Photography Q&A -Ask Me Anything About Photography

scott-nickell asked:

Zack, Maybe I'll be one of the last 8 questions... What are you going to do during your social media sabbatical? Do you find it a necessary to take a break from it? How does the time away play into your creative process? Hope you enjoy your time away... SWN

I usually take the month of December off from social media and the web and all that. This year I’m starting early and I may… may, just take it to February or so. Maybe till spring. Who knows. I’ll pop my head up for Black Friday and Cyber Monday for our annual DVD sale for charity. We’ll also have a new limited run shirt for that sale. I will be blogging on my main blog though. I’m so looking forward to hitting radio silence this winter! I have a lot of stuff planned.

First :: I’m moving into a small secondary studio space. The secondary space is for portraits, post production, experimentation, art, etc. It’s going to be more of a lab than a studio. By lab I mean in the “experimental” type of lab. Not a film and processing and printing type of lab. Hope to sign the lease this week and get the F to work on that.

Second :: NEW PORTFOLIO! My current print book is the same book I’ve been schlepping around since the end of last year. Every time I sit down to get to work on that I have some other thing I have to do. I like to take a lot of space to sort and edit my book.

With everything I’ve had going on I haven’t been able to do that. I’ll start to sort it out then I have to put it away. I’ve been doing inkjet printing for my books. This year I’m printing large 12x12 books using Blurb’s pro line.

I’m going to have a dedicated space for post production, planning, editing, thinking, and staring at my naval. It’s MY space. No one else gets to mess with it. Mine. Mine. Mine. Mine. I can close the door and everyone can leave me alone. I can turn on the music I want and just get to work. My shooting space is going to be pretty small. Large enough to shoot a full length of a band but that’s it. I’m putting a restriction on myself to push my studio creativity.

Third :: Building a solid promotional campaign for 2013. Getting my promos ready and made (I make mine by hand), getting my leave behinds together, thank you cards, etc. I also want to send four print pieces out next year. I have two designed and ready. Need to shoot for the other two.

I also have to check my mailing list, make some changes to that, get a better system for managing it. Add some new folks to the list. Take some off. Get everything synced, in the cloud, and ready to go for January 1st.

Fourth :: Shoot new personal work. I probably won’t get to this until January. I need to get in my space. Get it set up. Get some post production things I have on my plate finished. Get the new portfolio going. Etc. I have two main projects I want to get started on. One will take a few weeks of pre-production to cast for it and then two days to shoot for it. The other will take a few months to figure out and get it shot. Those will be my other two print pieces I send out for 2013.

Part of this personal shooting will also be shooting some 8x10 for the first time in 14 or so years. A friend is going to let me borrow his camera and I’m going to tray develop B&W film myself then scan on my Espon v750. There’s nothing like 8x10. OMG. OMG. OMG. It’s slow. Expensive. Etc. You don’t want to blow a shot. There’s a lot you can mess up but dang it… when you nail it… mmmmmmmmmmmm. So yeah. I’ll do a series of portraits with that.

Fifth :: Most importantly… ride bikes with the kids. Fix up the old playset in the back yard. Hang out with friends. Have a party or two. Build a fire in the backyard. Drink some beer. Turn 40.

Sixth :: Planning 2013. Thinking ‘bout stuff. Deciding whether I do some new workshops next year or not. Maybe a new DedPxl. There’s some plans for this Q&A blog that I’ll be working on. Going to the dentist. Might start some guitar lessons for myself. Looking for the OneString workshop. :)

I’ll be listening to a lot of Joy Division.

Cheers,
Zack

PS - This Q&A blog will not be dead. I’ll be back on it when I get back online.