Interview with Liz Linder

The way I think about it, I didn't decide to become a photographer, photography decided for me. When I was about twelve or thirteen, I picked up a camera and that was the beginning. I began to pursue photography in earnest when I finished liberal arts school [Haverford College, Pennsylvania], and realized I would have to do something for work. This seemed to be the obvious choice because it was my passion, and my life started to form around photography. This process involved getting smaller photography jobs and working as an assistant. Over time, the smaller jobs led to much larger assignments and soon enough I was a full-time professional.

I took a year and a half off from college. During that time, I went to the Museum School and thought maybe I should transfer everything. But it was expensive and would have required repeating two years of school. However brief, I got so much out of my time at the Museum School; I would definitely recommend it. One memorable class was the History of Photography with Jim Dow, which involved learning about contextual elements of a photograph. Additionally, this class helped me understand composition and lighting more deeply. During this year, I spent a long period of time photographing at Mount Auburn Cemetery in the Cambridge area. The trees, the stones, and the light and shadow helped me learn to see things I hadn't seen before. Compositionally, I apply that same knowledge to portraits and almost any situation today.

After graduating, I got a job at the Photographic Resource Center as the front desk person. It was an eye-opening experience. That job lasted a year and I learned a lot about the community here. I met many photographers who I know to this day, and spent all my free time in the library.

I then started working at SBI, which sells camera gear and film. Eventually, I started working for a few customers who came in needing assistance. I patched together a work schedule assisting a handful of photographers in a haphazard way, working for some really great people, but no one who was doing exactly what I wanted to do. I started making portraits of musician friends and soon I had a bunch of small assignments.

In all, I worked for about five years assisting on some level. I loved working for Sam Ogden. Through him, I saw first-hand how a business is run. He helped me understand what I needed to charge and how to produce what someone needs at the end of a photo session. In many ways he was my mentor.

The summer of 1993, I worked on three projects without doing any assisting work. One was a brochure for an environmental nonprofit organization. It was the lowest paying, but still took a lot of time and thought. The second was photographing all the architectural models for the Harvard Graduate School of Design's yearly catalog. The third project was a pin-up calendar - a collaboration with a business acquaintance - slated to be safe, tasty and internationally distributed. I had three great published pieces by the end of the summer although I worked my butt off, nonstop 24/7. After the summer, I didn't have the same quantity of work coming in and had to assist here and there. That summer was the big break: I knew I wanted to be a photographer more than anything else.

I tend to gravitate towards people and moments that have a balance of raw and quirky elements to them. I like a sense of humor and a strong emotional content. I want viewers to be able to relate to the photographs. I tend to make subjects comfortable enough so they drop their guard, and the portrait work I do reflects that. My style is pretty clean and straight forward with classic elements and an unexpected twist. I am really drawn to action and love capturing the moment, whatever the moment is. Since the digital era, I enjoy working in color more than I did in the film days because I can control it better. When I used film, I preferred black and white.

At a certain point, I realized I got more inspiration from music than from two-dimensional work because it exists in time; it's an emotional hit and more stimulating to me than looking at a painting or a piece of sculpture.

A singer friend of mine asked me to photograph her at an outdoor summer festival. While there, I photographed another act who had some label interest. They ended up buying a number of images and passed my name along. Through word-of-mouth, I started working with more musicians, not only doing portrait sessions but also concept work for CD packaging and promotion. This transitioned into doing covers for a trade publication, Performer Magazine, which led to more gigs. Because my music photography was so widely published and distributed, I began to get more inquiries for interesting commercial assignments.

It has been such a word-of-mouth process. I try to supplement my commercial work with a personal project or show and get some press on a regular basis. I'll send postcards out to my mailing list and more recently, supplemental email updates. Occasionally, I run ads in regional magazines. Currently, I have two employees and we are working together to strategically target ideal clients.

In 2007, we printed a brochure called, "Getting to Know Liz Linder". This 24-page piece chronicles moments between the time I wake up and the time I get to work. It includes very abstract images of the alarm clock, rumpled sheets and toothpaste, fried eggs, a window view, a shower scene; visual conceptions of all the things that could happen between waking up and going to work. The piece is effective in demonstrating that I work well on any scale, small or large. I love to make the mundane visually appealing.

