Signed and Released: Side Projects Are So Good
Common thinking in the photography industry is to always have a side project going in addition to your main job. Work, even photography work, is tough. You've got to have a personal project going to keep you sane.
Turns out having a side project can lead to some really good work too. Just ask Google about their 20% rule.
After a long time of not following this sage advice, I am now fortunate enough to announce two.
The Vancouver Project
A good friend of mine, Andrew Burton, and I have been talking for a couple of months about the rise of DSLRs with video capability and what it the implications for sports photographers.
Andrew had the foresight to see that this new technology would come to head in the very near future – namely the coming winter Olympics in Vancouver. Exploring thought, we also realized that this Olympics would be the first since the rise of the real-time web, live video broadcasting from cell phones, Google Wave, and, and, and.
Our realization lead to a plan of action which we're calling The Vancouver Project. Stop by and check us out.
Shameless plug: if you're in a position to help by spreading the word to the right people we'd love to hear from you.
Linked Photographer
In other news, I'm writing a book.
That is a very weird sentence for me to write. I write posts, tweets, cutlines… not books. But, apparently, that's happening :)
An excellent friend of mine, and phenomenal fashion photographer, Lindsay Adler, approached a few months ago saying that she was looking into writing a book, would I be interested in co-authoring?
Today, I signed the contract. We'll be writing a book that's got the tentative title Linked Photographer. It will be part treaties, part howto, and part reference on how photographers can use social media for business. It's a bit more than a for-dummies book, but
We'll be launching linkedphotog.com soon, so stay tuned!
I Support iPhones, Not Internet Explorer
Over a year ago, I started telling my friends that, "I don't support PCs."
I had gotten really tired of being everyone's (free) tech support. The problems were always the same: My WiFi doesn't work! || How do I move to a new computer? || I have a virus! || etc…
That, and after going all mac for a few years, the PC interface just felt clunky to me. I really felt inefficient working on darn WinXP. So… I just told everyone to go get a Mac, then come to me if they ever had issues.
I went from doing 2-3 housecalls a week to one every six months.
Don't get me wrong – I love all my friends, but I've learned that in the drive to be a "nice guy," it's reasonable to set limits on what other folks can ask you. Without exception my friends would grumble, deal with my Mac evangelizing, and go ask someone else to fix their problem. There were no hard feelings (that I know of – I've had a beer with each of 'em :] and I'd guesstimate that 40% of them have now bought a Mac.
iPhone support
To the point of this post: this blog now supports iPhones. I finally got around to installing the wonderful WPtouch Wordpress Plugin, and I must say – it's rather snazzy.
In much the same way that I don't support PCs, I don't support Internet Explorer very well. But, to prove I'm an Apple fanboy, I do now support iPhones for the 6 of you who visited via iPhone in the last 30 days :]
Somethings make you think…
I don't know if this is because of my lack of IE support or some comment on the attention span of different browser users or an indication that the people who read this blog tend to not use IE, but a screen shot from Google Analytics on the right.
Joey Joining the NewsTrust Team
I will be joining the NewsTrust team this summer as the Communications Intern. I’m very excited to be working with NewsTrust which is a non-profit that works to find and evaluate quality journalism and promote media literacy.
My job description for the summer:
Assist with editorial (articles and multimedia), community and marketing projects, and help develop our nonprofit social news network because NewsTrust wants to expand the quantity and quality of users on the site so that the site can become the community platform to promote quality journalism and increase media literacy.
I'm looking forward to starting in June!
3.5 Years of College… Over?
I took a leave of absence from Syracuse University today. I’m a senior with 1.5 semesters of school left.
The whole experience was … weird. I looked up the process online and found that I had to go to my home college to get the correct paperwork. I appeared, and asked for an academic advisor. After 20 min, or so, I was politely escorted into an office of the only advisor available, only to be told she could of no assistance.
