Jim Olson was at a crossroads. It was 1987, and he and wife Susan’s first son was due in June.  The future Nokesville residents had been transferred to Dulles from Memphis. “I had the airline job I always wanted, but it had been seven tough years working the ticket counter and gates,” Jim, a Minnesota native, said. “I wanted to be around for my kids, and I knew the airline hours would make that hard.” He considered starting different businesses, anything that would replace his airline salary and afford them flexibility. “I saw a magazine ad offering youth sports photography in another city, and that seemed interesting.” Jim liked photography but had no experience outside one semester of photography class in school. Nonetheless, he founded Olson Photography in March 1987, months before the couple’s first son was born. “The driving force was not missing our kids growing up – it could have been a car wash or really any type of business!” he laughed.

Jim stayed with his airline position until July of that year while Susan kept her job. “Here we were, having our first baby, and I announced to my father-in-law, a successful football coach and businessman, that I was quitting my job to start a business. Initially, it didn’t go over so well!” Jim said. “The pressure of a new baby and a new business was a lot to take on. But sometimes when your back is against the wall, that is when you do your best,” he said.

“When you start a business, you wonder – will the phone ever ring?” Jim said. “The first call I got was from a travel soccer team in Sterling with 15 players. I was so excited, I put a suit on to hand deliver the order envelopes. I took those team pictures, and that is how it all began!”

Launching a business comes with challenges, and Jim recalls one that still makes him smile. “Early on, I head out to Chantilly Youth Association (CYA) softball, where there are 15-20 teams,” Jim recalls. “At this point, I have one set of equipment. Everything is going well, until part way through the shoot when my camera stopped working. I told them I needed to get my other camera – but I didn’t have another camera! I drove to Fair Oaks Mall to buy a new camera that I couldn’t afford. Thankfully, they were able to adjust my battery and my camera worked! I still do CYA’s pictures today, so they cut me some slack.”

For the first five years, Olson Photography used an outside photo processing lab in Pennsylvania to fulfill orders. “Honesty and integrity are very important to me,” Jim said. “I promised a three-week delivery to my leagues. Sometimes our order wouldn’t be ready, and that wasn’t good enough for me.” The lab was over three hours away, and Jim would drive to pick up the pictures on Friday so he could deliver by Saturday’s deadline. So, in 1992, he took a chance and invested $100,000 to open his own lab. “It turned out to be the best thing – but at the time it was a scary step,” he said. “I didn’t have a background in photo finishing or running a lab. I was renting office space and had one full-time employee, and we had to learn how to work the machine and manage a fair amount of volume during the season.” 

Jim states the biggest challenge is replenishing the photography staff due to the part-time, seasonal nature of the jobs. “Employees are definitely the most important part of any business; we could not have grown without the many exceptional people working with us over the years,” Jim said. “They are the backbone and we have been blessed to work with many quality individuals.” 

Reflecting, Jim adds, “I see us providing memories and products for families to cherish for a lifetime. It’s very humbling and rewarding. They will have our photos for the rest of their lives – what an honor to be part of that. We are grateful for the continued support from so many youth sports organizations in our community and from the parents that make our success possible.”

Thirty-nine years, three adult children and two grandkids, three full-time employees (one of which is their eldest son, John), and a lifetime of family and photographic memories later, and Jim is humbled and thankful. “I love every minute of it – I never missed a practice or game with my own kids, and during our season I now write over sixty paychecks! It’s amazing what has happened since 1987.” 

And his father-in-law? “He was not good at handing out compliments, but he eventually came around, and said I was the most successful person he knew!”

# # # 

This feature appears in the October 2023 issue of Haymarket-Gainesville Lifestyle Magazine. You can read the entire issue here https://issuu.com/pamkamphuis/docs/hglm_oct_2023_weband pick up copies at these locations.

Photography has always been a medium to preserve moments and memories, but for some artists, it serves as a source of inspiration and a window into the past. One such artist is the renowned filmmaker Wes Anderson, known for his distinct and visually captivating cinematic style, which draws upon the work of French photographer Jacques Henri-Lartigue to infuse his films. While the two artists work in different visual mediums, Henri-Lartigue’s photographic compositions and Anderson’s cinematic worlds share distinct visuals capturing a sense of joy and playfulness.

