Archive for 2009
Picture of the week at Birdshare
I was tickled when I got the notification that this shot was chosen as the picture of the week this week and is being shown on the front page over at the Cornell Ornithology Lab’s All About Birds web site.
It’s a picture I really love and it’s on a site I have great respect for because of the work they’re doing to not just inform birdwatchers but to expand the body of knowledge on birds as well.
All in all, I’m just thrilled.
For those curious, the shot was made using my 30D and the 100-400 IS lens, handheld, over in mountain view near the Adobe Creek area off of terminal road. The swallows nest under the roof of a building housing a pumping station, and I noticed this one nest was seeing regular flights in and out as mom was feeding a couple of young. I stood off about 20 yards away and tried to time her exit — she would normally pop her head out just a bit to look, then drop out of the hole and then spread the wings and accelerate — think aircraft carrier launch.
It ended up taking 45 minutes and 300 images to get the timing just right (i.e., I finally “got lucky” — luck being a combination of some planning, a lot of patience and the high speed shutter on the 30D and a bunch of thumb mashing on the shutter button….).
Just to the side of this nest was another with three really cute chicks:
well, cute in a “I’m pissed off” kinda way. they seem to be practicing their egret imitations. Their mom was also repeatedly coming in and feeding, and otherwise they just hung out and watched. At least they have a view instead of a door that opens down.
Following my own advice on backups….
While writing my article on backups (and it’s followup) I decided some of my practices weren’t what I wanted them to be. The primary issue was the online catastrophic backups, which used Jungle Disk as a front end to Amazon S3 for storage. I really like the setup — Jungle disk was almsot flawless in doing what I needed the way I wanted it done, and S3 was reliable and backed by Amazon, so I didn’t need to worry about the “not here tomorrow” problem you sometimes have with startups.
But there were a few negatives: the cost — I was spending about $17/mo on storage costs with S3, plus about $1.50 a month to Jungle disk for their advanced features. I also worried about the occasional delays (I was only uploading about a gigabyte of fresh data a day, so a few days of heavy photo shooting could cause backlogs before the data was stored offsite; uploading the network is an option, but costs. Everything costs…) and finally the time it would take to recover via online recovery if I ever needed the backed up data bothered me.
So I decided to move to a simpler strategy: clone my disks and keep them offsite. Over the weekend I disabled and deleted the S3 store and turned off my Jungle Disk setup, and ordered a new drive.
Not an offsite drive, which might surprise you, but a new internal drive for the Macbook, a 340 Gig Hitachi 7200RPM drive. Why, might you ask?
Well, let me tell you: if you read the previous pieces, you saw where I noted that one of the best ways to never NEED your backups (always my preferred policy!) is to replace my primary disks on a regular basis; my laptop drive was (over)due, so it made sense to replace it before it failed. By upgrading to a larger internal disk, I could take the files I’m currently storing on an external firewire drive and put them back on the laptop drive.
That simplifies my computing universe — fewer spinning things hooked up to computers, fewer places to misplace data and one less “i have that data, but it’s not with me” opportunity. And it means I can repurpose that firewire drive for my offsite backup.
Amazon had a nice deal (about $75) on a Western Digital 320gig 7200RPM drive with a 16 meg cache (hmm. old phart warning: the first hard drive I ever bought — for a Mac 512K that plugged into the floppy port!) was a ten Megabyte drive that was wonderful and had more disk than I could ever think of using, especially compared to floppies… Now that drive is smaller than the performance cache on a hard drive… wow).
I could have gone as far as 500 gig, but that changes the price/performance,a nd even with copying all of the files off my secondary drive, I still have 150 gig free. By the time I start worrying about the disk filling up, the bigger drives will get cheaper, or I can simply buy a nice cheap external and split it up again. But for now, I’m happy on a single drive, a single backup drive, and a single offline external archive drive. Plus backups of each, of course.
I wired up the raw drive via USB to my laptop and used superduper to clone my primary drive. Then I let everything sit for two days with the new drive spun up, refreshing it daily with superduper — because infant mortality on your laptop drive really sucks, and giving it a couple of days before opening up the guts and swapping things is a bit of insurance. Just saying — nothing like putting your laptop back together and having it fail (or not boot).
