PixelatedImage Blog

Your desktop wallpaper for April.  I shot it in Old Havana, CUBA.

This image is 1280×853 (click it for the larger file). If you want a larger one, click HERE for a 2560×1600 version.

Now, I get a tonne of downloads on these desktop wallpapers and a couple folks have made comments in passing that they’d love to be able to use favourite wallpapers longer than a month without looking at a long out-of-date calendar. If you download this one, or you often do, would you leave comment and just tell me whether you like the monthly calendar being on there or just prefer me to remove it? Hey, I live to serve.

Enjoy.

If you’ve been around these bloggy parts for even a few weeks you’ll know that I’ve been wrestling with the whole 2.0 world. The social networking world which these days revolves around Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, etc. At times this wrestling has been more like a death match and more than once I’ve been left gasping for air and ready to give in. I haven’t because I think it’s worth the trouble to figure this stuff out.

Right now I am up to my neck in social networking, affiliate accounts, and things like AmazonConnect. My book comes out in 6 weeks and I want to get things in place to really do a proper job of promoting it. So I have a reason for all this frantic social networking stuff. But so do many of you.

Social networking, Web 2.0, whatever you call it, is nothing more than a set of tools. For some of you it’s a set of toys and you’re content to litter the information superhighway with details about your cat or your breakfast. I guess that’s ok, too. But the business applications for these tools are immense if you (1) use them with intent and (2) use them well. Not easy.

So, let’s talk Twitter. I use it because it can be whatever you want it to be. It can be a chat room, a newswire, a polling service, a micro-blog. It can be a tool to connect you to more people faster, and give you opportunities to go deeper. But it’s not magic. You gotta learn to use it. Here’s what I’ve learned after a couple weeks of living and breathing this stuff.

1. Be Relevant. For the love of all things good, PLEASE ask yourself this one question before tweeting: Who Cares? Seriously. If the answer is limited to you and your cat, keep it to yourself. If you’re micro-blogging as a professional then stupid tweets about absolutely nothing will only dilute the way I think about you. Perception is reality and if you’re Twittering makes you look vapid and silly, sorry, you’ve just become vapid and silly.

2. Know Your Audience. Who are you talking to? Professional photographers? Amateurs? All photographers? This guides what you say and how you say it.

3. Be Yourself. But be a carefully edited version of yourself. What you say on the Twittersphere and the rest of the internet ripples a long way. You can’t control where it goes or how it gets used, only what you say. So be mindful. Careers have crashed and burned.

4. Be Community-Minded. If you are looking to be a leader within a community you have to interact with, and serve, that community. Web 2.0 is fueled by reciprocity. For every person that follows you, follow them (unless numbers don’t matter to you). For every tweet you throw out to the Twittersphere, comment or respond to another. Re-Tweet.

5. Know The Limits And Move Past Them. Twitter can only do so much. It’s like an internet dating site. You find the girl, you chat with the girl, but if you don’t graduate from the online service to a face-to-face encounter, y’ain’t dating. Twitter is great for meeting and chatting, but you can’t live life at 140 characters all the time. Don’t be afraid to take it further. I’ve already had coffee with folks I’ve met on Twitter, in fact I have one tomorrow morning. And the more conversations you have, the more opportunities you find.

6. Get a Reader, like TweetDeck, to make heads or tails of Twitter and keep your head above water. What it took me a while to understand is that Twitter is a reciprocal numbers thing. If part of your goal is more followers, then you need to follow more people. But no one can keep track of all this noise, so Tweetdeck allows you to create columns for favourites, and groups. So I’ve got one just for photography in which I place the folks who generate actual content. Keeps me sane. Not everyone wants numbers, but I’m experimenting with something so that’s part of my goal. Tweetdeck allows me to do that and remain sane. Without Tweetdeck I’d have jumped ship.

7. Repeat The Tweet. I don’t do this, but probably should. If you want your tweets to reach the most peeps (what the heck kind of language is this new technology encouraging?) then you need to repeat your tweets a few times a day. I guess I’m I just don’t care that much because this seems like too much work. But if you’ve got something important to say repeat it, and ask people to RT.

