Tim Gruber and Jenn Ackerman use both photography and video to tell stories for editorial and commercial clients. 
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Coming Soon! Every year we'll be publishing at least two magazines of our work. Look for our first issue soon.
Ackerman Gruber Images is the start of something new and exciting for Jenn and I.
There’s a level of excitement in starting something new. New expectations and new dreams.
In grad school, our friends called us the Grubermans (Gruber+Ackerman=Gruberman). Today, a few years out of grad school, we finally decided to take the plunge and do away with our individual sites and fully commit to going about this as a team. Much like going about it alone we will have our challenges, but are beyond excited to be forging ahead as one.
Mobile Friendly and Flash Free :: If you haven’t yet – feel free to take a peek at our new site. We’re pretty proud of the fact that the site is completely mobile friendly. In this new design, we tried to avoid using Flash at all costs. Did you know that 7 million iPhone and iTouch users tried to download Flash on their mobile devices? Crazy stuff.
Our photo galleries no longer use Flash so they’re easily viewable by all and each individual image can be shared with all your socially connected friends via email, Facebook Twitter.(Follow us here on Twitter if you’d like) If you’re like Jenn and I, you view most of your video content on your phone so there’s also mobile-friendly versions of our videos. All and all we worked to build a site that is usable no matter how you find us.
Welcome to our new home.
ps: If you’re reading this by a RSS feed you might be shocked to see that timgruber.com and jennackerman.com are gone and the crazy new domain of www.ackermangruber.com has invaded your feed. Welcome to the new site and hopefully in time you’ll find it as useful as the old blog. Assuming of course you even found the old blog useful. 
Jenn and I migrated all our old posts for better or worse here so if you’re looking for any of our old posts you will find it here.
Our new website with Flash free photo galleries
If you haven’t noticed my blog has taken a backseat to living life.
I hate resolutions. I’d rather just act and do what needs to be done. So with that in mind I’ve made a point of making this a year of tangibles.
Savoring human interaction, basking in afternoon light, watching the dolphins swim, walking til my calves ache, collapsing to the seductive smell of a new book, saying hello to strangers, a messy and well used kitchen and so much more.
Basically a life with less noise. I’ve become a slave to technology and while I enjoy all the benefits it brings me the pitfalls have had me longing for a disconnect.
Seth made a great point that’s worth reinforcing for photographers and all creatives alike and that’s just to do it. Make it happen. By now you’ve probably had enough time to break your resolutions for the new year so disregard that and just get out there and act on an impulse. Try it just once. Don’t over think it. Just get out and see what happens.
I gave it a try all last week and today again. I went out to explore with my Hasselblad. What I found was a landscape of possibilities and if I’m lucky(we’ll see when I get the film back) a few images I can add to a project I’m working on.
The hardest part is starting something.
One key element of a successful artist: ship. Get it out the door. Make things happen.
The other: fail. Fail often. Dream big and don’t make it. Not every time, anyway.
Tim got his ideas out the door, to the people who decided what to do with them. And more often than not, they shot down his ideas. That’s okay. He shipped.
These principles might help in guiding your work. I know they gave me something to think about especially the few below. Read the rest of the principles here at 10 Principles That Might Make Your Work Better or May Make It Worse
A few of the principles to get you thinking:
2. Consistent voice is more important than consistent style.
Voice is about what you say. It’s content. Style is about what you’re wearing. It’s aesthetics. The prior informs the latter, not the other way around. Clothes don’t make the man. They don’t make your work either.
3. Does it have heart?
If it does, make it. If it doesn’t, why spend the time on something that doesn’t have spirit?
8. Being too comfortable is dangerous.
Most creatures die in their sleep. Keep moving, or get eaten. The only things you should be absolutely comfortable with in your creative process are your tools.
9. There is nothing keeping you from doing the sort of work that you wish.
What do you want? It’s a hard, yet crucial question. We all do creative work to get happy. It’s why we let it beat us up, and it’s why we keep crawling back to it. Figure out precisely what you want, and realize that if no one will pay you to make it, you can still make it for yourself. And you still win, because you’re happy.
