kelly hoffer photography

Photography seems to have changed since I was a kid, or learning it, or just younger or whatever. Because I know I am *only* 32 and saying things like “in my day” is hardly becoming or sensible. Do I even have “a day” yet?

But when I started shooting, the simple fact is, my medium was film. And film is unforgiving. Film is a time stamp. you can manipulate a print in the dark room, you can burn in the underexposed areas and dodge where there wasn’t enough of an imprint, and maybe even spot the print after it’s all dry when you notice the squiggle of dust that must have still been on the damn negative after you cleaned it and everything, sigh. But that is all you can do. There is a limit. Perfect. Finished. Whatever your desired end result is, has a finish.

Digital, on the other hand, is a whole other ball game. Digital photography is much more like writing for me. All the fears of “not good enough” and “not finished until it’s perfect, because you have the tools to make it so”, all that crap sneaks up on me, settles in my stomach, and besides making me want to throw up or hide in the closet, simply brings the work to a standstill.

There would be this point with an image where I could look at all the prints I’d made and see that I was done. I could look at the final print (cause normally it was the last print) and say, this is done, it’s as good as I can make it and I am happy with it. That really did happen more often than not. I am not a great bragger, but when I made a good a print, I could hold it up with a confidence I rarely have in things I create and say, this is solid, this is a good piece of work, and it’s finished.

I have a ridiculously hard time doing this with digital images. First, because there is room to over think them. You can always continue processing and there aren’t a finite number of channels. With a black and white print, that’s all the space you get and what you can manipulate with your actual hands and real chemicals is how far you can go. Photoshop, Lightroom, Silver EFX pro, all the tools I use now, crush that. I hate and love them for this reason. And I am still after 8 years of shooting digitally coming to grips with their abundance.

Second, digital makes it so easy to shoot your face off, which is a weird and slightly morose statement, but let’s actually look at it, you can fill a memory card and it’ll cost you nothing. Why not hold the shutter down? And it makes such a pretty noise, click, click, click, click, click…. And you might get the perfect capture, just the moment when the light hits a through the windblown branches or her eyes crinkle into the slits of the most real smile. But then you have the aftermath. When you dump that card with all those hundreds of captures and you have to sift and sort and start making the difficult, nay, impossible for the indecisive me, to choose the “best” image. And then you have all this room to start second guessing yourself. Room like that is less easy to come by when you have 36 frames and you have to pay to have them developed. Money as a photographer should translate to time, but digital makes us shutter whores and the only way to conquer this habit of overshooting is to reign ourselves in. But what if you miss something?, the tiny bad voice says. Well, then I miss it., you must respond, and tell it to bugger off back to it’s fear of missing out corner. If the decisive moment passes you by and you see it rather than capture it, relish the fact that you at least experienced it and continue on because there will always be more moments. Which brings me back to the shooting your face off thing, a weird sort of metaphor, but it is almost like we are shooting to spite our faces, getting every capture to not miss one and not looking forward to the editing…

and thirdly, the editing. oh the editing. Oh why did I take 500 pictures of this child that I now have to pare down to 50, of which the parents will then choose probably 5? It’s like eating an entire pie and realizing hours later as you lay prone on the couch that you may have overdone it. Somehow it was easier with the 36 frames, to choose the “best” image. Less to choose from obviously, but also shooting was maybe more tempered, depending on how much film you could afford to shoot, but the realization that you had to get 10 rolls processed and that would take a hundred bucks out of your bank account was somehow more of a real situation, then I’ve shot 500 hundred images and I will now need to spend time (which = money as we all know but don’t necessarily realize, as we will simply stay up all night to edit, we don’t need sleep, right???) sorting through them, just to get down to the best of the bunch. Questions I ask myself through this process are not sensible, I ask myself, I like this, but will the parents? what if they think this is a weird face even though I love the expression. It’s not my kid, maybe I should just give them all of them and let them choose, I don’t know, what if this face is the face this child makes all the time that is most meaningful, maybe I should leave both, Oh god, what if I choose wrong?! Now obviously I am not being a decisive or sensible artist as this point, but that’s part of what comes from shooting for other people (not a problem more or less indicative of digital more than film), and also an annoying abundance of choice. So lets say I get past that and choose the images I like rather than what I think someone else might like. Then I have to process them.

