PixelatedImage Blog

I stayed in yesterday, it was cold. But I picked up the camera and shot for an hour. This is a Commedia dell’Arte Arlecchino mask from Venice that sits on my mantel. The image doesn’t matter much, but picking up my camera and shooting was important for me.

In August I published a short piece called A Long Way To Go: A Rant. It was a little like the antithesis of the fluffy pep talk. And oddly it resonated with many, many people. I think people who are finding it hard to find and express their vision find it a comfort that others do too, especially those who’ve been on this journey longer. So I’m just going to re-iterate that as loudly and clearly as I can for those that missed it. It is hard. It is scary. And the closer you get, the more you care, and love, and want to succeed, the harder and scarier it is. But it’s also amazing.

I’ve just finished Pressfield’s The War of Art and his central premise is that for every artist there is a resisting force that holds them back, and the more you want that thing to which you aspire – the more deeply you care – the stronger that force is and the greater the fear. It’s not something you can avoid; it’s like gravity – inevitable, immutable. But it tells you something. The fear, the difficulty – they point like a lodestone to true north and reveal the thing that’s most important for you to accomplish in your creative life. If I am scared to death to submit my work to a competition – it’s that very thing I must do. That resistance, Pressfield says, comes in the form of procrastination and excuses, in false humility and stubborn arrogance. It comes in any form that will side-track you from your work.

And it’s those last two words he repeats over and over again. Borrow my copy of the book and you’ll see it underlined repeatedly. Your work. The work. Work. Work. Work.

Which is odd because he talks about muses so much it makes you wonder if he’s being metaphoric or actually believes in them. At first the two seem irreconcilable, two divergent ways of looking at the life creative. So which is it? Hard work or fairy dust? Persperation or Inspiration? To which The War of Art seems to answer, Yes. It is.

How dare we think that we can just pick up a camera, master the simple act of pointing and pressing, and effortlessly create something that will catch the eyes of others yet alone move their hearts or even satisfy our own need for expression? How flippant we must be to allow artists through the generations to spend a lifetime mastering their craft, while we expect our own training to be done over a weekend crash course or a 2-year diploma program. I’m not  criticising, I’m reminding you – and myself – that we have permission from the muses to take our time, to suck for a while, as we learn our craft, and hammer out our vision.

No writer I have ever heard interviewed speaks kindly of their process. They don’t use artsy, poetic words. They use words like work, arduous, painful. Would they trade their life as an artist for something else? Maybe. But that’s not the point, they don’t do it because they can, they do it because they must. Something in them pushes and pushes and pushes until it finds its expression. But the act of getting it out, like the labour of childbirth, is never easy. The years of honing your craft so that when it does finally come out, it comes out to its fullest expression, that’s not easy. But surely once in a while we all still catch our breath, step back a moment and remember how much we love what we do – hardships be damned. In fact, don’t the hard days make the great images even sweeter? Doesn’t it make the times this feels like play even better?

Even when you’ve got your mind around this vision stuff, it changes and evolves, making it tough for even the most introspective of us to keep up, to keep our fingers on the pulse of our own vision. And that’s the wonder of it – as you grow, experience life, travel, suffer heartache and setback, your unique outlook on the world changes, changing every frame you photograph. Your vision never finds its perfect expression because you never do. Photography imperfectly expresses our changing imperfect selves, making this a lifelong journey. I find that deeply encouraging. On the days when I’m coming up empty, struggling to see clearly or make sense of the story in front of me, it gives me the room to squeeze in a little grace, to relax, to take a breath. We’re not curing cancer here, folks. Amazingly, it’s often just that perspective that sets the muse free from my ridiculously high expectations, and in so doing allows her to do her work. And I do mine. And sometimes it feels like it is all coming out ok, that today I suck a little less than I did the day before.

