A few weeks ago, my friend Bryon gave my a last minute invite to go with him to Moab; in the form of “I’m going either way. Do you want to come with me?”. Let’s see… Ride to Moab. Activities already planned. Cool dude to go with. I’m in! Moab is a little bit like Chuckie Cheese’s for adventurous adults, but without the bad pizza. This one small area is packed with world class rock climbing, mountain biking, off-roading, hiking, and not to mention it’s being flanked on each side by the gorgeous Arches National Pack and the gorge-eous Canyonlands National Park. It was a good time. There was some rain and some wind, but mostly just a whole bunch of sand and sunshine! I could launch into some verbose story right about now, but I’ll spare you all and shut up. Hit the jump for the rest of the photos!

                          

Last year on a whim and my own dollar, I attended and shot the 2009 Teva Mountain Games in June.  I knew it would be a great opportunity to build my portfolio and I had an idea of trying to capture and tell the story of the event and put it into a small book that I would then use for self promotion.  It turns out to be the best little thing I’ve done for business so far.  When I made that, I also made a general portfolio book, and have also use various other marketing pieces like promo cards.  But nothing has been as well received as this little book.  Even a month ago at Outdoor Retailer, I had some new promotional material, but some people still received the TMG book best, even though they had already seen it and the other material was new.  Why?  I’m not 100% sure.  But I’ve got some guesses as to why it was such a big hit, and I think they could be applied to future marketing attempts of mine or anyone elses in hopes of achieving the same success.

1.  The Teva Mountain Games are insanely cool, therefore, anything about them is also insanely cool by association. Where else can you spend 3 days shooting in one place and have the opportunity get images of climbing, whitewater kayaking, mountain biking, road biking, freestyle bmx’ing, parkour, people running through the mud, great live music, all the while in a beautiful location like Vail, CO?

2.  The images are connected and they tell a story.  I found that photo editors and neophytes alike preferred the TMG book over the general portfolio.  The bottom line is that most people would rather look at at set of images that work together to reveal a bigger than a series of single disenfranchised images.  The average non-photographic person seemed more able to connect with the TMG book, versus the general portfolio whose disconnected images eventually would lose their attention, regardless of quality.  And for photo and art directors, the book also shows the ability to effectively capture and tell a story.

3. All of the TMG images were captured within a 4 day period.  This is really only for people who may interested in me from a work related angle, but I think this might be the way that this book contrasted most from a standard portfolio.  Let’s face it, for anyone who shoots full-time or has been shooting for a long time, it shouldn’t be that hard to come up with 15 great images.  But people aren’t looking to hire you hoping that you’ll get another one of those magical shots or that you’ll get lucky again.  What they need is a photographer they can depend on, and it can be too easy to have a portfolio that displays a level of work that far exceeds your regular output.  The TMG book displays a collections of images that were all captured in a short period of time, and therefore better demonstrates what level of images are to be expected during the period of an assignment, and not just what you can produce if given enough time.

With all this talk about about my 2009 Teva Mountain Games promo book, you may be wondering why the post is titled 2010.  Well, this is a post about the success of the 2009 book as a marketing tool; and nothing would prove it to be more successful than the fact that because of it the Vail Valley Foundation (who puts on the Games) has hired me to be one of their headline shooters for the 2010 Teva Mountain Games!  That’s what I call a direct effect.  Most of the time you can get a general feel for if your marketing efforts are working or not, but it can be difficult to discern which are being most effective and which aren’t being fruitful.  It’s certainly encouraging to get the kind of direct feedback I’ve gotten from this book, and I will certainly be making another book of images from the 2010 Games.  For the upcoming games, I will have unfettered access to everything, have much more information and control in my hands, and even be a part of the of the planing related to photo coverage.  So, add that to the vast personal growth I’ve felt in the last year and a few new toys, and I can only imagine that the 2010 images will be even better than the 2009 ones were! So stay tuned for some action packed image from the 2010 Teva Mountain Games.  But don’t stay that tuned, because they’re not until June 2-6!

I have been thinking of a way to give away a copy of the book with this post, but haven’t thought of a terrific way to choose a winner. So here’s the deal. Anyone who wants to be in the running only needs to comment on the post and pick their top three photos from the set. Whoever is closest to my top three picks is the winner and will be a proud new owner of the 2009 TMG image book that you just read all about. Without further adieu, here is the slideshow of images from 2009, one of which appears on pg. 68 of the new Rock and Ice Photo Issue! Ready, set, win!

                          

When I started writing this, I was on the plane home from Salt Lake City after spending 5 days at the Outdoor Retailer Winter Market. For those who don’t know, Outdoor Retailer is the largest outdoor industry trade show in the country and happens twice a year, once in January and once in July. It’s an intense blitz of every single person involved in the industry converging on SLC for five days of mayhem. The following post in a slightly rambling recap of my experiences this year, complete with a slideshow of images that hopefully transmit the controlled chaos of Outdoor Retailer.