I’ve been to academic advisors at least five times in the past, and have had the same encounter. Each time, I’ve been told that I should have seen a ‘recorder’ instead of of an 'advisor.'
A bit frustrated, I asked why the Recorders seemed to have all the answers, and the advisors couldn’t seem to do anything. It seemed to me, that the title 'recorder,' was more administrative, and the advisor was more … advisory. Apparently, I was wrong. Recorders are for “anything to do with paperwork.”
Still rather mystified as to what an academic advisor actually does, I put my name on the list to see a Recorder.
When I sat down, to explain for the second time, that I wanted to take a leave of absence, the Recorder in front of me complained that my recorder (last name beginning with letters: A-G) wasn’t in today. But, she could take care of me.
The Recorder pulled the correct, half-sheet, in-triplicate, form out of the top drawer of her desk, and had me fill out my name, ID number, phone number, and check off the reasons why I was taking the leave. I checked off “personal/family” and “other.”
Her paperwork competed, she told me she'd have to make a copy of the triplicate form, but the phone rang and the Recorder had me wait while she finished the call. I waited a few more minutes, during witch time I grabbed the business card of "my" Recorder.
Once it was copied, I took the triplicate form back, and continued to the next building to turn the form over to the office of the Dean of Student Affairs.
After taking the stairs to the third floow, I handed my form to the secretary, who said that she thought she could get someone to talk to me directly. I patiently had a seat in the lobby, and patiently denied the kind offer for water or coffee from the secretary (administrative assistant?).
I picked up the only magazine that remotely interested me on the side table – Contact Sheet – put together by the on campus, non-profit, photo lab. I had just enough time to flip through it and determine that it was by-and-large graphics of words like “peace” and “love” and in no way resembled a contact sheet of photos, when I heard my name called.
I was politely ushered into the bare-walled, narrow office and offered a seat on a couch flush to the same wall as the woman’s desk. She already had my half-sheet form, and explained that the university liked to conduct a brief interview with students taking a leave. Right away, she found that the form wasn’t signed by my home college. Though not yet exasperated, I slowly explained that I had just been to that office, and that they were the ones that had given my the form. She asked who I had seen at the other office, and I played a guessing game between two similar sounding names that began with ‘M.’
I guessed wrong as it turns out, but all was straightened out after a phone call that consisted more of gossip than enquiring if I had actually been seen by the sole person who could give me the from I had presented to the woman in front of me.
Hanging up the phone, the woman from the office of Student Affairs looked down at the form, noted my check-off reasons for taking a leave, and enquired for more details. I explained that my family had determined that I was better off focusing on my extra-curricular activities for a semester and that I intended to return to school soon.
A few more details, and we shook hands. I walked out of her office with wishes of ‘good luck’ and ‘we hope to see you back.’
I walked out the office with the following train of though:
- That was really, really, easy to do. Granted, I had to go to two offices, and talk with five different people, but that only took an hour. It’s hard to believe that getting out of school, and receiving at $15,000 tuition refund was really that easy.
- The one thing that I kept hearing from each person I talked to was they hoped to see me back. It seems that college students taking a leave of absence is a frequent enough occurrence that the staff has become resigned to it. They're used to it enough that the form has check boxes that read something to the effect of ‘school isn’t right for me,’ or ‘my grades aren’t to my satisfaction.’
- What does this suggest about the education system? Advisors don’t advise, paperwork is paramount, and a students leaving school is far too common. At no point was I asked not to leave, it wasn’t even a hard process — they just had me fill out paperwork. My ‘exit interview’ was a joke. All they asked me was if I’d be coming back … not that it mattered outside of the box they’d have to check.
Looking back, I’ve never been into college. I recognize that I’ve had senioritise since freshman year…
…of high school. I’ve been saying since then that college was about the experience more than the ‘education.’ It’s not that I haven’t learned anything from class. I have. But, I’ve learned far more from my experience of college, than from sitting in a classroom. I plan to go back to school. I plan to get my degree — even if it’s just so I can get a piece of paper that shows I’m ‘educated.’ This experience though, has caused me to question the value of the degree more than ever.