As I write this I got distracted, saw an email come in. It’s a comment from Rosane, a regular here and a Lumen Dei alumni. Please, she begs, give us something sunnier. I hear ya, Rosane. I get how this stuff might seem insufferably introspective. What I’m really trying to say is this: this is a tough craft, it’ll take a lifetime to master. And your vision is always changing, so it’ll take a lifetime to interpret and express. And if that’s the case I think the one thing that fuels this has got to be passion. Work hard, but lighten up. If you don’t do this for the sheer love of it – even on those hard days – why bother? Why do I keep at it when my work takes me to tough places, and 16-hour days, and 2 weeks of post-assignment nausea, jet-lag and deadlines? Because when I am standing on the edge of a rice patty and the light is just right and I am with people that fascinate me – there’s no place I’d rather be. I’ll happily go through it for that one frame that comes even close to capturing that feeling and passing it on. If this week is about the Why, then that’s it right there for me. And for me it’s one of the best feelings in the world – the feeling that I’m doing what I was put here to do. And that’s worth – a million times over – the struggle and the hard work.

Keep at it folks. Give yourself permission to work hard, to be you and not Ansel Adams or Sam Abell or  the photographer you wish you were. Feel free to suck for a while, to take lousy, out of focus images. To hell with the art snobs It’s how we get where we’re going, so long as we do it with passion, and if we’re in it for the long haul we might as well love it.

I highly recommend finding and reading Pressfield’s The War of Art. I loved it. As with all books like this, or even this blog, there will be things you take with a grain of salt, metaphors you find…odd, but there’s so much good in there that I can’t help but suggest you find it, read it with a pen in hand, and digest it. I’ll read it twice by the time the week is through.

One of my favourite Van Morrison songs is his cover of the Irish hymn, Be Thou My Vision. I love it as a hymn, as a meditation, as a reminder – whatever your faith – that vision ought to be bigger than us. Vision, despite what my over-use of the word might imply, is no magic thing. It’s not something that most of us can put a finger on, and it sure as heck isn’t something you can just pull out of your back pocket, screw to the front of your lens and shoot through to take the lousy out of your image.

Vision is bigger than that. It’s everything you think and feel and bring to your photograph. It’s your worldview, your experiences, your likes, dislikes, and your passion for those weird macrame owls, all rolled into one. You do not bring or not bring your vision to a scene – it brings you. It is you. That’s what gives your images the potential to be one of a kind, unique expressions of how you see the world. Vision is what you see and how you see it. And there’s but one of you on this planet. Nikon or Canon? Seriously? Who gives a damn? If you’re a photographer – and by that I mean you HAVE to shoot – if you don’t shoot, like the psalmist your bones would turn to wax and melt – then you could use an iPhone camera, or an old 110 point and shoot. Your vision is the asset that people should most be curious about, not your preferred focal length.

Whether we recognize that vision, whether our craft is equal to the task of expressing that vision, now those are the real questions. That’s why I am so hung up on the question Why. I don’t care which camera you use, I care why you use it, what you have to say to me. When I’m at home I don’t look at other images of India or places I’ve just been. I look at work that shows me something I don’t usually see, images that say “Did you see this?” and to which I can reply honestly, “I never have.” Show me more. Like this one. Or this one. Or this one. If I want to hear the same stories I myself tell visually, I can look at my own images. These open my eyes a little wider to the world I don’t already see. They engage me. Not once did it cross my mind to ask How they took them. If I’m distracted by the technique or the medium, the story’s not doing its job. I should be distracted by the photographs, not from them, in the same way that the writer of the hymn is essentially saying to God – distract me from all these distractions.

Vision is everything. Most damning of a photograph would be, not that someone doesn’t like it, but that they’re indifferent to it. A cliche. Something shot over and over and over again in the same way that others have shot it. Nothing new. Nothing unique. Nothing worth the exclamation mark at the end of, “Hey look at this!”

You have vision, sure as you have an opinion. Maybe we should move to another metaphor, another series of words. Afterall, using the term vision as metaphor for visual perception is not terribly clever. Perhaps we should go straight to it and call it what it is – opinion, thought, viewpoint (oops, another visual reference.) Ok, hang it all, I’m going back to the obvious stuff, heck I’m just going to restate it in different words. Don’t show me what you see. Show me how you see it.

I’m setting this week aside to focus on vision. No gear talk, no links to gear talk. If Canon announces a new camera built on the principles of Quantum Physics it will get passed over with a yawn here. I just need a break and if I need a break there’s a chance others might as well. This isn’t at all a dismissal of the importance of gear to achieving that vision, just a break taken in hopes of returning to gear with something fresh to say, a new perspective, a pocketful of inspiration that recently might have been emptier than we like.