In 1995, I assisted a really interesting photographer, Britain Hill, who had a four-day assignment for Rolling Stone, at Berklee College of Music. She lived out of town and when someone at Berklee called her for another assignment, she recommended me. I've been working with them on some level ever since. Through Berklee, my first image was published in Rolling Stone. Since then, a number of acts I photographed have been published in this and other publications including Spin. One of my favorite groups featured was the North Mississippi Allstars.

My work with musicians has led to calls from other magazines, sometimes for assignments and sometimes for stock images. For instance, I photographed John Lithgow for People Magazine; Jazz Times recently requested stock images of Kenwood Dennard; and I've had some cool assignments published in Guitar World.

My affiliation with Berklee has also led to other higher education jobs, including view books - thick, well-designed and often high concept publications for prospective students - which are really fun projects to work on.

The same as with other assignments: I look for concept. I prefer to interview my subject(s) prior to the photo session to find out more about their ideas and mental pictures. I gather these thoughts and offer suggestions to make them cohesive, taking into account their time frame and budget. I approach each act individually and try to find unique angles. If I'm feeling stale, I will change tactics, use a different lens, or alter the mood. On occasion, I will outsource for inspiration.

Through working on CD packaging, I have developed skills that translate well across many areas. When I was starting out, I was working in the trenches on projects with low budgets and high expectations. Basically, this was my boot camp. Now I can come up with strong visual solutions quickly and easily. For instance, an annual report for a pharmaceutical company needs a meaningful cover that attracts attention; rich details that support the story; as well as portraits of the people who make everything happen.

I spend more time preparing for some sessions than others. The Dresden Dolls were a cool, edgy duo that was a blast to photograph, and an easy session. For their live show, my focus was to show the high energy and dynamic relationship between the two performers. I ended up crawling around backstage working different angles, and photographing from the crowd's perspective with a long lens. I also photographed the duo before and after in the dressing room, capturing their theatrical makeup preparations. Overall, my focus was to encapsulate the scene and the vibe from a riveting show and translate it to a two-dimensional medium.

While I like the controlled environment of a studio, people can be more self-conscious standing well-lit in front of a backdrop. It's great to have a change of scenery and go on location. I love the challenges of working with existing environmental elements and available light. Live photography is exhilarating if the both the access and the lighting are good, since the performer is engrossed in the moment and not considering the camera.

I love working with available light, especially in clubs, which can result in strong, rich color saturation. I often hand-hold my camera so I can be more mobile, and do whatever I can to make myself more steady. I'll hold my breath, lean against a wall, rest the camera on something like a chair or a railing, and sometimes use a monopod. When the subject is more-or-less stationary, I photograph with as slow of a shutter speed as I can get away with, sometimes even down to 1/10 of a second. When the light is really low, for example in a nightclub, I photograph at higher ASAs, anywhere between 640 to 3200. Occasionally, I purposefully underexpose the image and punch it up later on my computer. When using a flash, I'll power it down, balancing the available light with the light from the flash to create a more natural look rather than a strobe effect.

Liz Linder

I sometimes go for a lens flare effect in my images, especially for performance photographs. I will even point the camera in the direction of the light to get that effect.

I make myself invisible mentally and am sensitive to the performance. The more the audience is focused on the music and the performers, and the more discreet I am, the better. The show comes first at all times, however what endures after the show are the photographs. It's a balance between the two. I also use a long lens on occasion to allow myself more distance from the stage, while still allowing for tight croppings of the musicians.

*For more of Linder's work with musicians, view her photo.net gallery.

I work primarily in 35mm. I started with a Canon F1 and used lenses with apertures of f/1.2 through f/2.8. When I needed to upgrade my camera system to adapt to the digital world, Canon made it impossible to do so with existing lenses, so I made the switch to Nikon. Currently, my favorite camera is the Nikon D2Xs. I love that camera, although it's super heavy. You could use it to defend yourself. The battery lasts a really long time.

My favorite lens right now is a 17-55/2.8, which is roughly in film lingo a 24-70mm. If I'm going on a simple assignment and only need one camera, I'll bring that and a 50/1.4 for low light situations. Sometimes I will use an SB800 Nikon flash. I've gotten into macro lenses lately, and also have a 10.5 fisheye, a 12-24 ultra-wide, a 35-70 and an 80-200. The 80-200 exhausts me: it's a lot of pounds to put in front of your face for hours on end.

