Interview with:Fred Slocombe [spfldnet]
PHOTOGRAPHY
 | Do you have an online gallery where one can view your photos? |
| For how long have you done photography? How did you begin? I was in elementary school, probably in the mid 1970's. I found a camera at a garage sale that needed to be manually advanced to the next frame. I used it to make all kinds of wild multiple exposures. My great aunt had a hand-held Zoatrope within which you could insert paper strips of images that animated when you looked through the slots and spun the device. She also had an antique stereoscope for viewing photos in 3D.
I became fascinated with optical illusions and obsessed with creating visual effects. By the seventh grade I had my own black and white darkroom. |
| What has been your education as a photographer? Entirely through self learning and experimentation. I was a member of a camera club for a while, took photographs for the high school newspaper, and while attending Ivy Tech Community College in South Bend, part of the curriculum was producing 35mm slides for a computer controlled nine projector multiplex. We used the multiplex to produce opening and closing credit sequences for video productions. We had CG, but one should never let old technology go to waste, especially if it can well outperform CG. |
| What is your favourite type of photography? I like nature. No bird is going to sue me for copyright infringement. |
| What do you try to express through your photography? Peace, tranquility, the need for preservation. |
| How do you choose your subjects? I look for things aesthetically pleasing and unusual, but I've become more and more jaded, as far fewer things are unusual anymore. |
| What type of preparation do you do before undertaking the photo session? The standard equipment checklist including lighting, batteries, SD memory cards, requirements at the location.
Google Earth and TomTom. I scan an area using Google Earth, then plug the coordinates into my TomTom. It works great if there are no road blocks. |
| Do you normally photograph with a purpose already in mind, or do you let yourself go with the flow? If I just go with the flow I wind up wasting my hard drive with useless photos. I need a purpose and really must understand every possible use for a subject. A re-shoot is devastatingly embarrassing and unprofessional. |
| Canon, Nikon, Fuji, Sigma, Olympus, Sony, Pentax...which do you place your bets on and why? I have a Nikon D50 and D60, Only a few months and already there are spots showing up on my photos that can't be explained away as a dirty lens or sensor. I have yet to experience DSLRs of other manufacturers. |
| Describe your current equipment: cameras, lenses, computers, accessories... Nikon D40, D60
Lenses ranging from 10mm - 300mm
Dell PC
Epson Scanner |
| What software and plug-ins do you use to retouch and manage your photos? Adobe CS4 Web Edition |
| What measures do you take to protect your work against Internet piracy? Embedded meta data
Copyright
watermarks |
| Are you a good salesperson of your work? In what should you improve? I was never a good salesperson. I have to let my work speak for itself because the way I look frightens people. |
| Which past masters of photography do you most admire? Ansel Adams |
| Are technology and digital retouching reducing the gap between professionals and amateurs? Only in that amateurs often use only one Adobe filter on their images. |
| What is your team of habitual collaborators like? A loose confederation of local independent hair stylists, make up artists, models, clothing and shoe retailers, and students. |
| With which other photographers do you normally team up with or do sessions with? None yet, Good idea. |
| Do you consider yourself more technical or more artistic? More technical. My professional experience has been in processing volumes of material produced by others for quick advertising turnaround. Laying out the final advertisement for various media formats. |
| What have you learned about the art of framing and composition? Juxtaposition is a subconscious form of communication that can operate so deep as to not effect someone until hours or days later. There is a whole science related to the study of perception related to framing and composition. Done correctly you can convey messages to a specific audience that would be completely missed by editors and censors. |
| How does one develop the instinct of knowing when to press the shutter release button? I have a mental checklist, supplemented by accumulated memories of past mistakes. |
| When should one use film, and when should one use digital? I tried night photography with my Nikon D60. The ISO was at it's lowest setting and the result was horrifically noisy still. A starry night must be photographed with film. |
| Does photography have the recognition that it should have in contemporary art museums? Contemporary art museums are cliques. |
| Which websites for photographers do you frequently visit? |
| Is there any particular technique that you could share? So far with a DSLR, taking the same photo in many different modes can help cover your bases. |
MOVIES-TV
| What is your specialty? Production, direction, something else? Technical directing. Post-production. |
MULTIMEDIA
| What is your specialty in multimedia? I have an AAS degree in commercial television technology from Ivy Tech Community College, South Bend, and a BA in Communication from the University of Illinois. I have experience with still photography (film and digital), motion film and video production (both linear and non-linear editing), Photography (both film and digital), decades of experience with Adobe software, and 3D modeling and animation. |
| Do you have a website or blog where we can see something of your work? http://spfld.net
You will see a link to the main menu under the slide show*.