8. Remember Your Purpose. If your purpose is to direct people to your blog, then do that – intentionally point people to new posts, but consider this: if you come off as too self-promotional, as more of a taker than a giver, the community to which you appeal is likely to be smaller than if you also point to great related content on other blogs. If your purpose is just to make a name for yourself then the usual rules of celebrity management/leverage apply, but here’s another: be a fan, not just a celebrity. The more you point people to others, the more valuable you are to others. People like folks who are givers.

9. Extend Your Brand. If I go to your Twitter page will I find your logo? Do you have a great avatar? Your web 2.0 activities are marketing activities, little chances to say Here’s Who I Am! The usual rules apply – be creative, consistent, and congruent with your brand and core values.

10. Please Control Yourself. You need to update Twitter a dozen times every hour? Seriously? Do you know that makes me want to poke my eye out with a fork? Remember tip #1 – Be Relevant – but please, be relevant IN MODERATION. The more you say the less impact each thing you say will have. More signal, less noise. Please.

Got a great tip for using Twitter as a photographer? Comments are open.

A hodge-podge to start the week.

Photoshop World in Boston is over. And I missed it. And friends like RC kept twittering about what a great time they were having. Way to rub it in. Anyways, PSW happens on the west coast in Las Vegas this September October and I’m plannig to be there. Now that PSW Boston is wrapped the Photoshop World Website now has details about the Vegas conference . See you there.

Speaking of PSW and NAPP, the latest issue (April/May 2009) of the official magazine of all things Photoshop, Photoshop User Magazine, should be arriving in mailboxes soon (pictured above). Look for my article, Global Workflow, in the Lightroom section.

I’ve spent the last few days reading McNally’s latest book, The Hotshoe Diaries. I have so much respect for Joe and that probably taints the way I read his stuff but judging by the huge numbers of people who love him and his teaching, I’m not alone. Still, I’ll keep this brief and understated. The Hotshoe Diaries is truly excellent and should have a copy. I don’t do much flash work but Hotshoe Diaries, like Moment It Clicks, encourages me to do more of it, to see it in different ways. But even if I never picked up another flash, I’m learning more about light, and there isn’t a photographer on the planet that can’t use that kind of learnin’.

And while I am on the subject of flash, if you’ve read the book and are left thinking about the mountain of gear you want, remember that Joe’s work is excellent because Joe knows his craft, not because he has a mountain of gear. Some of his best stuff is shot with one camera, one flash, and some gels. So, before you go all spendy on your credit card, take a look at the simple lighting tools made by David Honl. Joe mentions them in his book and I’m a fan of them too. Convenient, lightweight, easy to pack, and if you’re smart about it and pack it all into a small stuff bag with gaffer tape and whatever strobe, cable, remotes, you use, you’ll have a lighting kit always ready to go. Check out David Honl’s line of flash accessories HERE.

Almost Web 2.0′d to Death. I’ve been making a real effort to understand and get under the hood of Twitter and Flickr. Flickr is still kicking my butt, if only because I feel like I need more time to give to it if I’m going to do it right. And Twitter, that never-ending stream of 140 characters worth of mostly garbage, well I nearly gave up. And then a couple folks – like Seshu -  heard me gasping for air in my little corner of the Twittersphere and pointed me to Tweetdeck. I’ll write something later about why I use Twitter at all, but for now – if you use Twitter and are finding it overwhelming, try taming it with Tweetdeck.

Lastly, and I’ve saved the best till last – if you have ever wondered what truly excellent portrait work is all about, wondered “How do I create portraits so good people will be talking about them – no! – BLOGGING about them- in 20 or 30 years?” – then you need to click THIS LINK right NOW. It will mesmerize you in a way that is not unlike the proverbial train wreck. Haven’t laughed this hard in a long time…

I had to laugh and share this with you. I logged on to Amazon.com to get the link for my book when I found this:

It’s Joe McNally’s latest book, The Hotshoe Diaries, paired with my book, Within The Frame. And you can get both for $52.78. I’m one of the few on the planet who have read both of them and I can tell you they’re both excellent books. My laptop, as I type this, is sitting on my copy of The Hotshoe Diaries. I’m about half-way through it and it’s brilliant. I’m about to sign on to B&H and buy a new Nikon system and give up Canon once and for all, that’s how convincingly Joe writes. The Hotshoe Diaries is an important book. I hope people say the same about Within The Frame, but The Hotshoe Diaries is the real deal.