For portrait work, I'll mainly use the 17-55 and sometimes the 35-70. I've been getting into using the 85/1.8 and the 50/1.4 for portraits as well.

I use UV filters on all my lenses to protect them, but not to alter the colors. Occasionally, I will use a polarizing filter. I shy away from too much trendy post-processing and keep it straightforward. Today, everything is being over Photoshopped. I simply color-balance and make appropriate adjustments to black and white conversions. That's pretty much the extent of it.

I use the camera's internal meter, and refer to both the histogram and the image on the back of the camera. I zoom in to check for fine focus. Occasionally, I will use a separate meter. With digital, you don't need it as much as with film. For certain kinds of photo projects I will use a meter to test lighting in different areas to figure out where I need to put a strobe. I prefer minimal equipment.

I've been using Photo Mechanic for editing, and we just got Aperture for processing. I have three machines here and my processing machine is the fastest one. On this one, Aperture can sprint, on the others it jogs or sometimes crawls. When I'm editing, meaning throwing out images, I like to go really fast. Then we'll use Aperture or Photoshop to do the RAW conversions. We do some adjustments in RAW and some in Photoshop. We color-correct and do light retouching. We've calibrated our monitors using Eye-One Match. The entire digital process is quite an ordeal.

My studio manager, Casey, is helping me continue to grow this business. In the past three years, we turned this venture from a sole proprietorship with an assistant to a business with two employees. The second employee, Mary, does most of the post production and post processing and also assists with business building. We all wear a lot of hats, continue to refine our processes, and build on our collective skills while getting good work in and out the door.

It took awhile to solidify this. I have a RAID drive, which has redundancy, meaning there are five drives in a case. The information is distributed in such a way that if one of the drives fails, the other four will hold the material, in the event of disc failure. First, when I photograph, we download the images onto my machine. I do series of edits so we have the final batch of files that we're going to keep. I will burn a copy of the RAW files onto a disc and back it up onto an external hard drive off of my machine. Then it will go to the processing station. Once that step is done, we back it up on the RAID. The RAID has everything from the past two years we need to access. We also have a set of back-up hard drives on site and a set of discs on site. Just in case there's local trouble, I have a full set of off-site backups, which is updated monthly. It's time consuming and expensive. In 10 or 20 years, are these hard drives really going to work? I look at my antiquated floppy discs realizing I can't open those without extensive effort. As a professional, it's essential to have backups of all of my work in multiple formats.

Some of it I've done in-house on an Epson. Many photo labs will print on Epsons. The large-scale gelatin silver prints I have done through Palm Press in Concord, Massachussetts. They specialize in artists' editions, portfolios, exhibition and museum work, and are very well-connected in the photographic community.

I either FTP them or burn them onto a DVD: TIFFs for certain publications and JPEGs for other clients.

Although I have two employees, I've never had a map for my business: it's a work in progress. I'm currently talking to a business consultant and reading books on business strategies. I have good instincts regarding pricing and marketing, but as far as getting these instincts out of my head and coherently translating the ideas for others is something I contine to learn. I'm sure a class wouldn't have hurt!

I think you really need to. Most of the people I know who are successful have figured out something about the business that's working. It's not just what they're doing, it's the business around it. There are so many brilliant artists who are threadbare and broke. My sister, Joan Linder, is an artist and is successful at getting large grants, sells her work in galleries, and has a tenure-track teaching position. She survives as an artist and that's really impressive.

The best thing you can possibly do is figure out what it is you love about photographing and follow that. Don't worry so much about what you think you should be doing. Figure out what floats your boat and gives you satisfaction and then get behind it and really market it. Do what you love and try to get recognition for it.

Whenever I build portfolios, I always get second and third opinions on them, sometimes neurotically four or five, from people seriously involved in my field. My current process is to work with a designer to give my portfolio some level of visual aesthetic. I pair images accordingly and think of the sequence, how it reads, and what the body of work is saying. It's good to be aware of your audience. I think it's important to show what you're capable of, and at the same time show the work you love to do. My portfolios contain both commercial and personal work.