From there you will see a list of my many blogs and websites. I consider all of them still under construction.
http://spfld.tv
http://shopshoetopia.com
*Clicking on the slide show will take you to my gallery of images. |
| What has been your career path? How have you arrived to the point where you are? What did you do before? I laid out newspaper ads at the South Bend Tribune as a part-time job, then I went to work at the local cable advertising office, producing graphics and editing videos from 1993 to 2001. After my department was downsized I worked retail for a while and finally went to college and got my degree in communication. |
| What types of clients do you have? How do they find you? I use my brand as my nickname and involve myself in relevant conversations online. I volunteer my services. If someone can tangibly associate my efforts with their success, then they can pay me what they feel I'm worth. |
| How did your interest in multimedia technology begin? It began when I was still in elementary school, probably earlier. This was back in the 1970's. I saw a reflection of someone in a store window that made them appear to be inside the store. They stepped out of the sunlight and disappeared. I knew it was an illusion and I began to reproduce the effect in experiments with glass. Then I picked up a camera at a garage sale that did not automatically advance the film to the next frame. It was capable of multiple exposures and I used that with some interesting results.
In Sunday school I was part of a group that was to put on a puppet show about Moses and the burning bush. Everyone was frustrated about how to create the burning bush, but I came up with the idea of tying red ribbons to a small tree branch, blowing a hair dryer on it from below and shining a flashlight on it. They could have simply shook the little branch with the ribbons and achieved satisfactory results.
Later I got an 8mm movie camera and produced still-frame animations. All this before I finished elementary school.
All if this was barely acknowledged, if at all, by my parents. |
| Please provide a brief description of the hardware and software you currently use most. HARDWARE
Dell Dimension E510 PC
Epson CX4200 scanner/printer
Minolta (film) X700 with two lenses ranging from 24mm to 300mm
Nikon D40, Nikon D60 with four lenses ranging from 10mm to 300mm
Olympus digital audio recorder
Flipcam video camera (crap)
SOFTWARE
Microsoft Office (word, excel, powerpoint, publisher, access, outlook)
Adobe Creative Suite 4 (Web addition)
Newtek Lightwave 3D 9.5 (modeling and animation)
Sony Vegas Studio 9.0 Platinum
Anvil Studio (music generator)
Google's Picasa (image management) |
| What parts of your work are the ones you enjoy most and least? I don't know. The weird hours and weather issues related to scheduling photo or video shoots. Everything else is cake. |
| Technology and art - a collison of the left and right brain? Art is entirely subjective while technology has no latitude for interpretation. |
| Do you usually keep an eye on the work of your competition and analyze how they have done things? At my experience level I tend to recognize immediately how most techniques are achieved. I do envy the freehand artists and modelers who achieve realism. |
| How do you learn new techniques? Manuals? Tutorials? Trial and error? It takes manuals with trial and error. Lynda.com offers video tutorials and I am a premium subscriber. |
| What new technologies are you experimenting with now? Tough question. Technology may be getting smaller, faster and wireless, but I haven't seen anything new. If I ever get an Iphone, I'll look into developing apps. |
| What technology or phenomenon do you believe will revolutionize the sector in the next few years? If the entire electromagnetic spectrum is standardized, digitized, and compressed, it will be the dawn of a new era. If processors were bio-engineered. |
| Does it irk you when something new makes what you've already learned obsolete? I was in the Navy for 4 years and was totally left behind during the Internet Boom. The languages I learned were completely obsolete. |
