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Festival of Lights 2010

It took two attempts to get in, but we made it to the Charleston Holiday Festival of Lights at James Island County Park this evening. As usual, we listened to classic holiday music while driving though the park checking out the grand light displays. Nothing has changed about it in the six Christmases I’ve spent here in Charleston, but it’s always a fun time with the kids and it really makes the season feel complete.

Here’s a piece of the giant sand sculpture for this year, which was an underwater theme.

The line to get in earlier this evening was so long that we left and went to my brother-in-law’s home and hung out for an hour or so to wait out the crowd. The second time was a charm and we got to enjoy hot chocolate and roasted marshmallows.

The picture up top was just hand-held with no flash. I have a similar shot here that utilized a wireless flash being held by my daughter, but I lost the whole background with it (and I had it dialed down to 1/100th power). Sometimes the blurry shot captures the feel much better anyway. The second and third shots were taken with the camera held out of the sunroof in our mini-van. The sand sculpture was shot using the railing around the sculpture to steady the camera. The last shot of my son chowing down on a marshmallow was made with a wireless flash held in my left hand pretty much right over the fire pit – I had to be quick on that one!

Turn Up The Volume

As we approach the coming Christmas holiday, we rapidly run right into the new year almost as an afterthought. It usually feels like the wrap-up party of the holiday season. I’m taking this time between now and the day the ball drops as a time to focus on reinventing myself. I have nothing scheduled as of yet for 2011, but I plan on doing just that as soon as possible. If I’m going to keep myself sane I need to obey the voices that are not only in my head, but also coming from the people who really know and are close to me.

So, the biggest thing early on will be to increase my volume of artistic photographic work. I will begin with defined personal projects. I will also invite and include anyone who wants to join or help me on these as they will be huge learning experiences. I want to network myself to find good contacts who are photographers, make-up artists, models, designers, agents – anybody in the business that is working for the love of the art.

In order to facilitate that, I will need to hire people for my other business to lighten my own personal load as well as grow it and support its growing customer base. It’s no longer a passing thought that I will get to at some point – it is a need that must be fulfilled in 2011. I don’t need to talk about the details of that here because it isn’t within the scope of this blog, but it’s something that will help my artistic work in the long run, so it must be addressed.

Finally, I am determined to open my own creative doors to photographic assignments by the year’s end. What I mean is I want to get hired to do something really cool. I want my personal projects to be a foundation for other work – work that an art director will sit down and say, “We want to achieve this and you’re the person who can deliver it”. Once that starts to happen, I can use all of the skills I’ve acquired through my diverse lifetime of creativity and technical skill and do work that is meaningful to me (and hopefully to others as well).

That’s it in a nutshell. Now I’ve got a business plan to revise and another one to create. 2011 is going to be the best year ever!

Lucky Man

The more I read photography and gadget blogs to keep up with the latest technology, the more I dream about the ultimate rig of camera bodies and lenses, or the most eclectic lighting system, or how I would load up a computer to do the things I do at breakneck speeds. I admire how far we advance technologically with each passing year and pine over the newest of the shiniest electronics. Who hasn’t wondered what a 65″ TV that’s less than an inch thick would look like over their fireplace?

I often will price out the ultimate photography setup – from lighting modifiers down to the fastest glass money can buy. The number isn’t pretty either, so I usually end up pricing out the budget versions of the same equipment just to see what it would cost. I know I will eventually move to a full frame camera and get the Nikon 70-200 F/2.8 VR II as well as the 24-70mm f/2.8. In fact Adorama has a great kit of a D700 with those two lenses, but I just can’t justify that price (yet).

For now, I’m more than happy to use the tools that I’ve got. In fact, I’ve played with a 70-200 f/2.8 and compared the shots with my much more affordable 55-300mm f/4.5-5.6G and the results are identical when shooting with adequate light. My Tamron 17-50mm f/2.8 is the DX equivalent to the 24-70mm, and it performs perfectly well. Ever since I got that lens it’s been the one that stays on my camera the most – it’s a versatile workhorse. Sure I’d like a 50mm f/1.4 AFS lens, but my classic Nikon 50mm f/1.8 that my wife bought me for Christmas a couple of years ago works like a champ. I could go on an on – don’t even get me started about lighting gear!

