Change in Direction

I'm changing the direction of Bill Mellett Photography.  It's the next step in the evolution of the business as part of my own personal growth.

When I first launched my photography business it was all about taking action towards living a dream.  That dream was to earn a living doing one of the things that I most enjoy  which is taking photographs.  It's my attempt at "the persuit of happiness.”

The other things that I most enjoy doing are flying and lending my flying ability to volunteer with the CAP doing emergency services work.  We have a fleet of aircraft owned by the US Air Force and we use them to find downed aircraft, lost hikers and other missions primarily for the Air Force and Homeland Security.  Lately, we have been getting a lot of missions to photograph things like the aftermath of Hurricanes Rita and Katrina, the Gulf Oil Spill and some other things.

Well, the CAP figured out that I’m pretty good with a camera so, first I became part of the Aerial Photography team.  At first I was not excited about the idea of giving up a pilot's seat position for a back seat aircrew position.  But, that did not turn out to really be the case.  Now I am in charge of the whole Aerial Photography Program at my squadron.

In my work on Aerial Photography for CAP I discovered that I really like it.  I get to do the two things that I love the most of all at the same time. I appreciate the role that aerial photography played in early aviation and that aviation played in photography.  I believe that I am unique as both a photographer and an aviator in my passion and capabilities in both areas.  

I like it so much in fact that I am going to focus Bill Mellett Photography on Aerial Photographic Art.  I'm going to train my two passions on one unified effort.

I don’t have it all worked out yet but, the change of direction means that from a business point of view, I am going to focus on editorial work and sales of fine art.  I plan on doing some personal projects in North Texas to build up my portfolio in this area.  Then I am going to try and connect with art directors and publishers to get my work published. 

On the fine art side, I will produce an inventory of prints and try to sell them on-line and in person. I might self publish a small number of books and try to sell them at local venues.

The audience that I am targeting on the editorial side will be magazines, visitors bureaus, real estate professionals and anyone else who needs imagery of the areas that I will cover or that they employ me to cover.  I would love to see my work on the cover of Texas Highways Magazine, for example.  On the fine art side, I imagine my audience to be anyone with a special connection to the areas that I will cover.  I can imagine tourists to Dallas appreciating my aerial photographs of the city. 

This decision did not come lightly to me.  I’ve built up a client and partner base serving a small geographic area that I feel very loyal and imensely gratful to.  Without my clients, partners and friends help it would not be possible for me to have the courage to take this next bold step.  I’m not going anywhere.  I will still be there to service any of my existing base for whatever photographic needs they have and want me to handle it.  It would truly be my honor and I’ll continue to punt business back their way when I can.  I'll still volunteer my services to local charities.

I’m glad that fractured parts of my life are starting to dovetail together.  The next big challenge will be to develop the vision for my work.  I have some ideas that I'm exited to get started on but, I’ll leave that for now and save it for another blog post.

The iPhone Camera

There has been a recent trend in photography away from the ever increasingly more powerful computer technology in our DSLR cameras and even computer chips in our lenses to let us take tack sharp images even if our hands are a bit shaky. Any modern digital SLR can take incredibly sharp, accurate images even in very low light. They are really wonderful.

The problem is that this gee wiz science has been muscling out the art aspect of photography. It's been a little bit of a sterilization of the media. People get caught up in the fascination with the technology and forget about the art.

The quiet movement is called "The Best Camera" as in the best camera is the one that you have with you. Nowadays we all walk around with cameras attached to our cell phones. The beauty is that you can almost always be quick on the draw with it. A DSLR on the other hand is a fairly big thing that you tend to have with you only occasionally. Photography is art and the whole point is to get people to be creative and create art.

I know that I have had a lot of fun with my handy camera. A couple of Fridays ago I was in my office, not really in the mood to do any office stuff. So, I popped off some of the keys to my keyboard and rearranged them so that I got the letters TGIF to be together. Then I shot it with my iPhone just for fun.

I also like it because as I get more serious about my photography, a DSLR represents more serious work. When I've got the big gun out then that means that I have a purpose. It might be a real shoot for a paying job or it might just mean to hone my skill a little bit more for when I am shooting for real. Kind of like Tiger Woods hitting a bucket of golf balls, if I dare put myself anywhere near his category.

Cell phones are also really little computers that, by the way you can also talk to people with. That means that you can also program them. There are some really powerful applications for the iPhone that are a blast.

One of my favorites is Hipstamatic. Hipstamatic mimics old film cameras. You can change cameras and films that it mimics and just have a lot of fun with it.

As far as editing goes, photoshop has an app that is very powerful for a cell phone application. The best part is that it is free. The Best Camera also has an app that is not free but has some cool tools to quickly punch up a photo.

All of the photos on this page were shot and edited entirely with an iPhone.


I encourage everyone to unleash the inner artist and try some of these things. You've got nothing to lose.

Click the badge below to see my whole gallery of iPhone photos.