| You spend many hours in front of screens and in dark rooms. How do you compensate for that on a personal level? My photography requires my visits to the outside world. It's a good balance. I'm thinking of getting a metal detector too. That actually would coincide with my photography excursions to beaches and parks. Imagine hiking along with my tripod, two cameras, and a metal detector. That's exercise! |
| If you have to hire an assistant, what qualifications and qualities do you look for when making your choice? It would be an intern who is interested in learning. Not necessarily experienced but very thoughtful about taking gentle care of the equipment. |
| What types of professionals are you used to collaborating with, sharing experiences with, or forming a team with? Other graphic designers and video producers. We help each other and fill what ever niche necessary. I'll run a camera or audio for someone else. One of my professors had me just sit at a table while he had auditions because I look intimidating most of the time, even though it's just the way I look and not the way I really am. |
| What professional publications or portals do you follow regularly? Most publications are so full of advertising they are really not worth it, but I regularly visit www.Linkedin.com where other professionals post on message boards.
www.crowdspring.com is a meeting place where clients submit requests and then creatives compete by submitting their designs for various projects. |
| What advice would you give those who want to break into this profession? For a very long time it will seem like everyone can do this, but that's only because you hang out with people who do. If you can stomach hanging out with people who can't do what you do, you might have a few more clients. |
PERSONALITY
| What hobbies have you got? Photography, web design, writing. |
| Which actor would you like to be? If I had a chance to audition for a role, I could probably play Danny DeVito's very large son. |
| If you were sent to a deserted island, which book, CD and film would you take with you? I'd take Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand because I would never read it otherwise. I would take any CD because it would have a reflective surface with which to signal airplanes and ships, Pink Floyd if I could play it. For film, I'd probably go with The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. |
| How do you find the balance between working to live and living to work? Eight hours is a third of one's daily life. Another third is spent sleeping. All you have left is a final third of waking life to live. You can choose to take one other entire third of your life to experience all you are going to be able to experience, would you choose the one your body needs to regenerate, or the other one which you have given over to someone else to control? |
| In moments of tension, what techniques work in calming the mind? I recall memories of a recent experience on an empty shore of Lake Michigan. The waves on the sand, the wind in the trees, the warm sun and the smell fresh water. |
| A simple pleasure that for you is quite big or important. Pepperoni on pizza that cooked so long the pepperoni fried like bacon. |
| What is the greatest loss you have had in your life? My grandmothers, my father, my house, my career. But. I never lost a wife or child because I never had them. I would have to say that never having the experience of marriage or children is the biggest loss. This branch of my family tree will probably disappear from history. |
| How do you respond to telemarketing calls? I once worked as a telemarketer. I think they need to make a call quota so I cut as politely and short as possible so they can move on to more potentially successful contacts. I never accept offers over the phone. |
| Are you an ex-smoker? How did you quit? I smoked from age 20 to age 43. I quit simply because I could no longer afford it. It only took me two weeks to quit and I've been smoke free since 2004. |
| It is 5 pm on a typical Sunday: what are you doing? I'm usually cleaning out the remainder of my email and getting ready to settle in to watch 60 Minutes followed by Nature and Masterpiece Theater on PBS.