Wait, second and thirdly, are a lot the same, but moving on. The last piece, the final part of making an image from a digital capture is where I collapse. BTW, I shouldn’t be telling you any of this. These are my secrets. But they are not doing me any good, so maybe it will help to get it out there… but when I finally get to the processing, I can do it just fine. I have the technical skill, the tools and a fairly good eye for getting the image about right. But this is where the bad thing happens, even after I get an image set, right in it’s exposure, white balance, shadows defined, highlights detailed, it never actually seems done. It’s so damn easy to change it, so easy to make 15 different versions as they are only costing me my time and I’m still bad at equating that to dollars or tv time or washing my hair… and maybe it would look better in black and white, maybe with a little film grain, actually let’s make it color again and maybe I should get rid of that power line. It goes on and on. And I only just touched on the photoshop manipulation part there. I forgot about that. There’s not just plain old post processing, there are total and complete alterations that can take place. I can pop your head off in one frame where your eyes are just right and put it on this one which is almost the same except the traffic isn’t in the background. I can totally alter reality, and if I am good at it, you will never know.  There’s just too much. How will I ever know when it’s done?

It’s the same problem I’ve always had with writing. I write and write and I want it to be perfect, which is a thing I know quite well only exists in my head, but still I go back and edit and edit and it just never seems right, or done, because words can be changed, tenses can be altered, and it’s scarier to me putting something out there which could/should have been better. for some reason I’m not doing what I normally do when writing here, I am hardly editing at all and it is making this a lot easier, although now that I’m conscious of it, I’m thinking, I hope people read as fast as I talk because this is surely too long and now I’m rambling and I wonder if anyone is still with me…

Back to the photos though, you know what happens with all these images? I have them in various states on. my. computer. If I shoot an event or a portrait, I give the digital files, and they are gone, that’s ok, there’s a finality to it even though I am always thinking I could’ve tweaked that thing differently, but alas, finished. When I am shooting my own work, I am stuck in a pack rat too much harddrive to worry about using the space oblivion. I remember Mrs. H saying something along the lines of there is no going back to an image after you’ve made a hundred more. It loses something. She was right, as she always is. If I shot a roll then five after it, I was always most keen on the most recent work and the old roll got pushed to the back of the line where images that might have been good are kept for when I “have the time” (yeah right).

So I have zillions of photos waiting around to be brought back to the front of the line, too many options to make them perfect, and oh yeah and did I mention too many other amazing photographers and photographs to compare them too. It’s maybe just a lack of decisiveness issue and it’s maybe just my problem to get over, but I thought you out there might feel it too. And I actually feel a little better now. It’s time to get a new workflow down. I’ll let you know if I come up with any tricks or please let me know about yours. ThanksK

Oh and I am not editing this… Up it goes!

a favorite print of mine Ivy at the base of Blarney Castle

(I want to preface this by saying, this was a difficult piece to write and I don’t think it’s terribly well written. I hope you can excuse the jumbled train of thought and bad punctuation.)

I just finished reading Sebastian Junger’s touching memoriam to photojournalist Tim Hetherington, who was killed in Misrata, Libya.  I used to romanticize the idea of being a photojournalist, travel and risk and adrenaline. Junger talks about how he and Tim and all the other photojournalists in the war profession are in love with the risk, the dance between safety and getting the shot.  He talks about his friend Tim and ‘all those terrible, ugly stories that he brought such humanity to.’ It’s a beautiful piece. I can feel the brotherhood in it, the pain of loosing his dear friend and the idea that Junger himself might have a town like Misrata waiting for him somewhere down the line.

It reminded me of what made me realize that I would never be a war photojournalist.

I can see myself standing on the roof of my building in Queens. It is some time after nine am. I’ve been hearing the sirens since I woke up. It’s not until now that the sound really stood out. It’s like that in New York, the sirens are white noise. But now I’m on my roof, looking at what didn’t seem real on the television. Watching smoke pouring out of the Towers. It’s real. And I hear a voice in my head. A demanding and insistent voice, “Go get your camera,” it says, “Now.” And I think I actually shook my head in response and the very firmly, with no doubts, said “No, I do not want to have a picture of this, NO.”

I don’t know how long we were on the roof, my roommate and I, watching. Our landlord was also on the roof for some reason. He didn’t live in the building so I don’t know what he was doing there that day, but he stood with us shaking his head the way people do at non-sensical things and saying “All this for Allah?”

I’d woken up that morning to a phone call that had nothing to do with planes or terrorists. My friend Claire was in the city for her colloquium and wanted to know if I wanted to meet up. Then I got a call on call waiting, I can’t even remember who it was. I went back to Claire and got another call, this time from Ireland. It was an old boyfriend I had no interest in talking to. He asked me if I was ok. I remember thinking he’d completely lost his mind. I said, “yeah, I’m fine, what do you want?” He said he was just checking. I think I dismissed him completely and hung up, I somehow didn’t make it to asking why he was checking. I had no idea what was going on with all these calls. I thought it was a very strange morning. No one who really knows me calls me early in the morning. Then my old boss in NJ called and told me a plane had flown into one of the Twin Towers. I started to hear the sirens then. I went into the living room and turned on the tv. I can remember the disconnection at first. It was early, they were still filming what they stopped showing later. I think I saw a man jump from the building. I remember seeing it, but I don’t know if I did. The brain does that sometimes, plants an image in the place of what you were told. I started to cry.