I’m going to do two things this week. I’m going to get out every day for an hour, just me and a camera. Probably set the camera to B/W, put a selective focus lens on the front and wander, shoot stuff just to see what it looks like. The second, I’m going to write about vision, the art of seeing. It’s going to get meditative here folks, might even put on some beads and burn some incense. There might even be long awkward silences. And photographs of things I don’t usually photograph. Like macro shots of tulip petals. Or moody black and white stuff that’s all blurry. I don’t know. But there was a time when I went out to shoot just for the sheer fun of it. It was, what was the word I once used, Play?

So it’s back to navel gazing. But it’s navel-gazing of the best kind. No mere artsy-fartsy theory, this stuff; it’s the foundation of what we do – the need to express ourselves in ever-evolving, ever-clearer ways. And judging by the response to pieces like Zach Arias’ video TRANSFORM, it strikes a deeper chord with people than the photographic industry likes to admit.

You in?

I’d tell you how I shot the image above, provide EXIF data, etc., but it’s out of bounds this week. Sometimes all that stuff doesn’t matter. I pushed my lens into a bunch of tulips, loved the colours, textures, lines, and I went “Ooh, look at that.” I wanted others to go “Ooh, look at that,” too. That’s all.

In the interest of fairness, and to show I’m not a totally biased Flickr-hating jerk, I have created a Flickr account and am prepared to give it a fair shake – not as place to better my craft or give my images the best home possible, but in the interest of community and the hope that it’ll introduce me to some new folks. See? I’m no Flickr hater – I just think it’s a tool best used for certain things. Anyways, if you’re there already, share the loving cause I have no friends and I feel like I did in grade 7 at the year-end dance – all dressed up and sitting awkardly on the sidelines. But way less acne this time around. You’ll find me there as David duChemin. (Unless you’re name is Alison and we went to school together – in which case, you had your chance. (Some wounds just never heal…)

THIS link ought to get you there.

A few comments rolled in after yesterday’s post about the Fluid Galleries Giveaway asking about generating traffic to your website. Fluid Galleries or any strictly Flash-based site left without any kind of modifications has some limitations, one of the biggest of which is the difficulty – nay, the impossibility – of it being easily indexed by search engines like Google.

Now, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a field of expertise all on its own, as is the art/science of traffic generation. So think of this as a sketch book with some ideas I’ve scraped out of the jet-lag addled recesses of my mind, and not so much as a guide or comprehensive list.

First. The WHY. Ask yourself why you want to generate traffic. If it’s just to inflate your stats, then write things like “Keira Knightly naked” and BOOM! the stats for this post just went up. But do I really want that traffic? They won’t be clients, they likely aren’t photographers interested in being part of a learning community. They’ll probably never buy my books. Unless I promise to include photographs of Keira Knightly naked. See, stats just went up again. But why? In all likelihood you don’t want traffic, you want specific traffic. (Although even the random stuff that comes in helps your Google ratings.)

If you have site like Fluid Galleries you’d be best to either place it within HTML frames – I know it can be done but don’t know how. Or to precede the flash-based site with a HTML splash page with enough text saying the right things, that Google will pick it up.  These days, as the iPhone gains prominence, and flash sites won’t (yet) play nice with the iPhone, a small HTML gallery is a good idea anyways. So what are the right things your page should be saying? Depends on who you want to attract but starting with who you are, what you do, where you do it and why, is a good start.

Beyond that, here’s the magic secret everyone wants and I won’t ask you to join a club or learn a secret handshake to learn it: there is no magic secret. The web works simply – the more you are out there, the more people are talking about you, the more people are pointing back to you, the more Google will recognize you, the better your visibility, and the more people will find you talk about you, point back to you, and the on and on. It’s a spiraling vortex of cause and effect.

So what do I do to be sure I am visible?

1. Great content. Or at least consistent content. There’s no point getting people here if there’s no reason for them to stay. One of my goals is to create a community of like-minded people with whom I can share what this industry, and this craft, has so richly given me. If you’re slick and have no content or are overly self-promoting, people sense that and move along quickly.

2. Interact. This is where all you Flickr-holics are right about the value of Flickr. It’s a chance to interact. But when you do so, leave (a) an impression and (b) a paper trail. Make sure you let people know where to find you off-site, lead them back to your website or your blog.