When I was a kid it was Wild Kingdom followed by Wonderful World of Disney. |
| Something in which you are completely incompetent. Auto repair. |
| Of what are you an addict? Booze and just about anything deep-fried. Not so much anymore since my body started taking too long to recover. Oh, and Horseshoe Sandwiches. http://www.horseshoesandwich.com/ |
| You have nine wins in a row in a game of roulette: do you continue because you are on a good run, or abandon the game because statistically, it is your turn to lose? I take half of the winnings from the previous game and apply it to the next. If I lose the next game, I'm finished. |
| What toy gave you the best moments of your childhood? Lincoln Logs, Legos, An old 8mm film camera we used to make still-frame animations. |
| What was your favourite primary/secondary school teacher like? I can't remember much about that time in my life. |
| How did you meet your current boy/girlfriend? In college. It was love at first sight. It's like lightning striking. a Synchronized chain of expressions cascading emotions that would otherwise need to be expressed in hours of conversation. She was from Thailand and she wanted to marry me. I was jobless and living with my mother. It never would have worked. She eventually had to leave the country. I never stop thinking about her. |
| What was your first vehicle? A Buick Skylark. A hand-me-down from my mother. |
| Your New Year resolutions. Eat less, move more. |
| Is there any superstition that makes you change your behaviour? No. I'm completely secular and skeptical. However, that does not exclude the potential effects of operant conditioning that may influence my subconscious.
For example, I'm conditioned to recognize that my cat wants to go outside. My cat only needs to make a quick appearance before me and head toward the door. I often open the door to let the cat out and she will go out. However, she sometimes changes her mind and decides to stay in. I will close the door and go off to do other things.
At this point, my subconscious seems to have assumed that she went outside (due to operant conditioning). I will later wonder how the heck she got back in the house, having forgotten that she changed her mind and stayed in.
I have witnessed this phenomenon on other people. It might be useful. |
| Does knowing someone's zodiac sign help you to better understand that person? It might depend on how much they value the Zodiac. If you know for a fact that several people at an investment firm consult the Zodiac, you could likely base your investment criteria on their presuppositions and probably get ahead.
You would need to find out what source they use to read their horoscope, or actually study astrology to determine the value of certain combined heavenly bodies.
One might only be able to predict the decisions others make who have the same values represented in a common belief system. That's about the only value that can be found in any system of rituals. |
| Please list something you have not yet done, but that you would definitely like to do someday. Get married. |
| In your lifetime, what is the best news you have ever seen printed? The fall of the Berlin Wall. |
| To which other place in the world would you move without hesitation? British Columbia. |
| A bad habit you have overcome. Besides smoking, I can't think of any. |
| A word or expression that you love. "She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing. "
Macbeth - Act 5, Scene 5 by William Shakespear.
http://www.shakespeare-literature.com/Macbeth/25.html (...) |
| A word or expression that you detest. F#ck |
| What do you imagine yourself doing for your retirement? Probably what I'm currently doing right now. |
| If you were to return reincarnated, which real-life person would you like to be? Bill Gates. |
IDEAS
| Did God create the world in seven days, or do you believe in the theory of evolution? At the time the Bible was written they thought the earth was flat, so I take no stock in anything else written about the physical properties of the universe from that time, or any miracles for that matter. |
| To what percentage do you believe in statistics? Statistics can be skewed by selective sampling or by asking leading questions (probably more ways than I'm aware). Selective sampling would be polls taken on Cable News channels. Election results can be skewed by ballot stuffing, intimidation, confusing ballots, and many other methods. It really depends on the situation. Some quasi-accurate information can be gleaned from statistics, but there's always a margin of error. |
| Do you believe many illnesses can be caused by the mind? I have head of psycho-somatic illnesses and the effects of placebos. Technically, there is enough control of the body by the mind that stress over a long period of time will result in some form of physical illness. Endocrinology. |
| Do you believe it is true that humans only use 10% of their brain capacity? Not anymore. That theory dates from before Magnetic Resonance Imaging technology. |
| Using the subway without paying, shoplifting: is there excessive tolerance to these small offenses? I watched a dangerous car chase on Fox News (at the exact moment that other networks were covering President Obama's speech following his being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize). A man was being chased in Dallas or somewhere, by at least five police cars. The vehicle was a silver pickup truck that was being followed at dangerous speeds through downtown and residential neighborhoods.
