Category Archives: Commercial Photography

Mar 02 1 comments
Back Pain, Commercial Photography

Back Pain… Only a Memory

Injury and Recovery, Back Pain

After a lifetime of back pain, I am now starting my third year of life, pain-free. A little over two years ago, Dr. Doug Schottenstein, treated my chronic back pain with a facet block. The procedure is called radiofrequency (RF) rhizotomy and basically, he just disabled the nerves and the pain stopped almost overnight.

As a photographer, this was a lifetime of debilitating pain that was relentless and constantly affected my ability to work. Simply breathing could feel like a raw nerve being poked with an electrical cable and it got worse from there.  I worked in fear, always wondering when I would have my next episode of raw, knee buckling, back pain.

It’s gone now and I’ve nearly forgotten what it’s like, except for the occasional reminder of a twinge.

That’s okay. It’s humbling instead of debilitating.

Share and Enjoy:
  • Twitter
  • Digg
  • Facebook
  • Fark
Feb 09 2 comments
Commercial Photography, Commercial Photography, Food, Organic, Slow Food, Union Square, Vegetables

Greenmarket in the Studio # 11

A Rutabaga and a Pair of Diamond and Green Amethyst Earrings Set in Gold

My fruits and vegetables have taken on a new purpose as props for expensive jewelry. I love the earthy quality of root vegetables against the gloss and glow of gemstones set in precious metal. And in this case, I just love the word – rutabaga. I think Bugs Bunny used the word once in a football cheer.

What’s next? Now I’m looking for artisans with hand made jewelry. And maybe asparagus, but that’s out of season. What looks good with asparagus anyway? Tiaras?

Share and Enjoy:
  • Twitter
  • Digg
  • Facebook
  • Fark
Feb 02 0 comments
Business, Commercial Photography, Commercial Photography, Marketing

What Do You Sell?

Last Stop Coney Island

I don’t know if there are any formulas, books or websites for quitting, like there are for starting businesses. I didn’t see, “When to Quit Investing in Your Losing Business Venture,” on Amazon.  But I did a search for those words and what did I get? Mostly I found links to information on starting a business, finding or borrowing money, entrepreneur guides, articles on bootstrapping and little about quitting. It appears as if quitting isn’t a really popular topic.

There was one story.  It’s an April, 2009, BusinessWeek.com article called, When It’s Time to Shutter Your Business. In it, Joe Kennedy, author of The Small Business Owner’s Manual, says, “maybe it’s time when you’ve already unleashed your best products and ideas into the market and they did not work out well.” How can that apply to an industry where we essentially make customized solutions and not “products” as defined by a consumer market?

What would be our best products and ideas? Our last job? Our last good job?

It shouldn’t be a job at all. It should be ideas. The images we produce as examples of our skills, the ones that we exhibit on the web or via other promotional vehicles, to introduce potential buyers to our interests should go far beyond looking like a product we sell. They should represent ideas, motivation, our interests –  because what we create is so deeply personal, just showing samples is not enough to create interest in you. Shoot, shoot and shoot more until there’s a body of work that says, “I have ideas, good ideas.” It’s work, planning what you shoot and what you show and what you don’t show, but then a great body of work says volumes about who you are.

We don’t really sell photography, we sell trust, creativity, reliability, insight, and let’s not forget quality. If you’re not selling that, you’re just selling pictures. These days, you can get those anywhere.

“The general who wins the battle makes many calculations in his temple before the battle is fought. The general who loses makes but few calculations beforehand.”

Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Share and Enjoy:
  • Twitter
  • Digg
  • Facebook
  • Fark
Jan 07 1 comments
Commercial Photography, Commercial Photography, Greenmarket in the Studio, Organic, Personal Photography, Photography, Portfolio, Slow Food, Union Square, Vegetables

Greenmarket in the Studio #10

Onion Mirror

A vision evolving.

While in the process of this particular exploration I’m finding there is a lot of failure. Not failure in the sense of exposure or composition, but failure in concept and vision. And, there’s certainly no value in putting images into my book simply because I did it. Right now, I’m developing the concept of a dark series. The vision is evolving and this shot is more like what I need for the new series; it definitely feels like a sister image to the Steak photo that started it all, back in October.

Now the challenge is to find a thread that connects my next dark image to the first two.