3. Create a signature that’s memorable, consistent, and full of the kind of information that you want Google to pick up and index, along with a text link back to your site or blog. On the most basic level that could be: David duChemin, Vancouver-based Humanitarian and Travel Photographer. Visual stories told from the heart. http://www.pixelatedimage.com – The more you leave these calling cards, the more your name and the words in that line of text will get linked with your URL. Be specific. If you want people to look at your portfolio, link them there. If you want people to read your blog, link them there instead.

4. Comment on other people’s blogs. Your tone of voice, your contribution, and your presence on multiple blogs of the same kind will begin to draw traffic comprised of the same kind of people. This is a good argument for not being a jerk, and for remembering that while “on the internet no body knows you’re a dog” they sure know if you’re an idiot. I think Taylor Davidson said that. And that brings me to my next point.

5. Share the love like it’s going outta style. Cause it is. The internets are full to bustin’ of self-promoting takers and if you’re a giver you shine like gold in a pile of coal. Ok, lame metaphor, I was trying to be dramatic. So give great content and link, link, link. Make it your mission to connect people to other people who are creating great content.

6. Contribute. Scott Kelby has guest blogs every Wednesday. This Wednesday it was Tim Montoani (see what I did there?) I read his blog, liked his words and his voice and went to his site and then to his blog. I guarantee I’m not the only one. His traffic went up and many of us will put him on our blogrolls. If you have something to say, say it, but don’t confine yourself to your own blog or website – offer to create content for others and introduce others to your readers/viewers as well. Competitive people won’t find this easy. It’s counter-intuitive. But it works.

7. Consider joining a portal site like Viisual.com

8. Join industry-specific photography communities like the Travel Photographers Network, and be active. Post images, leave valuable comments, and make sure everything you leave behind points back to you with a text-based URL (see #3)

9. Mix and match with conventional marketing methods. Want to get more studio photographers to your blog about studio photography because a year from now you’re releasing a book and you need to do some legwork? Send a postcard to 500 of the top studio photographers in the country inviting them to visit your website, read your blog, and consider contributing articles to increase their visibility.

10. Investigate web 2.0 phenomena like Twitter and be open to new technologies, new ways of connecting. Twitter might not be for you, heck I’m not even sure it’s really for me yet. But I know it’s already driving people to my blog. So can Flickr and Facebook and Digg and all those other social networking tools. But not MySpace. That’s so last year. Don’t get too loyal to any of them because the life of these tools is often measured in months and not years.

OK, that’s my top ten off the top of my head. What’s your strategy?

Leave a comment, share the love – but be sure to read #3 again. Comments without a signature of some sort will be docked ten percent and you’ll be held back during recess to sharpen pencils.

You’ll be please to know I’ve stopped the navel-gazing in which I was stuck yesterday. Or at least I’ve opted to keep it to myself for now. I’ve got the loan of a 4×5 field camera to play with and if that doesn’t either satisy my need to jump the rut or send me back to digital with my tail between my legs in a hurry, nothing will.   So, onward.

I know not everyone agrees with me on this, and I’m cool with that. Different strokes, different folks, etc. BUT since it’s my blog and y’all don’t come here to hear me prevaricate…ahem…Flickr is a horrible thing to do to your photographs. I know, I know, you love Flickr, but before you go all 2.0 on me, hear me out.

Flickr is a great place to connect, a super-duper place even to find sycophantic people who will tell you everything you want to hear about how good your images are. Some of you need that encouragement and, God bless ya, you’ll find it there. Some of us desperately need to be told our images suck and need work. If you’re 5 years old, you should be PRAISED for creating a drawing of a house with a sun on top, regardless of the purple cat. Heck, BECAUSE of the purple cat. But if you’re 25 and you’re still drawing like that, the folks still praising you as the next Robert Bateman aren’t helping. You see that alot on Flickr. Some of us need it. Most should be seeking critics, not fanboys. Myself included. But that’s a digression.

