The secret to making your own photo gear & worthy photo-book project.
Share - Spanish upbringing and how it moulded Joseph
Inspire - Beauty after breast cancer project
Create - The DIY Photographer, and how you can make your own photo gear and save $$$
Plus a really cool workshop in Mexico that sounds amazing here>>>
Beauty After Breast Cancer Book: here>>>
Brent & Johny
I want to
make
money from
my
photography
I want to
learn to take
stunning
Portrait
image
I want to
learn to take
amazing
Landscape
pictures
Episode Highlights:
Johny: Hey guys what’s up? It’s Johny here and welcome to another episode of the SIC show. As always I’m super pump to be here. I’m here with my main man B. How are you my brother?
Brent: Hi, I am awesome today.
Johny: Awesome man, this week on the show we interviewed an awesome photographer Photo Joseph and he’s gonna share an interesting story about himself.
Brent: Yeah and he’s gonna share a project that he was actually working on Beauty of the Breast Cancer and he’s the DIY photographer so he makes his own stuff. Check it out guys and see how you can save a lot of money.
Johny: And don’t forget to check out the link below this video and grab your free course. We’re super pump about them. Let’s get into the show.
Brent: Enjoy.
**SHARE**
Brent: Alright Joseph share something funny and not many people know about you.
Joseph: Then many people you know “be funny” it never works. I’m never funny like that. You know I’m not funny. I’m not a funny guy. But you know something interesting. I don’t know how many people know this but I grew up in Spain. It’s a big part of me and kind of my life and who I become today. I think it’s interesting. Spent my childhood in Spain and we’ve spent traveling Europe and that really crafted who I am today. And part of the vision that I have for the kind of everything that I do as far as how I see the world, how I see people, what I do with my career and my life. That international beginning to my upbringing was really important part to that. People who just met me casually probably don’t know that coz it’s not like yesterday. You know I was little but it was a big part of my life.
Brent: How long did you live there for?
Joseph: 7 years, we moved there when I was 5 years old. And then came back when I was 12 so just before I turned 13, informative years.
Brent: Yeah for sure. That’s interesting
**INSPIRE**
Brent: Inspire us with one of your amazing images.
Joseph: So I guess you’re putting some tuff on the screen but we’re in a couple of project and one of them is hits Beauty of Breast Cancer project. This is something that I’m working on right now. Actually I’m just doing wrap shooting and the shot that you’re probably looking at right now is the cover of the book. Now because the book is all nudity. It’s partial nudity we can really show those here because of YouTube and all that stuff. But the photo that you’re looking at is the cover of the book. And the whole idea behind the book is gonna be a beautiful coffee table style book. It’s gonna be going to breast cancer centers all over the world hopefully. And the point is for women who are going through this is having to make a decision of what to do facing the breast cancer that they all have some guidance on the beauty choices that they can make and how they can still be and feel beautiful and sexy and wonderful even after breast cancer itself. Obviously a very difficult thing to go through and choices that women have are quite numerous. But unfortunately they usually face with making them very quickly. And the photos that they were shown as far as what they look like afterwards are usually very clinical and cold and kind of nasty poured snapshots type of thing. So the point of this book is to give them a beautiful book to go through casually that they can see and appreciate what can be done through traces of reconstruction or not. Tattooing or not. Just many choices as they are; that’s the book is all about. And it’s something that we’re really proud of. It should be out this October to go along with breast cancer awareness month. And the book is like so we’re wrapping shooting. A few weeks ago I saw some retouching to do. The whole layout or the book layout artist is hard at work right now putting all that together. And it’s gonna be really nice. I’m super proud of it. It’s definitely one of the biggest projects that are ever worked on. I’ve been working on this for a couple of years now. We’re nearly there.
Brent: Wow, so tell me how did you get involved in that?
Joseph: Well a mutual friend introduced me to the woman who’s the principal on the project. She’s the one who put this whole thing together. She initially came to me and asks me to shoot one portrait. She was just getting started on the project and she had the idea that she would find a photographer for every portrait. This is a pretty small town where we are. She original wanted to shoot 33 subjects. I think we ended up with 39 I think in the book is total.
Brent: Okay.
Joseph: And it became very quickly apparent that hiring a different photographer of find a different photographer for every portrait was gonna be a nightmare. And it was not gonna be an easy thing to do. And when I first introduced to her I was learning about the project. I had a very different that was going through breast cancer recovery. And so it was a very personal thing for me at that moment. And so I just signed on to the entire project. And we talked about and obviously decided it as gonna be a great thing to do so that’s how I got involved and how I chose to do the entire thing and it’s been a lot of work.
Brent: Yeah I can imagine and is it kind of your way of giving back a little bit?
Joseph: I suppose so. I don’t see so much as giving back. It’s doing what I can to help.
Brent: okay.
