Christopher S. Penn : Awaken Your Superhero » Photography

6 AM in St. Louis

Christopher S Penn — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 11:24:12 +0000

Two years ago I was wandering around St. Louis at 6 AM before one of the Social Fresh conferences. I had my digital camera with me, and was looking for interesting photos to take. Right around 6:15, I saw the sun start to come up. A look to the east revealed the reds and golds of a spectacular sunrise about to make its way over the horizon, even if obscured by all the local buildings. Amidst the urban clutter was the landmark St. Louis archway. A look to the west revealed my hotel, all 28 stories of it.

Sunrise was on the way.

If you’ve ever done any photography, you know that moments like sunrises don’t last for more than a few minutes. There’s a brief moment of magic when everything is just right, and then it fades as the day begins.

I broke into an all out sprint to get back to the hotel, racing inside to the security desk. The guard on duty probably wondered if someone had been murdered at the speed I ran up to him, but my only question was whether it would be okay if I went up to the closed restaurant on the 28th floor to take some photos. He called the manager on duty, who said yes, and the guard unlocked 28 on the elevator. Up I went.

I immediately had to perform some unplanned acrobatics. The cleaning crew had just mopped the black marble floors of the restaurant and as I dashed out of the elevator, I slipped and fell on what felt like the slickest black ice ever. Thankfully, lots of martial arts experience and luck kept me uninjured and my camera unbroken.

I managed to get to the window in just under 10 minutes from the time I saw the sky change and aim to the east. My luck held:

Be looking for opportunity.
Be prepared with the right gear and talent to take advantage of it.
Seize your opportunities with urgency, because they won’t last.
Be bold about asking.
Prepare to slip and fall, but be able to get up just as fast.
Take the shot.

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Believe none of what you see

Christopher S Penn — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 13:26:14 +0000

Much has been made of various attempts at illustrating how distorted our sense of self-image is (especially for women’s self-image) by the trade media using programs like Photoshop. However, if you truly want to blow up someone’s preconceptions about how manipulated everything is, there’s no better way to do it than to do it yourself.

If you have Photoshop or access to it, fire it up and pick a good image of yourself. Like most things, the better the source image (from a technical perspective), the easier it is to manipulate. For fun, we’ll use author Julien Smith’s photo that I shot at Podcasters Across Borders. I want to emphasize that I am not a Photoshop professional. I’m at best an amateur who can Google and follow directions. Everything we do in this little example is something you can do with almost no training besides learning where the individual menu items are.

The authentic Julien Smith

To start, hit three buttons: Auto Tone, Auto Contrast, Auto Color. This will fix up 90% of photographs. Remember that at any time, you can hit undo if a change isn’t quite as good as you’d hoped.

Next, hit up the spot healing brush tool and click on any blemishes or skin imperfections. With just one tool, you can change someone’s appearance fairly drastically, if subtly.

Julien minus minor imperfections

Next, let’s make him clean shaven. We’ll hit up the Dust & Scratches box and simply melt them away by making 2 layers and “painting” over his stubble with the blurred layer.

Julien minus stubble

Now let’s get into some truly warped things. We’ll apply puppet warp to his face, pin down all the sections we don’t want to move, and adjust his jawline. This step is so easy that a six year old can do it.

Bone warp!

So in just a few clicks, we’ve altered reality significantly enough that the photo of Julien is no longer an accurate representation of that moment or of him generally. Doing bone warps changes the actual geometry of his bone structure, something that only drastic surgery could do.

The enhanced Julien Smith

Want to empower someone – including yourself – to understand how absolutely false our perceptions of body image are? Learn these simple tricks in Photoshop, try them out if you can, and then any time you see a photo of someone, look carefully at it. Ask yourself which of these techniques were used (I guarantee at least one, if not more, in every media publication), and realize that pretty much everything you see on the cover of a magazine is fake and has been manipulated.

Even better, teach your kids how to do this and then make a game of spotting the tricks when they see photos of celebrities and other pop culture icons. The secret of this is the same as a stage magician: once you learn how the trick is done and can do it yourself, it loses all of its power over you. You realize it’s just a cheap parlor trick, some digital sleight of hand, so simple that you and your kids can do it. That realization shatters the perception of perfection that the media outlets and appearance-based industries desperately want you to buy into.

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Happy Black Friday!

Christopher S Penn — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 15:43:06 +0000

The sun’s rising over the horizon. The sales are on.

If you’re in sales, especially retail, did all your marketing preparation and campaigns pay off? Did you bust down the doors as a consumer? Did you sell out the shelves if you’re in retail?

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Happy Thanksgiving!

Christopher S Penn — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 15:41:05 +0000

Hungry?