Flickr is ugly, ugly, ugly. And while it has it’s uses, it is not the place to be showing your photographs to the world. Photography is a visual medium. Aesthetics matter. Your work deserves much, much better than the trailer park bulletin board (not that there’s anything wrong with trailers, parks, or bulletin boards, per se) – they deserve a gallery. A space that has been designed for showing the world your art, making it the hero. I guarantee the image that I passed over on Flickr would at least beg my eye for a second chance if it was hung on a stark white wall. (I’m not saying Flickr has no value, it does indeed. But you pick the right tool for the right job and if you’re looking to (1) showcase your images or (b) get truly constructive image critique, there are much better tools than Flickr. That’s all)

Why am I preaching this particular sermon? Because I want to love your photographs. I want to look at them – stare at them – and hear your intention, the thing that moved you to say “hey, look at that,” in  a powerful enough way that you captured it in a frame and now compell me to look at it too. I can’t do that on Flickr or a crappy website. But I can do it on a website created, not for interaction and Web 2.0 – but for showing and looking at images.

There is alot of great software out there for this very thing. Some frighteningly expensive, some not so much. The one I use is Evrium’s Fluid Galleries and the good folks at Evrium have ponied up for this month’s giveaway. They’re giving away a Fluid Galleries Professional Package to one luck winner, chosen through a random draw. But wait! There’s more! For everyone who does not win, but who enters, there is a $50 discount coupon code. For sheer simplicity of building a good-looking, Flash-based gallery, Fluid Galleries is fantastic. Yup, lots of other good ones out there too and I don’t have a bad word to say about most of them, but this is the one I chose and the one that’s sharing the love with you. Matt Brandon uses them. Gavin Gough uses them. I use them. If you use them to, there’s a chance we’ll let you into the cult. A slim chance, but a hope springs eternal right? Whatever you chose, I urge you to put your best work somewhere that dignifies it, gives it it’s best shot at speaking to me.

A couple resources to check out. First, PhotoShelter did some great research about creating websites and online portfolios that don’t suck – check it out, and download a pdf, HERE on the Photoshelter Blog. Second, the Fluid Gallery Website is HERE. Lastly, if you’re sold on fleeing from Flickr but need to do it on a shoestring, check out the Lightroom Gallery templates from the Turning Gate HERE, including a great one for quick iPhone portfolios.

Ok, same rules as always. Winner must leave a comment with their name and email address in the name and email fields. No email, no name, no prize. I’ll draw for this in a couple weeks when the mood hits. Those that don’t win will be able to email me for a $50 discount coupon, but I suggest you go to Evrium.com and sign up for their free newsletter and try to win your software first. They do a monthly photo contest – no rights grabbing, no wierdness, and the winner gets free software. Who couldn’t love that? And don’t forget I’ve still got three copies of Joe McNally’s new book, the Hotshoe Diaries to give away just as soon as they’re off the press – enter HERE.

Long-time readers will forgive me this foray into stream of consciousness introspection. Happens once in a while. Clears my head, re-aligns me. Newcomers will be terrified, thinking I’ve gone off the deep end. Don’t worry, I’ll be ok. Just needed to make my confession…again. I’m a repeat offender on this matter. Habitual, I think they call it.

I spent this morning online, looking through my twitter stuff, trying to keep my head above water and filter out the noise to get to something resembling signal. So many voices. And then I hit on a site with some truly great photography, and then another. Black and white. Polaroids. Stuff that, you know, SAID something. Or made me think they did.

And soon I was thinking about the days when I first fell in love. My beaten Pentax Spotmatic and a handful of crap lenses bought not so much for quality as for price. Bulk loading Kodax T-Max or Tri-X film. Hours spent in the darkroom. The tactility of it. The wonder.

And I started to think perhaps I need to return to the simplicty – to start taking some images with raw technology, for the sheer joy of it. Yeah, that’s what I’ll do, I thought. Need to return to the low-tech, high-touch days of film. Feel the fixer on my hands again, lose hours at a time in a darkroom. Red lights. The drone and ping of the timer.

Bzzzzzzzzzzz…Ping.

I need to get away from the gear fetish. Need to purge the gear-freak.

And so I hatched a plan.

Get a film camera.An old one. Preferably German.

Felt like such a good plan. Felt so right.

Visions of me carrying a Hasselblad 500CM, or a Nikon F3, maybe just an old M-series Leica. With a couple lenses. Not the crappy ones though, good ones. I wonder what I can find on eBay. Maybe Craigslist. Maybe I should wander down to the camera store, find something with the red circle on it. Or one of the new Leica digital models that just looks old and groovy.