Joseph: It’s a tough situation. The whole situation, the statistics, at least in this country statistics is ridiculous. It’s something like 1 in 7 will get breast cancer which is just insane. When you think of that you’ll realize that essentially every human on the planet will be touched by it. Everybody knows more than 7 women and therefore you will know somebody who gets breast cancer. And in fact it’s not just women in the book. We have a portrait of a guy. Men do get breast cancer too. It’s much rare. But they do get. So one of the portrait we have there is of a male who’s a breast cancer survivor. And he’s quite young actually. It’s in tenths and I think he was diagnosed. He was 19 when he was diagnosed. It’s just not the kind of thing you think of. So you know little bit of awareness in the book as well. But it’s really about guiding that light comfort for women out there going through that.
Brent: That’s awesome. Thanks for inspiring us with that. And I have to look at some of the other images that you’ve sent me from this book. They really are good. I like the tattoo, the one with the woman’s got a tattooed a part up to her torso.
Joseph: These are incredible ones.
Brent: Looks like you photograph a lot of these people mostly in their homes or in the environment or however.
Joseph: We have good locations. I’d say probably a 50/50 split between being here at the studio. I live in Ashton, Oregon, a tiny little town somewhere in Oregon. I’ve got a studio here so probably half here and then half on location. Those locations could be people’s homes. We went up to Portland then up to Seattle and both places we got some access to pretty places we could shoot in. They are in LA as well same thing. They got a really good hotel and gave us a place to work in. So we had some incredible backdrops which is awesome. In as many cases as we can the photo is meant to be a story of the woman. It’s not just a portrait. It’s not her against the white background. It’s really a story of or the photo is telling a story that goes along with her story. Why she made the decisions that she did or how she got through the cancer? And not all stories are happy. Some if these stories are quite sad and quite difficult to hear but had that life. They’re here today and that’s what they went through to get there or get here. The photos are as much as possible a story of them. Obviously we’re on location and we’re going to places like going up to a new city where we have to cram in a bunch of shoots in one day. We don’t always have the opportunity to build the story around the photo or build a photo around the story rather. So, on these cases we just have some pretty incredible locations that we’re able use and light and shoot it. And it were just awesome.
Brent: It’s good. And that is so good to be able to do something like that and get involved in a project like this where you can you know help people. I love that. It’s awesome.
Joseph: Thanks, I’m really proud of it.
Brent: Thanks Joseph.
Joseph: For listeners out there its beautyafterbreastcancer.com and listeners can go there and check out the project. We have a few photos up there. You can learn more about the project. And see how you will be able to order a book when they come up. So beautyafterbreastcancer.com please check it out.
Brent: Awesome and we’ll put the link in the show notes too.
**CREATE**
Brent: So teach us something Joseph. Show us how you create something.
Joseph: So I’m an author for Lynda.com. I have a ton of education up there which is really fun. And the course that is a technical series that is being released right now. It’s a series about DIY photography. It’s called The DIY Photographers. So if you go to Lynda search for DIY photographer and you’ll find it. And being a series, there’s a new video being released every other week. And it’s really cool format. So Lynda.com is 25 bucks a month but with the DIY series there’s one new video every 2 weeks and once its released it’s free for the 2 weeks until the next once comes out. And that goes behind the pay all and the next one is free. So you can watch. If you’re watching it from the beginning you can the every video in the series for free which is awesome. So these are all kinds of things that you would need to do as a photographer. Need to build or want to buy but not really necessarily wants to spend the money on. There’s a lot of photography accessories can be quite spendy I’m sure. All of the listeners have figured it out by now. And sometimes you know if there is something cool that you want but you don’t really want to spend a hundred bucks or 200 bucks on it. It’s one thing if you do it for your job. If you’re doing it for fun it’s not always practical or economical to buy. And a lot of things you can build on your own. So some of them are to replace things that you would buy and some of them are just cool ideas that you can make. So the one that I decided to talk about is a backdrop that you build and this built out of aluminum foil and some lighting. So the aluminum foil is really the key here. And this video is not or at the time of the recording of this video is not yet release on the Lynda series. It’s coming up soon. So you can watch this one. And the idea is that you’re shooting portraits so obviously you need a background. It could be a white wall, it could be a tree or it could be whatever. But if you take aluminum foil and we’ve all seen these. You take an aluminum foil and you crumple it up into a bowl or just crumpled it in your hands and obviously it’s reflective. And you crinkle it you get reflections in all different kinds of angels. It’s really cool reflective texture. So the first time I did this it was for a party that I was shooting and I wanted to do it’s sort of like a photo booth at the party basically. So you could do portraits of people there really easily. And I built this huge backdrop of sheets of aluminum foil and I bought that really kind of industrial really wide stuff so I didn’t have to use 50 sheets hanging from the wall. But just took strips of it and crumpled it up and I think I taped them into a wall or something like that. It’s obviously really light weight. You don’t need any special background just to hang it. I crumpled it up and paste it on the wall and overlap it so you get a relatively seamless background. And if you see the lines from it you just crumple it until you don’t see the lines. It was really easy to build. And if you put some lights on it especially some colored gel lights on it or if you’re at a party there’s probably lights flashing all over the place so everyone’s can be a little different. Light your subject. Let the background get hit to what it get hits with. And it can be really cool. You put a little out of focus. You know go a little shadow depth of the field. Cool and kind of mysterious glitzy background. Let it be in focus and is just dynamic, sharp, poppy, brightly colored backdrop that goes along with the party. It’s really cool and it’s incredibly cheap to make. You know you can go to a dollar store and buy a bunch of tissues and rolls of aluminum foil and off you go. It’s so cool and fun.
