Atlantis Black and White Cafe

02/04/2020

09/05/2019

I get asked a lot if I still do photography. Most people can't believe I walked away from it like I did, being as how good I was at it. The truth is that I didn't walk away from photography, photography walked away from me.
They have found it takes 10,000 hours to truly become a master of something, and I'm one of the few photographers that have actually hit that mark, and sadly because of what's happened to photography today, almost no one starting now will ever get to that level. There's just too many people with cameras, and not enough people that want to have their pictures taken the way it was 10 years ago or so.
What happened was the perfect storm, where Social Media got big, Digital Cameras got cheap, and everyone was "living their dream" or "following their passion". You couple that with $4.00 a gallon gas, and postage that made direct mail financially impossible, and that's where the problems started!
As I focused mostly on High School Seniors, and Families, the twist that came next was what really put the nail in the coffin. The new "photographers" were offering free sessions to all the pretty people for free--so they could build their portfolios--but that meant all the best subjects were now being photographed by the worst photographers, and nothing being seen was exciting enough to motivate people to have portraits done like in the past.
Another thing happened that was even worse, because not every "mover & shaker" is pretty. This led to those not being offered free pictures, to do what anyone being neglected might do, and said they weren't doing pictures, and senior pictures are stupid.
In less than 2 years, what took decades to build up as a great market, new photographers managed to destroy it all! When you realize that every dept. store that had a studio in it, closed them--and they didn't even need to them to make money, but to just bring people in to the store--the market was truly gone on all levels!
When it came to families, there were all sorts of other things that happened there that I could talk about, but the biggest is that they didn't have enough time to do the things they needed, and schools started to make it almost that kids should be doing something for the school every waking moment! In the end it wasn't about Who Moved My Cheese, but that there were just too many rats, and not enough cheese, to keep a studio going.
The sad part is that the people today won't be leaving any portraits for their future generations to get to know who their ancestors were!

03/28/2017

Much of what he says here, is the same thing that happened to photography. The skill was replaced by content, and the timelessness replaced by trendy--mostly in way of computer manipulations.
Photography...good photography, is something that you can hang on your wall, and 40 years later not be embarrassed by what you had "created". Though the people in the image may have changed, the emotions that the portrait captured is still there, and the way the image was done is in such a way that time cannot tarnish it, because the fundamentals of photography were to preserve memories, not to get likes on social media!

03/15/2017

There's a purity in Black and White photography, where the color is removed, and what's left is the subject, and the way light tells a story about who they really are.

03/14/2017

Within the next month, I will be restarting the photography business, but it will be a different business model than I had in the past.
The business will be much more specialized in what I will be offering, and essentially will be limited to photography you can't really get from someone that has a camera, or a few years of experience.
There will be more details unfolding as I start to put together marketing pieces, and get everything needed set up.

12/29/2016

It's been quite a while since I've posted anything here. After the fire, I really didn't have the place or desire to do photography, and in stepping away from it, the realization set in that photography was no longer something that you could do to make a good living at.In a nutshell, it wasn't just a who moved the cheese, but too many rats and not enough cheese also!
The past several years I have seen some great photographers close up shop, or just barely making it, and when you see that an area that supported 5 photographers, now has at any given time 50, with people that got a camera for Christmas claiming professional status 2 months later, you have to ask is there a market for photographer's?
I've actually realized that there might be, but not in the way people are doing photography now. I realized this the day I looked at one of my PR pictures that was a layered image, with the original to compare to. You see, photography today has become nothing short of fake! The pictures people are getting taken don't look like them, and 10 years from now when you look at it, you will see that person in the mirror thinking how bad you look, because what you compare the you now to is an image that was so manufactured, that it didn't represent who you were at all!

02/12/2015

Things with my house have been lingering on, and so I've still not been doing photography. In this time off, I have reflected a lot on what's happened to the photography industry, and would like to share what I've seen happen to it over the years.
Digital photography was a great tool, but when the price of digital cameras came down to less than a portrait session, many people saw how much photographers were charging, and saw this as a great way to make money. What they didn't understand in what a photographer charged, was that they paid for employees, place of business, and above all MARKETING!
Marketing drove the photography market, and was a huge cost, but with so much competition, charging so little, the flow of marketing quit, and the thing that got people interested also quit!
About this time, people saw word of mouth being how to get people interested, and from there new photographers offered free sessions to everyone that was thin and pretty! They knew that even a bad picture of a pretty person will still look good no matter how bad your skills are in photography, so where people used to see extraordinary pictures of pretty people, now they were only seeing average pictures, but this tactic caused an even bigger fail than killing the marketing machine.
What to smart people do when they are being ignored...they lose interest. So anyone that wasn't thin and pretty not being asked to be a "spokesmodel" had to pay for it, and the rest of the market just walked away from it. Where 6 years ago everyone wanted to have great senior pictures taken, today nobody even cares!
It's sad really, because great pictures are timeless, and are cherished more over time, but in that era where digital photography was accessible by everyone, the things people did to the images make them look dated in 2 years, ridiculous in 5, and hideous in 10. Most of those pictures layered with special effects, over-whitened eyes and teeth, skin smoother than a babies ass (on guys even), well, that too is contributing to the loss of interest, because that started 5 years ago, and we have finally hit the point where people see how bad it looks, but photographers that started with filters and not skill, still don't know what to do for those timeless images that families would cherish forever.

08/13/2014

I guess school is about to start, as people are calling inquiring if I'm still in business. I moved the studio almost 2 years ago, so that made people jump to conclusions. This past Feb. my house caught on fire, and that's where I did office work and sales. During the clean up when I didn't have electric or internet, my Domain for the website expired and there are these as****es out there that buy them and try to rent them back to you for hundreds of dollars a year. I thought the house would be done by now, but it was a wicked winter and the insurance company was a month behind in their assessment, then the bank messed around for a month, then the whole month of June it rained, and it wasn't until just a few weeks ago that the roof got finished. I am currently living in my studio shooting area, so at this time I've only been doing small shoots, and will start doing more when I get the house to where I can move in. In other words, it's been a lot of stuff happening!

07/11/2014

Lifetouch Inc. says it plans to end its yearbook publishing operation in Kansas City, effective Dec. 1.

04/28/2014

Lighting is like music, and there are so many forms of light. Classical music would be great lighting, subtle and full all at the same time. People that have studied photography understand light in it's many forms. Speed Metal...well, that would describe most of what you see today. It's not good, but it is fast. It's point and shoot a lot, and every so often there's something good in it, but mostly the only people that appreciate it, are the people that created it, or the people that played a part in it. To everyone else it's just painful.

02/27/2014

http://www.fastcocreate.com/3026935/everything-about-these-pictures-of-a-tiny-adventurous-lego-photographer-is-awesome?utm_source=facebook #18

U.K. photographer Andrew Whyte took pictures of a tiny Lego man taking pictures every day for a year on his iPhone, and theyre all tiny treasures.

01/10/2014

This is a great way of showing how photography has moved from images out of the camera to images out of the computer. The thing to keep in mind though is that the photographer here probably didn't do much of anything to produce the final product. The staff did all the work, and in the real world that's not how it happens. http://movies.yahoo.com/photos/disney-dream-portraits-1389290425-slideshow/

View the Disney Dream Portraits photo gallery on Yahoo Movies. Find more news related pictures in our photo galleries.