While talking with a few people about how the show was going, we all agreed that the typical OR experience is in fact less healthy than the typical college experience. Depending on what you’re there for, your day probably goes something like this: After the day up at Snowbird, where you can check out all the vendor tents, demo the latest gear and shred the mountain for free, the chaos begins. The show floor opens at 9am the next day, but you probably got up early for that 7:30am panel discussion on something important to your career. You always think you can grab breakfast on your way to the floor, but it never seems work out. So you wander the floor from 9-4, taking mental notes on where the free coffee is and how to get from any booth to any other booth and still go by an energy bar company for free morsels of food. Then at 4 o’clock the beer rolls out, and everything shamelessly degrades into Happy Hour. You wander from booth to booth trying to collect cool steins complete with beer, and try desperately to look like you’re still doing something that resembles work. At 6 the show floor closes and you go out to some expensive, gorging dinner that hopefully someone else is paying for. Then you go to a long string of parties, after-parties, and after-after-parties; for the sake of networking of course, not because you like to party. Finally, you round the night off with an hour or two of work in you hotel room, because you need to turn something in and get ready for tomorrow. Grab a few hours of sleep, wake up, and repeat. It’s incredibly exhausting, but it’s a lot of fun; not to mention that for a freelancer like myself, the entire industry is in a giant room and at your fingertips.

On my way to the show on Day One, I got a text message from Nicky Dyal, who I worked with in the Gunks to shoot some images (read about it here, on the old blog). The message said, “Whoa Ben!!! Sick photo in Liberty Mountain! I’m here at the trade show in SLC… are you?”. While I knew that Liberty Mountain was going to be licensing the photo to run full page in their 2010 climbing catalog, I had no idea it was going to be out in time for the show. That was a great way to kick off the show, made up for my lakofbreakfast, and it was also great to have some hot-off-the-press work to show to potential clients.

This year at the show I had a very different approach than at the last year’s Summer Market. For the most part, my hand was forced, due to the 6 week blitz it took to get this website running in time for said trade show. Basically I went into the show with one appointment and not much of a game plan. I was providing SNEWS, an outdoor industry trade publication, with interesting photos from throughout the day for their Morning Report, and I was checking some things out for Backpacker; but other than that, I had my one appointment and a whole lot of wandering to do. The thing is, it really worked. I ended up meeting with more art directors, photo editors and marketing people than the previous show, met and had great conversations with a few key people, and have some really exciting stuff lining up for the next few months.

While at the show, I had some new Pentax camera gear to play with, and play with it I did. I got some good hands-on time with the brand new K-x body, a new K-7 body, a DA 10-17mm fisheye lens, as well as most of my usual kit. Now that I’m back, I also have the new DA* 55mm F/1.4 prime lens, which I left at home in favor of the smaller FA 50mm f/1.4 prime. Expect to see my thoughts on this equipment and more example images in the following weeks. The quick and dirty report is that the K-7 is a rugged, amazingly compact, semi-pro body that is jam-packed with features; the K-x, despite being an entry level camera, is no slouch and has unbelievable high ISO performance; and the fisheye, as you’ll be able to tell from it’s dominance in the gallery, is just plain addictive fun.

I’m no longer on the plane home. It is now tomorrow. And even though this post was a little long winded, I promise that a whole day has not gone by since you started reading. Just be glad I cut out half of the stuff that I originally had slotted for this post. And as promised, here is slideshow of the wacky goings on of the 2010 Outdoor Retailer Winter Market. Enjoy the images, peace!

                          

Last weekend I headed down to Ouray for the annual Ouray Ice Festival.  As promised, here is a slide show of some images I took during my trip.  This weekend I’m goingto be snowmobiling in Steamboat Springs with a bunch of high schoolers.  Then next week I’m off to SLC for the Outdoor Retailer Winter Market.  Enjoy!

                          

No, that’s not the new motto around here, but it’s pretty funny. And funny, is how I like to start the New Year. For all the beautiful places I’ve been this year and great athletes I’ve photographed, this might be my favorite image of the year. I took it at a bar in Keystone, and something about the colors, simplicity, balance, warmth and crispness of it, not to mention the fact that it’s hilarious, really captures me. 2010 has started off with a bang, and a lot has just changed. There’s a pile of good times on the horizon, so keep reading for a breakdown of what’s new, what’s old and a slide show of some of my favorite 2009 images that don’t already appear somewhere on the webpage.  Enjoy!

