Monday Motivation: Born to Do This

Note: I consume a lot of articles and podcasts for artists and entrepreneurs, and I mostly share them on my private, personal Facebook page. However I realize that there are those of you out there who could find these helpful too, and so I'm placing them on my blog as well so they can be more widely available. Hope you enjoy the first installment of Monday Motivation!

“The most defeatist thing I hear is, “I’m going to give it a couple of years.” You can’t set a clock for yourself. If you do, you are not [an artist]. You should want it so badly that you don’t have a choice. You have to commit for the long haul. There’s no shame in being a starving artist.”

— Matthew Weiner

I recently re-read this excerpt from Getting There: A Book of Mentors written by Matthew Weiner, creator of the critically acclaimed TV series "Mad Men." It struck a deep chord in me, given the choice I've made to give up commercial work to focus on being an artist. Whether it's working at a job you hate to pay the bills, or having to tighten your belt indefinitely while bootstrapping your creative business, not to mention constant uncertainty and the self-doubt it tends to breed, deciding to get on the road to becoming a full-time artist entails major sacrifices. I know that it can sometimes feel overwhelming, which is why Weiner's story is so compelling because, as he describes it, he found himself in a hole that to anyone can seem impossible to climb out of:

“Upon graduation, I set up meetings everywhere in the hopes of getting a job. In three months I got nothing....

So for the next three years I stayed home and wrote spec scripts. My friends had day jobs, but I didn’t. My wife, Linda, worked hard as an architect and supported us. I attempted to shop my material around, but nothing sold. I got very bitter, seeing people I didn’t think deserved it succeed. It was a dark time. Show business looked so impenetrable that I eventually stopped writing. I began watching TV all day and lying about it.... I felt like the most useless, worthless person in the world.”

So for those of you who feel like it's never going to work, or are struggling to keep afloat long enough to get a breakthrough, I hope you take heart in Weiner's example. As Weiner concludes: "I do believe that if you are truly talented, get your material out there, put up with the rejection, and don’t set a time limit for yourself, someone will notice you."

How do you find the strength to persist? If you ask me, if you genuinely feel that you are born to do this, you don't actually have a choice. You persist until you get noticed. If you don't, you continue anyway. Because it was never about the money or the recognition, was it?

Have a great week everyone!

Checking in! (more frequently from now)

Checking back in on the blog after three whole months! Yikes. Just wanted to revive it and see something new before jumping in to a new phase here. Inspired by Lisa Congdon, whose excellent business course for artists I'm taking, from here or in, I'll be posting shorter, more frequent updates in between the more well worked-out, longer posts I'm used to doing. So for those of you who read the blog, make sure to check back in here a couple of times a week, because there's always going to be new stuff from now on, basically sharing things that I'm thinking about, cool stuff, links, books, and gear I've been looking at, etc.

I actually habitually post these things on my personal Facebook account and I've found they tend to help and/or resonate with my friends, but the problem is Facebook posts aren't discoverable on Google, so I figure, why not make the little extra effort to share the good stuff? Looking forward to being here more often, and I hope I see you guys around here too!

First time here? Have a look at my personal picks for the best posts on the blog or helpful tutorials for photographers!

Better Milky Way Photos in Under 5 Minutes: An Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Tutorial for Beginners

Following up on my previous guide to shooting the Milky Way, this quick and easy tutorial is meant to give beginners a solid starting point for editing Milky Way and night sky photos in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. While it doesn't address the finer points of a perfect Milky Way edit, it will definitely give you a more visible and dramatic Milky Way galactic core and can save photos taken in less-than-ideal night sky conditions.

A summary of the basic workflow I followed in the video:

1. Shoot in RAW with the right aperture/ISO/shutter speed for your setup. You want your stars to be pin-sharp and not streaking lines. Use this handy calculator to get the right settings. No RAW photo? Download the RAW photo used in the tutorial here.
2. Set your camera calibration to Adobe Standard and turn on automatic Lens Profile Corrections for your lens. If not available, try to manually select your lens from the dropdown menu.
3. Set Contrast to 100 and compensate overall brightness using the Exposure slider.
4. Bring down Highlights slider to minimize effects of light pollution.
5. Set white balance by maxing out Vibrance and Saturation, then moving the Temp/Tint sliders until you have a balance of yellow, blue, magenta, and green. Set Vibrance and Saturation back to 0.
6. Increase Clarity to taste, taking care not to introduce unwanted artifacts and too much noise into the photo.
7. Apply Noise Reduction. Attempt to minimize grain without smooshing out detail excessively.

From here, you can proceed to perfecting the photo with localized edits, composites, dodging and burning, etc. Hope this helps! Til next time.