What should photographers call me

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To start, when a couple inquires with me, I will respond back with my collections and a big congratulations! I normally have my consultation calls on Monday afternoon and Wednesday evenings. Once they schedule the call, I send them a Google Calendar invitation for an hour long timeslot and a link to Zoom for the call.

This will help remind them when the call is coming up soon, so no one forgets! I will then use Zoom for our actual call instead of Google Hangouts or Skype. I prefer the convenience of online video meetings and my couples appreciate it too! We can still see each other, talk, and make connections! Although I do make sure my clients have time to talk and ask questions, I generally try to guide the conversation.

I move towards certain things I feel are really helpful to know as a couple looking for a wedding photographer. I want to get to know them as a person because I feel like that means way more to them. So I ask them how they are and listen! I thank them for taking the time out of their busy schedule to talk with me… because they are busy planning a wedding day! And, once I get them talking, I will have them share about how they met and their proposal.

I love hearing both!! Once they share that, a whole door has often opened up. They start sharing about the wedding day details and it allows me to get to know them and their vision, interests, and who they are. I think they really appreciate that. They often hop on thinking about the costs and pricing, and they have a list of questions ready to go. But I want all of that to go away so that we can get to know each other as people — and a couple excited to get married.

Honestly, I want them to know that I care, regardless of whether or not they book me. Being transparent about my work and the end product is really important to me. My timelines are very detailed. About this time, I will start to walk through my offerings with them. I offer one collection with upgrades albums, extra coverage, etc.

Photography speaks. When I discovered and later understood photographic visual language, I saw that this language could inform, educate and move audiences worldwide without the need for a shared spoken language. A successful photo story, when well-authored and edited, is universally understood.

I once presented a photo story in China in silence to a professional photography group where the audience smiled, laughed, and fell quiet in all the right places — without a word in Mandarin or English. After the last frame, we all just beamed at each other. It was so thrilling. I believe in light. Photography is light. I have been most honored to support and publish work by many of them.

I intend to continue nurturing, encouraging, supporting, cajoling, helping, counseling, appreciating, celebrating, and paying for professional photojournalism for as long as I am able. I believe in its power. I have been there, as a young photographer, and I understand that passion and drive — and now, as my career has taken me through so many levels and roles in our industry, I feel compelled to support and nurture those storytellers, to help them continue to produce important work and tell those stories, often uncomfortable ones, so that we can, sitting in the comfort of our homes, be made aware of the darker side of our world.

This art, this madness, this compulsion to convey a story we know as photojournalism will not die, storytelling will not die, it will change and evolve but it is human nature to want to learn, to be educated and to understand our world through narratives. I first became interested in photojournalism primarily out of an interest in history. One day, while studying the Industrial Revolution, I found myself very saddened by a photograph of a child in a factory.

I remember realizing in that moment that both the child and photographer were likely no longer alive and I became fascinated by how the photograph could make me so upset for the hard life of someone who lived so many decades before me. In a way both of them became almost immortal through the photograph and there was something very compelling about that.

A photograph is particularly powerful because it is accessible to most of humanity. There is no language barrier in photography. I pick stories and pursue the projects I do with the goal of documenting not only important issues of our time, but ones that will also be relevant or perhaps even more vital for our understanding of humanity in the future. Twenty years ago, I took a formative road trip across the Southwestern states with my sister and my best friend. She was studying literature at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and he was a film school graduate who was just beginning to take his experiments with a still camera more seriously.

We planned to cross the San Juan Skyway, then head West to Canyonlands and Monument Valley, looping through New Mexico and back across the Colorado border, but we ended up taking the circuitous route. I would stand next to my friend, and see what he saw. We came to see the world differently; not through some new point of view, but by giving in to our heightened sense of curiosity.

Two decades later, this is still the Holy Grail. The photographers I most admire go out into the world with a sense of wonder and freedom and, yes, arrogance, challenging our apathy, making us see it afresh, for better or worse. Today, I am as willing and eager as ever to wade through the endless repeated themes and subjects to find those rare works that provoke, challenge and thrill me through their brave and insightful perspectives, or their sheer visual sublime.

When I left Yemen in August , the place where I learned to photograph, build a story, and really love a community, I felt very lost. For over a year I tried to seek out a new base, a new story and group of people that had meaning to me, for something I felt connected to, without success.

By November I was asking myself that very question — why am I still trying to do this? I arrived in Iraq in November , looking for stories having nothing to do with Mosul, yet I felt with so many other journalists around, I needed to find meaning elsewhere. Living with this tight knit group, I began photographing our surroundings, the Iraqi medics whose job was so morbid, but who were so jovial in our downtime. By working side by side with them and photographing what we went through together, I was useful, needed, and passionate about something again: I felt the desire to photograph for the first time in over a year.

A favorite childhood memory is of my father driving us to a hobby store, purchasing a few packs of trading cards and me excitedly ripping them open to see what was inside. That same rush is what propels my belief in picture editing.

In a time when our global awareness is under siege by an increasingly insular perspective, the responsibility of empowering photographers whose mission is to not just capture but to investigate, to enlighten, to excite, is one of the great privileges of our time. Today there are more photographers producing more photographs and populating more platforms than have existed at any other point in our history.

With that ubiquity has come an evolution in our audiences, which are more sophisticated and demanding than ever. What a thrilling time then to be tasked with looking through the mainstream releases in the hope of unearthing something unique, something beautiful, something rare. Why is it important? Look at where we are right now. Everyday Africa recently had a big exhibition opening in Nairobi. It was wild, a full house. A lot of the contributing photographers came in from across the continent, and we all met for the first time.

You should have seen how the African photographers were treated — like celebrities! Is it odd to be a white American man saying all this?

We all have to care about this. Even if it can be difficult, at times, to work with photographers, I love to reveal them, to help them edit, to build, with them, a story. They are our eyes. They astonish us.