Windmills

On the high plains there is a lot of nothing. Nothing can be good sometimes because there’s nothing to block the flow of air pumping over those plains. That flow of air has been powering windmills for generations as I learned on a visit to the American Wind Power Museum in Lubbock, Texas.

There is definitely a certain kind of beauty whenever form meets function. In this case, the windmills’ designs are obviously optimized to take full advantage of the blowing wind even in very light breezes. Less obvious design features help to control and balnce the windmill. If the windmill is allowed to spin up as fast as it wants in very blustery conditions then the windmill would litterally come apart in a centrifical explosion. On the other hand, if it is pointing in the wrong direction then it would not spin at all. The design experiments used to control and balance the windmills have led to some interesting shapes over time.

The windmill museum is interesting because they explain and display a lot of those shapes all together. Some of the windmills displayed only exist in America here. I’m talking most notably about the Dutch design. The Dutch windmill looked authentic to me. It had careful, unusual wood and metal craftsmanship that looks unlikely to have been fabricated here.

The people who run the museum definitely appreciate art. In the covered outside area of the museum there is a very large wall. There was an artist in a portable lift probably about 60 feet off of the ground working on the mural in the room. The mural was a landscape devoted to farm and windmill life. It was quite obviously a major undertaking.

Some of these photos were taken while the museum was open but, most were before and after hours "through the fence" shots.

See some more of the photos that I took here or click below.

Horse and Rider

One of the things that I enjoy so much about photography is that the camera gives me license to see sides of people’s lives that I never would have otherwise. My job as the photographer is not just to make pretty pictures but to try and capture the essence of someone and to tell a story with images. They pay me to visually present them in photographs.

I knew almost nothing about horses and the people that ride and care for them until recently when I did my first horse and rider shoot. I really didn’t appreciate the relationship that the horse people have with their horses. In my mind, the subject of the photos was the rider and the horse was there as a prop. I could not have been more wrong. It is horse AND rider together as partners. They are both equally important in their own ways.

It is absolutely not like photographing someone next to a lamppost. The lamppost just happens to be there and does not have feelings. It just is what it is, end of story. The horse very much has a mood, just like the rider and a feeling that is important and comes across in the images. If the horse is uncomfortable or agitated or worried then you can see it in the eyes and ears and posture. The horse and the rider have a connection that has to be respected and appreciated.

We got really lucky with the weather. I prepared by getting my subjects ready right during the best part of the light in the evening. We had just come off of a long spat of oppressively hot North Texas summer temperatures. This night was warm but, not too much so. The wind was also happily calm that evening in late July. The sky was also very clear. So, everything was falling in place for a good shoot.

It went off well. We squeezed a lot posed shots in including a wardrobe change from dress to jeans and shirt and from bareback to saddled. I don’t know if the sun sets quicker towards the end of the summer or if it just seems that way when you are trying to compose a scene and click away like a mad man but, I felt like my window of opportunity was really small and it was all over in a lot less time than I would have liked.

At the end of the session, I let Alyssa run Bailey around and I just shot them having fun. I think that both of them really liked the opportunity to stretch their legs out. I think that these were probably some of the best images from the shoot. It happens a lot that the best shots come when you just catch people doing what they love to do best. I count Bailey as a people, too.

The Joy of Photography in Arlington

I recently went on another photo walk with a bunch of other photographers. This time I hooked up with a group in Arlington, Texas. The goal is simple, it is just to go out as a group and photograph whatever and/or whoever we come across. There is a plan for where to meet, the route to walk and where to meet-up again at the end but, that's it.

It’s fun to hook up with people who you don’t have to explain why you like to capture images then spend hours culling the many frames and editing the keepers to appear the way we imagined it when we took the frame in the first place.

Another one of the things that separates just anyone with a camera snapping pictures from those of us that are a bit more serious is our willingness to twist and climb and crawl to the right spot to get the angle on a shot that we have in mind. I had fun on this walk observing other photographers taking their pictures. Some folks did contort themselves a bit. It’s funny to watch only because I know that I do the same exact thing sometimes. I’ve ruined shirts and pants doing this. This time I didn’t ruin any clothes but did risk my neck standing on a wall probably 20 feet off of the sidewalk taking some shots of a waterfall at the University of Texas – Arlington.

I took some images of a few of the students who were out and about on a Saturday morning during the summertime. They were surprisingly very pleasant and agreeable to having their pictures taken at that hour.

There was one guy in a pickup truck that saw us and was telling us to take a picture of him. The photo that I got looked like he was angry and yelling at me but, he really wasn’t.

One of the photogs with us had a thing for photographing trash. What was even funnier was that he would shoot a trash can then other people would just join in and give it a try for the heck of it. I photographed them shooting a boring trash can. I have to admit that I’m as guilty as them though. I took one shot of an outdoor cigarette ash tray that I wouldn’t have otherwise.

A shout-out goes to Michael at Arlington’s Main Street School of Music for being cool and letting us get cool inside his school and letting us shoot him there.

Check out the whole slide-show here.