If an education system is so used to seeing failure, what faith do I put in it? Is a piece of paper worth all the aggravation, and expense to achieve? Could I be better off going to work on topics that fascinate me, that need the help of my generation?
I'm "young man with my whole life" in front of me according to the academic advisor I saw today. Here's hoping she's right.
You’ve Noticed the ‘Links’
If you've read this blog with any regularity, (or even if not) you might have noticed the obtrusive number of "These are my links for…" posts.
I recently stopped piping my tumblr posts to my twitter account so I've been looking for a solution. In the mean time, the best I can come up with is to have delicious auto-post links to this blog via postalicious.
Apologies for it not working or over-working, I'm still working out the kinks.
Your up:
- If anyone has a good way to get tumblr to auto-post a digest to wordpress. That would be insanely useful.
- How do you like the links living here as opposed to twitter?
- Anyone know a good micro-brewery in the upstate New York area that isn't Saranac or Middle Ages?
Death Valley Photos
I've got my Death Valley trip photos up on flickr. Not too bad on the time too! Took me 6 days to work up the courage to sort through the nearly 1000 photos I shot, cull, edit, caption, and keyword them all.
No GPS on this trip, so Geotagging is out. Bummer.
Aught 9
A happy aught 9 to ya'll. Several quick items:
I'm obviously back from Death Valley. I'm through my first round out culling— 1000 pics down to 134. I'll get them up soon~ish.- Check out my most recent blog post at CoPress. It's a direct response to our first public criticism that took me too many hours on New Year's Eve to write.
- Happy New Year!
- I decided to stop auto-posting my Tumblr to my Twitter account last week. Today will be my first blog post covering the 'best of' posts.
‘Backpacker Responder’
I've officially set gmail's 'vacation responder.' I'm off for a week of backpacking in Death Valley – the lowest altitude in North America!
It will be a much needed break from the internets. I've been dying for a backpacking trip for months now, and I can't recommend it enough to all of us who spend our lives living and dying by wifi access.
To celebrate I'm (finally) publishing part of my take from my last excursion on flickr – which I've now adopted as my means of publishing photos. Combined with the flickr export plugin for Lightroom, putting up photos immediately after a take is really easy, and the online interface rocks!
Fair warning: uploading through the plugin failed on me for the first time on this take. …Meh, I'll deal with it when I get back.
One other note: I've been working a lot (and officially taken over "Business Development") with CoPress recently. We're working very hard to see to it that college media has a future in this internet evolution. Please come check us out!
I'll end by saying this: I've been trying to check more and more items off my seemingly endless todo list, and finally got around to compiling this monstrosity. Try not to laugh at my poor sense of 'nifty' or hair too hard.
Newspaper Clippings Time Lapse from Joey Baker on Vimeo.
I've got a new year's resolution to get back to blogging more, so expect to see less of this stupid I-feel-obligatied-to-post-this-housekeeping-BS-just-to-have-something-up-there. And more real content.
I'm working on a piece that has the working title: "Print isn't dead, It's a luxury good."
Merry New Year's!
Business and Coolness
I've been super busy lately – I've started working at my school paper again. Even though it's a part time job, it's really a full time job. My new title is "exponent of the evolution." I will write more about that soon – there's a lot to say. For now I'll just leave it at: I do a lot of new media.
If you haven't seen it yet, check out Jeffrey Friedl’s Blog: Nikon D3 Shutter Release in Super Slow Motion. It's really well done, and very cool to watch.
More soon!
In Civilization Again.
I've been back in civilization for a couple of days now. I'm re-adjusting to life here in the USA – it is very different from the UK (you can wear shorts!). I've been reading a lot of the news that I missed while I was gone. Seems like nothing shocking happened, but there have been several good articles posted recently that got me thinking. I've get most of those posts written, I'll be publishing them shortly.
