Between my partner blaming me for never being around, getting older and less excited about jet lag from long flights, I have been transitioning towards wedding photography. Covid most certainly strengthened my resolve as there was not much traveling going on anyway. Life is getting back to normal. I admit that I still make a small part of my income with travel photography, so I was thinking about a way to make the best of both worlds. Why not shoot weddings primarily and travel during the off-season? It would not be more than three months a year while staying close to home. This was when the idea of van life kicked in.

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I wanted to travel at a slower pace, and the idea of sleeping next to my shooting locations was appealing. I shoot a lot of early mornings. Waking up at 5am is hard enough; I don’t need to account for one extra hour of commuting from my hotel. The more I thought about it, the more a van made sense. Until I actually started experiencing the road.

I took the road last month for a week-long trip. I was excited to check whether this was doable. Being an outdoor person, being on my own and out in the wild is something I enjoy quite a bit. The van itself and the outdoor experience are not for everybody. Some people need the hustle and bustle of city life and the afternoon drinks with colleagues. But if you are more into the peaceful and quiet nature of remote places, it is lovely. The bottleneck for me was making my photography work with it.

The act of taking pictures accounts for probably 20% of my time. The rest is shared between editing, writing, marketing, and other administrative duties I wish I can delegate at some point soon. Multitasking has become a thing. I write on my notepad when I am out with friends; I edit most of my shots on Lightroom mobile while riding the metro, and I can deliver an entire wedding album if I am stuck on a plane long enough. I think we all do that one way or another. For those of us who freelance, we breathe our photography, and it becomes an integral part of our daily routine, even without a camera in our hand.

I drove a total of 15 hours on that trip. 15 hours may not sound like much for an entire week, but driving is the one thing you cannot squeeze into a multitasking routine. There is no writing when you are driving! There is no culling, editing, or answering customers’ inquiries. Suddenly, I realized 15 hours was a luxury I could not afford with my current workload. I can zombie walk to a shooting location at 5am with minimum sleep and nothing but my grit. Crossing the country at 70 mph in that shape is something I am not willing to try.

I wish my troubles stopped there, but the lack of decent wifi came to be another nail in my coffin. Once again, I rely on a lot of editing and emailing. The bandwidth required for the 200MB GFX files is massive. Do not get me wrong, you can find phone service and wifi in many places. Free ones tend to be weak and strong ones get really expensive really quick.

A lot of people are making it work. Some can focus for a few days at a time on the experience and be completely cut off from the world. I think it just requires a different organization and workflow and, in my case, mixing it with a high-volume and communication-heavy wedding business is certainly not helping. I have a little too much commitment packed in a single day. Working from the road means it will never be the absolute freedom one can imagine as you will always need to set up somewhere with a decent network service. I also understand a little more why most people I meet on the road are couples who can split responsibilities. It is a different world out there, and it requires a different organization.

Despite those two points being huge hurdles, the one thing that hurt my photography the most was the reduced social encounters. Public transportation and hotels are the best way to meet locals or fellow travelers. Out of those encounters will rise ideas, stories you are willing to tell, or recommendations of must-see locations in the area. This is, for me, what travel photography is about, not jumping from one Instagram location to the next. It is about the people.

The one benefit of spending a fortune on a van is that you do not need to pay for a hotel room, therefore, those encounters will pass you by. Besides, there are so many limitations on where you can park that you will always find yourself a little more isolated.

My dreams of van life are not dead, I will just need to look at it harder and figure out the proper workarounds for me, and when I do, you can bet I will make a blog post about it.

There are tons of tutorials out there for shooting portraits. But many don’t get into the specifics that help you truly love the portraits you shoot. So we dove into our archive of original cheat sheets and infographics to find exactly this sort of stuff. How many of you use the three-color portrait method? Alternatively, what do you know about placing a nose in a portrait? Or lighting?

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Well, guess what! Over the years, we produced all these photography cheat sheets ourselves. And we’re helping you find exactly what you want by assembling a select few. We hope you get all you need for shooting portraits right here.