A bonus feature of this change: the old drive in the laptop was a 5400 RPM drive. Upgrading to 7200 RPM improves the I/O characteristics and speeds the overall performance, especially if you’re doing things that eat lots of virtual memory (like, oh, photoshop or lightroom, or running both). On a mac, check /var/vm and see how many swapfiles you have and how big they are. The larger your VM set, the more your disk is going to affect overall performance, and in many cases, a slow disk is the real problem to performance, not lack of RAM. hint: people how are proud of NEVER REBOOTING THEIR COMPUTERS are never re-initializing their VM environment. Silly boys. I’ve seen major complaints about slow performance in firefox and photoshop magically disappear on computers that were simply rebooted. Just saying.
So for $75, I remove a $20/mon charge to pay for the online backups, I add enough disk to my primary computer to keep me for at least six months or longer, added a faster disk to speed up overall performance of the computer, and I really didn’t do anything to weaken my backup strategy. All I need to do is remember to bring the catastrophe disk home once a month, refresh it, and get it back offsite again; I can choose to do it more often if I finish a significant project, too. And that’s very manageable for me — just put repeating tasks in your calendar to nag you, right?
There is one other upgrade I’ll need to make, which is my bus-powered backup drive is now too small to fully backup my primary drive, but I don’t need to worry about that for another 50 gigs of data or so; that’ll cost me another $75 (or less by then) down the road.
So I now have my primary disk (320 gigs) with a time machine backup and THREE superduper cloned backups (one offsite, one nightly, one weekly); I also have a pair of 500 gig drives which store all of my long-term offline archival stored data; they’re clones of each other, and one is stored offsite. These hold the files I don’t ever expect to touch again but won’t throw out for a while just in case (the import backups of all of my photo shoots, for instance), so they are in fact more redundancy. Just in case, you know?
The old laptop drive? It goes into the anti-static bag and gets filed with all of my yearly paperwork and taxes; it’ll stay there until I dispose of this year’s paperwork down the road, at which point the drive will have a bad date with a big hammer and some other power tools and get tossed in the trash. I much prefer my hard drives not end up in hands of strangers (if I do give a drive to somene else, it’s generally after a multi-pass, multi-pattern write/erase sequence, but drives are cheap enough, I kinda feel they’re not worth losing track of until you know they’re destroyed, and there’s no sense destroying until later, because you never know when you might need it…. It hurts nothing to wait…)
So I’m following my own advice and fixing my own backups — again. Using simple technology to reduce “failure by complexity”, using as few mechanisms as reasonable, using multiple redundant backups and backing up on different time sequences to avoid the problem of corruption not found until too late — and keeping copies off site, without being anal about it.
It’s probably overkill, but disk is cheap enough now that it’s cheap insurance. And I’d rather have one too many backups than one too few.
Stuff You’ll Like
A weekly compendium of stuff I found I thought you’d like. If you do, let me know, so I know to find more of it for you.
- Virtual Photography Studio: Photography Disaster Protection and Recovery: Are You Prepared? A very good way to store stuff like your gear inventory and photos is Evernote; it’s a nice tool that has mobile versions for many phones as well, making it really convenient as a way to store stuff you might need access to on short notice.
- Austin Mann: 10 Ways I’ve Used Gaff Tape in the last year (via Scott Kelby) (Austin’s web site)
- Lightroom Labs: Keyword Sets make repetitive keywording push button easy. (I really need to implement this into my workflow).
- Zeldman: On Self-Promotion. Direct self-promotion is ineffective and will go unnoticed unless it is backed by a more indirect (and more valuable) form of marketing: namely, sharing information and promoting others.
- Steve Berardi: How to use the ‘special’ histogram
- Mike Spinak: Red-Tailed Hawk Photo Shoot. A great overview of the planning and thinking that helps you make a nature shoot successful.
- John Harrington: Nine Inconvenient Business Facts for Aspiring Photographers
- Dave Cardinal: Tack Sharp, a tale of three images
- audublog: santa clara valley audubon speaking up for local burrowing owl population.
- Because I had to:
The fun of Ottawa and San Jose
Tonight was the Ottawa vs San Jose game, Dany Heatley playing his old chums (and half of Canada’s sports journalists in town to cover it), with Michalek and Cheechoo coming back for their first visit since the trade.
