Archive for the ‘Thinking’ Category
Saturday, July 10th, 2010
Well, folks things have been exciting lately. July 4th weekend brought many great photos of unusual subjects, including chorus frogs and PhD horticulture students doing their work with raspberries. There’s been good news that I’ll tell you more about when it hits the presses.
But the main point of this post is that very soon many of the entries will be video. I am adding a dedicated camcorder to my mix soon. To all those dslr video enthusiasts, don’t worry, I’m continuing to do that as well, but will use the 5d for things that it is best suited to and the camcorder for that which it is best suited. When I have someone on location with me willing to do so, I will have them recording behind the scenes sorta stuff, for the blog.
Tags: camcorder, dSLR, video
Posted in Thinking, Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010
Last Friday, 6-18-10, I went to the members preview of the 2010 International Conservation Photography Awards at the Burke in Seattle, Washington. It was truly an inspirational evening. The site was fantastic, the wine was good, the company was good, and of course all of the images were beautiful and moving. That’s right, every last one of them. You can see all the winners here. I especially suggest you check out the winner in the Community at Risk category. It’s certainly not a cheerful image, but it left a permanent impression on me and I couldn’t help but look at it over and over all night.
Of course, I couldn’t go all the way to Seattle without going over and shooting a few images at Olympic NP. This is the site that is the Northwest as the rest of the world sees it in their dreams. (Honestly, more of the Northwest was like this before the arrival of us Europeans than currently.) Well, I did have a very limited time; need to return to the day job on Monday and all that. (Damn end of quarter. Career transitions take too long if you ask me.)
Well, it got to be Sunday around noon and I had to get going. I was planning on leaving in about five minutes. At this time, I was feeling a little bit down about what I then felt was an unproductive weekend photographically. I was photographing some bunchberry at the time when someone pulled up behind me and parked. Their pickup was uncomfortably close. It was an NPS employee. He says to me that I sees I am doing some nature photography and he knows of something that might be of interest to me. Their was one of the giant silk moths on the wall just outside of the ladies’ room in the campground, Heart o’ the Hills. I walked over there and photographed this truly beautiful moth (photos to be on my site soon.) I don’t know the species yet, need to research that, but I was incredibly excited because, this is the first giant silk moth I’ve ever been able to photograph. Most of these moths are declining due to their reliance on old forests. I regret that I did not get this guy’s name, because his gesture of kindness made my shoot.
Tags: award, contest, moth, National Park, Olympic, photo, photography, Washington
Posted in Thinking | No Comments »
Sunday, March 21st, 2010
I just wrote my letter to the White House that many photography organizations were alerting me about the opportunity to do so. This was about the current intellectual property climate and possibly improving this for content creators.
The current climate worries me greatly. Content – photographs, video, writing, etc. – is losing value rapidly right now. A very large portion of society today feels they should be able to get this material for free. I feel that the internet has contributed greatly to this. The internet has brought us many great things, but there are definitely corrosive elements too. Eventually, I think it will become obvious to a larger group of people how detrimental culling the ranks of professional content creators so dramatically will be.
I particularly worry about the loss of serious journalism. As it gets harder and harder for newspapers etc., to make money off serious journalism the field rapidly dwindles. As this field rapidly dwindles, the void will be filled with regurgitated press releases from government and big business. What state will our democracy be in when the press is only telling us what the big corporations and government want us to hear. For recorded history, hasn’t the most important things the press has done been when they alert us to when big business and/or government is hurting us. As important as news of the quake in Chile is, to me it doesn’t compare to the older story of the Cuyahoga burning. The Chile story tells us of a natural disaster that we can respond to by sending charity, but there’s nothing for us to do to end the problem. The Cuyahoga on the other hand warned us of how industry, unconstrained in what they threw into our waters, was poisoning us all. There was definitely something for us to do, lobby for the Clean Water Act. If the only news we were getting is regurgitated press releases… Of course, that was a burning river, we probably would’ve heard about it on Twitter, but what about Watergate?
Tags: copyright, intellectual property
Posted in Thinking | 1 Comment »
Friday, January 1st, 2010
On his blog yesterday (12/31/09), Vincent Laforet made some interesting predictions for the near future and what it means for photography. Chief among these was that the new upcoming tablets would revolutionize the “print” industry. (Print in quotes because this would rapidly move the industry away from print on paper.) I welcome the idea of paperless publications. Wouldn’t it be great to have a conservation publication without all the environmental costs of the paper production? Not to mention this would eliminate one of the largest costs for the publications.
The problem is will this work? Much of the audience has definitely gotten used to getting content for free in this electronic age. Once folks get used to getting stuff for free, will you be able to get them to pay for it again. One thing I have always found frustrating about this is no one seems to consider the logical conclusion of this modality. If pay dries up for all of the content creators, what will happen to the content in the long run? Sure, I and others love photography enough that we’ll continue, pay or not. However, without the prospect of payment, I won’t upgrade my technology very often, if at all, and major travel will be impossible. Furthermore, I only allow use of my photography for free when it aids a cause that I feel strongly about. Thus, I feel the world of no payment for content will lead to the death of serious content built on research and lots of time. In other words, people will not do the research and other non-fun stuff behind the photography for free.
So, the main question I’m writing about is what will this new technology mean for the world of conservation photography? Well, if Vincent’s predictions hold true, it will be a brave new world leading to an exciting, lucrative, and productive new world for us conservation photographers. The only problem will be that we will need to stay very current on what sort of content is needed from us. The tablets will allow for a wide variety of media to be presented and we will need to make sure that we can provide what is wanted from the major content providers.
I am cautiously optimistic, if publications can solve the problem of monetizing content for the tablets, the near future is bright indeed. That however, is a rather large hurdle.
I suppose there’s also the quasi-socialistic solution; public doesn’t pay for the content, but in return supports the lifestyle of the content creators. Do you think America would like that alternative?
Tags: future, journalism, photography, print publications, technology
Posted in Thinking | 5 Comments »
Saturday, November 7th, 2009
Anxiously awaiting the arrival of my new photo/video editing work station, so that I might get to work on editing my first editorial short. The subject of the film is oak savanna restoration here in the Willamette Valley.
It’s an interesting time to think about how cash flow is such a limiting factor on trying to keep up with technology in a field like photography. My main goal is to pursue advocacy journalism for the benefit of conservation efforts, making a living along the way from this and other photography endeavors. I am trying to stay current technologically to deliver my stories in the most powerful methods possible. The cost of the associated items means that I must pick and choose very carefully which items to purchase in this pursuit. It is quite anxiety inducing at times, as I’m not sure how good at predicting what will best serve me. Furthermore, filtering advice from others is difficult with the fact that those giving the advice might have very different motives and criteria.
An important thing to remember, is push what you currently posess to the limits. Get everything you possibly can out of it.
Tags: equipment, technology
Posted in Thinking | 6 Comments »
|