I've got photos from my trip as well, I'll get them edited and posted in the near future.
A couple of other notes:
- I wrote a paper for a class comparing the freedom of press in the UK and the US. It actually is interesting to compare the two countries from a journalist's standpoint. I'll clean it up and post it online.
- I've started to write a massive article on what I'm calling (for now) The Death of the Photojournalist. It's become a massive list of thoughts and research on the state of the industry today as it relates to new media. I have yet to decide what I'm going to do with this.
- Putting "Nickleback" into Last.fm gives you a wider range of music than you might think.
Great Scots!!!
I've just managed to update my portfolio(s) a bit. But… I'm off for two weeks of backpacking in Scotland (and no internet access). Photos on return!
HINT: There will be no blog updates for a while.
Editing: ‘Real World’ Style
My semester is coming to an end in London and I've just completed a video class that I really enjoyed. It was really my first experience playing with video equipment that ranks at the 'prosumer' level. Lessons learn'd a'plenty, but to the point of this post:
A project that I did for this class was something of an experiment for me. I took footage of a few nights spent in my flat in London – which I share with 10 other people. We had joked for a while that we lived in a MTV Real World atmosphere. Reviewing the footage, I couldn't have summarized it better.
No doubt we act and behave a lot like the characters in the Real World, but when I was editing the footage, I got a real sense of how MTV is able to edit their footage to do all the things that they are accused of doing – enhancing conflict, portraying characters in a certain light, changing the timeline, etc…
And that's sort of the rub – reality TV is shot in a journalistic style. It appears to be capturing a slice of the lives of a cast of people. That, is the problem though – they are a cast, and it is a show – not a journalistic report. There is no greater moral oversight to how the show is shot and edited.
I noticed that in editing, it was more fun to pick and choose clips, change the order of events (slightly) and so forth – it made my finished result more entertaining to watch. However, i certainly couldn't have presented it as a journalistic work.
I Don’t Support PCs
About a year ago, I read a blog post, (I wish I could remember who wrote it, I owe them a 'thank you') where the author wrote that he 'no longer supported PCs.' At the time, I thought this was amusing. The vast majority of people that I know own PCs. I've been the local tech support for as long as I can remember. Heck – I was the IT department at my middle school. I've been supporting and fixing people's PCs so much that its just expected that I can fix anything in real short order. (Sometimes I can, sometimes not.)
Reading the post, I admired the author's undertaking, but didn't think it could ever apply to me. There were just too many people that I knew that owned PCs. I kind of liked helping them out.
However, in the last 6 months a large number of people I know have been making the switch – to the point where I'm no longer the oddball out when I pull out my MacBook.
So, about a month ago, I decided to start to tell people that I just don't support PCs anymore. If they need help, they're more than welcome to go see ___mutual friend here_____ and get help, I "don't support PCs." Of course, if they wanted to go buy a Mac, I'd be happy to help them with any questions they might have.
I thought for a while that this would be a real turn-off for people. They might think that I was purposefully being unhelpful, or mean, or whatever. After all, it's not like I can't fix their issue, just that I won't. To my surprise, the reactions have been mostly: "Well, you're a bit of a Mac snob, but you're right, Macs are better. I'll go talk to ____ until I get a Mac."
Moral of the story: Not supporting PCs has made my life much easier. I have less headaches, and people seem generally open to getting a Mac.
Sidenote: Macs now hold a 6.5% market share – up from 4.4% where it's been hovering for years.
London Book Store Your Videos – Currently Viewing “Book Store”
This is a just a quick little thing that I did in an hour for class. Really not the great, but I figured I'd post it.
The Economics of the Iraqi War
This article, raises an interesting point that I'd like to extrapolate on. The article argues this:
The U.S. government has spent "more than half-a-trillion dollars" in support of the war effort, while that money could be spent on pressing needs in this country, he said.