I should have a leather satchel, too.

I should see if I could find an old Linhoff tripod, like the one I used to have, the one that pinched my fingers and never stayed up. But it said Linhoff.

And within minutes. Seconds. The length of a whim. I’d spent two, no ten, thousand dollars in my mind. In pursuit of simplicity. In repentance from gear-lust.

From pretense to pretense.

I’m sick. What’s wrong with me? I write about photography more than I make photographs…

Chase Jarvis recently made a comment with words that have been resonating – something about photography versus the photography industry. And in my mind those two became anti-thetical. Which side am I on…?

CS Lewis says, and I paraphrase to the detriment of his words, that the great temptation of storytellers is to fall more in love with the means of the telling than with the telling itself…

Perhaps it’s time we all grabbed a Holga. A roll of film. Took a photograph just to “see what it looks like.”

It’s Lent. A 40 day period of fasting on the Christian calendar. Some people give up chocolate. Perhaps I ought to have given up anything to do with photography that is not the actual act of photographing…

There. I said it. Confession’s good for the soul. Fact is, as artists, we all struggle to find the balance. As photographers we have an unusually symbiotic relationship with our tools. It’s not a bad thing. It just is. Maybe I’m the only one that struggles with it. I suspect not. PMA is on right now, people are a-twittering about latest products, lots of tweets pointing to new cameras. Haven’t seen a single tweet pointing to a great photograph.

Days like this leave me wondering…am I part of the problem? Or part of the solution? What would happen to me as an artist if I took time from the high-tech/low-touch, and returned to the low-tech/high-touch? Maybe it’s time we just stopped buying so much gear, or reading reviews about gear, and went for a walk. With a camera. And 36 frames.

It used to be so simple…

**

Some outstanding questions from the past weeks, both those you left in the comments of the Big Q, and those sent by emails, etc. And by outstanding I mean they never got answered, not so much that they’re really exceptional questions, necessarily. For those unfamiliar with the Big Q, this is a new feature where you ask questions and merely answering them relieves me of the need to scour my brain for more blog material.

Wallpaper. A number of you have asked how I make the wallpaper. One savvy reader even wrote in begging me how I do it because he currently makes one in Photoshop, creating 31 text layers on a grid and painfully moving them around into alignment. So I copied his text and replied with, Heres how I do it…and pasted that sucker right back in there. I wish I coulda given a better answer, something more magical. But that’s how I do it. Open Photoshop, create a grid with guides, and lay it out layer by layer. the good news is once you’ve done one you only need to do seven versions as every month will begin on one of the seven days o’ the week. And once in a while you turn the 31 off, once in 12 you turn of the 29, and 30 too.Then I pick an image, drag this group of layers on top and I’m done. Option 2 – do a screen capture of the calendar on your Mac Dashboard, then crop it and overlay it onto your image. Easy but not as custom. As for the actual image on the March wallpaper and the work done in post-production, which is what some of you were asking, I’m working on a Here’s How/Here’s Why, kind of video thing.

Model Releases. Oh, the amount of questions I continue to get about this. Do I? Don’t I? Let me simplify this to terms that would make a litigator break into hives. A model release is needed to satisfy legal issues surrounding publication, ie USE of the image. It is not required to CREATE the image. There’s lots of places on this planet where you can get arrested for pointing your camera at anything other than a bug, there are places you need a permit to set up and shoot, and there are places you’ll just get stoned (with rocks) if you shoot the wrong thing. But model releases are not needed to create images. Do I get model releases? Yes. And no. Depends on the situation and it depends on the application for which I am creating the image. When I am working, for example, for World Vision, i have an assistant or producer who gets these releases filled out and signed and we carefully caption my images so we can cross-reference them with the releases. When I am shooting in India on my own travels I do not. Just imagine how you would react if a foreigner speaking no English walked up to you, took your photograph, and then presented you with a legal document. I don’t think so. Yes, it can be done, and it has been. But it’s not my way (you have to read this line with an Obi Wan Kenobi voice). Anything more on model releases should be gleaned from actual lawyer types. There’s an excellent on-going column in Photoshop User magazine, and as a bonus, if you buy the next issue there’s an article in there about my travel workflow.

