Sean Schmidt is 26 years old and running unsanctioned ultramarathons.

MOSSLESS: Your work has developed quite substantially in the last year. What caused this growth?
SEAN SCHMIDT: That is quite a nice compliment; I have been very fortunate this year.  I started making better photographs in the fall of 2008 after seeing a friend’s photograph from a Holga posted on Facebook.  It was this really awesome shot of a hispanic family riding a gondola somewhere in California.  I think a guy had a cowboy hat on in it.  Seeing this photograph was like a light switch went off in me and where suddenly I had my purpose all mapped out before me, but only vaguely.  Up until that point the only photographs I had made which were respectable to me were from Siem Reap, Cambodia.  I traveled there in 2007 to teach myself how to do photography and when I returned to the states I was at a loss for inspiration or direction.  I went through a year trying to figure out how to get a project started, till my friend’s Holga photograph sent me down this awesome, massive path I am on now.  

This past year I think I grew so much because I was fortunate.  At the beginning of the year I was rejected from grad school which was very inspiring. It lit a fire under my ass, and I begun feeling my way through the dark, teaching myself about exposure and framing, aspect ratios and genres, what aspect ratios lend themselves to what subject matters, what subject matters lend themselves to what films, what subject matters Matter to anyone, and all kinds of awesome things along those lines.  

By the fall I met Costa Manos, who was the first celebrity photographer I had ever met. He is this awesome cut and dry guy, who inadvertantly fanned my fire to work harder. I did a workshop with him in Maine, to see if I was able to make photographs like the ones I did while in Cambodia.  Costa has an awesome, strict rubric to follow for making and critiquing photographs, and he affirmed some lines I was drawing in the sand for myself about photography, and how it should be done.  Costa was cool because I left the workshop buring, thinking, “O.K. Here is how it is.  Go make photographs and be a photographer, or don’t.  You’re either it, and you got it, or you don’t.  Now get to work.”  Since then I have been very focused and very dilligent, and met another great photographer Catherine Karnow, to help me edit and understand my photographs.  She is absolutely wonderful!

ML: How long have you been taking pictures?
SS: I did a project on Hurricane Katrina in February of 2007, but I officially started photography on April 1st 2007.  In the afternoon.  

ML: What do you try to look for when you’re taking pictures? What do you avoid?
SS: Lighting; I look for good light, avoid bad light.  And listen.  I try to listen to shit around me, like birds and trains and the conversations of strangers.  Being attentive is more important to me then looking for certain things. 

ML: Top ten blogs?
SS: Best blog out there is East Kingsley.  Jamie is awesome and puts his heart into everything.  He is awesome and passionate and has great taste of all things Fine. Mossless is great.  You have a very keen, selective eye which I like.  Most blogs are junk; pretend factory girls and other things I am not interested in. Unless you know of a real good one? Otherwise forget it. Not interested.