The point is that I really want this stuff but I don’t really need it. I’ve never found myself thinking that I couldn’t create something because my equipment wasn’t the top of the line stuff. Prestige is a very slick thing. It makes you desire the stuff you think you need, but you really only desire it because of it’s forbidding price or scarcity. Sure that full frame camera that shoots clean files at ISO 6400 coupled with that fast zoom lens that lets in a whole stop of light more will let you get shots you just can’t get with the cheap stuff, but the masters of years before got the job done with much less gear and relied on their skills to make things happen – not their wallets.

This all comes down to a simple fact about life. If you’re in a position where the things you dream about are not critical to your survival, then you are in a really good place. My mind goes back to our most recent event at the children’s hospital. I asked a mother if she would like to get her picture taken with her child and she said, “I don’t know if I can – it’s been a really rough week”. Well, little did I know at the time that her precious child had been diagnosed with the big C just four days earlier. This was all fresh to her and here she was, trying to cope and be strong for a child who was still all smiles and as sweet as can be, wishing that she could have a healthy child again. That’s a dream worth pining over. It’s moments like that that make me realize that I’m a lucky man ’cause I just don’t need what I want.

Help-Portrait 12/16/2010 Event

Yesterday the Help-Portrait group that I started that is serving the MUSC Children’s Hospital held it’s second event of the holiday season (we did two because we could). This time it was a whole new group of photogs who volunteered for the event – Eugene Mah (who also has shared a set of photos from the event on his site), Kristi Heupel, Drew Anderson, and my lovely wife Amy Nienstedt joined my big bald self in taking shots of the awesome kids, families, nurses, and staff members at MUSC.

Everything started smoothly, we had a brief scare when they tested the fire alarm (last week we had to endure an actual alarm that was pretty frightening), but we were able to get set up quickly and started shooting right away. The biggest scare was when I forgot to instruct one adorable little girl to stay on the panel board floor I had put down on the white seamless backdrop. The poor thing walked right into the seamless paper and nearly brought the whole thing down on herself! Luckily we were able to swiftly get her out of there and we patched things up quickly – another reason why having a group of photogs on hand is great! Other than that things went very smoothly – we learned from last week’s event and brought more laptops so we could wrap up the editing and delivery of the photos much more efficiently. We also had the wherewithal to grab some shots of ourselves as well as the staff at the Children’s Hospital, who are an awesome group of people who give their hearts to these kids every single day.

I don’t need to go into too much about how this makes me feel, you can read this post about it, but I just wanted to say that we’re all here now on this planet together and no matter what cards life has handed you, we all need to look at the gifts we have and celebrate them.

Jackson, Giving, & Jordan’s Socks

I was having a conversation about dogs with a client of mine and I started to show her some pictures of my furry friends when I stumbled on this shot of my dog Jackson. Poor Jackson has been robbed of his daily walks because I’ve been trying to rest my back for the past week (he has a habit of suddenly jerking me in the wrong direction every time a truck or squirrel goes by). This picture made me sad because I know how much Jackson loves to be outside, especially when we go for a walk through my neighborhood. Don’t worry buddy, we’ll be out walking before you know it.

I was listening to my favorite radio show while driving between jobs and a guy called in and told the host that he was having a hard time coping with the loss of his daughter who died during a bone marrow transplant shortly after she had beaten cancer. He said the only thing he could remember about his child was how she had to suffer and then die – he couldn’t remember anything about her before she was sick. I can’t even imagine that kind of pain. It makes my back pain seem quite trivial. Tomorrow, I will be heading back over to the children’s hospital again to take portraits of the kids and their families that are stuck there during this holiday season. The older I get, the less I care about getting and the more I care about giving. Whatever I can do to make these kids and their families lives a little brighter is a million times better than getting the latest gadget or the shiniest hunk of a meaningless product. That random doohickey you get will be outdated and you will probably forget when, where, or why you got it. The look on the mother’s face when I showed her the shots of her little boy playing up to the camera and looking like he could be anywhere but in a hospital, like he was just being a regular healthy kid waiting for Santa to arrive, will be with me forever.