Share and Enjoy:
  • Twitter
  • Digg
  • Facebook
  • Fark
Dec 31 0 comments
Commercial Photography, Commercial Photography, Greenmarket in the Studio, Organic, Photography, Slow Food, Union Square, Vegetables, slow food

Greenmarket in the Studio #9 (onward to 2010)

2:02PM, 12/28/2009 - Celebration Onion 2010

I bought a dozen onions and brought them into the studio for the usual shoot ‘em and eat ‘em routine. One by one I placed them on set and, one by one, little personalities revealed themselves. These are the year-end onions, the ones that aren’t in the best of shape, but are still worth eating. No longer are the stems green and bright, they’re brown and look more like the ones in the supermarket than the greenmarket, shipped from far away and weeks or months old.

Am I deluded? Onions? Little personalities? Four years of this and still thinking there are little people in there somewhere. Should I make a metaphorical reference to the year passing as layers of an onion and go cliché on everyone?

Too late.

I pay homage to 2009 with this celebration onion. I will cut into it with sharp abandon, and with tears in my eyes, throw the thin slices into a hot frying pan drizzled with sesame oil, sizzling and transforming itself into something sweet, fragrant and appealing. Oh, how 2010 should be so transformed from 2009.

Happy New Year.

Share and Enjoy:
  • Twitter
  • Digg
  • Facebook
  • Fark
Dec 08 1 comments
Bookbinding, Commercial Photography, Commercial Photography, Craftsmen, Marketing, Portfolio

Moab Paper Features D.A.Wagner Hand-Made Portfolio Case

Detail D.A.Wagner Portfolio

Detail - Slipcase and Top of Book. Click on photo above to see the whole story.

The folks over at Legion Paper, the parent company of Moab, took a liking to my hand-made portfolio and featured it on the Moab Facebook Fan page. Made with Ballistics cloth, Rayon and Japanese hand made fabric, the portfolio pages were printed on Moab Lasal Matte 235.

And, as nice as the detail photos look, the inside of the book is much prettier, it has my photography in it.

Share and Enjoy:
  • Twitter
  • Digg
  • Facebook
  • Fark
Nov 28 0 comments
Advertising, Commercial Photography, parody

A replacement for high cost of original, creative thinking

Fifty years ago,  Calvin Communications, a leading corporate industrial film producer of the 40s and 50s, created this short film as a spoof of their own corporate work. Using their regular actors, Calvin (whose clients included DuPont, Goodyear, General Mills and Westinghouse), would regularly produce parodies that were shown at company get togethers.

This film from the Prelinger Archives opens with a commentary that says, it is a groundbreaking replacement for the high cost of original, creative thinking. Some things never change.

(References here were from Wikipedia – yeah,yeah, I know, not the best references! – and Steve Hoffman Music Forums)

Share and Enjoy:
  • Twitter
  • Digg
  • Facebook
  • Fark
Oct 31 0 comments
Commercial Photography, Food, Greenmarket in the Studio, Organic, Portfolio, Slow Food, Union Square, Vegetables, slow food

Greenmarket in the Studio #6

Double, double toil and trouble; Fire, burn and caldron bubble.

Double, double toil and trouble; Fire, burn and caldron bubble.

A Chinese lady came up to me in the Union Square market last Monday morning, pointed down and asked, in broken English, how much? I don’t have a clue what gave her the idea I worked at this particular kiosk at the market, but it gave me pause to look down at a group of pumpkins with long, wild stems, as if they had been torn off the vine instead of cut. No prices.

Now, I wanted to know, too. How much? They were two bucks apiece. I took the three most interesting stems (almost more important than the pumpkins themselves) and bagged them so the stems didn’t break on the way back to the studio. Then, I stopped and told the lady how much they were, but she looked at me in a funny kind of way – I don’t think she understood me or, maybe she’d already gotten over her pumpkin jones.

Vicki says these pumpkins remind her of Shakespeare’s witches in Macbeth.