Economy Sagging Due to Iraq War? - TIME
The article goes on to present poll results stating that 68% of the American people think that withdrawing from Iraq would help the countries economic troubles. The argument is fairly convincing. Especially considering that the US annual budget is now over $3 trillion, and the US GDP is now $13.13 trillion.
The point is well made that this war has had significant negative impact on the US economy. This is the point that I'd like to dwell on.
Historically, wars have been good for the US economy. They've sparked economic mobilization, technological advances, and increased economic output. Now, I'm not sure if this holds true for the Vietnam War (I suspect it does, but I cannot find anything to back it up). It certainly holds true for:
- The Revolutionary War
- The War of 1812
- The Civil War
- World War I
- World War II
- The Korean War
- The Gulf War
If it is to be believed that the Iraqi War has actually harmed the US economy, then I think that it is remarkable in that it is the first. It's also important examine why that has happened. These factors would be invaluable in assessing the worth, or even the status, of a war. One might even make a case for economics determining the 'correctness' of a war in the future.
Confessions of a Caffeine Addict: I Must Be American, ’Cause I Run on Dunkin’
So you know that feelin' when you know you had a good shoot. There's a smile on your face. A bounce in your step. You drop everything to upload the images and three star them almost immediately.
...this feeling was ruined for me today when I picked up a copy of the student daily. Not only was the back page photo grey - legit, no tonality whatsoever - but the edit was atrocious. I knew I had better photos than the ones they ran; I had posted them on facebook! ::insert mental screaming here:: I am sick of subpar editing! and learning nothing more than the latest mix of Cher and DJ Unk! I want someone to see where I'm not seeing, to give me suggestions, and slam my framing (or lack thereof). I want someone to transfer my card, hand it to me, and tell me "you're good."
Confessions of a Caffeine Addict: I must be American, 'cause I run on Dunkin'
Well said. Can't tell you how much that bothers me too.
No doubt, sports are a little hard to edit. Frequently you do need that shot of that one play or that one player doing just the right thing. It's hard if you don't come back with the shot they need. Editors frequently have a choice of publishing a sub-par shot that shows what they need to depict, or pissing off the sports editors and publishing a shot that is good, but doesn't go with the story.
Which is better for the paper? I don't think there is a hard and fast rule. Ultimately, the situation should never exist. It's the photographer's fault if they didn't cover the story well enough to come back with the photos that are needed. It's hard to complain if you didn't do your job right.
On the other hand, if you did do your job; did come back with that shot that tells the story of the whole game, and the editor still picks a different shot … well, then. He better have a damn good reason. If he doesn't then he's not doing his job.
Italy and Dublin
I've finally gotten my Italy photos up in a semi-coherent form. Since I was at it, I decided to be timely about my Dublin trip this weekend. They're both on my 'recent' page.
A funny anecdote:
When I went through passport control entering Dublin from the UK, the officer was by far the friendliest that I've ever encountered. She asked how the trip was, how long us "lads" were staying in the country, and so on. She made sure to write on our visas though (two stamps, not just one), that we were supposed to leave the country in 3 days, just as we had said we would.
When reentering the UK (after 3 days in Ireland), we went through to passport control and before even entering the main que, were asked if we were arriving from Ireland. On saying that we had just come in, we were told that there was no need to go through passport control, just show our boarding pass at the exit, and we went right through.
Needless to say, I was a bit shocked – the UK passport control has been the toughest that I've ever seen. Constantly checking my student visa, and assuring that I was still planning to leave when it expires in 4 weeks.
What I gathered from all this was: Ireland is a separate country, but the UK just doesn't really care. International Politics are funny.
Xkcd – A Webcomic of Romance, Sarcasm, Math, and Language – By Randall Munroe
xkcd - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language - By Randall Munroe
Yea, woah. Wish I had said it that clearly.
