The first interview of Dave Ward Photography

My photographer friend Alisha has to interview a few photographers as part of her photography courses, and she asked me to be an interview subject. I accepted, so here is the first interview of Dave Ward Photography. 1. Do you have any formal training? No, but I'm not untrained. When I was about 8 years old my father, who had been doing photography since the late 1950s, took me into his darkroom and taught me how to develop b&w film and then make prints from the negatives. I learned the joys of Dektol D-76 and watching the image appear under the red light, and I learned the not-as-joyful experience of winding exposed film into the developing wheel in pitch black darkness. My eye for photography was developed during years and years of art training in school. I never took photography very seriously when I was younger, and instead did a lot of drawing, eventually becoming a newspaper illustrator in the early-90s. The art classes in high school and college taught me how to "see" a good image, and how to work with composition, tones, etc. The principals of visual art are the same in all fields, so when I got back into photography in the early-2000s (and finially took it seriously) those skills were already in place. 2. What part of your job do you consider dull or repetitious? Shooting is never boring. But processing photos (I work all-digital now) can be very tiresome. While it's exciting watching the image "bloom" in the chemical dray in a dark room, it's usually not as exciting tweaking every setting while developing RAW into 16-bit Photoshop files, or while doing tone mapping for HDR work. The developing & post-production phases in digital photography are far more controlled and precise than in analog (film) photography, but the gain in control is balanced by the fact that it's less exciting and less "magical." 3. What would you say is the most important step in developing or refreshing your creative thinking? First: Right from the start, learn how to be inspired and excited. In my experience, developing your "eye" makes this easy. Once you learn to see the beauty that others walk right past and take for granted, you'll find inspiration and creative stimuli everywhere. I remember walking through Whatcom Falls Park with somebody and being stunned by the leaves overhead; the sun was shining above, so looking up at the leaves you saw this luminous green glow coming through them. It was just stunningly beautiful. I tried to show the other person, but the response was completely blasé. I felt a little sad realizing that most people don't have a developed eye and can't see everyday beauty like that. Second: In the book Shambhala Chögyam Trungpa writes about a phenomenon called "the coccoon." People like to stay in the places, pattern and mindsets they are familiar with. The familiar feels safe, so we surround ourself with familiar, comfortable things, creating a "coccoon" that we feel safe in. It feels cozy, so it's easy to think of it as a good, nice thing. But you have to break out of the coccoon if you want to be a mature and beautiful butterfly. Trungpa was writing about personal psychological growth, but this applies perfectly to creativity as well. You have to deliberately CHOOSE to get out of your little ruts in life, whether it's going grocery shopping somewhere you don't usually go, cooking a new recipe you haven't tried, or simply taking a different route to work. Next time you're driving or walking and pass a street, ask yourself "Have I ever been down that street?" and if you haven't, turn down it. Even the tiniest little adventure can refresh your thinking and recharge your creative batteries. 4. What does Photography mean to you? Whether it's drawing or music or photography or writing, I approach all arts authentically: I create for myself, and hope that it will also appeal to others. So photography is my expressive and creative outlet, even when I'm doing simple commercial shots. When I was in school, drawing -- pencil, pen and ink, Prismacolor pencils, even airbrush -- was my creative outlet. I also was writing and recording music a lot at the time as a second outlet. But in the early 90s my energy started declining, and drawing became to much work and too time-consuming. The music, too, went on the back-burner. I gave up drawing in the mid-90s, and only occasionally draw since then. For years in the late-90s I had no creative outlet. I became very frustrated for years. Then in the early 2000s I got my first digital camera. For the first few years I just took personal "life documenting" photos like everybody else. But in 2003 I started paying more attention to composition and treating photography more like an art, and I started expressing myself creatively with photos. In the fall of 2004 I found the upstart website flickr.com and quickly got deeply involved in the photography community there. That was when I truly started pursuing photography. The creative outlet I had once had in drawing was finally replaced. 