A dark Cave. In the middle, a Caldron boiling. Thunder. (Shakespeare)

Happy Halloween. (Not Shakespeare )

Share and Enjoy:
  • Twitter
  • Digg
  • Facebook
  • Fark
Oct 23 0 comments
Commercial Photography, Commercial Photography, Greenmarket in the Studio, NYC, Organic, Portfolio, Slow Food, Union Square, Vegetables, slow food

Greenmarket in the Studio #5

Sweeping Leaves, Mustard Greens

Sweeping Leaves, Mustard Greens

Now that I’m moving onto this dark thing…

Black backgrounds are so completely different to shoot on. The black just wraps itself around the subject matter. Where white is wholesome, clean, crisp and elegant, and never loses my subject, black is erotic, deep, surrounding and foreboding (but not in a creepy kind of way), and can swallow my subject like a black hole.

Recently a friend asked if I was tired of shooting vegetables and the market. No, not really. It’s challenging to find the interesting and unusual in the familiar; it’s not always easy. And what I find fascinating is, there is a front and a back to these studio subjects that I am sure is not intentional, but purely by coincidence. The most involvement I have on set is getting the produce to stand up. With very few exceptions (like Green Market in the Studio #4), I don’t style. If a stem is broken or a leaf torn or eaten by a passing insect, I don’t retouch it. It’s about real food, just as I bought it. The only difference is, I shoot it before I eat it.

If you like arugula, broccoli rabe and bitter greens, you’ll love this very simple recipe for wilted mustard greens.

Wilted Mustard Greens

1 bunch of mustard greens (about a pound or a 2″ circumference of stalks when tied with a rubber band – that’s about what I had)

2 cloves of garlic pushed through a press

3 or 4 tablespoons of dashi (at about 1:5 dashi to water) or vegetable or chicken broth

1 tablespoon of olive oil

1 tablespoon of sesame oil

Okay, here’s how: Tear off the leaves from the stems and thick veins (and discard those guys)  and wash and dry them as you would lettuce. In a large frying pan or sauté pan heat up the olive oil on a medium/high heat and add the garlic and brown (about a minute). Add the dashi or broth to the pan and add the greens, tossing gently for about a minute or so (not much more, or you find it’s cooked down to nothing). Remove from the burner, drizzle on the sesame oil, add salt and pepper to taste and toss. Put it on a nice plate and eat. Serves 2 to 4, depending upon how much you love your greens.

And don’t forget to share.

Share and Enjoy:
  • Twitter
  • Digg
  • Facebook
  • Fark
Oct 18 6 comments
Brain, Commercial Photography, Commercial Photography, Photography

FIRE! No, wait. MEAT!? Or is that, NAILS!? WOOD?

Grilled Steak on Stakes

Grilled Steak on Stakes

Addendum – October 27, 2009 – Calumet Photo selected this image as a Photo of the Week. Nice start.

I built a patio over the summer with Vicki. With the help of Tim and a neighborhood kid, we moved the six thousand pounds of sand, gravel and pavers by hand that had been dropped on the front sidewalk by the delivery guys, to the garden about 50 feet away. Over the next 4 weeks the two of us tilled, excavated, leveled, filled the hole with gravel and sand and laid stones until we had a lovely, small patio in the middle of our (Vicki’s really) garden. No war stories. No injuries. A perfect execution by a couple of DIYers.

What’s this got to do with the photo?

It’s the nails, or stakes as they call ‘em, that were used to hold the stones in place. They’re huge. They’re more than twelve inches long and a quarter inch thick with a rough, galvanized finish on them and every time I drove a stake into the ground, they grew more beautiful and interesting. When we completed the project, I went out and purchased a dozen of the stakes and they sat in a red bucket on the floor of the hallway for weeks until the idea came: steaks on stakes. I yanked apart the palettes the pavers came on and let the large, four inch, wood blocks sit in the weather for a month. Now I had the stakes, the wood for a fire and an idea. The idea progressed along, during the move and while making phone calls and sending mailers, until it came to fruition last Thursday, when it all ended up in front of the camera. It came together quickly; it’s what happens when my neurotransmitters slam those molecules into their receptor sites and then I spend a few nights sleeping on the idea. My axons and dendrites get all excited, and then with a steak from Pedro the butcher (with the patience of a saint) at Los Paisanos around the corner, it all began.

Wood. Stakes. Steak. Fire. Boy, that was fun.

I have so much of my new work on white, it’s time to start a black series. This is number one.

Share and Enjoy:
  • Twitter
  • Digg
  • Facebook
  • Fark