One of the most striking elements of Henri-Lartigue’s work is his fondness for shooting everyday life as if it were a cinematic scene. His use of composition, perspective, and framing often transformed mundane occurrences into captivating visual narratives. When exploring Anderson’s filmography, one can see the clear influence of Henri-Lartigue.  The symmetry and meticulous attention to detail in Anderson’s frames mirror the composition and visual storytelling of Henri-Lartigue’s photographs. Anderson’s characters often exist in worlds that are reminiscent of the past, and his use of costume and set design draws from the same well of inspiration as Henri-Lartigue. We can even see Anderson literally place Henri-Lartigue’s photographs into the scene.

In the video above, brought to us by Alex Kilbee on his YouTube page, The Photographic Eye, we can see this fusion of photography and cinema. Jacques Henri-Lartigue’s influence on Wes Anderson is a testament to the timelessness of visual storytelling. Both artists share a profound love for the aesthetics of the past, celebrating the beauty of ordinary moments and capturing them in a way that transcends time. Henri-Lartigue’s photographs are windows into the past, and Anderson’s films are captivating worlds that never existed but feel as if they could have. 

The artsXchange program, a collaboration between River Arts Alliance (RAA) and the Minnesota Marine Art Museum (MMAM), continues on Thursday, October 19, 2023, from 6:30-8 p.m. This month’s event will be led by photographer and RAA member Pete Mutschler.

Taking good pictures is easy these days. Creating great images is much harder, but well within the reach of most people with a cell phone and a computer. There is a lot of conversation in the photographic world about the use of digital tools and how much manipulation is appropriate. Photoshop and similar programs have given us incredibly powerful tools to adjust, combine, and manipulate existing images. With artificial intelligence, individuals can now create photographs of things that don’t really exist.

For this workshop, local photographer Pete Mutschler will walk you through the basics of where technology fits in your efforts to create great images and how you can use it to create your own style. Included in the program will be a discussion on how some of the great photographers in the past may have used technology and where tools, such as those driven by artificial intelligence, may lead us.

We will be working on actual images during the workshop, so feel free to bring some of your own (on a flash drive) if you are willing to share.

The event is free for members of RAA or MMAM and is included with museum admission for others. Registration is required, and space is limited to 25 attendees. To register, visit riverartsalliance.org/september-2023-artsxchange-registration. The museum is located at 800 Riverview Drive in Winona.

This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund.

Learn more about River Arts Alliance at www.riverartsalliance.org. Learn more about the Minnesota Marine Art Museum at www.mmam.org.

Photographers tend to take two different sides on AI imagery. Some say that it’s not photography. Others embrace it and try to learn the technology to add to their skill sets. In our interviews on this website, we’ve discussed lots of different opinions that photographers have on AI. That’s the center of the latest Magnum Photos Square print sale being done in collaboration with the World Press Photo Organization. We spoke to photographer Anna Bedynska — who beautifully stated the difference between real documentary and AI imagery.

For this Square Print Sale, Magnum Photos and the World Press Photo Organization are taking a stand with real photographers to celebrate the difference between human photography and AI-generated imagery. You can support this mission with a purchase of a print at the Magnum Photo Shop.

“A documentary photograph encapsulates what someone has observed, contemplated, meticulously created, and redefined,” says photographer Anna Bedynska. “It is a synthesis of someone’s perspective point of view, a profound synthesis of thoughts, emotions, and creative choices. We enter a dialogue through photography between the photographer, the person photographed, and the viewer.” She continues to state that we combine a personal experience as a viewer when we document what’s in front of us. Ultimately, it’s not just about capturing the world as it happens — but also showing a unique perspective.

“Each camera click is an exploration, a deep dive into another person’s worldview, making the photograph a captivating tapestry of human perception and worldview. This process, this dance between creativity and reality, transforms an ordinary image into a captivating story that is a trustworthy reflection of a real and true story with which the viewer can identify. It is a fusion of different minds and points of view converging to create something unique, trustworthy, thought-provoking, and priceless. The process of searching for meaning and truth in documentary photography is a value in itself that AI is not likely to give.”