Brent: Great, I’d love to try that. Do you have a picture of someone you photograph with the background that you can send me?
Joseph: Yeah absolutely I will. I’ll send it to you so that you can show up in the show notes. It’s the party that I did for and still online so you can send it on a gallery for that there’s a bunch of them.
Brent: Awesome, I’ll relay that. Well thanks for that joseph. Really good create there. I love the DIY photographer. Serious I need to go and check this out because in the past I’ve made a lot of things for myself you know diffuses and all sorts of different photography accessories because I couldn’t afford it and often here in Australia it’s way too long to actually ship something. If I buy something off like B&H photo video in New York the shipping is often more expensive than the product. You know it’s like a hundred bucks to ship it here to Australia so sometimes I just got to make my own stuff.
Joseph: Yeah so in January of 2016 which is not really that far away. I’m gonna be doing this photography/cultural tour workshop in Oaxaca, Mexico. And the fellow that I’m doing this with has been doing cultural tours there for like 20 years or something. He’s been doing it forever. And he’s American but he spent half of his time in Mexico. He lives there half the time in Oaxaca. He knows the people like no other foreigner possibly could. And he has access to things that were other tourists absolutely don’t. So he takes very small group of people through these tours just see textile mills and see food being made in real traditional homes. And museums and things that are off to be in path; just some really interesting scenery and beautiful stuff to see. So we decided to turn this into cultural tours/photography workshop so people will come along and learn photography of course and I’ll be teaching just all kinds of things. We’ll talk about doing portraits, we’ll talk about food photography, and we’ll talk about, we’ll talk about landscape photography and then obviously go out and shoot that. And the way we set up the agenda we have photography every morning and then in the afternoon when it gets a bit hotter we go inside and get out of the sun and see some classroom type learning.
Brent: Siesta?
Joseph: or siesta yeah maybe we have one of those. And then in the afternoon evening when it cools down again we head back out and then go back to shooting. And it’s gonna be a huge amount of fun. So the place to find out about it and find out more is you go photojoseph.com/workshops and it’s there. We are not selling the tickets yet. There’s a mailing list sign up for more info so you learn more about it. I mean everything you wanna know that is on the page right now but sign up for that mailing list coz we will be releasing the tickets very soon. It’s gonna be very limited space. I think we decided to max it at 9 people I believe. So we keep it quite small. And the good news is because it’s Mexico it’s gonna be very affordable. We’re not telling the price yet. We’re sort of in a couple of last things to figure out before we have a price yet. But it’s gonna be affordable for sure. It’s not gonna be some massive you know $6,000 workshop. It’ll be much more affordable for more folks and we’re super excited about doing this.
Brent: It sounds amazing. Is this the part of Mexico that’s not like big tourist estimation so you can actually see the real people, the real culture?
Joseph: Absolutely, yeah you’ll be the only foreigners there. I can’t guarantee that obviously but that is the expectation.
Brent: I love going to places where you can actually get to meet the real people that actually there you know. Not the tourist traps and you know what the local people want you to see to actually get to experience the culture. That’s what I love about workshops like this. Joseph, can I come along?
Joseph: Absolutely, come on down.
Brent: I maybe there who knows.
Joseph: That’ll be awesome.
***
Brent: Man, interesting guy, Photo Joseph.
Johny: I know. I wanna go to Mexico.
Brent: Yeah, Mexico man.
Johny: Seriously, awesome workshop.
Brent: And guys often you go to this place on this workshop and you go to all these tourist spots. You don’t actually get to experience the real culture. And that’s what I’m loving about this workshop that Joseph is having in January is you get to go away form the tourist areas and just experience the real culture with someone who’s lived there or knows the people. He’s like an insider thing.
Johny: I know these spots are very limited guys. Check out the link below. Jump on his workshop. And man I would love to go so if I’m free I’m gonna try and make it out in person. This would be awesome.
Brent: And that Beauty of the Breast Cancer project. What a great course you know?
Johny: Really inspiring.
Brent: What a good thing to get into. You know helping women and then there’s one guy in the booklet that’s actually got breast cancer.
Johny: Wow, that’s crazy man. You kind of think or yourself is lucky every day when you’re healthy man.
Brent: I know.
Johny: Coz people just go through adversity .But what a great way to give back with your photography. I absolutely loved it and then the DIY photography mate; the Macgyver of photography. I saw you looking at the bell. You’re like “that’s the bell hit.”
Brent: Yeah guys I made a lot with my own stuff too. So if you do wanna save in your photography in making accessories like a backdrop and things like that he’s the guy to watch so check it out.
Johny: Check out all the links below for his stuff. And don’t forget to check out our free courses below. I’m super pumped about them. Click the link there and choose what you’re really interested in and get started today.
Brent: Awesome.
Johny: Epic show, epic photographer; absolutely loved it. Have a great week guys.
Brent: See you next week, bye.
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Johny & Brent