Cheechoo had a really solid chance early on a wrap around that I still don’t understand how he didn’t score, and then was more or less invisible the rest of the game. That kinda sums up why Cheechoo is now a Senator (and on the 3rd/4th line there) and not a Shark. Great hustle, great guy, fading talent on the depth chart.
Michalek had a hell of a game. Heatley had a hell of a game. It was a lot of fun. The Sharks won pretty handily, but both teams made it interesting.Tonight’s three stars: Heatley, Michalek and Marleau.
But here’s what really made it fun tonight…
An old friend and Apple cohort is from Ottawa, and boring the hell out of everyone around us talking hockey was a time-honored tradition back at meetings we were at together. He was at the game tonight, so before it started, I texted him and set a bet — loser buys lunch.
Then I spotted him a goal.
THEN I found out Thomas Greiss was starting in goal instead of Nabokov.
So I spotted him TWO goals, just to poke at him a bit.
And I won the bet.
A good time was had by all, I get to have lunch with an old friend — and he’s paying….
How much fun is that?
Why does the turkey cross the road?
Oh my god! He’s got CRANBERRIES!
(a happy thanksgiving to everyone n the U.S… don’t pig out too badly)
Stuff You’ll Like
A weekly compendium of stuff I found I thought you’d like. If you do, let me know, so I know to find more of it for you.
- Clients from Hell: anonymous submissions from the world of independent contractors showing how unrealistic expectations or bad communications can make life hell for both sites… Funny, in a really sad way. One in particular caught my eye: $1,000 is very expensive, you know. We only want a simple website with our current contents, and contact form as well. And don’t forget about CMS features. We want to add or edit content on our own. (and it continues on from there, until you get this massively complex project). it reminded me of a scene from Two and a Half men where the brothers were discussing hiring a prostitute for Alan. “What can I get for $200?” “Crabs and a stolen wallet”. But unfortunately, until the wallet gets stolen, many times they won’t believe you…
- Twitter’s new privacy policy: is a joy to behold. It’s short. It’s sweet. It’s in english. Not lawyer English, real English. And it’s intelligible. They deserve serious recognition for keeping it real and simple here.
- Picture Taker or Image Maker: Scott Bourne talks about an important aspect of taking your photography to the next level. One of the things I’ve been working on this last year is consciously thinking my way through what I shoot, more scouting, planning and timing a shot as well as looking at how best to take advantage of what’s given me. On my recent Morro bay trip, my rock at sunrise shot was scouted and planned in advance and turned out very much as I wanted, while the otter silhouette was a case of showing up and seeing the pre-dawn light coloration and realizing that silhouettes was the best possible use of the shooting situation, which led me to shooting in that mode the entire morning, of which this morro bay at dawn shot was one of the better ones. Ultimately it’s about who’s in control,you or the camera; the more you take control instead of deferring to the judgement of the camera (as good as they are today), the more reliably you will take high quality photographs, and more importantly, take the photo your inner eye sees. I don’t see “take control” as “shooting in manual”, by the way, unlike some photographers. Instead, I see it as knowing how to get the camera to take the image you want to take instead of the one it’s programming wants to take. Sometimes that’s manual mode, but many times, that’s simply adjusting the settings to bias the camera’s decision; it’s about knowing your gear and being active in managing it instead of standing back and mashing the shutter.
- Gary Crabbe: I need more space. This is, really, a photographer’s variant of my bad birders comments.
- Smashing Magazine: Designing Social Interfaces – Overview and Practical Techniques
- Mashable: ten wordpress plugins to help build community
- Kirk Tuck: anatomy of a corporate shoot. A great description of a corporate shoot and how to make it work.
The “purism” of post processing
I was asked for a copy of a photo I’d done to be used in a birding guide, so I told them I’d re-do the image and send it along. I just did, and I found the contrast between my previous version of the photo and the new version.
Here is what I originally published:
and here is what I just did:
the differences are for the most part fairly subtle but also stunning to me. Same RAW image. For the new image, I used Viveza to pull out the highlights in the face, reduce some of the blown out whites on the feathering, and to darken the green of the grass to help the bird stand out and make the grass look more natural — I’ve come to realize my 30D has a bit of a yellowish tint to greens that needs to be adjusted out. I also sharped it differently (and better).