Janet came out of her room, saw me sitting on the couch crying. I showed her the television. I told her what had happened. She paused for a minute looking at the tv and then said, “I have to go to work” and went to take a shower. When she came out I think it had sunk in that she wasn’t going anywhere. That’s when we went to the roof.

There are tears, writing this. That day was wrong. It still has the haze of a dream that wasn’t. I don’t need pictures to remember it. Even now, almost ten years later, I look away from images of September 11th. I’ve never done well with images of violence. I’m sensitive to them, I feel pain through them. Maybe that’s the point, but I don’t think most people have the same reaction. We’ve become immune to images…

A photographer always carries their camera. That was drilled into me. It’s a simple statement and a damn obvious one. Always have your camera. Always. And I do carry my camera almost always. I document my life on Flickr. Photos are my journal entries. I have always believed in photographs as documents. Stand still history. So have your camera, but using it is an option not a rule. Sontag spoke about how barricading ourselves behind the lens ejects us from the actual experience. Whether you buy into this or not, it’s worth it to see both ways.

Photojournalism can give the innocents a voice, it can communicate what we might (hopefully) never experience first hand. Photojournalists only weapon is the record and the record has power. It doesn’t matter to the world that I didn’t photograph the Twin Towers that day.  But it makes a difference to me. I prefer to imagine the towers the way they were when I was little. When I was a freshman at NYU, they were there, perfectly framed in my window.

I remember being at the top on a class trip, the way they swayed, the feeling that you could lose your footing even on the right side of the glass. I prefer to remember them this way.

I went to a summer photo program at Parsons in NY when I was seventeen. One of the first things we did, was make pinhole cameras. They’re pretty easy. You take an empty oatmeal container, paint the inside black and make sure the lid is light tight. Poke a teeny tiny hole with a pin and make a black tape cover (your shutter) throw a piece of photo paper in there, point it at something cool and expose the paper. poof! Ok, that’s maybe a little simplified. But it was a really cool thing to make and takes funny, squishy, ethereal pictures. It’s a bit of a production though.

Now that we’re all lazy and digitally inclined there’s a new way to get the pinhole effect. And my friend bought me this fantastic contraption Photojojo’s pinhole cap: http://photojojo.com/store/awesomeness/slr-pinhole-body-cap/

As my first post in more than a year, I feel like I should explain. I got a job. A real job. Like the kind where you go to work at the same time every day and you sit at a desk and they pay you the same amount every month and you have this magical thing called health insurance. And the funny thing is, I love it. I love my job, the people I work with and even though I miss photo, I still shoot (I still document random life through photos and flickr), but now I don’t have to worry about shooting to pay my rent. That always took a little of the joy out of it, ya know…

Anyway, onward with photo! I have managed to sneak in a little photo at work. So that ties in nicely.

There is this part of the office where around 5 pm this magical light of pretty prettiness come in the window and makes one of our few bare walls glow. Oh natural light. I love you so. sigh. So I dragged the confused company founders to the magic wall and made them sit for portraits and then over the next few days I pulled most of the management team.

They are basic portraits shot with a fixed 50mm at 1.8. (Did I mention I love short depth of field too?) I’m quite pleased with the series. Hope you enjoy them!

People keep giving me advice. But then I keep asking for it. Nothing new there, I have always asked everybody and their brother and their brother’s cousin’s friend’s roommate’s for their opinions. The only difference is that in the past I used to ignore them completely and do what I wanted anyway. It was such a signature move that my one friend actually stopped answering my pleas for her thoughts because she said “it doesn’t matter what I say, you’re going to do whatever you want anyway.” She said it with a smile though.

And yet I find myself changed. Maybe I’ve lost some of my “much-ness.” I’m still asking for opinions, but instead of keeping my head about me, I’ve become completely embroiled  the “everyone” – in what everyone thinks I should do. All this mishegas has weaseled its way into my brain and made a nest and “everybody” is its fluffy lining.

I’m mentioning it on this meant-to-be photo blog because I am starting this business pretty much from scratch and that’s where the “everybodies” and the come in. I’ve been shooting since I was 15 and professionally for 7 years and yet in all that time I never really managed to set up a proper web presence or even settle on a logo. So I’m starting from scratch, in a new city, a new (ish) business and I want to do it right.

Right, but what’s right anyway? Is it the way other people have done it in the past? The way the new cool kids are doing it now? I get so mired in all this silliness that I don’t know where to turn. Then my friend (who isn’t effected by these sorts of brain plague issues and can’t understand how I get so wrapped up in them) sent me this interview with David Horvath, the creator of Ugly Dolls. And what stood out for me was “Get as much input as you can, then don’t follow any of it.”

So we’ll see how that works out. = )

Yeah and here’s a picture of some mops in love. Why? Why not?