Hello, My Name Is: Marc Edward Smith

Name: Marc Edward Smith
Occupation: photographer
Hometown: Layton, UT
Birth town: Layton, UT

How did you get started with photography?

I picked up my first SLR camera in August of last year. I’ve taken probably 150,000 pictures in 365 days — I quit my day job. I quit just to learn. I had finished a year at Weber State and decided that it wasn’t for me. I love school and I enjoyed all the aspects of learning, but it was taking too long to get to the meat and potatoes of photography and what I really wanted to be doing. I felt constrained by their way of doing things, the way they said, “this is how you do this” and “this is how you have to do this.” I decided to learn on my own. Try everything and fail on my own.

I love art. I studied art, but I was never really good with any kind of medium — graphic pen, painting — I couldn’t do it. I like the idea of taking an experience home with me and keeping it but photography always seemed too expensive. I had a friend who pushed me in the right direction. He bought me a camera — he spent $1,000 on a camera and told me, “you really need to do it.” I had a throw away camera at the time, it didn’t take very good pictures, but you could see the composition was there. So this friend actually invested in me, I didn’t ask, he just told me I had to do it. And I am and I haven’t looked back. It’s consumed me. I feel like it’s all I’ve ever done and I’ve only been doing it for a year.

I’ve since bought a new camera, new lens, bought some higher-end gear. I’m making myself broke just so I can learn to shoot pictures.

When you got your first camera did you know that you were going to go in this direction?

Before I got that first Sony camera, I had a little $70 Samsung digital camera and I was out in the desert driving around — now, growing up I spent a lot of time in the Salt Lake Desert with my father, you know, shooting guns, camping, stuff like that, but I’d never seen the grass like that. It was knee-high and green, really translucent and beautiful. I took that picture with my digital camera and enrolled in the photography program a couple of weeks later. In the 20 years I’d been going there, I’d never seen anything like that before and who knows if it’s ever going to look like that again? But now I had this picture. It motivated me. If I can’t paint or draw or do anything like that, I’m going to take a picture. Since then, I’ve tried really hard to be the best photographer I can and take images to that level of detail.

I’d always wondered why we couldn’t make sensors for cameras take all of the information, both the light and the dark? Why are we always stuck with either one or the other? If you’re taking a picture of somebody’s face you can use a lot of tricks, you can expose for the face and use a light to pick up the back or you can use a flash to light up the people after you expose for the back. But I hate using my flash. I absolutely hate it. I’d rather set up my camera on a tripod and wait 40 seconds to record it all. I want to get a picture that represents what I’m seeing.

Your photos are largely HDR, or high dynamic range. How does HDR work?

I’ve been shooting high dynamic range since March. When you take a normal picture, you adjust the exposure level to get the light right. This way you don’t get a blown out picture or an underexposed picture. When you take a high dynamic range picture, you actually take three pictures. What you do is set up the perfect exposure, you test the light and see where your exposure’s at. Then you set your camera on Auto-Exposure Bracketing, which means that when you take that one picture, it will take what you’d ideally want for a best exposure, then it will automatically take another picture that is two stops lighter and then another that’s two stops darker. Same exact scene. What it does is get you three stops of light information.

Later, you combine all three of these layers in a program — I use a program called Photomatix — and blend them. During that blending process, you take every piece of color information per bit, which if you’re shooting RAW is going to be 24 bits of color per pixel. So if you have a 5,000 by 4,000 pixel image, which is approximately a 18 megapixel shot, you’d have 24 bits of information per pixel instead of an 8 bit pixel. Am I losing you? Basically you get a hundred million colors on a picture versus just two million.

And you get all the light information as well as the dark information. When you look at something, your eye exposes for both the light and the dark. Normally, though, if you point your camera at a bright object, everything else will come out black. With HDR, you can still point at that bright object and it will expose lighter and darker and give you all the tones. Some of the shots are not perfect because it’s a software. It’s not a perfect process. But I really enjoy it. It’s changed my life.

How did you get into the Hill Air Force Base?