It does bring up the debate about “purity”. Where does post processing end? Or should end? I don’t see anything in this photo that wouldn’t be acceptable under any circumstances in a contest, or that I didn’t do with dodging and burning tools in my wet darkroom 35 years ago (in the Good Old Days). And yet the differences — simply because I now have better tools and know a lot more about how to apply them — are pretty intense. It’s a much better photo (IMHO).
What this really does is show why 90% of this “purity” is baloney and should be ignored. There are legitimate issues that DO need to be understood, especially where contest rules and publication/journalist ethics are involved — but those are nothing new, and we’ll probably be arguing about those 30 years from now…
Amusingly enough, in the new photo, I now see a “blemish” near the egret’s eye, which when I magnified it turned into a small flying insect that happened to be crossing the bird at the time I shot the photo. It was basically invisible in the older version of the image. I should probably clone it out, but… would the image still be pure enough for you then?
(ducking)
Purists beware
I just recently overheard a self-described “purist” photographer ranting on about how we’re all cheaters and that the photographic masters before us lacked our current luxury–even desire–to “customize” (read: manipulate/photoshop) images. It was “…all about the the composition, a beautiful subject, and a properly exposed picture”.
via Chase Jarvis Blog: Purists Beware.
I was mulling over how to broach this subject myself when Chase Jarvis nailed it for me.It came to me that I’d made a fundamental philosophical change in my mindset when I was elbow deep in Lightroom and madly adjusting lighting levels in Viveza that this whold idea of “customization” of photos being either
- bad
or
- unique to digital photography
is bogus.
I’m old enough to have actually spent a chunk of my life in a darkroom. An honest to god, full of smelly chemicals stick things in the liquids and watch the images appear out of nowhere darkroom. Where I’d print multitudes of test prints and experiment with burning in shadows and dodging highlights to fix exposure problems, where we’d use the photographic equivalent of white-out to fix dust spots and do all sorts of “tweaks” to get the final printed photo to look good.
Nobody was a master of that more than Ansel Adams. His artistry was even more in the darkroom than behind the camera. Thomas Hawk talked about that a while back:
So much of Adams’ work was in the darkroom. One of the biggest challenges, even today, when images are used from the Ansel Adams archive (at the University of Arizona in Tucson) is to ensure that the final image from the negative is a quality image. So much of the final outcome of Ansel’s work came from the darkroom.
via 10 Interesting Things I Learned About Ansel Adams
So much of Adam’s quality in his photos is in how he manipulated his negatives to make them the absolute best they could be. So much of these “purity” arguments are bullshit; I’ve been a questioner of HDR, but recently I’ve come to realize that most critics of HDR (myself included) only notice HDR when it’s done badly — the well-done HDR doesn’t call itself out as HDR, so the good examples don’t balance out the mistakes; they simply don’t get noticed.
I’ve come to realize these turfing fights aren’t new — and aren’t about creating good photos. And honestly, they don’t matter. What matters is the photo, no? Hey, are you going to argue with Ansel Adams? (not me!)
(also see: G. Dan Mitchell)
Know when to hold it, know when to fold it
Sometimes you have to know when to hold it. Sometimes you have to know when to fold it.
One of the hardest life lessons I’ve learned is this: if the only person who knows (or cares) about a deadline is yourself, it’s not really a deadline — and don’t kill yourself trying to make it. I used to really stress out when I’d commit to something then not make the date because other things came up (even though I felt those things were more important, or out of my control). Even though the only person it mattered to was me.
I finally figured this out, and started teaching myself not to sweat over details that didn’t really matter. I decided back in 2006 I wanted to try to organize a second career around a camera; I never worked with Bill Atkinson, but you can’t be an Apple geek (or like me, an Apple alum) and not know about Hypercard, and in fact, I did a lot of work in Hypercard over the years. I did work with Dave Cardinal at Apple, and when I started dabbling with digital cameras and then run into their work, it was that seminal eye-opening moment that made me realize that I could make that shift as well, and that was the starting point for this second career planning.
That was in 2005.
In 2007, I thought I’d become a pretty good photographer and started seriously looking to fire up my second career plans. And then I blew out my knee by stepping in a gopher hole, then dad got sick (and then he died) and by the time I surfaced from helping mom through the estate, 2008 was almost over and it was time to try again. Then I landed the gig at Palm, and I knew it was going to an insanely fun few months and it went on hold again. And now it’s almost 2010, and I feel like it’s time to try again. So we will.
