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.

11:43AM, 2/3/2010 - Late Season Winesap Apple with Dead Leaf

The leaf is dead, but the apple lives on.

I find it amazing that apples keep for so many months after harvest. According to AskMen.com (a web site for kitchen challenged men, among other things), “if stored in a cool, dry area (the basement and the fridge drawer are always good picks), apples can last anywhere between 3 to 6 months.”

Honey has an indefinite shelf life. Supposedly in Egypt in 1800, some archeologists found a pot of honey and, when opened, found it tasted just fine. (Both died later from the curse of Tutankhamen. >I’m making that part up<).

Sliced turkey, on the other hand, gets slimy in a few days.

Go Figure.

Detail of Heat Sink, Lighting Services' LumeLEX 2024 - Winner, Next Generation Luminaires Design Competition

Just a few weeks ago, a U.S. Department of Energy panel of 14 judges from the architectural community handed out one of their coveted Next Generation Luminaires Design Competition Awards for Excellence in Lighting Design and Application to my long-time client, Lighting Services, Inc., for their architecturally beautiful, modular, and very green, LED spotlight.

As a privately held company, LSI never sits on their laurels – they’re always up against the big boys. I can relate to that. LSI’s fixtures hang in museums and institutions all over the world and this is just one of the many awards they have won. They are always developing new designs and incorporating new technologies, while practicing sustainability. They are serious about protecting our environment and work hard at it.

I’m proud to have LSI as a long time client, trusting me to photograph their products.

Now, if only I can figure out how NYC recycling works.

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?

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

The Fun of Being Thoughtful.

No kidding, that’s the name of this “educational” film that is part of the Internet Archives (a fun site to visit for ephemeral films) Ernest M. Ligon, Ph.D, author of The Psychology of Christian Personality (published 1938) was the educational collaborator. This short film from 1950 is about the Proctors, a family that seems to be on Prozac, or maybe that’s Xanax. Scary, this one is.

It demonstrates how the perfect family behaves, thoughtfully (oh, gag me now). They have no real emotional stress. Problems are resolved with a double date (more like cheating on the girlfriend and supported by the sister) and talking to dad and mom about sensitive issues. They’ve got to be kidding. This genre of films were shown right through the early 70s in high schools, until someone got smart and realized, Zombies!

I try to be thoughtful, but not as dramatically moody as Eddie, when I make cold calls to people I hardly know (sorry to all the art buyers). Behavior like this today would be considered psychopathic and the Proctor family may go berserk at any moment with their repressed anger.

12/14/09, 10:14AM Union Square Market - Where's the Purple Broccoli?

Where’s the purple broccoli?

I make my marketing message as clear as possible because I want the attention of the smart, little shops with brilliant creatives who fly under the radar, as well as the equally brilliant big boys. I’d certainly lose the interest of those I wish to work for if I sent out a constant stream of mixed messages. Not an easy task in a competitive industry as this, but probably one of the most important lessons we can learn and a word we know all to well. Focus.

If you want to find your audience, keep your message consistent, your work focused and your vision clear.

Petey. If the studio had a mascot, it would be Petey.

There is a chunk of nearly every day dedicated to writing, reading and exploring. When I launched this blog last July, it felt like a chore to keep up all my marketing efforts. Twitter. Facebook. The blog, and all the other places I’m active. Now, what it’s become is a morning routine. This isn’t a bad thing. I’ve read various articles and postings on the value of social media, and I can’t say that it’s brought me work, but what I can say is, it’s brought me discipline. It keeps me current with the rapidly changing face of commercial photography and offers up opportunities, if I choose to take them on. The web is a level playing field and that’s what I have loved about it since I built my first website in 1995.

This week, The Photo Argus featured D.A.Wagner photography and a D.A.Wagner Photoshop tutorial, both a direct outgrowth of my social medial efforts. Social media works. just not the way I had imagined it would.

It just keeps coming together.

Petey, here, seems to have a different opinion. But I beg to differ.

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.

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.