The Three Color Portrait Method

“The approach for many portrait photographers is arguably lazy. Instead of genuinely creating, many rely on the model to do something. But besides giving them instruction, try giving wardrobe input. Using the Behance platform to develop storyboards and mood boards helps a lot. It can dictate things like lighting and more. Plan to go above and beyond by using the three color portrait method. Add props into the scene to give the model something to do. Try flowers or candles. Create a story. Don’t just sit there capturing a model vibing in front of a camera. Those photographers tend to do nothing else but copy the work of others. If you’re looking to create work to feed the Instagram algorithm, stop. Put the camera down, thumb through a few photo books, and get inspired.”

Check out more in our blog post!

Shooting Portraits with an f1.2 Lens

“When shooting wide open with an f1.2 lens, you’ll get a sharp yet soft look. This soft look makes everyone appear lovely and it’s very addicting. But you can deliver more sharpness by just stopping down a tad. We already talked about this, but the ultimate point is to find the balance. Personally, I like the softer look with a Polarizing filter on the the lens, which enhances the colors and contrast more. It’s a similar tactic to what many f1.2 lenses have with their APD variants. With these variants, there is an extra element that brings even smoother bokeh to the photos. Give it a shot!”

Check out more in our blog post.

Positioning the Nose While Shooting Portraits

“In addition to this, give the nose a background. By that, we mean to place it against the skin. Notice how, in the image above and our lead image, the nose is against the cheek? That’s what you need to do. This makes the nose pop out less and makes it look more flattering. From here, you’ve got a variety of techniques and poses you can use. You can fold their arms, put their arms down, etc., but our focus here is the face, and it’s best to adjust this last. Don’t worry, that still means you’ve got a whole lot of posing options. Your subject’s face just needs to be posed a specific way.”

Read more in our blog post.

Backlit Portraits

“One of the most important elements in creating a great backlit portrait is to make sure your subject is properly exposed. The default metering mode for most cameras will meter the entire frame rather than focus on your subject. For the best results, set your camera to spot metering and meter for your subject’s face to ensure it’s properly exposed.”

Read more in our blog post.

Important Elements of Portrait Photography

“In my experience of shooting folks of every race, everyone is rendered by cameras in the orange and red channels. Those are typically associated with the skin. You need to find a color that contrasts with the skin. You’ve got five other colors or so to pick from. Once you’ve gotten that, figure out the background. A person shot against a red brick background will inevitably be affected by the red light reflecting off the background. If it’s your intention to get that effect, cool, move forward, but chances are it’s not. Lastly, you need to separate the person from the background. That’s typically done using lighting, wardrobe, and depth of field.”

Read more in our blog post!

Praise dancing, a response to the biblical injunction to “Praise him with dancing and tambourines!”, is deep-rooted in Baptist and Pentecostal churches in the American south. Rahim Fortune took this picture of praise dancers in the town of Edna, Texas in 2020. It was part of a series focusing on the family of a young creative director, Chasidy Chevonne, for a book project in which Chevonne reflected on Black womanhood and the lives of the women she grew up among. The photographs were originally released to mark Juneteenth – the federal US holiday commemorating the end of slavery – a month after the murder of George Floyd in May that year; they were intended “as a form of visual healing”. Texas had been the last state to hear the Emancipation Proclamation, in 1865.

Rahim Fortune has been photographing in the southern states for the past six years; his work, including this picture, will feature in the inaugural PhotoFairs exhibition in New York next month. His pictures often examine different elements of his own heritage – his father was an African American living in Austin, Texas and his mother part of the Chickasaw Nation in Oklahoma. He thinks of his photographs as “a love letter to the place I grew up in” and a series that speaks to the “mythic quality of culture” in the American south-east. As well as his praise dancers, Fortune’s work celebrates blues musicians and rodeo queens, tracing the contributions of Black and Native American traditions to contemporary Americana and folklore. His ambition, he says, is to produce a body of work that can “ascend [beyond] any narrative around rural Black identity in America as one of simply servitude or oppression. Rather, I intend to highlight the boundless creativity and possibilities of the music and people who still contribute to this culture.”

