Happy Memorial Day

Photo: That's me in the lower right corner of an AAV-7, an amphibious assault vehicle.

Image © Copyright 2008 Michael Seto

Wishing everyone a great Memorial Day Weekend. Recall that this is a time of remembrance to honor those who sacrifice to serve the greater good; not just a long weekend to get away or BBQ. I ran into some sailors in uniform last night at my local bar; they were in NYC for Fleet Week. Chatting with them, their professionalism, commitment, and patriotism was evident. The couldn't have been older than 25 - the same age as me in the photo above.

Anyway, the bumper sticker flag lapel pin jingoism that passes as patriotism today may be cheeseball and easily scoffed at. But as someone who has led young men into combat, the true virtues of sacrifice, commitment, morality, integrity, and service to the greater good continues in those who go into harm's way for us.

As Admiral Nimitz said of the Marines on Iwo Jima, "Uncommon valor was a common virtue." The same is true today, bumper sticker or not.

Fleet Week in New York

Images © Copyright 2008 Michael Seto

Good morning. Yesterday, May 21st kicked off Fleet Week in New York City. Five US Navy warships, including the USS Kearsarge (LHD 3) cruised stately up the Hudson River in a parade of ships that included US Coast Guard and Canadian Royal Navy vessels. A flight of four F-18 Hornets buzzed overhead as well.

I took up a position on the Hudson Riverwalk and shot some pics using my Nikon 70-200 VR lens, arguably one of their best zooms ever made. I tacked on a 1.4x teleconverter to give me a bit more reach, a equivalent of a 420mm lens at the long end. With the aperture stopped down to f5.6 (from f4) I got some sharp images, above. I used a Nikon D2x at ISO 100 giving me a shutter speed of 1/500th.

I posted a few photos on flickr and immediately had a news blog ask for usage of the photos. News at light speed.

Last night I ran into a couple of sailors at my local bar, Thom's, and chatted for a few minutes. They were from the USS Monterey, CG 61. I told them I was a former Marine (we're never ex-Marines) and we talked about life aboard ship. Whenever I see a Marine in uniform, I always buy them a drink. Sorry Navy, close but no cigar.

Organic Food Shoot

This past week I was hired by Kopali Organics to take basic photos of their products as well as shoot some more styled magazine type images showing their snack items and raw materials.

With the basic product shots, one wants to focus on high key, good visibility on all items, labels, product, etc. This is not the time for fancy lighting or shallow depth of field.

The styled shots followed the standard food mag approach, tight, shallow focus, dappled light, shadows to reveal texture - and the two photos above what we came up with. I'm not showing the product photos since they're not quite as dynamic - a shot of a plastic bag.

Fortunately, all their food items were raw or dried or chocolate covered...mmmm...chocolate. This makes managing the food a lot easier than trying to partially cook a burger so it looks finished but does not dry out. Or the shoot where someone put brown shoe polish on a frozen turkey to give it that "just out of the oven" look.

Eddie Adams Workshop

Thank goodness, I finally sent in my Eddie Adam's Workshop application. The workshop is a three-day intensive for aspiring photojournalists, set up by Pulitzer Prize winning PJ, Eddie Adams - you know the photo of a South Vietnamese Army Colonel shooting a VC prisoner in the head. It's meant as a springboard and intensive immersion course in photojournalism, something I find myself drawn to more and more.

The hardest part was editing and submitting up to 20 photos. Choosing one's best work to show is extremely difficult, just as in writing. It took me two weeks to weed myself down to sixteen images. You can see my submissions at:

http://www.michaelseto.com/Proofs/EddieAdams/

And once submitted, there's no turning back. So if they suck...oh well.

I've been super busy otherwise, shooting some products for a small organic food company, my on-going work for City Harvest, and some jewelry photos. I hope to dig myself out from under all the post-processing required over the weekend.

Torrey Pines Here I Come

Well, a nice little package arrived today from the USGA - my pair of tickets to the U.S. Open. I'll be staying with a close friend, Joanna, who lives like 10 minutes from the course. I plan to bring all my photo gear and shoot the practice days - not quite an accredited US Open photog just yet - but I'm hoping to meet and chat with a couple of the SI guys through a friend's intro.

Anyway, I'll be out in San Jose seeing the folks then down to San Diego for the entire week. I'm bringing my clubs as well; man cannot live by watching golf alone after all.

Let me know if you're going to be out there.

Updated Blog with RSS and Email

Okay, so I am not as slow as I thought I was.

I often watch older people, like my parents, struggle with new technology. Even a cell phone elicited from my mom, "How do I check voicemail?" And then I wonder if she would figure out
how to enter names and numbers into her phones memory.

Heck, sometimes I even struggle with that stuff (if only engineers and designers made things more user friendly...but I digress.) Remember, I still not a member of ipod nation.

Anyway, I figured out how to add an RSS feed and email subscription box to this blog. So those of you who were looking to subscribe - if any - nows your chance.

Stay tuned...

Captain's Log: Spring Fever

Hey gang,

Happy May Day and Spring to everyone. The weather in New York City is finally changing, though it's been volatile the last couple weeks, going from 75 F to 55 F from one week to the next. Sorry that the Captain's been MIA for a few months. I think my last Captain's Log was around the new year. So I'll be catching you up on the last four months - but first a message from our sponsors...

