photography – Page 2

By Brad Beckstrom

I’d been working in marketing and advertising for 30 years, but still felt like I’d never really created anything. Sure, I’d produced events, created new products, award-winning campaigns, promotions, even new agencies. These all had something in common, they existed solely to promote products. These creations included logos, brand imagery, engaging copy, but they really belonged to the products they were promoting more than the person or teams who worked on them. It was time for me to step back and start creating again. Creating, like I was back in school, telling stories and taking photos with my first camera. Doing it just for the experience.

Earlier this year, I embarked on a quest. A quest to create something, a body of work. A quest, free of branding, focus group input, monetization strategies, or even logic. I started this quest before I even knew exactly what it was or how it would work. I started in Bangkok, Thailand, walking for miles and taking photos with my son’s camera. As I walked, the anticipation of more kept me moving forward, seeing many things I’d never seen before. My knees and legs ached from all of the walking, but it felt great.

My visit to Thailand was originally planned as a sabbatical. I had a few meetings but not enough to slow me down. Each morning as I set out, more than scenery came into view. I was learning to see again. [Read more…] about Learning to See.

A Single Step

By Brad Beckstrom

I lost something 30 years ago and I just found it. In high school, I dreamed of creating great images, starting my own creative studio. Life moved on, the working world, a business, and later, a family became priorities. After college, I put down my camera creatively. That was 1985. Just this past year I picked it up again.

You see, I didn’t physically lose the camera. I’ve taken thousands of photos in the past 30 years. I’ve traveled, taking all of the requisite nicely composed tourist and family photos. I’ve loaded up Facebook, Instagram, Flickr and the like with iPhone photos.

In the mid 90s, I experimented with the first digital cameras, producing digital postcard events for clients. Images that included full-color logos and postcard backings. The personalized postcards were printed on-site using high-tech dye sublimation printers at events across North America and as far away as Singapore. They were phenomenally popular and drove our business for years. We printed and loaded literally tens of thousands of images onto the web using something called fetch, before photo sharing sites like flickr or SmugMug arrived. My interest in photography had paid off, but in the end, this was just high-volume, branded event photography.

How I began to scratch that long-lost creative itch.

One snowy Saturday I came across the award winning documentary “Finding Vivian Maier.” It’s about a longtime nanny who took over 100,000 photographs and hid the negatives in storage lockers that weren’t discovered until decades later.

She had shown her work to no one. [Read more…] about The Big Audacious Quest.