I’ve been a huge fan of Twyla Tharp and her use of project boxes for things she’s working on. Here’s a brief primer on the idea from Twyla if you’re not familiar with it:
The Project Box. Everyone has his or her own organizational system. I start every dance with a box, the kind you can buy at Office Depot for transferring files. I write the project name on the box, and as the piece progresses I fill it up with every item that went into the making of the dance. This means notebooks, news clippings, CDs, videotapes of me working alone in my studio, videos of the dancers rehearsing, books and photographs and pieces of art that may have inspired me.
The box documents the active research on every project. For a Maurice Sendak project, the box is filled with notes from Sendak, snippets of William Blake poetry, toys that talk back to you. There are separate boxes for everything I’ve ever done. This archive provides material to call on, to use as a spark for invention.
The box makes me feel that I have my act together even when I don’t know where I’m going yet. It represents a commitment. The simple act of writing a project name on the box means I’ve started work. The box also connects me to a project. It is my soil. I feel this even when I’ve back-burnered a project: My box may be away on a shelf, but I know it’s there.
Most important, the box means I never have to worry about forgetting. One of the biggest fears for a creative person is that some brilliant idea will get lost because you didn’t write it down and put it somewhere safe.
The purpose of the project box also has to do with efficiency and ease of work. A writer with a good storage and retrieval system can write faster. She isn’t spending a lot of time looking things up, scouring her papers, and patrolling other rooms at home wondering where she left that perfect quote. It’s in the box.
The Problem:
For years I’ve been struggling with keeping my own idea boxes, quotes I like, photos I’ve torn out of magazines and other misc creative snippets organized. My ideas and things are scattered across moleskins, random notebooks, multiple text documents, emails to myself, moving boxes, rubbermaid totes, a del.i.cious account, bookmarks in books and on and on. Being a nomad for the last few years of my life having physical boxes just isn’t practical for me. For the most part I didn’t have a system when it came to organizing my things; it was and still is a creative disaster.
Solution:
Evernote.
Slowly thanks to Evernote I’ve been working to change that. I signed up for the free(there’s also a premium version) service of Evernote and downloaded the app for my Mac and iPhone. I’ve had the app on my iPhone for months but never really used it. The other day out of necessity I finally gave it a shot. Jenn and I have been holding little mini workshops and the last one was a marketing workshop with a focus on defining our list of ideal clients. I was paging through past Communication Arts Photography and Advertising Annuals looking for ad agencies working on projects I like and projects that might be a good fit for my way of shooting. My problem was that I wanted to have a visual documentation of the ad agencies and the work they commissioned. If I didn’t care about preserving my annuals I could just rip out the photos, but seeing as I enjoying flipping through ‘em and at 24 bux it’s not exactly like ripping a photo out of a free weekly. I needed to a find a solution that visually allowed me to document the work and the ad agencies that did the campaign.
I was able to quickly flip through my annuals and with my iPhone take photos of the work I liked. From the iPhone app I was able to sync my snapshots to my Evernote account and within seconds I had a visual archive of potential clients tagged, cataloged and all indexed in an easy place to find them. The killer part is that Evernote has ability to search beyond just simple text in a document. It can search for text in images. I’m not sure how it does it, but it’s really helpful. So not only do I have a visual archive of creative inspiration it’s an image archive that’s searchable beyond simple text.
There are a million other uses for Evernote, but others have covered that a lot better than I could. See these few posts for more uses: How to Use Evernote to Create the Ultimate Post Conference Reference Guide and 14 Practical Ways to Use Evernote
Either way give it a look if you’re looking for a way to visually organize your ideas and inspirations. As a photographer I couldn’t think of a more useful productivity/organizational app.
Here’s an ad campaign I cataloged in Evernote that I liked and it shows an example of Evernote’s ability to search an image for text.
A screenshot of my photo inspiration notebook in Evernote. Any images I come across that I like I throw in this inspiration notebook.
Read more from Twyla in her article titled Why Creativity’s a Habit and Everyone Can Learn It.
Keep this in mind the next time you’re pricing your work.
Legend has it that Pablo Picasso was sketching in the park when a bold woman approached him.
