Ian Curcio

1. Just because you shoot something doesn’t mean you have to show it. If you want to market yourself as a commercial photographer and you just shot the best wedding of your life – don’t show it in your portfolio.

2. There is a fine line between being a versatile photographer and the jack-of-all-trades. You don’t have to specialize but don’t let your portfolio be all over the place either.

3. Show the work you want to get hired to shoot even if you have to shoot self assignments to get it. If you show food in your portfolio, you’ll get asked to shoot food. If you show family portraits in your portfolio you’ll get asked to shoot family portraits. Don’t worry, those jobs you don’t like to shoot but pay you, will still come.

4. Don’t self edit, even the best photographers can get emotionally attached to an image that’s not their best. Everyone needs a good editor on their side and it’s not your mom.

5. Be socially active. Use social media. Talk about yourself and your work. Act like you already have the job. Create a blog and update it often with worthy information. What good is it to have a banging portfolio if no one knows about it?

6. Spend the $10 to get a domain name because an online portfolio with yourname.someothershit.com isn’t worth looking through.

7. If you have an iPhone or any smart phone and you’re not carrying your portfolio on it you’re wasting an opportunity to show your work to everyone you meet.

8. A gallery with more than 18 image is too big and less than 8 is too small.

9. Consider having multiple portfolios or Web sites if you have multiple interests.

10. Update often. Don’t be stale. Keep things fresh.

I'll be taking in Richard Ellis' lecture for the SC Chapter of ASMP at The Art Institute in Charleston South Carolina on Saturday, February 27th. After that I’m going to be taking part in student consultations beginning with a round-table discussion on the basics and techniques of what makes a good portfolio. If you live in the area I hope to see you there.

Posted by Ian at 01:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'll be teaching a two-part-off-camera flash workshop at The Light Factory in Charlotte NC on April 10th and 17th. First and foremost this workshop is about taking your flash off of your camera and either holding it, putting it on a stand, taping it to a wall or setting it on top of something and sticking stuff in front of it. From there we'll just keep digging deeper. It's about how to get magazine quality photographs with a minimal amount of equipment. It's about why lighting an object isn't much different than lighting a person. It's about lighting landscapes. It's about adding light, mixing light, coloring light, choosing light, shaping light….light light light.

It's about walking into a space and lighting it from the ground up. I come from a background in editorial -assignment photography. I'm usually alone, rarely do I have an assistant and I've almost never been to the place or met the person I'm about to be photographing. I assess the environment, person and/or object and the lighting quickly becomes subject and location-driven. It's about coming up with epic ideas and executing them on the spot.

Posted by Ian at 01:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've been looking at photography like music lately. I've heard musicians say they can hear the sound in their heads but they're not satisfied until they can get that same sound to come out of the speakers. Well I feel the same way about lighting a photograph. There are times I can see the light in my head and I'm not satisfied until I can see that same light in my prints. As photographers we need to learn to "feel" our light, much in the same way a musician "feels" their music.

No doubt we need to have our technical skills down. A musician doesn't just pick up a guitar or sit down at a piano and start producing timeless music without an understanding of the chords or notes, without knowing what A, B, C, D, E, F and G means. A photographer isn't going to pick up a camera and start creating mind-blowing images using flashes without an understanding of shutter speed, aperture, ISO, flash power and flash-to-subject-distance.

And in the same way musicians forget about all those technical aspects of music when they're grooving along and feeling the music, photographers need to be able to put all the technical aspects aside when shooting and groove along as they're feeling their light. You don't think Jimmy Page or Elton John knows each note by name as they are hitting them do you? They feel those notes, they feel what is coming next, they aren't always thinking about it. It's true that not all great musicians can read music and I don't think it's necessary for all great photographers to be able to spit out math equations all day long either. We need to learn our tools and then we need to feel with them.

I understand that can be easier said than done. I cannot tell you how many times I've been trying to find my groove when lighting something and I just keep failing at it miserably. It's during those times I start to doubt myself as a photographer. I think I suck and I have no business trying to put my name out into the industry's wave of professional photographers. But the truth is that not even the best musician can walk into the studio and complete a Grammy-award-winning album in one take. Hours are spent trying to perfect those sounds, tweaking those rifts, changing this and changing that and lighting anything in photography whether it's a person, building, plate of food, whatever, is exactly the same. It takes time, practice, trial and error and in the very end, even the most perfectly-technical lit picture isn't going to resonate with your viewers at all if you aren’t feeling your light.

Disclaimer: I shot the above photograph of Radiohead’s frontman Thom Yorke at Bonnaroo in 2006 and did not light it. Those are stage lights and I was one of about 50 photographers stepping on each other for the first three songs.

Posted by Ian at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

What do you do when you have an assignment in Chattanooga on energy and the Tennessee Valley Authority's 800-megawatts of electricity-generating-capacity expansion? You light it. I drove by the power grid the evening I arrived in town and figured out the sun was going to come up behind the grid in the morning. I don't always have time to location scout before shooting but when I do I try and take advantage of it. I decided to get up early and use the sun to silhouette the grid. I was trying to get an image that showed a massive amount of power. My thinking was that by lighting the rocks using a blue gel it would create a feeling of electricity and energy.

Here’s how it looked on the page:

Here’s a link to the virtual magazine: Southeast Resource

Posted by Ian at 10:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)