Help Wanted

I need you all to start thinking of your social/business networks - you LinkedIn and myspace/facebook users.

1) Literary Agents - I need recommendations for a good agent for my book. A non-fiction work, a memoir about a naive young man that joins the Marine Corps. In essence a coming of age story; think combo of Accidental Asian meets Jarhead and The Caine Mutiny.

2) Movie People - I'm finding work as a Production Still Photographer very interesting and gratifying. I want more. So pass on names of movie people, producers, directors, etc. that I might reach out to for more work.

3) Event Planners - I do great work shooting events, and especially like corporate type gigs. So let me know who you know that is involved in this area that I might approach.

...now back to our regularly schedule program...


2008 has been a great year overall. I continue to build my photography business (check out revamped website www.michaelseto.com), with writing taking a back seat for now. I pretty much am committed to try and make a viable living from photography and more work has been slowly coming my way. I realize that I need to market myself much better since most of the work comes through word of mouth and recommendations. At the same time, I'm consciously holding back to make sure I carve out enough time to finish my book project.

What Now Lieutenant? is my memoir about my six years in the Marines and how it changed me. (updates on www.whatnowlieutenant.com) I have about 275 pages of the rough manuscript done. My outline projects a final manuscript of about 430 pages - so about 2/3 done. What I am focusing on is polishing a book proposal. I understand 90% of non-fiction is sold by proposal, a 10-12 page document that summarizes the book, market, competition, and why you should write it. It's supposed to be sent to agents and editors to try and get them to offer you a contract. A few selected friends, with writing experience, are helping me as readers for the proposal; it's always impossible to edit your own writing.

Now that I'm finished with my three month internship at a small publishing company, INK Publishing, the book proposal is my priority. The internship gave me some useful structure and a schedule. I learned a lot about how magazines, especially with tight budgets, solve their imaging needs. As a photographer, this was an invaluable lesson in how to make myself visible to the right people, and what skills I need to win their business. I successfully got a few pictures published in Skybussing, My Midwest, and Go, all airline in-flight magazines.

But April suddenly became busy with photo gigs - in one week I shoot a record eleven gigs. Wow. I'm finally emerging from under the resulting post-production; yes, the work does not stop with just snapping the shutter. I'm finding I spend two hours on post- for every hour of shooting I do. It's been great - I think I grossed about $4k in April, my best month yet. The great thing is that I feel much more certain about what areas of photography I want to concentrate on. I really enjoyed a couple of indie films where I shot the production stills. These are the stills that go into ads; they're meant to capture the look of the actual film. Then you've got the behind the scenes stuff as well. To me unit/production photography combines documentary with a commercial flair - all shot PJ style. That's photojournalistic style, I really like this type of work, as opposed to fashion. I'm also enrolled in a class on photojournalist at ICP, the International Center for Photography - the class is in it's third of ten weeks and I'm benefitting from having others look at my work, though most of the participants are more intermediate photogs and students.

With the maelstrom of photography work, the book proposal got put on the backburner till this week. Now, I'm starting on a revised proposal. My goal will be to get query letters out toward the middle of May. It's tough trying to balance working on the photography, marketing my photography, and setting aside the proper time I need to work on the book. It always feels like each week only allows me to do one or the other. Hmmmm. My plan going forward will to be try and build on a few areas like events and unit stills - stuff that pays well and motivates me, respectively - while setting aside adequate time to write. We'll see how that works out...

I do want to mention that the project I hoped for, a three-month documentary for City Harvest, a NYC based charity that rescues food, had been approved in Feb and we're entering our third month of shooting. This is strictly pro-bono but a great opportunity for me to get a foot in the door and associate my name with a well known non-profit. They'll use the photos for publicity, fund raising etc. And there's been some talk bandied about of a gallery showing to publicize the program I'm documenting - but that's putting the cart ahead of the horse and in the next valley.

Socially, I say I've been pretty reclusive and monastic; the immediate response from those who know me is, "bullsh-t!" They're probably right. I do get out, but I must say the range of what I do and where I go is curtailed. I'm trying to save $$$ so weekly $200 dinners are out of the question. I'm trying to keep my living expenses (outside of rent/utilities) to about $1000 a month. Maybe 30% of my previous spend rate when I worked on Wall Street. The Seto freezer is filled with leftovers and frozen pot pies - yikes. The only real luxury I allow myself is...you guessed it...GOLF! I've been on like four trips to Myrtle Beach since Thanksgiving with another planned for the Memorial Day Holiday. I'm also going out to the US Open in June at Torrey Pines San Diego with the hope of doing some golf photography. A friend of a friend is trying to hook me up with some folks from Sports Illustrated so we'll see how that works out.

Anyway, that's a very quick rundown of my last four months. I apologize for being MIA. I feel like I'm seeing people a lot less - those once a month things now have become once a quarter. Working a sole proprietorship, especially one where I'm constantly learning and far from any mastery of my subject takes a quantity of mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual commitment that I did not conceive of beforehand.


Michael Seto