5. What are the biggest professional challenges you face? I have full-blown Attention Deficit Disorder, which is a lot more serious and challenging than most people can imagine. My own self-confidence is also not especially strong. So I'm practically crippled in terms of both self-promotion/advertising, and in terms of the business acumen which is absolutely necessary for a successful career as an independent photographer. I the last year I have come to realize and accept that I will be a failure in photography (at least in terms of a career) unless and until I find a business partner who will do the promotion and handle the business aspect -- organizing and planning, tracking expenses, etc. 6. How do you go about promoting your work? As I mentioned, I'm practically incapable of real self-promotion. I'm too terrified to submit my art for inclusion in a show or display in any gallery -- or even in a coffee shop. Instead I post all of my finished photos online on flickr.com, and also cross-post the best ones under my facebook and myspace accounts. I do have a website, daveward.net, and recently redesigned the entire site. I do have business cards, and the footer of all my emails and online communications includes the name "Dave Ward Photography" and the address of my web page. Unfortunately, that is the extent of my self-promotion. I'm good at creating promotional materials -- my "day job" is graphic design, and I have a background in advertising design specifically -- but I'm just not able to work up the confidence to promote my own work. 7. What has been your greatest accomplishment with your work? There are two measures of accomplishment or success in arts: commercial/professional accomplishment, and artistic accomplishment. Artistically, my greatest accomplishments are my "Apothecary Women" series which depict women holding old pharmacy bottles with the photos processed to appear very old and worn, and a few high-fashion shots I've done in the last couple years. My greatest professional accomplishments are the twenty-something photos I have licensed to the Washington State tourism campaign, and a license I sold last year to use one of my photos to advertise heating pumps in Denmark and Europe. 8. Who are your influences? My two single biggest influences are the photo-secessionist member, Anne Brigman -- the greatest of the pictoralists, in my opinion -- and a brilliant photographer-friend of mine in Australia named Kate O'Brien. Brigman's photos are very painterly fine-art. Kate's work is surreal, witty, gorgeous and absolutely unique. I've also been influenced by Art Nouveau poster master Alphonse Mucha and 60s pop artist Roy Lichtenstein. I also have to mention a brilliant Danish photographer Lasse Hoile, whose melancholy, moody style is also very inspiring and influential to me. 9. What was your funniest, scariest, most bizarre, or most touching story from a photo shoot? The model I have the best working relationship with is Bridgette Colette. Our creative sense and our artistic goals just line up perfectly, and we work together almost telepathically when shooting. She lived in Marysville, which is a full hour from my studio in Bellingham. In November 2008 we did our first shoot. I drove to Marysville to pick her up, drove us back to Bellingham to do the shoot, and when it was over I drove her back home and then finally drove myself back home. Four hours on the road just for the benefit of shooting with her -- but it was VERY much worth it. A month later I was planning a Christmas shoot and had a model lined up, but that model got very sick just a few days before the shoot. Bridgette agreed to step in for the shoot, and also pitched several other ideas, so we set up a big shoot only a few days before Christmas. The day of the shoot, it snowed. I drove to Marysville, finding the roads icy and dangerous. It was nasty, but I *had* to do this shoot with this fantastic model. The drive with her back to my studio was a little more challenging; snow was falling hard, and the roads were getting worse and worse. We shot in the studio for several hours, and got in the car to drive her back home around 8:30pm. Now it was dark, and the roads were horrible. The one-hour drive to Marysville stretched into nearly two hours, but Bridgette and I talked the entire way there, making it enjoyable despite the nasty conditions. Once I dropped her off, I headed back north to Bellingham. That drive was a whole different affair. A new snowstorm was hitting hard, and now the lanes were completely covered, and much more slippery. Worse, there was a lot of blowing snow. For several miles north of Burlington, I was stuck in a genuine whiteout. All I could see was thick, swirling whiteness at the hood of my car. I could not see the ground, nor even the headlight beams. The only thing guiding me for a while was two little red dots — the taillights of the car in front of me. I just hoped that they knew what they were doing and steered to keep those red dots in front of me. It was all I could do. I couldn't pull over and stop because I couldn't even tell where the edge of the road was. It was the most intense, stressful, exhausting drive I've ever done. But to shoot with Bridgette, it was absolutely, unquestionably worth it! 10. What other thoughts would you like to share? Don't get so caught up in being "artistic" that you lose sight of commercial value in your work. And conversely, don't get so caught up in being "marketable" that you start making your photography in order to please other people. It's a balancing act. Also, shoot in RAW mode, keep every original RAW image on a hard drive (a RAW "morgue file"), use a gray card (!!!), and pay attention to the tonal dynamics in the photos -- too many photographers have flat images because they don't pay attention to the full range of brights and darks. And finally, please, for the love of God, don't get caught up in photo fads like the current one with tastelessly exaggerated HDR effects.