“It’s you — Picasso, the great artist! Oh, you must sketch my portrait! I insist.”So Picasso agreed to sketch her. After studying her for a moment, he used a single pencil stroke to create her portrait. He handed the women his work of art.
“It’s perfect!” she gushed. “You managed to capture my essence with one stroke, in one moment. Thank you! How much do I owe you?”
“Five thousand dollars,” the artist replied.
“B-b-but, what?” the woman sputtered. “How could you want so much money for this picture? It only took you a second to draw it!”
To which Picasso responded, “Madame, it took me my entire life.”
Read more on charging by the project or the hour.
Came across this neat letter dating back to 1973 from Disney legend Ward Kimball to a young fan who wanted to be an animator.
Some solid no frills advice in there.
A few highlights:
What I am trying to say is that becoming an animator is a growth process that involves basic curiosities for all things, because man, animation is just not making things move, it is THINKING, THINKING, THINKING! You can’t know enough about everything. Curiosity is the key word. See everything! Do everything!
Learn from others, BUT DON’T COPY THEM! Try to retain your individualism while learning the basic rules. Don’t become dogmatic because you’re going to change your mind about what you like and what you dislike hundreds of times before you’re thirty! This will happen if you develope your imagination along with your curiosity.
You can read all the animation books in the world but learning the art has to be done while doing.
By now I know well enough that you can’t put a lot of weight in contests, but we all know they’re good for keeping our name out there. I was happy to be included in the Communication Arts Photography Annual for my Served Out: Aging and Dying Behind Bars project. Communication Arts dedicated a full two pages to the project and the reproduction was spot on.
Contest season is practically upon us again and this will be the first year where I no longer focus my efforts on photojournalism contests and make the shift towards contests seen by more art buyers and magazine photo editors. One thing I’m going to miss about the PJ contests is how dirt cheap they are compared to a lot of the fine art and glossy magazine contests out there. Entering 15+ images for a mere 40 bucks seems like such a bargain now.
The project on the Communication Arts website:
Jenn and I love to go on walks. For us walks are therapeutic. It gives us time to hash out a lot of ideas. Sometimes those ideas die quickly(our minds cook up some crazy ideas) and other times we have ideas that actually stick. Most of all it’s nice to get away from the computer and just give your mind a little time to recharge.
Depending on my mood I’ll bring a camera with me or if I’m lazy I’ll just wing it with my iPhone. On Saturday I was feeling lazy but Jenn brought her camera and of course the day you don’t bring your camera you come across a kid with a Scream mask surfing. Thanks to Jenn I was able to take a few frames for myself.
Moral of the story. If your gut tells you to grab your camera listen and grab it. Or fall back on your loved one.
Pardon my lack of posts recently, but between marrying my best friend, Jenn Ackerman, a honeymoon, and a lot of good ole life I’ve been pretty busy.
Photo by Jim Korpi
Many thanks to Jim and the rest of our talented and wonderful friends; Kainaz Amaria, Chad Stevens, Matt Eich, and Sonya Hebert who all provided us with such a poignant and beautiful documentation of our day. As a photographer you couldn’t ask for a better gift. Thank you all so much!
Slowly getting back into blogging and catching up on old drafts I have in my WordPress folder. Sadly it seems like the link to the original article by Rebecca Norris Webb was killed, but I still think it’s worth sharing.
As a freelance photographer this is the kind of thing I need to be reminded of every now and then. Sometimes you need to push the tedious tasks aside and get out there and make some pictures.
No matter how busy and preoccupied I would become over the course of this project with the many, many tasks connected with it – editing film, writing grants, visiting editors and curators, fundraising, updating my website, returning emails, giving slide talks, teaching workshops around the world – I made sure that I photographed at least once a week on my project. The act of photographing always put me back on track, reminding me why I was working so hard on the multitude of less-than-glamorous tasks involved in getting a project out into the world.”
Be true to your own vision. Ultimately, this will make your project unique and memorable and successful, that is if you are patient, passionate and persistent enough.
This was the original link should it become live again: http://www.behancemag.com/Rebecca-Norris-Webb-Ideas-From-Start-to-Finish/5510