Btw, totally joking about buying a Nikon system. But buy enough of my books and I’m there!

One more post before the weekend, keep reading…

I know the title of this post is lame. Sorry. And the photograph has nothing whatsoever to do with the post. Them’s the breaks. Lamayuru, Ladakh, India, 2008.

I sat with two friends yesterday for lunch. Hamburgers at the Red Onion in Vancouver.

One of these friends is easily one of the most accomplished magicians on the planet. What he can with his hands and a deck of cards would amaze the most cynical. He’s the magician other magicians look up to. No cheesy Vegas act, this man is a craftsman and he entertains a client list that he can’t show anyone because it’s attached to an equally long list of Non-Disclosure Agreements. The other is easily one of the best variety acts on the planet. I was the odd man out, having retired from comedy 5 years ago. But we spent a couple hours sharing stories, talking about business and marketing and doing a lot of laughing.

2 hours, I hamburger and milkshake later, I came away with three distinct thoughts.

1. There is absolutely no substitute for being awesome.
Being the best you can possibly be, committed to your craft and putting the hours in bring you closer to mastery, is – hands down – the best way to get where you are going as a creative person. It is said that you need 10,000 hours at something before you can master it. In my showbiz days it gave me unending amusement to see 18 year old kids calling themselves Master Magicians. It becomes a cheap, meaningless moniker and it reeks of amateurism. If you have to say you’re a master, you aren’t. Let others, and your work, do that for you. Put in the hours. If you put in 8-hour chunks, that’s still 1,250 chunks to get behind you. That’s 3 and a half years of practicing your craft for 8 hours a day every day, no days off. Wanna be awesome? Put in the time.

2. We all fake it till we make it. All of us.
One of my buddies tells me that at the end of every gig he goes home and tells his wife he didn’t get the knock. You know, the knock. The one where they finally discover you have no talent, that all along they’ve mistaken you for someone else with a similar name, and they’ve come to tell you to pack your bags. Almost every one I know in the creative arts has a similar fear. It’s not a bad thing. I think it comes from the way we do things in the west. There’s a sense that there’s a right way to do things, a well-beaten path that we should be following, and when we don’t – because we’re artists, dammit! – we feel like we’re thrashing about, trying to discover our own path, and so sure that other creatives are all on a nicely paved path of gold. How did we miss that path? Are we less talented? Less motivated? Nope. We just haven’t discovered the secret: There is no such golden path. You make your own, and it’s only as others look at your path once it’s been blazed and bushwhacked, that it looks easy.

3. Shift Happens.
The creative arts – when we make a living from them – exist rather painfully and in fragile tension within the world of business. We’re never sure if we’re artists or just sell-outs. The needs of the market and the needs of our souls to create are often at loggerheads. So the usual rules don’t apply. Many of those rules revolve around the whole concept of competition. We compete for business and for the praise of others, desperate to be among the best. Oh, if only someone would recognize me as “one of the best photographers in the world!” Whatever that means.

Competition among creatives is cannibalistic, it feeds on the soul and excretes arrogance and, ahem, crappy art, pardon the pun. Ever notice something about the guys that are really making it? They give and give and give. They aren’t slickster salesmen, they’re the ones who are excited about the work of others with no need to put it down in order to maintain the equilibrium of their fragile ego. They teach, they mentor, they know that the craft is bigger than they. They’ve learned that when you give, it comes back to you, and it’s good for the soul, and when the soul is healthy, our work is better and our vision clearer.

If you’re still bound by the old competition paradigm, let me encourage you to join many of us in the Cooperation and Collaboration paradigm instead. Make the shift. The water’s warmer here, the ideas flow better, and we know there’s enough work out there for everyone. It’s not a normal pool; the more of us there are, the more the pool expands to accommodate us. It’s scary, sure. Paradigm shifts always are. But it’s less scary than trying to live the creative life as a lone wolf fighting his way to the top of the pack. Let it go, man. Work, and work hard, but leave the fighting to others. We have 10,000 hours to put in, if you’ve got time to fight and compete you don’t want it badly enough.