Lens or Camera. Should I spend my money on a better lens or better camera? This depends largely on whether you have a lens or not. If you do not have a lens, your camera will work better if you get one. But if you already have both, and all other sarcasm/considerations aside…the better investment is in the glass. Why? Bodies obsolesce within about, oh, the time it takes to remove the new camera from the box. Lenses take longer. And a quality lens has a more significant effect on the look of the image than making the jump from, say, a 20D to a 30D. I try to get minimum 3 years out of a camera body, but way longer out of a lens. It’s smarter money spent on better images.

In my absence the Big Q got neglected. Let’s ramp it up again, folks. If you have a question about gear, travel, shooting, or business-y kind o’ stuff, leave it in the comments and I’ll pick one or two to reply to next week.

PixelatedImage.com – Think Tank Photo Shape Shifter Bag Reviewed.

I can’t tell you how painful this video technology is for me. I did this yesterday and between the chainsaw guys outside my window, my cats getting in the way, and the pain inflicted by iMovie, it’s a wonder I didn’t end up on a rooftop with a rifle, let alone actually finishing this and posting it.

It’s on Vimeo at the suggestion of my savvy wife and some of you. This should work. No doubt there are all kinds of subtle crappy problems with audio, etc. I’ll learn. Lemme know if you have problems.

Update: Once you’ve seen mine, take a look at Matt Brandon’s addendum / smart-ass response to it, if only to get a glimpse of the kind of sarcasm I have to deal with on our Lumen Dei tours.

This is the first “normal” Monday in a while. It’s been go-go-go for so long I’d forgotten what the daily routine felt like. Well for now my crazy travel and assignment schedule slows down, and I’m home for a while working on final edits for the book, and the usual stuff I start the year with. We’re 2 months in and I’m only now getting around to “starting the year.”

So, a few things.

First, now that I’m back I’ll be spending more time in the Vision Collective. If you’re not a member yet, we’d love to have you there. It’s a forum, it’s free, and it’s the water-cooler for this blog. You can get there HERE and if you join, for crying out loud don’t use a name like LittleBluePill and then wonder why I rejected your membership. Use something like a real name and an email address that isn’t Russian and you’ve a better shot at being approved.

Second. I finally got the details sorted out on the Pixelated Image Blog Gathering. So. Here’s the deets, peeps: Saturday, March 14th. 2pm to 5pm at the Yaletown studio of my illustrious friend Kevin Clark. If you want to come I need you to email me – info at pixelatedimage dot com – for the address and details. Drop me an email, and if you don’t seem too creepy I’ll send you the full details. It’s a low key thing, just a chance to connect. I’ll provide refreshments. So, I really mean it this time: who’s in? Send an email.

I just got my grubby mitts on the new Think Tank Shape Shifter – it’s been pretty popular and therefore hard to get. Think Tank finally got them back in stock and I’ll do a video review of the bag later this week if I can re-acquiant myself with the technology. I want to use my G9 and shoot straight into iMovie but can’t seem to get the camera to talk to the computer. I’ll sort it out and get something made. This is a dry-run for pod-casts my publisher wants me to do. Any of you have thoughts about YouTube vs. Vimeo?

I posted the wallpaper for March and a couple comments/emails have come in saying “how’d ya do it?” If you’re curious let me know and if there’s enough interest I might walk you through the how and the why.

PMA starts in Las Vegas this week, which means lots of news coming from the manufacturers and suppliers that feed our addiction. Not the earth-shattering stuff we get from Photokina, no doubt, but this could be an interesting week all the same. If you like gear.

I’m now on Twitter, and while I’m still trying to figure out why on earth we need this, you can find me there @ pixelatedimage. Mostly it’s mindless reactions, comments, notifications, and updates on my jetlag. Good times.

This is the month that Joe McNally’s new book, The Hotshoe Diaries, comes out. Don’t forget to get in on the draw for a free copy HERE.

Lastly, it’s a sad week for fans of Zack Arias. Zack lost his father this weekend. Please be thinking about him and his family, and praying if you’re the praying kind. You can leave condolences HERE on his blog. I know he’ll be touched by the strong outpouring of support from the photographic community.