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Happy Thanksgiving!

Christopher S Penn — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 15:38:39 +0000

Happy Thanksgiving!

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Managing vs. leading

Christopher S Penn — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 12:29:50 +0000

The difference between managing and leading is starkly simple. Imagine you’ve got a patch of woods that’s brambles, thorns, trees, and brush.

Leadership is being the girl or guy in front, hacking away at the foliage, making the trail.

Managing is being the team behind the leader that’s maintaining the trail, keeping it clear, keeping it free of the obstacles the leader has removed, for everyone else to use.

You cannot do both well.

If you’re leading, it’s counterproductive to go back down the trail and manage. If there’s no one else to do it, there’s no one else to do it, but every second you spend managing the trail is a second you’re not moving forward.

If you’re managing, it’s irresponsible to forsake your charge, wander off, and attempt to lead. You might not know where you’re going, and more importantly, the trail behind you will fall into disrepair quickly.

Neither is better or worse. Both are vitally important. If you want real success, know the difference between management and leadership, know which better suits your personality, and know which you’re more talented at.

Inspired in part by Ken Savage and New England Warrior Camp, which is where the photo was taken.

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Teaching The Pebbles

Christopher S Penn — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 10:46:40 +0000

Other posts in the series:

When Mr. Penn approached me, as he had others, with the opportunity to create a guest post for him in his absence, I was initially and naturally quite honored. That feeling, however, turned like spring weather in the Midwest often does to a horrible feeling of dread. How could I, far from a professional or even remotely consistent blogger of letters, possibly hold a candle burning at both ends to the likes of Mr. Wall, Ms. Hoffman, Mr. Kownacki, or even Mr. Penn himself?

It took me a few days of fighting a Xanax-resistant strain of seizing panic to finally realize what he did here: not only was this an opportunity to fill space on Mr. Penn’s website while he racked up more frequent flyer miles than Clark Kent, it was a teaching moment directed squarely at me, and that’s a superpower we all possess.

Despite the reflexive reach for a gas mask that the term “life coach” compels out of me, we all possess some knowledge of some subject we can convey to someone else in the world. It could be a mechanical, philosophical, intellectual, or an artistic skill or talent, but the unrealized superpower in all of us is this: No matter the pursuit and how much you think you know or don’t know about it, there is always someone who knows less about that subject than you. These people are your target, your audience, and your unrealized opportunities.

It’s important to remember that whatever your subject or level of expertise, your students will almost never be blank slates. Like pebbles on a mountaintop, each student will behave differently in accordance with their natural gifts, needs, and their own unique imperfections. Some of these pebbles will stubbornly refuse to move, fighting the push of external force and the pull of gravity and in doing so deny themselves their own innate potential, accepting a destiny of forever remaining where they lie. Some will veer off too soon, impulsive and without direction, and tumble off the mountain, never to be heard from again. Some only seem to move when forcefully motivated by the boot of the teacher. Many will sadly slide down the smoothest path available, avoiding friction and resistance at every possible turn, safely landing at the goal of the bottom without so much as a scratch, but at the same time unnoticed and with little fanfare — they will have traded away their potential for an easy victory but are left with nothing to build on of their own.

The best students, however, will be the ones that show patience. They recognize their flaws and they wait — waiting to be shaped by the teacher’s tools — however limited those tools may seem — and allowing the experience and the environment to smooth away the imperfections. They’re the last pebbles to leave the mountaintop. Once these pebbles are ready and set down the path of the mountain, however, they become immense, awe-inspiring forces unto themselves that even the teacher dares not stand in the way of. They command a following of the very environment around them they once waited unassumingly in — water, ice, wind, boulders the size of cities — and transform it all into a crushing, unconquerable force of an avalanche that changes the landscape of the world.

What about the teacher, you ask? Of course the teacher is a pebble himself influenced by his own teacher until set free to become the foundation of his own mountain. Turn enough pebbles into unstoppable waves of energy, however, and you will be seen as the real definition of a superhero — something everyone will fear and respect for your ability as a kingmaker to unleash the power of the pebbles under your care.

My own pebble is the girl in the picture above, and my shaping tool is a camera. She’s ever the patient student and has taken well to learning my photographic philosophy of being part of the world she imagines inside the camera — as opposed to being simply on the world with a camera in hand. You can see the rounding of the corners and the smoothing of the jagged edges of this pebble with every new photograph she captures. Should it continue to be her pursuit, it will not be long before she is ready to be set upon a world that will never see her coming — and I will take great joy in watching the elements at her command rush past me and form something more amazing than I could ever imagine for myself.

