The year is 1987 and I’ve just taken over as president of Hasselblad USA after being with Polaroid for over 17 years.  Hasselblad was just in the process of kicking off a workshop series with a young commercial photographer I’d never heard of, Dean Collins. I had spent virtually all of my Polaroid career, at [...]

Every year Summer School gets a little better thanks to the feedback in the survey we do a week or two after the program ends. After last year’s school we heard requests for more hands-on shooting, more marketing and business and several suggestions to make the program more centrally located. Well, we’ve managed to do [...]

 I found a great quote from Andy Warhol that got me thinking…
They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.
Whether you’re just starting out as a professional photographer or aspiring to be one, there’s very little that happens in this industry by itself. You’ve got to be proactive and you’ve [...]

We know time is your most valuable commodity and there’s never enough of it.  So in putting together this year’s program we took the key points from everyone’s feedback following last year, and built a new Skip’s Summer School!The three top requests from our 2011 post-program survey were more hands-on training, more marketing/business and a more central location. 
There [...]

Last week’s post about RETV with the Albert Watson interview got some great comments, one of them from good buddy, Terry Clark, who wrote:
“Before the Internet I read five newspapers in the morning plus thumbed thru a few magazines or books on photography. Yes, it took a bit of time, usually about 90 minutes, but what a [...]

Last week I ran a post featuring the promo video for the new Get In Motion tour, featuring Jeff Medford and Ross Hockrow. For many of you this will be your first exposure to a program that focuses on film-making, but this morning’s post really isn’t about the tour. 
While the techniques of telling the story in a [...]

Over the last few months I’ve run a number of great videos leading up to Summer School.  In fact, I’ve found great videos on just about everybody, with the exception of Jules Bianchi and her sister Joy Bianchi Brown and Roberto Valenzuela, but both of them did a couple of terrific guest posts. Jules and [...]

It’s a wonderful lazy Sunday morning. It’s a great time to catch up on loose ends and then, after an hour or so, work’s put away for the day.  What I’m dealing with this morning is my thought process on the photo politics of Northern Ohio. I just don’t get it!
Here’s a prime example: I was able to [...]

Next week I’ll get things back to focusing on the “how to” aspect of photography, kicking off the week with a great guest post from Catherine Hall.  However, for now I’m left with absolutely nothing pressing to write about this morning! That’s happened, at best, maybe three times in the last two years!
So that puts me in [...]

I found a quote recently:
My first six years in the business were hopeless. There are a lot of times when you sit and you say “Why am I doing this? I’ll never make it. It’s just not going to happen. I should go out and get a real job, and try to survive.
Things are ramping up [...]