RobertBenson.com

Here’s a sure fire way to impress an art director on a big shoot: use this new product which transmits liveview feed from your DSLR to a portable wireless monitor. No cables, ac, or wires. You can shoot, someone else monitors the monitor to see what’s doin. $335 bones from a company in Poland. Gotta get one of these. Someone please send to me as gift.

Here’s some cool video shot in 2000 frames per second showing a Canon 5d shutter opening and closing….

Shooting Driving Plates for 24 from Stargate Studios on Vimeo.

Okay, not quite a boy. Photographer and good guy Jerod Harris helped me out with a shoot today and stood in before the subject arrived… Photo shoot was about a writer who wrote a book about affection. (Hearts on ballo0n… affection… get it? Ugh.) Here’s the simple lighting I used (Elinchrom 72″ Octabank with Speedotron head inside):

Here it is, my new website: www.seekSHELTERimmediately.com.

This website is in addition to my main website, www.robertbenson.com. What you’ll see here are shelter images – homes – along with people that reside in ‘em. It’s an outsider looking inside some of the most unique homes in Southern California. It’s also a mixture of portraits, all with homes as a backdrop and theme throughout. I also have a collection of photos of homes near flightlines (flightline shelter) like the image above.

This is entirely a personal project; none of these photos were made on assignment. I used a mixture of film (Mamiya 7 and Hassy) and digital. The website itself, like robertbenson.com, comes from aphotofolio.com. Forget livebooks.com – if you’re shopping around for  a website that looks professional and is fully customizable, check out aphotofolio.com – they are the best around for multiple reasons, which I’d be happy to talk about to anyone who asks.

If you have or know someone with a unique home who would be open to a photoshoot, send them my way!

Bet this photographer has all the Gucci camera gear…… Read more on his new job title in a press release here.

Few days ago I posted info about a photographer in Haiti who was running a workshop where he charged attendees $4,000. He claims the workshop teaches photographers how to work and shoot in a disaster zone.

He received more than 60 hate mail type messages on his blog where he advertised the workshop (which he quickly deleted). You can read the photographer’s response to these messages here, cached by a sportsshooter member before he apparently came to his senses and rewrote his firey rebuttal. I offer this not to add fuel to a fire, but there is a lesson to be learned here; learned quickly if you follow a bit of this…

There’s something going on here that isn’t evident. Even if you look close you probably wont pick up on this…

It’s not what you think it is! They aren’t cars parked in front of a building!  Click here to see how photographer Michael Paul Smith is making these ordinary looking images look pretty cool, once you realize what’s going on. Click here.

No real point, just interesting: 2010 cover on top, 1992 cover below.

I dragged my feet and really didn’t want to,  but my rep talked some sense into me, had me get on a plane and go to New York City for a week to meet editors at various publications. That’s where I was just last week.

I was hesitant to make the trip because I viewed the meetings as a series of job interviews – and does anyone really like those?

But in the end it proved worthwhile, and the phone is already ringing – almost. I’ve met with editors to promote my work (and myself) on small levels locally numerous times: with the editor at the local newspaper or regional magazine, but never anything on a balls-to-the-wall level such as the NY trip, where I met with editors at New York Times magazine, Fortune, Forbes, Outdoor Life, Mens Health, Mens Journal, a couple of ad agencies and more.

None of em kicked me out of the room either.

Promotion in the past consisted of mailing out postcards to editors and email campaigns. Even had an ultra expensive Adbase membership for a year to help me in reaching out to potential clients, but nothing – i’m slowly realizing – beats a face to face meeting with a portfolio and a good attitude.

Emails get deleted, postcards can get trashed. But a 20-45 minute meeting with a person remains memorable. During one of the visits, with a photo editor at Fortune Magazine, the topic of photographer promotion came up, and she told me she gets about 40 emails a day from photographers trying to get work. Think she reads them? At a portfolio review here in San Diego two months ago through the local APA chapter, I asked one of the reviewers – a creative director at a large Los Angeles advertising firm – how many emails she receives from photographers each day. “Fifty or more,” she said. “Do you read them?” I asked. “No, I delete them all.” She said it with no remorse, no hesitancy and no hint of having done anything wrong.

So the face to face meeting…. David Laidler and Chris Dinon at Aurora Select set things up. A large chunk of magazines are based in New York City, and most seem to be open to meeting a photographer in an area where they might not have any go-to shooters. Appointments were made, and all the meetings went the same way – arrive at the magazine headquarters (usally a 40-story plus building somewhere in Manhattan, or the sprawling and beautiful New York Times headquarters…), sign in, ride the elevator up, tell the receptionist who we were there to see….  Photo editor arrives, small talk, into a conference room, portfolio is page turned.  Before all that I give them a one minute version of who I am, where I live, my background….

I remembered a recent post from Rob Haggart at aphotofolio.com where he wrote about these types of meetings, reporting in part:

1. “Make sure your website and portfolio compliment each other- the best of your work in the beginning of your website while the portfolio has to be consistent throughout.  Sometimes it is best to work with a neutral person like a consultant or a client you have a close relationship with for a non-emotional attachment to the images.  Rob has a huge list (here)- interview the ones you are interested in working with.
2. Make sure your portfolio is professional and what the industry is expecting to see.  If you portfolio looked thrown together, then you have cheapened the images.  The presentation talks about your attention to details as you would on a shoot- the production value of the book transfers to the production value of a shoot.
3. Let the viewer look at the images at their pace- don’t comment on every image- wait till they ask a question.  If they don’t ask anything then you need to ask them questions from your research (i.e. about an ad you loved that they did)
4. Research- who you are talking to and the agency.  This is why a database is so crucial to your marketing.  A database is not only for sending out e-promos and mailers but used more efficiently for research.  We like Agency Access for several reasons- it’s clean, folders tally up total contacts, accounts and titles plus it has map quest to get you to your meeting.
5. Research the agency by going to their website to see their accounts.”

You can read the rest of this story on aphotofolio.com by clicking here.

Here’s the portfolio they saw: