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| Credit Michael Bloom |
Originally, I meant to sort of “interview” him, with myself asking questions, and him answering them. But, he took liberty and typed up an entire article! I didn't want to splice it to fit the interview style, because I felt like it would degrade the quality and interrupt the flow, so here are the questions I asked:
What
drew you to photography? Anything specific?
(Where)
Did you go to school/take photo classes? When?
When
did you get into it? As a beginner?
When
did things get serious?
What
do you use when you take photos? When you edit them?
How
do you like to take photos/edit them the way you do?
Any
model photographers? Styles you've "stolen" from
anyone?What are some of your favorite places/people you've
photographed in the past? Currently? Anywhere you wanna go?
Mike went ahead and answered them, extensively and cohesively, in one big timeline. It's quite a read, but one well worth reading, especially if you're stoked about photography, and want to do it in the future. Anyway, without further ado – here it is! (Hit that jump first, though)
I was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1970. I have a mother, a father and an older brother. My parents still live in the Eagle Rock house in which I grew up.
I’ve always been fascinated by light and gadgets. I remember watching dust specs drift in the light coming through the blinds when I was very very young - like, before kindergarten young. At the same time, my dad was always taking pictures of everything. There was a camera in our faces all the time - 8mm film, Kodak Hawkeye Instamatic X, flash cubes, flash bars, Polaroid Sx-70 and for the special stuff, maybe the Pentax would make an appearance. I would play with the cameras and look through the view finders.
Shit got serious in 1977. I was 7, Star Wars came out just around my 7th birthday - total life changer. I wanted to know how they did “THAT” and I wanted to do it too… so I immersed myself in everything about movie making - but mainly on special effects, make-up and cinematography. I had a Fisher-Price Adventure People set (#309 TV Action Team http://www.thisoldtoy.com/l_fp_set/toy-pages/300-399/309-advsertvactionteam.html) and it came with a “working” TV camera which was essentially an eyepiece and a mirror - when you flipped up the shade, you could see the image in the viewfinder. I would “fly” the camera around and watch the image through the tiny viewfinder - imagining that I was filming my own movie in the Star Wars universe. http://www.thisoldtoy.com/fisher-price/dept-7-playsets/d-Adventure/1-pics/misc/fpt1161-2.jpg
The more I tried to emulate what I saw on the big screen, the more I learned, and the more I was curious about how I could put it on film myself. I had the opportunity to put some real film in one of my dad’s cameras and take some “real” pictures. It was a trip to Big Bear in 1978 that I really remember loving “taking pictures”. Even though the 36 exposures were used up, I kept taking pictures with the empty camera.
I was hooked.
(the pictures came out like shit, though. I was covering the lens with my finger. Total waste of money. I got totally in trouble for it, and it jeopardized my future career - it was months before my dad let me put real film in a camera again)
I think “getting serious” was cemented somewhat in/around 1979. Along with Star Wars, photography, and other kid things, I was very much into The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, and other “classic” rock bands (which were semi-recent classics at that time).
One summer day, forced to help clean out the garage, I found a box stuffed with Life magazines. The March 1972 issue caught my eye:
I flipped through it and was transformed by photographer Jim Marshall’s images. This guy was WITH the Rolling Stones… in their hotel rooms, in their tour bus, on their airplane, on stage with them… everywhere… I realized that someone could make a living being “that guy”.
Saving up some money, In 1983 I bought the best camera and Lens I could afford - a Canon AL-1 (not AE-1) and a Tokina 28-80 lens. It went everywhere with me - and it became part of my identity. I was the photographer. The camera was just “part of me” and me part of it. It got me into places, it allowed me to have access to things. It gave me a reason to be and an excuse to experience places and things and people I wouldn’t have had a reason to otherwise.
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| Credit Michael Bloom 2010 |
“Hey, you’re not allowed here. Oh wait, you’re a photographer… here, get closer.”
Eagle Rock High School was (and still is) a 6-year school. grades 7-12 are in the same campus. There were lots of benefits to this - our Jazz band program was nationally recognized, electives were open to all grades, 7th grade boys got to see 12th grade girls… I joined the band in 7th grade, and worked my way up the ranks on schedule. Junior Jazz band in 8th and 9th, Senior Jazz in 10th and 11th. I also started taking photo classes (informally in 7th grade) then as a formal class in 8th grade. The photography teacher felt that I had enough talent to allow me to join the Yearbook staff in 7th grade (informally) and submit photographs to the editors. He would pay for film, and would process the film and make the prints. Great deal. Unlimited film and processing. I became one of the primary school photographers - it got me out of classes (Sorry, I gotta to photograph the Chess Club) and got me into places (Sorry, I gotta go to the teachers lounge to grab Mrs Webster for a photo). People who never talked to me or looked at me wanted to be in front of my camera - I was a passenger, but I got to enjoy the benefits. As I was in band, I got to photograph all the events. Since our Jazz band competed at a college level, the jazz festivals had some heavy hitting musicians in attendance. http://articles.latimes.com/1987-05-21/news/gl-1608_1_eagle-rock-high
At the festivals between sets, I would wander around taking pictures of the performers on stage and back stage. Because I was a musician too, I had an added qualifying layer - I wasn’t a photographer who was a musician, I was a musician who was a photographer.
In 1987, the band program “ended” with the retirement of Mr. John Rinaldo (see the story linked above). There was no point in slumming through one last year with a new instructor… I was done. So for my senior year (87-88) I took advantage of a program which allowed me to attend Pasadena City College for both college and high school credit. 2 periods at ERHS, then in the car to Pasadena for the rest of the day. At night I worked at Ritz Camera in the Glendale Galleria. That job allowed me to have access to other equipment, and taught me how to interact with the public.
I was accepted into PCC’s arts program as a pre-college 12th grader -and was able to get access to the college’s facilities - a more modern darkroom, a larger photo studio with more more modern equipment, and an entirely new group of open-minded teachers who were used to interacting with adults.
My sights, though, were set on the school up on the hill - Art Center College of Design.
I had no chance of going, though, because it was way way way too expensive. The only shot I had was to apply for a scholarship and get student loans, and that too was a long shot. The scholarships were awarded based on portfolio review, and generally only 1 student per year got a scholarship.
So to leave out the dramatic “Rudy-esque” story, I worked my fucking ASS off, and created a portfolio that was fucking AWESOME. I got a ½ scholarship to Art Center, which came with some crazy stipulations, and borrowed some money. I worked at a camera rental shop in Pasadena to help pay the remainder, and to pay the costs of expenses - which were about $1k a month - and this is in 1989 money.
Art Center was a blur because in order to keep the scholarship I had to 1) keep a 3.5 or higher GPA, and 2) could not take any breaks between “Terms”. An academic year at Art Center is broken into 3 “Terms”. A normal graduate will have taken 8 Terms to receive their degree. A normal graduate would attend 2 terms, and take a term off, take 2 terms, then take a term off, etc. But taking a term off would end the scholarship, which would make attendance impossible. So yeah. That couldn’t happen.
By the time I left Art Center in 1992, I had been getting paid for my photography work, had been published in magazines, and had a fairly strong foundation for my future career.
The only problem was that I was done.
Exhausted.
Spent.
Within 2 years of graduation, I quit photography.
⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗ ⊗
It was a few years before I picked up a camera again for anything other than disposable vacation photos.
(professionally there’s a reason behind this - but that comes later*)
When I next picked up a camera it was a digital camera. I rediscovered the freedom I felt as a kid, flying my camera around the house, taking imaginary pictures with abandon. Though now, those pictures could be captured on silicon - saved or deleted as I wished for no cost. My mistakes erased or deleted. It took a few years, but I recovered my passion and continue to this day photographing as much as I can, trying new techniques, no medium, new subjects. Maybe some day I’ll get paid to do it again, but I hope not.
(*now the story of what happened between 1992 and 1994 to drive the final nails into the pro-photo coffin)
Art Center was an amazing experience. I learned everything there was to learn about the technique of photography. The science, the chemistry, the physics of photography. Every bit of the processes of processing was distilled into precise steps. There were no snapshots, there was no flying the camera around the house and watching the world through the lens. Instead, each element in front of the lens had to be perfect to appear precisely as directed onto the film behind the lens. Let me explain…
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| Military Base in San Pedro, CA. Credit Michael Bloom 2010 |
In the first term at Art Center, you might as well have hung your free will at the door. Your life for the first
few months consisted of a 4x5 camera, 90mm lens, a tripod, a powerful lupe, weighted focus cloth, a few levels, a couple dozen film holders, a polaroid back (if you could afford it), and lots of Tmax 4x5 sheet film. You needed HC-110 or Dektol developer, D-76 developer, replenisher, test strips, sheet film developing hangers, tanks, trays, tongs, focus scopes, easels, seamless paper… the list was endless… and expensive. The instructors were mainly WWII and Vietnam Vets who had attended Art Center on the GI Bill. These old salty dogs had fingers stained yellow from stop bath and fixer, and could read the density of a negative by holding it up to a light. They demanded perfection. Perfect focus, perfect lighting perfect exposure, perfect development, perfect agitation, perfect etching, perfect enlarging, perfect spotting perfect mounting. They graded each assignment as a “C” - then you could get points up or down from there. If you didn’t pass their classes you didn’t move on. If you didn’t move on, you were kicked out. If you were kicked out your dreams were dashed.
For the first months we generally photographed Balls, Cubes and Cylinders. I found someone’s example on Flickr:
The seemingly sadistic assignment required that:
1: The provided Ball, Cube and Cylinder (BCC) must be photographed on 4x5 Tmax 100 sheet film, a white table top surface, against a white seamless backdrop (provided). The final product for the assignment will be an 8x10 black and white print dry mounted to an 11x17 mountboard and finished with a beveled matte. Negatives and proof-sheet will be attached to the back of the board.
2: The BCC must be present in the photograph, and must not be physically touching each other in any way.
3: The texture of the BCC surfaces must have density (detail) in every face - highlight to shadow. All objects must separate from the background and the tabletop surface.
4: Each object must be lit as follows:
a) The Ball just be lit in a way that the shadow does not bisect the shape - the curvature of the ball must be drawn with the shadow edge.
b) The Cylinder must be lit uniformly from top to bottom. The must be separation between the top surface and the edge surface of the cylinder. The shadow line must not bisect the shape.
c) The Cube must be positioned so that 3 unequal faces are towards the camera. Those 3 faces must represent 3 different tones.
5) All surfaces of the BCC must be in perfect focus, and all vertical lines must be parallel. The back edge of the table top must be visible in the scene, and must be in focus. The background must graduate at least 5 zones left to right, and must not be in focus. The background must be lit evenly from top to bottom.
The final print was examined closely with a 10x lupe. Any imperfections on the print were noted. All mistakes were noted. If the lighting was off, if the cube didn’t separate, if the sphere had too much of a highlight, if the cylinder was brighter at the top than at the bottom - all noted. Any mistakes in the processing of the negative would show in the background - which had to be equally lit top to bottom so that any imperfect agitation of the negative would show as uneven grain marks. If the stop bath was too warm, pinholes would appear in the highlights. If the fixer was too cold, the film would become discolored. If the negative didn’t dry properly, dust would appear. If the imperfections in the negative weren’t etched out with a scalpel, they would show as dark lines in the printing (which couldn’t be removed). Spots on the negative would print as white spots, which were “spotted” using a .000 brush and special photo paper ink. And if you did everything right, and maybe held the print in the press too long attaching the matte… well… you’d singe the paper and would have to start over.
Oh, you had 5 days to do it… perfectly.
This is my rifle, this is my gun. This is for fighting, this is for fun.
I don’t want to imply that Art Center was BAD - rather - it was too good at creating perfect technicians. As the terms passed by, my peers took time off, traveled, tried different things, some dropped out, some changed majors (which meant starting over), but because of my scholarship I had to keep going… twas brutal.
Those of us who stayed began to follow their own interests. Some moved to focus more on fashion photography - others moved towards studio photography. Some moved towards location photography, or editorial photography or portrait photography. Some brave ones moved to Fine Art™. (Actually, some pretty amazing photographers graduated from Art Center… and some even better ones dropped out). Check out the list of people who attended Art Center - it’s pretty crazy.
To supplement my tuition costs I tried to turn as many assignments as possible into commercial projects. I made a deal with a guitar shop in Hollywood, for example, and photographed their collection. I got some cash from the guitar shop for the photos, I got to use their immaculate guitars, and I shoe-horned the photos to match the assignments. Simulate an outdoor shot using indoor studio? No problem. I’ll just build a set and lean this here guitar against this here park bench… Need to photograph a reflective metal object? No problem, this Dobro here will do just fine.
In my 5th term (around 1990-91) our photo class was given the opportunity to test out a computer program that was in beta called Photoshop. It was going to change the way we did everything in the future, and the school wanted to make sure we were exposed to it early on. For a semester we labored over this slugging and confusing application - making colored shapes and putting text on the screen with no real sense of what to do - or what it could do. This was before layers, before filters, before most things we use today. You could strip out shapes, you could make paths, you could make “marching ants” selections, and then fill them with colors… I didn’t get it. It wasn’t for me. I rejected it, believing that clients would rather have it “right in the camera” the first time, and avoid all that expensive computer time after the shoot was over.
Yeah.
I graduated a couple weeks before the 1992 LA Riots. I was still working at the camera rental shop in Pasadena and I was shooting professionally a few shoots a week. I saw that several of my colleagues and former classmates were spending more and more time using their Macs and less time behind the camera. These people were bringing in thousands of dollars a month retouching photos for photographers. I saw that they were doing much of the stuff in the computer that we were taught to do in the camera and darkroom. Where a shot would take a day or more to do, and would require testing, lots of lab work, lots of color correction, and lots effort, a basic shot could be taken, and all those corrections could be performed afterwards in the computer.
I started to get it now.
Anyone could shoot “Those” kind of shots. Those product shots that I was getting a couple hundred dollars each for (shooting a catalog was bank - 50-60 products at a couple hundred dollars a shot…) could be done much faster - the camera was essentially getting the shot “close enough” and the rest could be done in the computer. As the process got faster, and the equipment got cheaper, clients began to realize that they could take their OWN pictures with their own 35mm cameras with film scanned to CD-ROM. The expertise that I’d developed wasn’t necessary any longer, as the craft of photography changed almost overnight.
Mind you, I was shooting a bunch of editorial stuff - Modern Drummer, Pulse Magazine, concert stuff, portraits for a bunch of classic rock guys, advertising campaigns for music equipment manufacturers, and of all things, Paul Mitchell’s white shampoo bottles.
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| Credit Michael Bloom 2010 |
Somewhere along the way I got hooked up with a crazy group of artists who had somehow landed a very dry corporate account - producing collateral material for Paul Mitchell Systems (the shampoo people). Now, this wasn’t the advertisements you’d see on billboards, this was the stuff that hung on bottles in the store, was on shelves at salons, and was mailed to salon owners in monthly flyers and catalogs. All those bottles had to be photographed. And I knew how to photograph white cylinders on white seamless. Bonus. So a few days a week boxes would show up. I’d set up the bottles, take the photos, process the transparencies, and collect the checks. I was getting so much work doing it, that I didn’t really have much time to look for additional clients or projects. I didn’t have a rep, so there was no one out there selling my “amazing” services. When I wasn’t shooting white bottles on white seamless, I was photographing black boxes with red leds on white seamless for another client.
One day, while working on those white bottles, I asked the designers why they weren’t using the computer for the clean up work on the photos - that it would save everyone time and and speed up the process.
Almost on a dare, they said, “ok smartypants, you do it.”
So i stepped up and did it, and effectively worked myself out of one of my biggest accounts. D’oh.
It wasn’t too much after that that we lost the Paul Mitchell account. That demoralizing event, plus the bleak outlook for additional photography clients, plus a lot of other shit, and I needed a serious change. I was done.
After proving my ability “making pictures in the computer”, the lead of the design group took a chance and said that he’d give me more work - but I needed a computer. So, without much fanfare, I sold everything. Everything. Every piece of everything. Leaving not a single piece of photo equipment. It was liberating. I made about 4k from the sale, and with that, and some creative financing from Apple, bought a workstation with all the bells and whistles. And from that point in 1994 till today, have made a living in interactive and internet related stuff.
The end.
Some highlights -
Meeting and photographing Jim Marshall while I was in high school. Photographing some really amazing icons. Becoming friends with some amazing icons. Having my work appear on magazine covers, in advertisements, on CD and Album covers, being mentioned in Liner Notes… being able to pay bills with money made from photography.
Some tech stuff -
The first camera I bought with my own cash was a Canon AL-1 (not the AE-1, but the AL-1). After I left my job at Ritz Camera, and moved to Pasadena Camera Rental, I switched to Nikon because PCR was Nikon exclusive. My first Nikon was the manuel FM2 - and I had that camera until 1994. I had a Hasselblad 500CM with some accessories. I had a crappy Calumet view camera, and a ton of other random equipment. Working at the camera rental place, though, was fucking GOLDEN. I got to use all the equipment for free - so I had access to the top equipment any time I wanted it (providing it wasn’t out on rental). The freedom to use that equipment allowed me to do things that other students couldn’t do without paying a ton of money for equipment (or rentals). I was really lucky to have that access - couldn’t have done anything without it.
After 2001, I’ve gone through a bunch of different digital cameras. Mostly Sony digital (because I worked for Sony and got discounts at the studio store for several years). As sensors have improved I’ve had to upgrade my equipment. In the past, camera bodies and lenses lasted forever, and improvements in image quality came from newer types of film, and newer processing and printing technologies. Once digital came on the scene, the sensors were part of the bodies - so as sensors got better, you have to “toss” the body - no upgrading. Because I was so familiar with Nikon, I chose to stick with Nikon when the time came to buy a DSLR. First I bought the Nikon D200, then upgraded to a D300s, then over a year ago, to the new D600 full frame DSLR. I shoot most often with the camera in my iPhone, though. As a wise photographer once said, “The best camera is the one you have with you”.
Recently I’ve been shooting with a GoPro Hero 3+ Black - shooting short video vignettes which are more like moving photographs than film pieces. Mostly having fun - which is all that matters.
For processing my images, I use a suite of different applications. On my PC, Photoshop CS6 is almost always open - for my “day job” as well as for my photo (and now video) manipulation and processing. I shoot RAW and “fine” jpg format, and process my RAW photos in Lightroom (which I dislike, but use anyhow). For video editing I use Sony’s Video Vegas Pro (version 12 currently).
I usually spend my vacations taking photographs - of landscapes, people, things, anything that is interesting to me. I enjoy shooting long night exposures as well.
Stolen… lets seee.. .that gets into a much deeper conversation. I am not an artist. I am artistic. I am a technician. I can take pictures and make photographs, but I have nothing to say. I don’t have a song in my heart or a story to tell or a message to convey. I like to emulate. So yes, I’m heavily influenced by everything. I steal everything I can, I copy everything I can. I’m like the Borg. I want to assimilate everything and try every technique. I want to understand how things are/were done, why they were done, etc. I feel closer to the artists when I can understand their processes - I’ve always looked behind the curtain, always wanted to see the dark rides with the lights on. I always read the last page of a book first, and read every spoiler I can find.
Thanks for that Mike! It's a helluva story.
If you haven't already, check out Mike's website. There's lots to see and lots to read, it's definitely worth a click (it's free, too!).
In other news, I've got some cool Instagram photos to share soon, as well as some other cool stuff.
And as always, thanks for reading.
--Aaron F.
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