Have a great weekend. Go shoot something you love. See you next week.

PS -  45 days until the release of Within The Frame

I got this in an email from one of my students recently and it gave me a chuckle:

“You know you’re an amateur when you get your first email from a stranger who wants you to do business  portraits, and your flip your lid- I’m getting paid for this?! SWEET!   Then you promptly head to the local  camera store to purchase the gear you will need to do the shoot,  which of course is more than you’re getting paid.”

Oh to return to those heady, carefree days of total financial irresponsibility in the name of art.

In my past life I went bankrupt. Actual legal bankruptcy. It was not one of my shining moments. The months leading up to the bankruptcy were pretty dehumanizing and I realized very quickly I had never taken the How Not To Be a Moron class that others seem to have taken. I comforted myself with the oft-quoted fact that many successful business people have declared bankruptcy at least once before they found success, when in fact they had been risk-takers and I’d just been an idiot. Oh the list of things I didn’t know then. Well I know them now.

If I were doing the curriculum for the course Finances: How Not To Be A Moron, here’s some of the classes that would make it into the syllabus:

1. Basic Math. If you spend more than you make, you’re operating at a loss. This is not usually good. Since money doesn’t grow on trees some people use credit cards. This also is not good. Spend less than you make. Seriously.

2. Buy Low. Your business is not a game and it’s not about ego. If you don’t need a top o’ the line Hasselblad, but just really, really want one so you can say you have one, that’s heading into Moron territory and your accountant or spouse needs to open a can of Dumb-Ass on you.

Rent gear you won’t use much and charge it to the client. If you don’t need cutting edge gear, buy trailing edge gear. If you don’t need new Pocket Wizards, buy used ones when someone less savvy than you buys the shiny new ones. That’s the thing about photography – some people buy new gear the moment it comes out just because it’s new. And then they sell the old stuff, which is probably in pretty good shape since they obviously aren’t buying this stuff to make actual photographs. In fact, if you tell them how awesome they are for having the latest and greatest, they might give you a deal.

3. Sell High. Price your services accordingly. You can’t compete solely on price. Don’t believe me, try competing with Wal Mart and get back to me in a year if you’re still solvent. Set your prices appropriately high.

4. Assets and Liabilities – If it makes you money, it’s an asset. If it doesn’t – even if you bought it pretending hoping really, really hard that it would – it’s a liability. Liabilities are bad for the bottom line. Avoid them if you can, sell them if you already have them and put that money into assets. Like a savings account. Or better marketing materials. Or a professionally designed logo. Already have assets? Keep them around as long as it makes sense. I like to keep my computers for 3 years, wouldn’t make sense to replace them every year. Sure, it’s an asset, but only once it has made more than it costs.

5. Taxes. If you follow these tidbits you’ll eventually hear your accountant (tell me you have an accountant…) at year end say “Well, I have good news and I have bad news.” The good news will be that you made money. The bad news will be that the Fed wants a piece of the action. Make this as painless as possible:

• Put something into a savings account with every invoice that gets paid, and leave it there specifically for taxes. No, you can’t dip into it because Nikon just released the D4x and it has HD video AND makes fruit smoothies.
• Know what you can and can’t write off and jealously keep track of expenses and receipts. If you can write off a portion of your home rent, do so. If you can be writing off automotive expenses, make sure you’re tracking mileage and keeping receipts.
• Put something away against retirement; it’s a write-off. In Canada it’s an RRSP, in the U.S. I believe it’s a 401K. If you’re going to give money to the government why not put a chunk of it into a savings account instead? Ask your accountant how much you can sensibly contribute and consider making it an automatic monthly debit.

6. Make A Plan, Stan. It’s not rare that anyone goes into business with a vague plan like, “Hey! I know; I’ll get a camera and take pictures for a living!” but it’s very rare that these people actually see that plan bear any fruit. Not without learning some hard lessons first, anyways. Sit down and take a hard look at how much money – actual dollars – you need to make a living. Rent, heat, internet, phones, groceries, taxes, every penny that you need to spend on a monthly basis. If it’s a big number, you need to make an even bigger number every month. How are you going to do this? How much do you need to charge? Sticking your head under the covers and hoping the monster magically goes away is not going to help. Make an actual plan, with real numbers and stuff.