It’s one of the many open secrets of the universe that we all possess this ability — most of us simply fail to realize it. We are content to be our own unassuming pebbles gliding down the easiest route possible on someone else’s mountain.

Your challenge and biggest reward as a teacher is to find these pebbles of opportunity on your own mountaintop and set them upon the unsuspecting world below, transforming them from a humble start into something unimaginatively powerful. These pebbles do not necessarily need to be children or relatives — we are surrounded by potential pebbles of all ages in nearly every interactive aspect of our daily lives.

Be a superhero: Find a pebble and teach it to become its own mountain.

Bryce Moore (@abiteofsanity) is an IT professional by day, a photographer by love, and one of Christopher Penn’s many pebbles by grace and choice. While trying to duck out of the way of boots thrown in the area of his cranium, he photoblogs daily and writes not nearly enough according to some people at abiteofsanity.com.

The wedding of Steve and Mindy Penn

Christopher S Penn — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 16:26:41 +0000

I’m thrilled to have celebrated and been a part of my little brother’s wedding as best man yesterday. For those wedding guests who are interested in the photos from the event, you’ll find them in this Flickr set. Special thanks to Brooke Pichette for some of the ceremony photos!

Here also you’ll find the prepared remarks for the best man’s toast I wrote and delivered amidst much revelry:

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen! If I might have a few moments of your time to say a few words.

More than a few of you have probably noticed how much I use my camera. I’m an amateur photographer, with emphasis on the amateur part, and I wanted to share a few observations from behind the lens. Cameras can capture much more than we can consciously perceive. Our eyes see everything as a blur, a continuous flow, doubly so at a wedding, but the lens can capture the tiniest moments in time.

One of the things a lens can catch that our eyes miss are little expressions on our faces. Psychologists and behavioral specialists call these micro-emotions, the faces we make in between moments. We never see them. They’re there, and they may register subconsciously, but we never really see them with the naked eye. In those slices of time, everything is revealed, because we’re unable to mask our true faces, emotions, and feelings in the spaces between the notes of life.

Why do I bring this up? In the past day, I’ve had the chance to take plenty of photos of Steve and Mindy, and here’s what the lens shows in the moments between the chaos of getting married: they really love each other, very deeply and truly. The thin slices of time when no one is looking tell the reason we’re all gathered here today: two friends in love not just consciously, but thoroughly, in every way from the obvious to the subtle, from the conscious to the invisible. Love that’s apparent even when no one is looking, even when no one except the camera lens is even capable of looking.

Please join me in a toast to Steve and Mindy as we all wish them a lifetime of those little moments together. To my brother and my new sister, I celebrate all the moments you’ll share together – even when no one is looking.

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Photo Friday: New York City HDR

Christopher S Penn — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 12:17:03 +0000

As much as some of my friends who are professional photographers dislike HDR as a gimmick, it’s a fun gimmick, so I do it when I can and when I see the opportunity.

Click for a larger version

This is one of my favorite shots of New York City in HDR, not just because it’s dramatic and stormy, but because of the subject matter and timing. If you’re not familiar with New York City, this is one of the major banks that got hit hard in the financial crisis. The photo was taken a little more than a year ago when the market was in flames, so the appearance of HDR-enhanced doom and gloom over a well known financial institution was quite apropos.

Have a great photo Friday!

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The light you see

Christopher S Penn — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 15:45:18 +0000

The light you see

Photography’s an interesting art form. At its core, it’s entirely about light. How much light reflected from the world around us dictates what our picture looks like. As a photographer, you have nearly total control over how much light you choose to see, what quality the light is, and what you choose to see with that light. In total darkness, photography is phenomenally uninteresting – but rarely are you ever photographing in total darkness, unless you leave the lens cap on. Even on the darkest of nights, there’s enough ambient light to take a photo.

Don’t believe it? If you have a camera that can hold open the shutter (like a DSLR) and a rock solid tripod, set it up facing out a window one night and press the shutter. It may be a minute or two before you hear the shutter close, but when you look at the result, you’ll see quite a bit. As long as the camera is undisturbed, you’ll have a photo that looks shockingly like the daytime, even when your own eyes struggle to see.

This makes for an interesting metaphor for your life, doesn’t it? It’s not that there isn’t enough light in your life so much as it is your eyes, heart, and spirit might not be open wide enough to pick it up. A camera set up to patiently wait in the middle of the darkest night can see as if it were day.

If there’s not enough light in your life, plunk yourself down like the camera on a tripod, stop the chaos around you, take a whole bunch of deep breaths, and open up your eyes. Don’t think – just wait, watch, breathe, and see if your mental and emotional lens can find the light that’s already there.

The light is there, waiting for you.

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