New Year. December 31st marked the end of my first year in business as a full-time adventure photographer, and I have to say that I’m pretty happy with the way it went. In 2009 I spent a month living in Joshua Tree National Park in California with an old friend and a new friend, climbed and shot in the dry deserts and lush mountains of Utah, failed miserably at climbing the Grand Teton, spent 4 weeks gallivanting around the northeast collecting an array of images, went back to J-Tree for another week, logged well over 100 hours of road trip time, took over 30,000 images, almost died 3 times and much more. Not a bad start. If I can continue the trend of visiting and photographing beautiful places, while lowering the occurrence of near death experiences, it’ll be a pretty good beginning to 2010. There’s a lot on the horizon that I’m excited about. Some things are planned, some things are prospective, some things are just ideas and hopes, and the more I think about it all, the more it fills me with energy to make it all happen.  Stay tuned!

New Website. For the better half of 2009, getting a new website was high on my list of things to do. The old one was a template site and wasn’t customizable enough for me, was to limiting, and in my opinion, just wasn’t professional looking. I wanted something completely original, completely me. So why did it take so long? Because I was originally hung up on the idea of doing it myself. I got books on HTML and CSS, watched a bunch of tutorials, and tried to learn everything. Us creative types are usually also control freaks and want to exercise our creativity in every possible arena. But that mentality often just causes us to be distracted from whatever it is that we’re really trying to accomplish. Luckily, I got wise (it happens ever now and then) and realized that if I continued trying to do it myself it would not be done for many more months. Not only that, but it would also considerably pull me away from my real objective, which is growth as a photographer, not a web developer.

That’s when I decided to bring in some back up, er, someone to do almost all the work.  I went to my friend and climbing partner Jeremy Fields, who just so happens to also be a professional web developer.  He agreed to “help” me build the site.  Jeremy is absolutely fantastic to work with, and as I already knew, is a great guy.  He is very prompt, professional, creative, easygoing, and very talented.  Thanks to him, the website is ready now, not the six months from now/never that it would of been if I had continued trying it myself.  A few weeks ago, I was talking with a photographer friend of mine, and he said something that stuck with me: Do what you’re good at, and outsource the rest.  That’s not always an option, but when it is, it seems to be a good plan.  I think this a a great example of that in action.  Thanks Jeremy!

New Blog. I always felt that the old blog had a bit of an identity crisis.  What was it about?  Genny and I?  Climbing?  Photography?  Pictures and stories?  Nothing?  Who was it written for?  Friends and family?  Photographers?  Adventurers?  With this new blog I hope to remedy that problem.  The old blog will stay active and will go back to it’s original purpose of just being about the life and adventures of Ben and Genny.  This blog will take a more professional look at my life as an adventure photographer.  Meaningless diatribe and incessant rambling might will yield way to more purposed content.  I will still share lots of stories and photos from the field, but will also begin including some posts that will have a little more substance for photographers, while hopefully also still having some significance for the non photographic folks out there.  I will also delve into the occasional gear related post, talking about what I use and why, and about what ever kind of cool new toys that are out there for photographers and adventurers alike.  My mission is to have a well balanced mix of content that has something for everyone.

New Resolution. No, I’m not talking about higher megapixels. That hasn’t changed.  I mean the kind of resolution one tends to make around New Years.  I’m generally not the type for any kind of resolutions, but I’ve been trying to be more intentional about setting goals and pursuing growth as a photographer and as a person.  A few weeks ago, I came up with a rather odd goal and I’ve recently decided to make it my theme for 2010.  My new resolution is *drumroll*… to take more bad pictures.  This of course is not to be confused with wanting to take less good pictures.  Now most photographers would probably agree with me that taking bad photos isn’t really something you need to put effort into.  It generally just happens all on it’s own.  I’m not talking about those mistakes, things like missed focus, bad exposures or poor framing.

If there’s one skill that I certainly have, it’s the ability to know ahead of time what things I’ll be good at and only do those, while at the same time completely avoiding the things that I know I’ll be bad at.  It’s great for appearing like you are good at everything, but it’s terrible for growth as a person, since it causes me to skip the part of life that might have the opportunity for failure.  The kind of bad photos I’m looking for are the kind that come from experimentation, the kind that come from not knowing how something is going to turn out, or the kind that come from intentionally working with subject matter that you know is boring just to see if you can capture it an interesting way.  The bottom line is that sometimes a great image only comes on the tail end of a bunch of crap.  As Thomas Edison said, “I have not failed 10,000 times.  I have successfully found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”  So, now I will welcome failure as part of the path to becoming a better photographer and as part of pursuing perfection.

And that’s what’s going on in my world.  It seems like 2010 will be all about ‘more’.  More trips, more mistakes, more growth, and hopefully, more great images.  So, now you’re all caught up.  Moving on.  This weekend I’ll be hanging out, climbing and shooting in Ouray, CO for the annual Ice Festival.  Keep you eye out for some fun images upon my return. Peace!

Scroll down for the slide show.