Those are the first five classes I’d put on offer. They’re the ones I’ve learned the hard way.  Why do I keep going on about this stuff? It’s not because I’m obsessed with money. In fact few things drive me up the wall like MLM people with “opportunities” to discuss with me while talking non-stop about money. Money is a means to an end, and not the end in itself. If I could do what I do without ever thinking of money again, I would. But going through a bankruptcy is a fast way of snapping back to this hard reality: if you aren’t wise about this money stuff you won’t have a fighting chance of doing what you love. That’s all I’m sayin’.

Feel like sharing your own nuggets of hard-learned financial wisdom? Comments are open.

Creativity is the sudden cessation of stupidity. - Edwin Land

Creativity comes from trust. Trust your instincts. And never hope more than you work. – Rita Mae Brown

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep. – Scott Adams

A few years ago I had one of those mind-altering epiphanies and before you jump to conclusions, it was completely drug-free. I picked up, and read, Joey Reiman’s Thinking For a Living. Amazing. Made me see, among other things, that creativity is an asset, and harnessed well you can live on it. How many of us would love to make a living doing what we love, being paid to do what we do anyways, just for the love of it? Reiman is a former ad-exec, so the book is written from that angle. One day he’s running an ad agency and overnight he realizes that the clients are essentially paying for the ads to be executed but getting the creativity and the thinking for free. So he switched gears and turned his former ad agency into an ideation firm. Now they get paid to think and should the client so choose, they’ll execute the idea as well.

There’s a couple take-away nuggets in this for photographers. 1. Find the book and read it. 2. You should be selling your creativity and vision, not your ability to wield a camera. If you sell the former then the price is higher because there’s only one of you. If you sell the latter, the price is lower, because these days everyone claims to be a photographer. Simple supply and demand. Scarcity drives the price up. Your creativity and vision is an asset. For those of you that skipped Vision Week because it had “no real world application,” you should go back and read the articles and discussions. If you think creativity and vision are not the rarest of commodities and therefore valuable, well you couldn’t be more wronger.

Furthermore. You should read Hugh MacLeod’s How To Be Creative, and that’s available free as a PDF right HERE. I’m halfway through it and it’s fantastic.

Lastly, if you are in Vancouver, be sure to check out Creative Mix, Vancouver’s Ideation Conference. It’s a one day conference about creativity and pulls together an astonishing array of speakers at the top of their fields as creatives. There’s a chef, a juggler, businessmen, designers, a photographer (I’ll be speaking on Creativity and Constraint) and others. More info HERE. It’s just gaining momentum and the site’s not complete, but this is going to be great day. Book time off to be there. Thursday, October 22. At the Roundhouse in Vancouver.

A quick 5-minute video to run you through my personal back-up system. Click the screen capture above to see the medium-sized Vimeo version.  If you’d like to download a tiny version for the iPod or iPhone, click HERE.

Well, nearly made it through a whole video without the cats interrupting. Not that I mind when they do but soon y’all are going to get your expectations up and start coming here just for the cats and that’s when they’ll go on strike. Keep an eye out at the end, the cats start doing a scene from Fight Club. They’ve been rehearsing.

Here’s an oversimplified cheatsheet.

When it all comes down to it what matters is not whether I use DVDs or not (I don’t) but whether the system you have works for you well enough that you’ll use it. If your computer blows up or is stolen tomorrow does it leave you high and dry? With the cost of harddrive space these days, there’s no reason not to have some kind of back-up plan, even if it’s not as paranoid as my own.

Got a plan? Share it with us. (And yes, I know I got the date wrong. I recorded this on March 23, a Monday. Sigh…)

This one’s for pros, and aspiring pros. But I think it might equally apply to all. Mostly it’s a sermon aimed at me.

By pro I mean someone making a living from photography, no more, no less. There’s the other sense of the word, as in “she’s a real professional” and the implication is that she conducts herself with high standards, and frankly I’ve met plenty o’ pros who are not real professionals, and lots of amateurs who are. I’ve said it before, being a pro means you make money – no more, no less. It is not a badge of merit, it is not a seal of approval. It doesn’t even mean your work is good; that’s a matter of craft and while it’s assumed that you must be good if you’re a professional that logic is a little like saying the food at McDonalds must be excellent on account of the millions of customers. Wal Mart is full of mediocre, and it keeps on selling.

