Favorite Shots of 2019

Every year, I like to look back at my work and evaluate how I did as an artist and see if or how my work progressed. Looking back at my 2018 recap, it seems like I was feeling optimistic. While 2018 was a challenging year, I felt like I was progressing as an artist and moving forward with the artist/life balance.

In 2019, that forward momentum stalled. It stalled so much that this has been one of my most challenging years artistically, socially, personally and mentally.

As far as I can tell there are a couple of factors at work. There may be more that I’m not seeing or admitting to myself. There probably are. Humans are bad at seeing what is wrong even when it is apparent to everyone around them.

The first challenge for me was that my family life got much more challenging this year with my son starting school for the first time. That meant that our family life was condensed into evenings and weekends. I work teaching photography on many weekends or am traveling. In the evenings, I need to be out shooting. I felt like I wasn’t giving enough to my family this year for various reasons. While having my kid at school gave me a full extra day during the week to do more work, I got more work to fill that time.

I ended up getting a Career Development Grant from the Arrowhead Regional Art Council to put on a two-month show at the Cedar Coffee Company in Two Harbors. I’ve never done a solo show of that magnitude before (although I did one smaller solo show without having prints for sale). The primary goal for the grant was to do the process of preparing for a big show, so that I could learn what it takes and be able to teach it. I ended up writing in the grant that I’d print an overwhelming number of prints myself without understanding the time commitment that it would require.

As far as time commitment, I had estimated that with prep time, packaging and printing, it would take me about 20 minutes to make a quality print (if I get the first print right). Sometimes, it takes multiple prints to get it perfect. I was also trying to learn to use multiple different papers and that took extra time. Then right in the middle of crunch time, my printer’s wifi connection crapped out on me. I set up a wired connect which was faster (not by much), but I lost all my presets for printing and had to spend a day regenerating those. For the grant, I estimated 43 hours of work. I ended up putting in well over 125 hours (on top of the normal stuff I do like processing shots, writing articles, updating my websites, sending out work, trying to sell images, shooting portraits, running my workshops, etc…). I often put in 50-hour weeks and sometime longer and then I added 10 to 15 hours of additional work onto that.

Anyway, it was exhausting.

I ended up spending most of the time that I would exercising in the summer on the printing project, which was literally exhausting (and I gained back the majority of the weight — nearly 30 pounds — that I had taken off over the last two years which makes exercising harder and on and on). Did I mention it was exhausting? I’d have to look up the numbers again, but I printed over 300 prints myself in a three months leading up to the September and October show.

In the end, I sold around $1,600 on a grant of $3,000 (total expense was above this if you include the money I put into the show as well) — keep in mind that the sales wasn’t my only goal (do the math and that was $12/hour based on the sales. That’s not a living wage and the show was actually at a loss — again that wasn’t the goal. Being an artist living on print sales alone isn’t going to get you by). Sales was one of the measurable outcomes that I exceeded for the grant. Over 10,000 people saw the show, which was amazing. During the show, I got a ton of messages from people who had been there and were happy to have seen my work. It was really cool. In the end, while it was exhausting I feel like the grant project successfully developed me as an artist. And, I feel like the grant was a good example of public support for private success.

During the year, I was also working on a print-a-day project to better learn printing. Up to this year, I had sent all my prints out to a lab, but I wanted to master printing. Between the show project and my print-a-day project, I ended up about 600 prints this year (not all were saved). You really get good when you do that many prints in a year.

When I look at one of the prints I made compared to those that my lab makes, I’m absolutely blown away at the difference. The improvement from how a print looked at the beginning of the year versus a print made at the end made is massive. I narrowed down the paper that I love to print on and have a workflow that gets me to a good print quickly. Getting good at printing was by far my biggest achievement as an artist this year and I have my print-a-day project, Cedar Coffee Company, the Arrowhead Regional Arts Council and a friend who lent me a high-end printer to thank.

I’m not very good at retailing my own work even though I was a retail manager and corporate line leader in a previous career. So, I’ve found a home for all these extra prints at The Big Lake in Grand Marais. I just need to drop them off. The Big Lake seemed like the perfect fit for my work. I love the art that Abby, the owner, stocks. The small, quirky vibe of the store fits my style and has the feeling of a store where I’d like my work to be. And, statistically speaking, assuming we stay in Grand Marais until my kid graduates from high school, there’s a good chance that Abby’s kid and mine will go to prom together. That is statistically speaking in a class of about 30 to 40 kids. I’m kidding, but you never know. They were both named after gods.

But I digress and if you have taken one of my workshops, you know how long I can go off on a tangent…

Another factor in my stalling momentum coming from 2018 into 2019 is money. I don’t really like to talk about money, but here’s another factor in my down year. Since 2016 my income has seen a seriously significant downward trend with 2019 my worst year in many, many years. I changed accounting programs in the last couple of years, so I’d have to dig out old records to give you percentages, but it was a huge and hurtful hit in income this year of about 40% of my 2016 income. That’s stressful and worked against me this year. There are actually studies that show if you worry about money your IQ goes down. I’m not sure I have that high of an IQ to have it go down… As I’m sure you can relate to making less money is always stressful.

Another challenge this year was paying attention to the political situation in this country. If you have been following along with my yearly updates, you know that my values are being challenged. My value for the protection of wilderness is especially being challenged with environmental rollbacks happening. I don’t want to go into it here to much, because when you talk about politics as an artist there are always people who tell you to get back into your lane — as if an artist can’t speak out about politics — but I’ll add a quote from a famous photographer. Towards the end of his life Ansel Adams was asked, “What is the most critical fight right now?”

