Archive for the ‘ Life as a Photographer ’ Category
For future posts to this blog, go to www.jonhillenbrand.com[ READ MORE ]
You know that feeling when you look at older technology and marvel at the intricacies of their jeweled engineering? I have named this feeling technostalgia. Today, I was playing with a very old lens, an 85mm f/2 AI-S Nikkor lens which has no motors, no chips, no auto-focus, no communication with the camera, nothing. But what [ READ MORE ]
Funny how things work in the Corporate World. After 5 years of being blocked, Flickr was recently freed from the shackles of Big Brother’s proxy at my work. All it took was a single phone call from someone obviously much more important than I. Now, instead of having to bring images home on a jumpdrive and [ READ MORE ]
I had to shoot an annual meeting for a women’s group the other day. The client wasn’t asking for anything special, just some images to put on a newsletter, in a website or wherever they could find space. So I took the requisite pairings and crowd shots but then later concentrated on the very pretty country [ READ MORE ]
The red door dustily banged open temporarily scrubbing the dirty grout of the men’s conversation. She paused there in the opening, a sudden wind taking its cue to wrap around her silken form the particles of the failing daylight. Her swollen pout threw daggers at the men, her final words a commandment, a gale force whisper. The men [ READ MORE ]
Some of you will simply not be with me during this post. But today I was talking to a friend of mine on the phone and she mentioned that she was going into a Costco to buy some food in good ol’ American portions. So I excitedly asked her to look and see if they [ READ MORE ]
Maybe it was the lateness of the hour, but at the end of the work day today, the cleaning woman showed up and started speaking with such prophetic wisdom that I found myself listening intently to every sentence in her half-Haitian-half-English tongue. She’s just like an oracle in the old Greek style. She almost never [ READ MORE ]
The BBC, inspired by such films as Baraka, has brought a revolution to mainstream documentary filmmaking, specifically Planet Earth and now Life. Many of the mind-blowing shots are done on location, but several would be impossible to do out in the randomness of the great outdoors. The below behind-the-scenes video demonstrates what it takes (and how [ READ MORE ]
I’m giving a new look to my blog. The photos will be larger, EXIF data like shutter speed, f/stop, ISO and camera type will be posted in the left column and links to other blog entries are now at the bottom of each page. Background and text colors of the blog will change depending on the color [ READ MORE ]
Absolutes of ideology are succulent butter to people who are in the checklist stage of preparing to sail with Greenpeace, pasting enlarged dead baby photos to poster boards, annoying their coworkers into voting for someone or screaming about the dangers of running with scissors. Pretendindians scream about the persecution of their ancestral 16th cousin, twice removed, feeling the [ READ MORE ]
Tonight I had dinner with someone who asked me about having a backup plan if the whole photography thing didn’t work out. I thought for a while and responded that most of my career has been spent in the less-affluent side of things due to the fact that I never wanted to “sell out” and [ READ MORE ]
Morality is a giant flock of birds, every one joining and leaving as necessary to fulfill their immediate ambitions, the overall shape and direction coming from the collective emergence of the many. There are those who would enliven the flock and those who would laugh at its destruction. Today I flow on my own, straggling [ READ MORE ]
Tonight as my sister, niece and I looked out from the roof-top deck at the rising dusk, my niece said, “Good morning, night.” Even though she is three, I am inspired by her sideways approach to everyday things. One day, after I sang the phrase, “too many monkeys,” during a long walk, we transformed the [ READ MORE ]
A good photo is knowing where to stand. – Ansel Adams As someone who is often asked for advice on photography, I usually tuck this quote in right after giving an overview of the bucket analogy, three-point lighting and the two-thirds rule. To me, it all comes down to this: knowing where to stand. Today, I thought of that [ READ MORE ]
I shot Billy Corgan for a benefit concert the other night. Though he was donating his time, he made a few comments to the crowd which reminded me that contempt for the audience is not always made up for by expert guitar picking. This reminded me of the axiom, “Remember Your Audience.” Film school was [ READ MORE ]
Today during a studio shoot, I had an interesting interchange with an older woman who volunteered to be a model for a set of ads we are putting together for the launch of a new wing to a hospital: SUBJECT: “I own my own ad agency, so I know all about photos. And if there are [ READ MORE ]
Or are we merely the beneficiaries and victims of Existence, depending on the flap of the butterfly’s wings? Things happen. Shit happens. Life happens. Ups and downs and gutters and strikes. Why do things happen? Who knows why the vibrations among the atoms of the universe gang up on us or choose to shower us with [ READ MORE ]
I’m glad I’m not a writer, in the professional sense. Sure, I take photos, and sure, some people might think I’m putting myself out there with my “vision of the world”, but for me, my vision(s) of the world are literally snapshots in time, not labored over, heavily edited presentations of my most deep and [ READ MORE ]
Getting my car washed is one of the larger joys in my life. Now that I am just two or less payments away from full ownership of my car, I strangely find myself wanting to trade. Maybe it’s because of a few possible large expenses coming up, but maybe it’s because the grass is always [ READ MORE ]
Lesson for all budding photographers out there: BE ORGANIZED. I may have a messy apartment, and maybe my desk is a little disheveled, but take a look at any part of my computer or the digital asset databases that I have domain over and you will see that they are as clean as a fresh [ READ MORE ]
Look at this… There’s creativity, and then there’s blow your mind creativity. As a photographer among many accountants, I’m often labeled as an artist at my admitedly very corporate job. And sometimes that feels good because I want to be someone different from the regular pack animal. I’d prefer to be the black sheep if [ READ MORE ]
So have you ever felt like it was Friday when it was only Wednesday? Or did you ever think the week must almost be over, but it’s only Tuesday? It’s like our mental clocks are just getting back from vacation with a tan and stories while you’ve been slaving away at the data entry. That [ READ MORE ]
“How can you prove whether at this moment we are sleeping, and all our thoughts are a dream; or whether we are awake, and talking to one another in the waking state?” -Plato, 428 – 348 BC I was told by my father once that if you write down your dreams immediately after waking [ READ MORE ]
Here’s what I did today. Got up and went to work Went to a meeting Shot a headshot for a doc Went to a Christmas lunch Went home and spent a few hours watching CommunityChannel Productive. I love how when you are talking in a big group at a big table, and the conversation is [ READ MORE ]
Sometimes after a long 12 hour day when I haven’t had a chance to eat lunch or breakfast, and the valet at the restaurant I was just shooting photos at asked me impolitely to move my car because I was parked “illegally”, in his words, in his precious parking lot, and afterwards the person in [ READ MORE ]
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