Anna Bedynska

About the sale, the images in “Writing with Light” are some of the last moments a viewer might be sure is being created by a human being, according to Anna. Her image for the sale was shot with a Canon 5D Mk II — and it shows proof that a human being shot it. The photo itself has an almost ghostly and ethereal feel that makes me think of an AI-based world of some sort. Most importantly, it makes me feel something and I’m sure it will do the same for someone else.

Like many other photographers, Anna thinks that something needs to be done about authentication. “I think that Authentication and Verification, whether the picture is AI-generated or created by a human hand, is crucial, as is the security of Data Privacy,” she explains to us. “There should be a Penalization system for violating personal, creative, and intellectual rights, and these policies should be homogenous and global.” For many photographers, she’s describing a very ideal world.

All photos by Anna Bedynska. Used with permission. Check out her website and Instagram for more.

Photography-on-the-Net, one of the original digital photography forums and perhaps one of the most prominent of the time, is shutting down at the end of 2023.

Running continuously since April of 2001, Photography-on-the-Net has acted as a digital gathering place for digital camera enthusiasts, professionals, hobbyists, and generally anyone interested in photography. The site operates a number of forums on gear as well as places to discuss photos and techniques. Photography-on-the-Net also operated a camera gear marketplace and a massive photo gallery of more than a quarter million images that can be used to browse the results from specific cameras — down to specific settings.

While the forums have been in operation for more than two decades, that will end this year.

The site’s founder Pekka Saarinen published the news on the site earlier this month. The post, spotted by Canon Rumors, paints a picture of a once thriving community that has fallen out of popularity due to a number of factors, not the least of which is a decline in general interest in digital photography and the growth of social media.

“There is no one reason for the decline of digital camera, there are several. Better mobile cameras killing people’s interest to heavy and expensive systems like SLR with lots of lenses. Photojournalists use iPhones, photographers get less hiring opportunities, families and friends use mobile devices. Some special interest shooters like bird and wedding photographers, sports and action shooters can not really work with phones, but they are a minority. Image quality does not matter much to 99% of people, when viewed on mobile all is sufficient,” Saarinen writes.

But it’s not just the lessening interest in photo equipment that Saarinen believes has led to the decline of Photography-on-the-Net.

“Facebook was founded 2004, three years after POTN. Twitter was started 2006. Instagram was founded 2010. Snapchat 2011. Discord 2015, Tik Tok 2016. All those multi-billion dollar companies have conquered the market, created the social media as we know it, intentionally aiming to addict by algorithms, put people into own bubbles, track you to target ads, lose content validity in short time so that new content gets created constantly. Some of them reduce message lengths thus directing young people to short attention span and think less about complete sentences. Photos are shared via social media apps, Whatsapp and cloud services. This trend has sped up in last few years, and AI will change it all again. Soon people won’t have to write or create anything — it’s all done for them,” Saarinin says.

“Sad truth is that there is no place for conventional forums any more with the recent generations. Traffic is down. Enthusiasm is down. Mood is down. Discussion is down.”

The lessened interest and fewer visits adds to an issue where, according to Saarinen, Google is serving fewer ads to forums in general.

“Google delivers fewer and fewer ads in forums (most ad slots are empty, meaning we don’t have even a chance to get anything), so for a long time I’ve had to pay most of the server costs from my own pocket, even with some occasional donations which I appreciate,” he says.

“Even if financially this wasn’t a burden, I do not have time or interest to code by request or set up servers (I’ve put thousands of hours for POTN during the years). Members can get very demanding, there’s no real joy in this ‘service’ for me any more. I do not really shoot photos any more, I have other interests and a profession in music.”

The site’s founder says that the only “logical option” remaining is to shut the site down by the end of the year, though an exact time has not yet been determined. Saarinin says that he is not planning to keep a read only version of the site up either, as that still incurs server costs. Instead, he will “pull the plug” and the site — and its contents — will be taken offline.

“I apologize to our members (some have been here over 20 years) that the site can not go on, but nothing lasts forever. I fully intended to keep this running, but it’s not a viable solution any more. All I can say I’m sorry for the situation and mourn loss of a great community. All things come to an end, and it is time to move on.”