Wow, that was a long caveat, and it has only a little to do with the reason I initially fired up the laptop.

I’m tempted to make this week about business and self promotion, though I don’t suspect it’ll become anything that structured. I keep hearing over and over again how bad it is out there (and it is) and how much we’re all struggling (and many are) but I’m beginning to wonder if focusing on the problem so much is getting in the way of focusing on the solutions.

So let me start the week by saying this. You can do it. If the goal is to make enough money to live debt free and within your means, to do what you love and pay your taxes, then you can do it. If the goal is simply to use photography to make your first million because, hey, how hard can it be to point and shoot?, then you’re in for a shock.

You can do it.

But it’s hard. You knew that was coming right? So the question begged is: How badly do you want it?

Divas won’t make it, they’re too concerned about not getting their hands dirty and spend more time thinking about the destination than the long road to get there. Divas don’t want it badly enough. There are easier ways to gain praise.

The Wannabes won’t make it either. They’re more concerned with being able to say they’re a “professional photographer” than about rounding out their skill set and working their ass off. And the moment they do get their hands dirty and start working their ass off, well they stop being wannabes, don’t they? But while they remain Wannabes they won’t make it.

The Critics won’t make it. They spend more time looking at, and bitching about, the work of others and not enough being honest and hard on their own work. Comparing your work to the work of others is a fool’s errand. Be inspired by others’ work, learn from it, absorb it. But don’t compare yourself to it one way or the other.

I’m not saying divas and wannabes and critics won’t change their stripes. I’m also not saying that once some folks have “made it” they won’t become way too big for their britches.

I’m saying you have to want it so badly you’re willing to actively pursue solid evaluation and critique from talented eyes. Find others who are creating consistently good work and attach yourself to them. Work long hours to over-deliver on your promises to a client. Take a marketing course. Find and monetize other skill sets within your passion for photography. Create multiple income streams. Teach a course. Work for free once in a while because it’s good for the soul and the portfolio to do so. Study and revere the masters but don’t emulate them. Sit down every day and work. Pick up the camera every day and shoot. And when it gets hard, or frustrating, or the phone isn’t ringing – keep at it, push through; the race goes to the passionate and the perseverant.

I’m saying we need to get to work. In easy times it’s easy for the work ethic to slip, for the spending to get loose, and for our craft to get sloppy. This is an opportunity to recalibrate, to fine tune, to put first things first again. But remember this: the pro still shoots for the love of it, would shoot if he never made a penny from it, and does all this so he can shoot more, not less. The pro doesn’t do it for the praise or the kudos or the Rolex – it’ll show in his work. She doesn’t do it prove she can or silence the demons that says she can’t – that too will show in the work. The pro does it for the love of it.

I’m saying, You can do it. I can do it. I may never be – will never be – Steve McCurry or Ansel Adams or Yousef Karsh. Doesn’t matter. I’ll be me. You’ll be you. But one thing’s certain – we’ll have to work at least as hard as those three did to become who they did, to produce the work they did. Knuckle down, folks, take it one piece at a time, but knuckle down. Now’s  a great time for us all to create one of those “what would I do if I could not fail” lists and follow up with a “what will it take, step by difficult step, to get there” lists.

If this gives you a push, or motivates you to do something you’ve been pushing off, put it in the comments. Your ideas and thoughts might inspire others who know they need to get to work but are having a hard time putting it into actionable steps. Here’s mine:

I will finally overhaul my portfolio, and I’ll do it by the end of April.

Now it’s your turn…

“The professional respects his craft. He does not consider himself superior to it. He recognizes the contributions of those who have gone before him. He apprentices himself to them.

The professional dedicates himself to mastering technique not because he beleives techinque is a substitute for inspiration but because he wants to be in possession of the full arsenal of skills when insptiration does comes. The professional is sly. He knows that by toiling beside the front door of technique, he leaves room for genius to enter by the back.”

Another one from Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art, to begin your week.