Fine art and portrait photographer Michael Gilbert was commissioned by a magazine to photograph this 103-year-old woman, the oldest living resident of Pueblo, New Mexico. She had lived in Pueblo all her life.

OK, so the job was to do a portrait of a nice old lady. Piece o’ cake, right? Wrong.

Michael Gilbert:

This old lady was going to be profiled in the magazine because of her advanced age and because she lived in this place her whole life. So in doing her portrait, I didn’t want to make her look younger -- I wanted the photograph to retain the age that she actually was, and to show where she was living.

So I’m thinking about the portrait, that I want it to look gritty, and to shoot it straight on. I would use a wide angle lens, not usually used for portraits. Since it needed to be an environmental portrait, I was coming up with ideas of how to marry the subject, the woman, with the background. It’s New Mexico, so I’m thinking about the sun and adobe building, and the wooden ladder…

So all this is in my mind and just as I’m about to start shooting, she put her hands in front of her face.

“Is there something wrong?” I asked.

“Five dollars,” she said.

What was I going to do? Luckily I had cash on me, so I gave her five dollars and took the photograph.

As I positioned for another photo, she did it again – she put her hands in front of her face, and said, “Five dollars.”

I stood there for a moment, puzzled. “What is your name?” she asked.

“Michael Gilbert.”

“Well, Mr. Gilbert,” she said. “It’s not five dollars for this session. It’s five dollars per picture.”

What could I do, argue with her? So for every single click of the shutter, I handed her five dollars. If you look closely at this portrait, you will see a wad of crumpled up five-dollar bills in her hand.

So that experience turned out not only to be a great portrait lesson for me, but a lesson in economics as well, from a 103-year-old lady.

(Looking forward to Michael's next portrait session story, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.)

Michael Gilbert's biography now appears on Koloist. Just click on his name under “Contributors” in the right-hand sidebar of this page. Some of his projects have appeared on Koloist before, which you can see here and here and here and here.

Michael Gilbert will be at Pacific New Media UH Honolulu April 2 - 8 to conduct a seminar on Large Format Printing & Black and White Digital Printing, an introduction to Niks software.

If you're a photographer and have had an interesting experience during a photo session, please share! You can post a comment here, or click on "Contact" to email Ugo directly.

Artist Kathleen Jacobs uses Kolo photo albums as mini portfolios to show her work:

I like the small Kolo photo albums for presenting samples of my artwork, and use them to promote my art for possible shows in public spaces like universities and museums, or private galleries, or for private art collections.

The pictures in these small books are shrunken down photocopies of my work. I put just a few in each album as a representation of my art. I group them into categories by subject matter or the medium, so for example I’ll make a book showing some of my landscapes, or figures, another showing oil paintings, another of my watercolors, etc.

The content really depends on the recipient. Sometimes in one book I’ll put a photo of some of my working sketches alongside a photo of the finished piece, to show the progression and my process -- that I work from life (as opposed to working from photographs).

The cloth albums are beautiful, and I really like using the Kolo Noci photo album – it’s just the right size for a project like this. Often I’ll leave behind three or so different books, to give the recipient an idea of my range.

I use the paper Kolo Vineyard album when I’m mailing books to people. They look nice but they’re inexpensive and lightweight for mailing, so I don’t need to worry if those get returned to me.

Many artists today mail off digital images of their work on CDs. Certainly I can see the advantages of that, but there is something about presenting these small books that I feel is special. It’s a more personal and tactile experience, something that people can hold in their hands. I think it has more emotional impact than digital.

These mini portfolios are concise, easy to show several examples at once, and it’s a nice presentation. I think this way I can give the recipient a feel for what my work is like, and hopefully pique their interest in seeing my original paintings.

There’s more about Kathleen Jacobs and a few examples of her paintings at Easthampton City Arts.

More images of her mini art portfolios are here.

Our creative friend Hildi saw earlier posts (here and here) about Polaroid photos and projects, and shared this Polaroid album that she made herself:

When our son was born, a friend gave us a Polaroid camera as a baby present. It inspired us to do this project. We took a picture of our baby every month of his first year.

As we all know, a baby changes a lot in one year. There is something about the immediacy of a Polaroid print that makes this project more poignant. At the end of the year, we had a monthly record of our baby's first year.

I put together this homemade album for the pictures. I chose the accordion structure because it can be viewed both as a book or all at once in a panoramic display, which works great for this time lapse narrative.

I made the accordion myself, it is really simple:

1. Cut a long length of cover weight paper (I used Arches Black Cover) and fold it onto itself, alternating directions.

2. An easy way to get the folds equal and even is to use a piece of chip board as a template to score against. To score, mark the fold with a bonefolder or butter knife.)

3. The covers are white matboard attached to the first and last panel with a dry adhesive. (ATG tape or Gudy-O would work.)

4. I “titled” the mats with an inked wooden type “1.” (A rubber stamp would work well.)

5. I mounted the pictures to both sides of the accordion, this means both the back and front are covers; the dot at the bottom shows which side to start on. (The back cover has a "1" with two dots at the bottom to indicate the second half of the year.)

6. If you are disciplined and follow the one-picture-a-month format, you will need six panels, mounting twelve pictures to both sides of the accordion. I couldn’t resist adding extra cute pictures, so mine is a bit longer.

7. To mount the pictures, I used clear archival Kolo photo corners. I like that Kolo products are archival.

You can see on the desk that I also use a Kolo Havana photo box (for organizing photos) and a Kolo Cortina photo album (as a brag book).

Hildi has shared some other projects on Koloist; one is a great tip about nostalgia hoarding and the other a toddler's big photo album handmade by her parents almost 50 years ago. (Cool to see her parents' creativity rubbed off on her.)

Steve, this is yet another great project idea for your new PoGo that your wife is hopefully going to give you (hint hint). The new ZINK self-stick Polaroids should work beautifully for something like this.

Photographer Kelli Taylor shared her CD album project:

I’m really loving comfort gifts right now, and recently had fun creating CD albums for my sisters-in-law. Both of them have little boys (and one is due any day now with her third), so the CD albums were a good blend of fun and functional.

We used chocolate archival Kolo Cortina CD albums, each displaying a picture of our nephews in the cover window. The albums were loaded with CDs, some of them photo and some music. Everything from pictures of the boys and our family… to parent-friendly kids albums and soothing songs for late night feedings.

We were sure to leave a couple CD sleeves empty at the end too, so they can add their favorite discs. A great grab-and-go album for long car rides or a trip to order prints.

For more go here.

A sharp-eyed Koloist visitor spotted the cloth-hinged archival pages, unmistakably Kolo, on the American PBS TV show, Antiques Roadshow recently. The pages (top photo) were used to display these valuable 1935 photographs and autographs of humorist Will Rogers and pioneer aviator Wiley Post, obtained just a few hours before both died tragically in an Alaskan plane crash.

No kidding, the collection of items shown in this top photo was appraised at $18,000-$20,000.

Tip: If you have ephemera that could someday be worth this kind of dough, do yourself the favor of storing and preserving it with archival materials – not merely “acid-free.” That goes for not only the scrapbook or album pages, but also the adhesives you use for mounting the items to the pages.

Coincidentally, around the same time this Antiques Roadshow find was reported, Kelli Taylor (whose camera is never far from her side) was greeted at the entrance of an exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago with this Kolo Newport album, used by the museum as a guest book. Once again, the telltale Kolo signs here are those archival sheets' cloth hinges, which allow the pages to lie flat when the Kolo Newport album is opened.