Police set spike strips for the truck and blew out the truck's tires. The truck drove on the rims for over a mile before finally being forced off the road into a ditch.
I thought it was a car-jacking or a robbery of some kind. The driver just left a gas pump without paying. I think the police over-reacted. They already had the information on the vehicle and probably security camera footage. Did they need to goad the driver into a high-speed chase? No. |
| What do you think of the squatter "movement"? Never heard of it. If it's what I think it is, it's likely a symptom of a much bigger problem not being addressed by our elected officials. |
| Does brand name influence your buying habits? Brands are always more expensive than generic. That is the brand influence on me. |
| Do you think tipping is a good custom? It's unfortunate that waiters in restaurants are often paid below minimum wage because they must rely on tips (Indiana). Tipping is necessary and until waiters and service personnel are paid a living wage, we will have to tip a bare minimum of 20% |
| Are there too many holidays in the work calendar? If I liked my work I would be bored to tears on holidays. |
| Do you think the catastrophism about climate change has been exaggerated? No. The Northwest Passage is opening up for the first time in recorded history, my corn and bean crops are getting flooded every planting and harvest season lately. California is burning up in drought. I doubt that climate change is being exaggerated. |
| Do you boycott brands if you learn they employ children in third-world countries or harm the environment? Ever hear the term "Getting Niked?" If you worked in a Malaysian Nike Factory and you didn't work fast enough they would beat you with a shoe.
In Tijuana, Mexico there are no environmental restrictions. Chemical waste is dumped into the open sewers that run down the streets by the homes of the factory workers. Birth defects have been reported. The companies are American.
It's too difficult to find all of the companies responsible for environmental and human abuse. |
| Do you defend animal experimentation for the development of medicine that can save human lives? I don't know. I guess it depends on whether or not the goal is to actually save all human lives, or only those who can pay the highest price. |
| What is your opinion of the rise in popularity of plastic surgery and implants? People can do what ever they want with their own bodies, as long as they are making informed decisions. It's unfortunate that we judge people so heavily on their appearance. |
| Should more limits be established for cars within downtown areas? Everyone needs a little more exercise, but there are still those with special needs who need vehicles to get around. |
| Do extraterrestrials exist? It would be arrogant to assume that we are alone in the universe. I someday hope we can become extraterrestrials because in five billion years our planet will be consumed by our sun (If not already destroyed by a stray comet). |
CULTURE
| What do you currently have in your MP3 player? Abba
America
Amy Winehouse
Bjork
Black-Eyed Pease
Buffalo Springfield
B B King
Chuck Mangione
Cracker
Crosby Still, Nash & Young
David Bowie
Dethklok
Eagles
EBN
Edwinn Starr
Ennio Morricone (Theme from The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.)
Feist
Frank Zappa
Jethro Tull
Laurie Anderson
Led Zepplin
Leopold Stokowski - The Planets
Lita Ford
Little River Band
Lynyrd Skynyrd
Marvin Gaye
Mason Williams
Megadeth
Metallica
Miles Davis
Molly Hatchet
Moody Blues
Neil Young
Nelly
Ozzy Osbourne
Paul Simon with Art Garfunkle
Pete Seeger
Pink Floyd
Rush
Sly and the Family Stone
Spyro Gyra
Steppenwolf
Supertramp
Survivor
Temptations
The Black Eyed Pease & Justin Timberlake (Where is the love)
The B-52's
The Doobie Brothers
The Edgar Winter group
The Lovin' Spoonful
The Pointer Sisters
Three Dog Night
Tom Waits
White Zombie |
| What books are you currently reading? The Politics of Denial by Michael A. Milburn and Sheree D. Conrad.
The True Believer: Thoughts on the nature of mass movements by Eric Hoffer. |
| 
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Fred Slocombe
Springfield, Illinois, United States
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