That doesn’t mean nothing happened in the meantime. In fact, the delays have been a blessing in disguise. I’ve spent a ot of time and energy in battling bits in photoshop and lightroom, in studying my work and really being honest about my strengths (and flaws) and working to fix the flaws; in studying other photographers and understanding their strengths and how to adapt them into my own work.
In 2007, I thought I was a good photographer. Today, I’m a much better photographer. Sometimes delays can be frustrating, but you turn them to your advantage.
There are always reasons to say “not yet” to your plans; planning is easy — and safe. Doing is hard, involves risk, and may fail. But sometimes, “not yet” is the right decision, even if you don’t like making it at the time. You might miss out on an opportunity, but if your plans are sound and your planning is done well, you’ll run into later opportunities later. (hint: if your plans revolve around a “now or never” situation, it’s probably a badly thought out plan. If you don’t have follow-on opportunities to build your business with, how are you going to grow your business?)
So knowing when to hold it — and using that hold time to improve your chances of later success as you can — can be a positive. You can’t be afraid to say “it’s time” and push the button and make it happen.
At the same time, you have to be realistic, and you can’t force yourself to push the button simply because it’s the date you said you were going to do it on — going in for the wrong reasons and at the wrong time makes the chances of failure skyrocket, and if it fails, it’s going to be harder to generate future opportunities or feel confident about going out and grabbing them when they happen.
There are also times when you simply need to fold the hand and try again. When I left StrongMail, I’d been working on a project called Dare2Thrive, and decided to take some time off and push that project into production. Once I left on my own, some outside factors kicked my motivation in the crotch, and I realized there were some fundamental flaws in my approach that I couldn’t easily solve.
The big one: I was putting myself into primarily an editorial role, not a creative role, and on a long term basis, I decided that was unacceptable; I wanted a situation that focused on my own material rather than creating an environment where I promoted the work of others.
That’s not something you fix by tweaking the CSS. I realized I needed to start over, tear it down to the bare assumptions, and starting over. I hated the decision at the time; at the time I felt it was fixable, but the external issues I was dealing with made it necessary. I realize now that not only was it the right decision — it saved me from almost certain failure if I’d pushed forward, and that was without taking into consideration what 2008 was going to surprise me with…
Holding it and Folding it. Never fun. To take something you really care about and want to do and stuff it back in the closet is hard. To take it out behind the shed and “Old Yeller” it is traumatic. If it’s the right thing to do, though, it has to be done, and many times, it creates new, better opportunities later if you let it.
And for the record, the core or Dare2Thrive — the piece that first made me want to do the project — is alive and well as part of this new project. And dammit if it isn’t even a better project now than it ever would have been in its original form.
And if anyone wants to buy them, I have the original dare2thrive domains available and parked, at least until I figure out a use for them….
Understanding the starting point
To map a path, you not only must know where you want to end up, you have to know where you are. In fact, you really don’t need to know your final destination — it’s fine to say “let’s get to sweden, and then we can figure out where Stockholm is, and once we get there, we can find the hotel”. But if you map your route by starting at the wrong place, you’re screwed.
I’ve been spending time studying the analytics of my existing environment and trying to figure out what is working and what isn’t, why I like and what I don’t. It was about a year ago I decided to move from typepad back to wordpress and consolidate my presence on one blog on chuqui.com (I actually made the move in January). Overall, I think that worked very well; I like the platform and I like the technologies involved. I used an off the shelf wordpress theme that I feel worked fine in the interim with limited tweaking, and I can’t complain.
The numbers on the blog are decent. Since shifting from Typepad to WordPress, feed subscriptions have grown from about 425 to 650 (+35%). 16,000 different people visited in 2009 (so far), a number I find fascinating. Traffic is split 40% referral from other sites (including clicks from twitter postings), 40% direct (primarily RSS feeds) and 20% search engine. The search engine number is too low, but I haven’t done any significant optimization for SEO.
An interesting tidbit is that 45% of the pages published get no (zero, none, nada) viewings; if you factor out pages published in 2009 and generating views based on RSS/Twitter, it’s more like 70%.
A typical posting has about a two week lifetime where it’ll get views based on being in your RSS feed or posted to twitter/facebook; after that, unless it’s got prominent visibility on the site, gets traffic from links from other blogs or search engines, it no longer exists.
