelbyOne, leading photo workshops, and making personal appearances. Rick’s enthusiasm for digital imaging is contagious. He is a man on a mission – a mission to make digital photography fun, creative, exciting and rewarding for others. Rick’s latest (and 36th) book is Creative Visualization for Photographers. With nearly 40 years of experience, this self-taught photographer has many accomplishments – and many more anticipated for the road ahead. As Rick suggests, “When you are through changing, you are through.” See www.ricksammon.com for more information. Rick can be contacted at mailto:ricksammon@me.com