I had been thinking and planning on shooting the Eclipse of 2017 for almost a year. Plans changed a few times, but I ended up heading down to Tennessee in my Jeep Wrangler with Jim Lenon and Bryan Minear. We got there three days early to scout and shoot in the Smoky Mountains.
photography
Working With Brands
Lately, I've been working with some brands that I really love, t-shirt companies, restaurants, coffee shops all places that I inherently can get behind.
When working with brands it's all about mutual benefit and relationship. If what you bring to the table is valuable to the needs of the brand, and you receive the benefit that you expect, then things tend to work out. The missing piece that sometimes creatives lack is follow-through. We tend to push deadlines, get lazy, tired, or busy with other priorities. That's not going to get you very far in such a competitive field.
It's really important to build actual trust. To me, this means you need to put your cards on the table, tell the brand what makes sense to you, what your end game is, what you hope to accomplish. Listen to the needs of the company. What are the benefits that they will tangibly receive from your work? What does a win look like? What is a miss? Is there a good avenue for constructive criticism both ways?
Then once expectations are set, follow through with your commitments and over deliver. It's just like any other relationship you have, building trust comes from a genuine care for the other party. Of course, you don't want to undervalue your work, but you also need to care about their goals as a top priority for your job.
It's one of those simple to say, hard to do, things.
Let me know in the comments if you've experienced either a huge hit or miss when it comes to business relationships and why the results ended up being what they were.
Prescribed Walks
In November of 2012 I got a fever. It lasted a week. Then another. Then another. It was a low-grade fever that seemed to correspond with joint pain and fatigue.
I explain the fatigue to folks this way. In Michigan, you get cold nights in the winter. Sometimes -10 degrees. The best thing about the end of a long day is getting under your three blankets and getting warm. Then a thought hits your mind. Shoot. Tomorrow is garbage day. So you force yourself to get up out of bed, put your coat and boots on, and haul the trashcan out to the curb. That's what the fatigue felt like, only it never went away. Every day was the same.
The doctors checked me for malaria, lupus, and Cat Scratch Fever (which I was hoping for). They tested for all the normal cancers as well. Eventually, in the fall of 2014, I was diagnosed with Lyme Disease.
I never remembered a tick bite and never got a rash. But Lyme it was. I subsequently spent the next two years on a rotating wheel of antibiotics, first oral and then IV.
With the fatigue and all that, I wasn't exercising. My doctor told me I needed to move, I needed to exercise, so I started walking 30 minutes a day. I'd bring my phone, take some pictures and eventually bought a camera.
I would have never started down this road without the gift of this pain.