Here’s his answer:

To save the entire environment: wilderness protection, proper use of parks, breakdown of Federal operation of the parks in favor of private interests, acquiring new park and wilderness land, unrestrained oil drilling and mining on land and offshore, etc. First on the list now is that all the wilderness areas must be protected. It is very important. With the current Administration, they are gravely threatened. It means that the small inroads this country has made in protecting some areas, both for scenic beauty and for invaluable resources, are threatened.

Here is an important point: Only two and a half percent of the land in this country is protected. Not only are we being fought in trying to extend that two and a half percent to include other important or fragile areas but we are having to fight to protect that small two and a half percent. It is horrifying that we have to fight our own Government to save our environment.

When I first wrote about the politics in this country influencing me as an artist, I remember one comment was something like, only a snowflake would let politics influence their art making. That’s something I disagree with. My photos are political. If you have read my Artist’s Statement, you know I use my artwork as a way to show the beauty in the world with the hope that the more people see of how beautiful places are, the more they’ll want to protect them. Of course, politics are going to affect me, especially when they go against my artistic vision. With the looming climate crisis, I’m worried about the direction our country is heading and I’m worried for my son’s future. With the growing income inequality, I’m worried for everyone’s opportunity to achieve what I’ve been lucky to achieve. There’s dignity in doing work and there’s love in doing the work that you enjoy. I wish that for everyone. But, that dream isn’t happening for the majority of Americans — not to mention when people have less disposable income, they can’t buy expensive camera systems and take photography workshops. Anyway, when your core values in life are challenged, it influences your art and it can be draining — at least it is for me. To fight that I joined a political party, was elected local unit party chair. We did well in the midterms. Now, I do the best I can to lead a small unit of the party, but I feel like I need to do more. That takes time. Time which was consumed by other projects. Time that was consumed by doing the work of being a chair. I don’t know if I can do it for another term…

Does anyone know how to clone people? Because I could use three of me.

One last challenge is/was in order to keep on top of news, I have been spending a lot of time reading news on the internet. I’m not sure that it has done anything but waste time and make me more worn out. It isn’t helping me as an artist. I’m probably addicted to the internet and need to spend less time on it. This is something that I’m going to have to address if 2020 is going to work better for me as an artist and person.

Speaking of time. I didn’t have a lot of spare time this year, so I shot a lot less and got out fewer times. Photography is 99% doing the work and 1% imagination, so if you aren’t getting to work done you aren’t doing photography and you aren’t being an artist. Considering that I’m a photographer not doing the work is a poor reflection on me as an artist. I felt that struggle.

My work suffered.

I felt like my composition improvement stalled exactly where it was at the end of 2018. I didn’t have the time to work on it.

On a plus I’m watching tones and light more than in the past. I’m trying to add more subtle glowing lighting to my compositions and bring that out when processing the images. I feel like I did achieve some of that.

There’s more that worked against me this year, and lots that went right. For example, as something that went right I made a couple of fun YouTube videos about photography. It’s hard to cover it all, but I feel like if I can at least express some of it and if that helps anyone else out there, then I’m doing right and giving back to the artistic community for everything that it has given me.

Being an artist isn’t something that you do in exclusion. Life, all of it, intrudes and affects your art. Life challenges all of us and if you aren’t being challenged, then you aren’t living in this world. For an artist, you have to live in the world. You must let everything influence you and your art. For your art to be good and interesting, as Toni Morrison said, it must be of this world. And your daily life, your triumphs and challenges, be they personal, professional or artistic, are of this world and are what makes your art an extension of you. Everything that goes on around us influences us and that in turn must influence our art. If it doesn’t influence what you put on paper, then your art is nothing but a hollow shell.

That’s why I put it all out there for you in these yearly posts, because I’m just a human that does art. I want you to see that even artists at the top of their game struggle with that same human struggles that everyone else has. There was a self-help book that I paged through in a bookstore once that said, never compare someone’s outer success to your inner struggle. So true. We all have struggles and successes. We are all the same.

Anyway, this year I felt like my momentum in life in general stalled. Going into 2020 as an artist and human, I have to figure out how to break out of the stall. Getting out of a stall is a hard fight, especially for an introverted artist. I’ll get out somehow. But, it isn’t easy. Hopefully, photography will be a catalyst for me as it has been in the past.

Here are the annual photography statistics:

• Number of 3-star and above images in 2019: 437
• Number of 3-star and above images in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018: 478, 417, 353, 507, 523
• Number of 5-star images: 5 (this is a good year)
• Number of images that I kept: 13,318 (I still need to sort images from travel, so this will likely go down my several 1,000)
• Number of total images in 2016, 2017 and 2018: 16,711, 18,461, 18,296
• Number of presentations at Canoecopia: 3
• Number of Singh-Ray webinars: 1
• Photography Workshop locations: Death Valley to the Smoky Mountains and everywhere in between
• First full year with SmugMug: Worth the switch. It’s so much easier to get my work online and for sale. Get 40% off SmugMug here (I earn a commission if you sign up through that link. Please, don’t let that influence your buying decision).

My Favorite Images of 2019

This gallery of images represents my favorite images from 2019. I don’t know if they are my best, but I do know that I love them. I’m making art for me and for you and in the case of the clock tower image from Dubuque, Iowa for my mom. But, all these images are favorites of mine. There’s one image from each month.

The Iowa farm image or the Death Valley image is probably my favorite from the year. It was hard to narrow this down because for my favorites I not only like the look of the image, but I usually have an emotional connection to the image as well.

I initially picked 76 favorites, so some that were equally favorites had to get narrowed down. So, here we are with my 12 mostest, favoritest images of the year.