I picked up my camera and my tripod one day and went up to the Hill Air Force Base Museum because that’s a place that I’d go with my dad who’s retired military, along with my grandfather. I really enjoy that museum, so I took one or two pictures, posted them on their Facebook page and then one of the guys that works there called me and said, “hey, would you like to come and get inside this B-24 and have access and take some pictures?” My answer was, “when?”

What is your process when you go out to shoot?

I don’t think about my pictures. It’s an automatic process. Pull out my camera, take the picture. Sometimes I won’t think it’s any good, but I’ll keep them. Sometimes I’ll get back to them later. The picture of the cockpit in the B-24 was one I didn’t process until someone asked me if I’d been able to get inside one after looking at my shots from the Hill Air Force Base. I didn’t like the image that much when I took it. But I went to the folders and looked at it and pulled it out to process then, two or three months after I’d published the original Hill Air Force Base. Now it’s in the Utah State Fair. I went in and entered it with four others yesterday.

What is something you want to impart to other people who are discovering their passion for photography?

Each photographer should have his own style. You shouldn’t change that style. It makes you who you are. You want someone to look at your pictures and know it’s you, or Ken Rockwell, or Trey Rattcliff. You have to develop your own style.

How do you support yourself doing what you love?

I have no income. I do sell some prints. I have a 13 by 19 photo printer, so I double mat them and do an 18 by 24 frame. I took pictures of a fire, I was at work at a car dealership at the time and there was this guy there who knew I was heavy into photography and he told me there was a fire about a mile away. I just jumped in the car, I didn’t even tell my boss I was leaving. I drove out there with my camera — I’d just taught myself HDR techniques, basically. I’d probably taken two HDR shots before this fire presented itself — I took out my tripod, and started snapping.

I didn’t think I was going to get anything. I had a really slow memory card. When you’re trying to bracket, you’re taking several shots in a row and when you’re doing that in RAW file at 25 megs apiece, my camera would only do six or seven shots and say “Memory card writing, please wait.” I eventually got a new memory card, but at the time, I could only take 30 shots of the fire with the one I had. Later, that fire department bought 60 prints plus a huge one for their lobby, so I made a pretty good chunk of change doing that, but that was purely accidental.

What’s your favorite thing to shoot?

National parks. I love national parks. It’s not just the shooting, though. It’s getting there, traveling, camping, being able to take my vacation home with me. When people ask me what my favorite picture is, I think of that quote, I think it’s Imogen Cunningham who said it: The one I’m going to take tomorrow.

How do you feel about the way we tend to interact with photography these days?

I come from a big family — seven brothers and sisters, big Mormon family. We were born here in Utah. My dad was in the Air Force. He had a 35mm Minolta and a Sony video camera that held Betamaxes, you know, before VHS. It was huge. He didn’t make a lot of money, being a father of seven, and NCO in the military. He’d been in for 15 or 20 years, but he got those for the family and my mom made picture books for all of us kids. Each would have pictures of each kid, birthdays, camping, every significant event in our lives, from the beginning until 17 or 18. And on top of that she had the family photo albums.

I don’t see that happening anymore in people’s homes. I don’t see people putting photos that they went down to Walmart to get processed into a book to keep anymore. I’m glad my parents took the time to take pictures and keep them. It’s important for me to have that and it’s something I want to be able to give to my children so they can see their history.

What are your plans for the future with your photography?

I’ve been thinking about doing a workshop here or going to California, charging $250 and giving people an all-day workshop that takes them from start to finish. I promise success — I mean, you can’t win with every picture that you take. It doesn’t work that way. I’ve taken pictures and brought them home thinking “these are going to be the best HDRs I’ve ever done! These are going to be fantastic!” and I’ll pull them up and think, “these are horrible!” But that’s how you learn. That’s how I learn.

I’d like to travel the world doing this kind of stuff, go inside the Basilica, get invitations to different places, even go inside crazy places no one would think to go to take a HDR, or even just a picture.

Hot: military aircraft and aeronautic history; off-roading and building rock crawlers; video gaming with family and friends; camping; traveling.

Not: litter and pollution; big government; speed limits; racism; TV journalists.