• Rahim Fortune’s new body of work, Hardtack, will be presented by Sasha Wolf Projects at Photofairs New York at the Javits Center, 8-10 September

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Justus Fine Art Gallery will host “Seeing: a Photography Exhibition” in September.

The exhibit will feature work by artists including Beverly Buys, Robbie Brindley, George Chambers, Don House, Carey Roberson, Andie Roberts and Eli Vega.

“Along with the individuality of artistic styles, a range of photographic processes will also be displayed. In conjunction with the photography show, a Haiku poetry competition, inspired by the works on display, will be held throughout the month,” a news release said.

The opening reception will be held from 5-9 p.m. Friday as part of the monthly Gallery Walk in downtown Hot Springs. The exhibit will be on display through Sept. 30.

Selections from Roberson’s “Morning Stroll Surprise” series will be featured in the exhibit.

“‘Morning Stroll Surprise’ is an iPhone-based side-project, that began while on a trip to New York in 2015, and was originally intended only as a creative exercise to get out of an artistic rut, and to lose some weight while taking morning walks (but that is a whole other issue),” Roberson said in the release.

Eight years later, “it has developed into part of my creative practice and is a major influence in all of my other work. The premise of the project is to study the unnoticed through a process of subtraction, framing, and questioning. Poetic connections are created through little shifts in perspective. Hidden arrangements wait to be subtracted by the camera’s frame and brought into a new life. Disparate forms and objects generate into new contexts and meanings, and framed assortments of circumstances give significance to the often unremarkable. Unfortunately, the weight loss part hasn’t gone as well as the project,” Roberson said.

Roberson earned a BFA in Studio Art from Henderson University in Arkadelphia and a MFA in photography from Louisiana Tech University. He is an associate professor of Art at Ouachita Baptist University in Arkadelphia, where he is the gallery director for the Rosemary Adams Department of Art & Design Galleries, and teaches art foundations, photography, sculpture, printmaking, and other studio art courses. He previously served as an associate professor of Art at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock from 2002 to 2018, where he headed the Photography Program, along with serving as the BFA coordinator and interim chair of the Department of Art & Design.

“Roberson’s artwork integrates traditional studio media with new digital technologies and methods to create quiet personal narratives,” the release said.

Roberson has exhibited in over 70 competitive, invitational, and solo exhibitions. His work has been exhibited at the University of North Texas, Ithaca College, Huntsville Museum of Art, Mobile Museum of Art, the Arkansas Museum of Fine Art, and numerous other university and private galleries around the nation. He is a winner of the Arkansas Arts Council Individual Fellowship Award and has works in a number of collections, including the Mobile Museum of Art in Mobile, Alabama. Roberson’s artwork has also been featured in the national publications of New American Paintings and CMYK Magazine.

“Using a film camera and an enlarger, nothing is digital in Buys’ process of creating cyanotype prints. Each print is one-of-a-kind — no two prints from the same negative are ever the same,” the release said.

“Cyanotype prints are made when sensitized paper is exposed to ultraviolet light. It is simple and direct in execution,” Buys said in the release.

“I strive for perfection at the beginning and embrace, even encourage, the imperfections that the process brings. The photographs are grid-like in that I enlarge each negative on six separate pieces of film that I have pieced together kind of like tile on a floor. The resulting negatives are placed on cotton rag paper that I have coated with the simple cyanotype chemistry. On sunny summer days, I make the prints by exposing this sandwich of sensitized paper, negative and a heavy sheet of glass to hold all in place under the sun. The prints are developed and washed in a large tray in my backyard using a garden hose. The simple tools and processes that I use to make the photographs reflect back on the type of ingenuity that I appreciate in the subjects of my Delta imagery,” Buys said.