It amazes me when I think of what one of my daughter’s softball teammates, Jordan, has done this holiday season. She started her own charity called “Warm Feet Happy Hearts” and collected 3,640 pairs of socks and distributed them this past weekend at the Convoy of Hope to kids in need. When I was 11 years old, all I cared about was what time GI Joe was on in the morning! There is nothing you can give that kid that will match what she has done for others (but you can donate a package of socks which she is still collecting). Her heart grew with each pair of socks she handed out on Saturday, and she’s shown the kind of leadership and gumption that presidents are made of. It’s truly inspiring how an idea can grow into a movement, even in the hands of a young child. Thank you Jordan for your inspiration! Check out the photos of the event on their Facebook page.

Cellphone Inspiration

Saturday night my wife and I were driving home from a Christmas party and as we crossed over the Ravenell Bridge the fog was engulfing the tops of the suspension towers and they looked downright mystical. I was armed only with my iPhone for the evening, but that’s never stopped me before. The idea of iPhonography (or any cell phone with a camera and the ability to edit photos directly on it) is to exploit the scene using the strengths and weaknesses of the cameraphone to your advantage. If I had my NIkon with a tripod and remote shutter release I would have taken a more traditional long exposure of this scene. Because I was sitting in the passenger seat of a minivan and only had my iPhone, I attacked it with a much different style.

I knew the resolution and low light capabilities were going to be less than ideal, so this is an instance where I need to embrace the onslaught of digital noise. I wanted the suspension wires to come at me like laser beams while still fitting the first tower into the frame. I tilted the camera sideways and shot through the windshield. The light from the lamp posts reflected unpredictably in the dirt on the windshield, but I think it adds a bit of excitement and unpredictable movement to the shot. The fog is better defined towards the back tower, and the green tint from the lights are contrasted sharply by the brake lights of the car in front of us. All of these elements came together in a matter of seconds in my head and then in my hand.

After I “tapped” the shot, I used an app called Camera+ to brighten and saturate it a bit, and then applied the cool frayed border that I feel accentuates the grittiness of the shot. I did this before we made it to the entrance of i26. Within minutes, I was uploading it to Flickr. This is the kind of creativity that just wasn’t possible a few short years ago. I’m not saying that it is necessarily better than what could be done if you take your time and use “the right” equipment to capture this scene, but it is something different and new. It’s a sign of the times – many of us have this ability nowadays and it can be used as a way to quickly express ourselves with little room to second guess our intentions. For me, iPhonography is raw, bold, and beautiful.

Party On!

It’s that time of year again when every minute of my day is filled with stuff to do, and luckily a good portion of it is fun. This weekend we had a lot of partying to take care of, and the most important one was my son Kegan’s 7th birthday party.

Despite the rainy weather which meant no go-carts or bumper-boats, the kids had a lot of fun playing video games and winning prizes in the arcade as well as the usual pizza, cake, & ice cream goodness.

I’ve got a whole set of party pics here on my Flickr stream.

Only a couple of weeks until Christmas, and they will be just as busy. Don’t forget that we’re doing the second Help-Portrait MUSC Kids event this Thursday from 2-4PM!

What I Want For Christmas…

This morning I had a very meaningful conversation with my wife. The last time I had a conversation with her like this was over five years ago. Shortly after that conversation, I started Charleston Tech Support. This time, Amy is convincing me to go pro already with my photography and to stop pussy-footing around with my many excuses. This morning I told her that I still needed more experience. She of course said the magic words, “You will always be striving to be better, that will never stop”. She’s right.

I told her that I still feel like I’m developing my own style. I want to have my own voice. I want people to look at a photo I made and say, “That looks like a Nienstedt shot”. I want to find that unique signature that makes me me. The reality is that it’s already there. We all have our own unique voice buried in our soul. The trick is to trim down the distractions that are obscuring it. This involves peeling back the layers of your subconscious mind and listening to what your voice is saying.

Day 319 - Modest Mouse at the Music Farm

So I’ve been listening to my inner voice real hard and it’s been telling me a couple of things. The first is that I love shooting people now more than ever. I recently wrote an article about it, because it intimidated me at first. Now, I find it absolutely inspiring. Making a photo is one thing, but making a human connection is, to me, a much bigger thing. The other thing my voice is telling me is that I love music. Actually, it shouts that one pretty loudly.

Less Than Jake At The Music Farm 6.11.2010

So, after doing the math, it is obvious that my voice wants me to shoot creative people. I love to write about creativity. I love to create. I love the process. I love the feeling of that moment of zen when you get into the zone of creation. I also like to connect with creatives. With that said, my vision for my work is based on capturing creativity.

