You know what, Instagram?  I’m sorry.

I cursed you and your buddy Hipstamatic for the last couple years.  You were destroying our industry, flooding our market with imagery, and making the construction and process of image-making too easy and less intellectual.  I was one of, if not the guy who wrote the blog post that started the whole Damon Winter/POYi mess.  I cursed iPhoneography, Holgaroids, and Urban Outphittography™.  Oooooh, I like that – Urban Outphittography.  Note the ™.

I’m big enough to admit that I was wrong.  Well, sort of.  Wrong is such a subjective term.

Here’s where you are right.  I caved one day when walking along a storefront and finding a little window with a mannequin head in it I wanted to shoot.  I didn’t have my 5d Mark II, nor was it a scene I really needed to break out a big DSLR and really work.  It was the morning after landing a great gig and I was happy.  I was excited about life, excited about being my own boss, and excited about being so freaking lucky to be able to be able to make pictures still after leaving my staff job a year-and-a-half ago.  Something about that window, that little patch of light, that reflection that made me want to just snap and capture it.  I whipped out my iPhone and made a frame and randomly used the Instagram app, which I had on my phone and never used – know thy enemy.  Then I posted it and was suckered into a medium I had previously put on blast.

Now, I can sit here and try to wrap the reason for you as to why I am on Instagram and why I am not a hypocrite, but I can’t.  I am a hypocrite.  I’m using and enjoying my latest foray into Instagram.  It has been six weeks and 36 frames (ironically, a whole roll of film), and I think I know why I’ve changed my mind about it.

What I haven’t changed my mind on its role in photojournalism.  I think it’s a slippery slope of ethics to be be masking and changing content for news stories.  For feature stories, illustrations, and work not labelled as news?  Sure and please do.  I think there is one last holdout of truthiness out there, though, and that is documentary photojournalism. It is a field that should adhere to its own set of rules and ethics, no matter how the world changes around it.  I’ll preach that until it dies (don’t worry, I’m not going there).

Damon Winter and Ben Lowy are two of my favorite photojournalists and friends, and more power to them for using the iPhone for evil (kidding, guys).  Their work inspires me, and consistently pushes me to be a better photographer.

There is something to be said for making pictures that aren’t important, that don’t change the world, and that aren’t perfect.  I just need to make pictures…more.  As a freelancer, I apparently spend 12.2% of my work hours making actual photos per this diagram.  That is true.  I make pictures when I am hired and honestly, I don’t pick up my cameras as much as I did at the paper.  I used to shoot 3 assignments a day for years and years.  I wore my crappy cameras out.  Now, I have gear that is nice and snug in a bag in the corner of my office and not rolling around in my trunk.  When I shoot now, it is much less frequent, but much more deliberate and important.  I’m paid more for those shoots, the risks are higher, and it’s my name on the line.  Not the paper’s.  I lose a client if I screw up.  It can be frightening, but always exciting.

Instagram lets me document random moments that don’t need 21.1 megapixels and a Lightroom bath.  These are pictures that aren’t important to really anyone but me.  They are there just to document for the pure sake of documentation.  They are slices of me with four little corners, four even lines, and some borders.  It may be just a fad, but you know what?  Participating in a fad means at least you are participating.  It means contributing the the visual history of what we put as photographers out there.  There may be a lot of it overdocumentation now, but it is who we are in the Applocracy we live in. Again ™.

They aren’t photojournalism.  They aren’t perfection.  They are just..life.

So, Instagram, please take me back.  I’ll never be mean again.

Lovingly yours,

Chip

Got a nice little write up from the fine folks over at Jen Bekman Gallery and 20×200 for the upcoming Hey Hot Shot! competition.  I have no idea if I’ll make the cut or not, but it was cool to read someone else’s take on a project I literally do just for fun when I’m bored or in need of a visual reset.

Thanks – love the site!

Ah, red…how I missed thee.

I don’t hang my camera around my shoulder everywhere I go anymore.  It’s not the fact that I don’t enjoy shooting, because I love it more than anything other vice I have, but I just don’t feel like everything needs to be photographed at every moment.  There’s too much of that going on right now.  I have an iPhone like everyone else just in case a Pulitzer happens to fall in my lap.  I want the times I do break out a 5D and a 50mm to be unique and random as my life is right now.  I’ve been rockin’ a 50mm almost exclusively now – I’ve fallen back in love with it.

I found myself in Washington D.C. a couple weeks ago to teach a couple break-out sessions at the National Press Photographers Association Business Blitz workshop, which has several stops in the next six months.  I highly recommend going if not just to throw things at the speakers, but there was really a wealth of information on our business available on the cheap.  I found myself sitting in the audience of John Harrington and Allen Murabayashi when I wasn’t waxing about the business and learning a lot myself about everything from SEO and marketing to invoicing and contracts.  Do yourself a favor and go if you can…well worth it and they are rotating speakers out at every stop so you don’t have to listen to me go on and on about red.

Alas, I didn’t take any time see the sites, because I want to bring my girls up and have that be our time to experience it.  What I did do is a lot of eating and drinking. So, the one time I decided to actually bring a camera with me was on a little trip to Chinatown, only because, well I figured there might be some red. These were literally shot on a stroll up and stroll down on one block in about 10 minutes.  That’s it.  I think I shot 12 frames the whole time I was there, and these are a quarter of them.

I don’t know why I even share them, but for me the search for red is more a personal endeavor…athletes will toss a ball around, firefighters wash their trucks, etc. Me? I make rectangles and play with primary colors.

I’ll throw one of the only frames I made in South Beach during an unrelated shoot a couple weeks ago, only because there isn’t really other place for it than right here in the most random of blog posts ever.

Assignment:  go on tour with realtor and reporter to homes left abandoned in North Port, FL.

If anything had “oh-no” written all over it, that did.  I’ve been on the “tour-with-realtor” assignments a million times before, not getting into any house, struggling to make pictures at 65 mph.  However, the realtor, Shannon Moore, saved the day.  She understood exactly what I wanted, and had all the codes and keys to make it happen over a couple hours on an assignment for The New York Times (story by Andrew Martin here).  She took us right into homes that are part of the 17% of all homes in Florida literally just that.

Empty.

While I knew the editor wanted to see Mrs. Moore for investors – literally guys on the phone who may never see a property before selling it – I wanted to piece together a series of details that show that emptiness after the housing crash.  It wasn’t hard to find.  Homes devoid of an human feeling, boarded up, decaying in their drywalled cave.  One was a grow house raided by the cops a few weeks prior.  Another a home with doggie door boarded up.  Many of them in various states of robbery.

When I moved to Florida almost 10 years ago, I would go on tours of these perfect little developments with a realtor selling them before they were even finished.  Now, some of these homes can be bought for less than price of the car we were riding in.

While we’re on the subject, go check out Greg Kahn’s Pulitzer finalist essay…amazing stuff that shows the human side of all this.  Here.