Buys’ cyanotypes have been showcased in solo exhibits at Arkansas State University in Beebe; the Delta Cultural Center in Helena; the Russell Fine Arts Gallery at Henderson State University; and the University of Memphis Art Gallery in Memphis. Buys’ work has also been included in group exhibitions including the annual “Delta Exhibition” at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Art in Little Rock; “artSpark 2013” in Raleigh, North Carolina; the “2011 Winthrop Rockefeller Institute Legacy Art Exhibition” at Petit Jean; and “Selections From the University of Arkansas at Little Rock Permanent Collections” at the University of Arkansas in Little Rock.

Buys earned a BSE in Art Education from Henderson State University, an MA in Photography from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, and an MFA in Photography/Printmaking from the University of Memphis. Buys served as a professor of photography at the Ellis College of Arts and Sciences at Henderson State University prior to retiring in 2014.

Chambers’ photographs focus on the landscape in an attempt to “look beneath the symbolic language we overlay the world with and glimpse what’s there” will be included in the exhibit, the release said.

“Place a tiny human face somewhere in the landscape and the eye will find it immediately. Any text in the scene and the eye wants to read it,” Chambers says in the release.

“Avoiding these symbols, I try to create a blank slate that is still visually dynamic, leading the eye into ever deeper levels of textures and detail. If the viewer connects with the image, they project their own feelings and meanings onto the piece.”

Chambers earned a BA in Commercial Photography from the Brooks Institute of Photography in California and currently maintains an active studio in Little Rock. His work has been included in a range of group and solo exhibitions, including “Beyond Symbol” solo exhibit at the Baum Gallery of the University of Central Arkansas in Conway in 1999; “Small Works on Paper,” 2003, 2002, 2000 and 1998; “Visual Anthropology: Welcome to our Neighborhoods” group show at the Laman Public Library in North Little Rock, 2016; two-person show, Anna Eaton Stout Gallery, Brescia College, Owensboro, Kentucky in 1996; “Trappings Exhibition,” Hot Springs Arts Center, Hot Springs, 1991; “Lightwriters,” Kresge Art Center, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, 1984; and “Prints, Drawings, Crafts Exhibition,” Arkansas Museum of Fine Art, Little Rock, 1991, 1984 and 1983. Collections include Arkansas Fine Art Museum, Henderson State University, University of Arkansas Medical Center, Kimberly Clarke Corporation, and LSI (GMAC Financing).

House “is respected for his dramatic black-and-white portraiture and rural scenes, along with his altered Polaroid prints. His work has been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout the U.S., along with a wide range of publications. His photography has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, American Forests, Boy’s Life, Persimmon Hill, First Freedom, Free Hunters, Outdoor Oklahoma, Wood, Traditional Bowhunter, Backpacker Magazine, and Woman’s World, along with a variety of university textbooks, and covers for fiction and nonfiction books. Two collections of his work, “Buffalo Creek Chronicles” and “Not a Good Sign,” have been published by Phoenix International Press.

Selections of Brindley’s spare landscapes will also be included in the exhibit. “He only shoots with film using a Mamiya RB67, which requires a tripod and careful attention when composing his photos,” the release said.

“My work is a slow process. Sometimes driving all day over many miles of back roads and dirt paths, passing small towns and empty fields … to take one picture,” Brindley said in the release.

“Roberts has been photographing since she was a child and more seriously for the past 15 years. Her images reflect her interest in finding beauty in the abandoned. She doesn’t manipulate the imagery she finds, but creates engaging compositions from what she sees. This exhibit will be the first time Roberts has shared her work publicly,” the release said.

Vega was first exposed to art while attending Texas Tech University “where he gained a foundation in color theory, design, and composition. It wasn’t until 20 years later that he first began to explore photography,” it said. He currently teaches private and group photography workshops, along with writing. His books include “Renditions of Famous Paintings,” “Right Brain Photography (Be an Artist First),” and “I Always Wanted to Be Somebody (But, I Settled for Much More: Me).”

Owned by artist Dolores Justus, Justus Fine Art Gallery, 827-A Central Ave., is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday. Call 501-321-2335 or visit http://www.justusfineart.com for more information.

“My Garden,” by Beverly Buys. – Submitted photo

“Morning stroll surprise in red rock, black asphalt, and white reflective plastic,” by Carey Roberson. – Submitted photo