My signature is still a bit harder to define – that comes with the maturing of my technique. I realize that if I pursue my vision, the signature will define itself as long as I don’t consciously take on the styles of the artists that I admire. That’s a tough thing to avoid because we take in so much unconsciously that it’s hard not to mimic something that your mind has absorbed from all of your creative inputs.

I can no longer put off my aspirations because I don’t feel like I’ve established myself enough yet. That’s just silly. Going back to what Amy said about never being satisfied, I don’t know if I’ll ever be comfortable with whatever style I’m embracing at the moment – it will always morph into something else. The second record I put out with my band back in the day sounded nothing like the first record. In music, people are less forgiving of that kind of change, which is why so many bands suffer from the “sophomore slump” and probably why it was somewhat easy for me to walk away from it all. I wasn’t feeling what people expected from my band anymore. On the other hand, with photography and fine art, I think people expect you to grow artistically.

The photos I’m sharing with you are some of my favorite shots I’ve made at some of the shows that I’ve attended in recent years. Up at the top is Bryan from the Bouncing Souls, followed by Isaac Brock of Modest Mouse, Buddy from the punk-ska band Less Than Jake, an overhead shot of the Gaslight Anthem with a focus on their set list, a close-up of Robert Randolph, and below is a shot of the band Weston. These are a good representation of where I’ve been within regards to shooting music, but I want to expand on it more. I think these all capture a specific moment during their performances, and I want to further define those. I need to put myself into position to capture that moment when an artist and/or their fans enter that zen state and is completely one with creativity.

So, what do I want for Christmas this year? I want to put it out there that I want to creatively capture creativity. I want everyone who’s reading this to pass it on to someone who might be able to facilitate that need. If you’re a musician, or a painter, a dancer, a chef, an actor, a writer, a comedian, or if you know somebody who creates anything, then I want to capture it. I want to be hired to document the moment that something is made and the people involved in making it. If you know art directors, agents, designers, or anybody who is looking for photographic services please point them to this blog. I’m very serious about this and will not sit around just waiting for someone to hand me an assignment, but I believe in the power of putting yourself and your goals out there. Not in a “The Secret” type of mystical way, but in a spread the word enough so that the right person will hear it type of way.

Thanks for reading this – I’ve been trying really hard to define where I am on this journey for a long time. I have written about going pro recently, and the more I explore it here on this blog and with my camera, the clearer the map to my next destination becomes.

Thoughts On Today’s Help-Portrait Event

Before I start, I just want to credit the photographers who took the pictures in the diptych above. John Lindroth took the photo on the left of Krista Leapold, myself, and Kathy Hare, and Kathy Hare took the photo of me on the right. John, Kathy, & Krista all joined me to photograph children and their families at the MUSC Children’s Hospital this morning.

I have to go ahead and say that we had an absolute blast doing this today. In fact, it was a major highlight of my journey behind the lens so far. The families were genuinely grateful and excited to get their pictures taken. The looks of joy on the kid’s faces was worth more than anything tangible in this world. I wish I could share some of the pictures that Kathy & John took of the kids checking out their photos on the back of my camera’s LCD screen. Their joy was matched only by the joy in my own face as I looked at their reactions. I felt like a parent on Christmas morning watching his children open up their gifts. But the pictures we made today are for the people we photographed and are not mine to show, so I can only share my words with you.

To be able to share our passion for photography and creativity with people like those that we served today is why most of us ever decide to make photographs. We want people to share in a moment of time that we stopped forever because it meant something to us at that point. Little gifts like this will hopefully make the experiences these children are enduring filled with enough highlights that their passion for life will burn stronger than the illness that put them there.

Unlike the other local Help-Portrait group that is serving the Charleston Convoy of Hope on December 11th, we did not serve hundreds of people today (they did an amazing job last year and are estimating over 1,000 subjects at this years event). This gave us the opportunity to not only create professional portraits, but also take candid editorial style photos of the kids during the event. We were lucky to photograph every kid that was not confined to their rooms, which was amazing. They each got a CD filled with the pictures we made, and the hospital also got a DVD of all of the pictures we took so they can use them any way they want to.

I shared a bunch of pictures in yesterday’s post that are similar to what I was doing today, so because Krista was helping out today I present a picture I took of her being her bright and cheery self. Thanks for reading!

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