In other words, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) matters, especially if you want to avoid having to constantly throw traffic out onto the RSS feed to drive views. At the same time, if you aren’t updating on a regular basis, you’re going to disappear.
My adsense advertising made me about $0.75 this year. I haven’t done any work to try to maximize this — it was literally a put-there-and-watch test — but that’s really pitiful. Part of that, I think, is that Adsense seems to work better in a non-geek audience; if your audience lives within the tech-geek echo chamber, Adsense might as well not exist. it is certainly not a panacea; hell, if anyone still thinks there’s a magic cookie where you put up a blog and money rolls in, they deserve what they get.
On the other hand, my limited (very, VERY limited) tests using Amazon affiliate links netted about $40. That won’t pay the rent, but it will buy the occasional photography book (which I can review and generate affiliate links, which…); and since it’s literally a free option for readers, there’s little downside.
About 40% of my total pageviews are to the front page (http://www.chuqui.com); I’m not entirely clear why. Adsense revenue generated by the front page: $0.00. Talk about a waste of real estate.
Most popular content: all over the place. No real trends, which is probably good, because if my hockey writing was clearly my most popular material, that’d be bad for business.
Over on twitter, I’ve passed 1,000 followers, which just stuns me. That’s double (or more) what it was six months ago.My flickr viewing stream has a solid, regular pattern, and in fact has better SEO than my blog does — more on that later, and that’s not a bad thing, it just needs to be understood (and it can be leveraged).
My interpretations of this?
“Just posting” isn’t enough for what you publish to have an audience. The good news is that the blog format encourages conversation and allows for a less structured writing style. The negative is that if that’s all you do, most of the words or pictures will get seen for a short period of time and then effectively go away.
There are options to mitigate that. On a technical level, SEO techniques help improve visibility through the search engines. Good site design can help make content accessible to a user who visits the site, but the blunt reality is that people who visit the site don’t explore; they read what they came to see and leave. you can reduce that with careful planning of your home page and your posting-detail page, but still, expect “stick around and enjoy your stay” to be a tough sell.
I’ve decided that one way around this is repackaging. Tidbits does interesting work with their e-books, and I’ve been watching David duChemin‘s experiments with fascination, and I think this is a very interesting technique to explore. Content creation via the blog, which allows you to explore a topic in depth and over time, in a conversational and non-linear style, and then pull that content back together into an e-book where you can structure it and polish it and then publish it in HTML and/or PDF and then feature that publication on the blog entries where the content came from. The “typical” user won’t wander the blog to read the entire thread of postings, but I think if they find the content via search or from a link from another site, and the page they land on has it available as an extended article — that I think is a workable distribution for longer and more complex material.
It makes it easy for the viewer. If you make it complicated, they won’t. And you get a bit of the best of both worlds, the informality and interactivity of the blog format, and the formal “published” format for easy distribution — and for someone to come and grab later if they’re not part of the immediate conversation.
And since it is now in a tangible (albeit e-published) format, I think it is easier to make an argument that it has some value, which if you want to convince someone to exchant something of value for it, can’t hurt.
And it can be made to work with both text AND images, and adapts well for creative commons rights usage. You can get paid via an ecommerce solution as well as a donation model, depending on what you want to do, or even give it away and use sponsorship or advertising models if you want.
And that seems to be the starting point for the whole shebang, no?
You don’t take pictures for a living…
Many years ago, when I was doing book reviews for Amazing Science Fiction (at that time owned by TSR. I did say “many years ago!”) a common question I got was ‘How can I get paid to read books?’
It may sound like I’m picking nits, but this is an important semantical detail: I didn’t get paid to read books. I got paid to help readers decide whether to read (and buy) books.
Typing is a skill. Writing is a craft. You don’t get paid for writing. You get paid for selling what you wrote. What you wrote is an asset, and your income depends on how others value that asset and what they’re willing to pay for it.
Ditto photography. The act of taking a photograph is a skill. The act of making a photograph is a craft. You don’t get paid to make a photo; that photo is an asset; it has to be valued and bought to generate income. (or more wonderful thoughts on making vs. taking, see Scott Bourne and Chase Jarvis)
Nowhere in here have I mentioned the word “art” or “artist”. To a good degree, it’s an irrelevant concept in the discussion (except it’s not). In my way of seeing things, to be a craftsman, you have to master the skills. To be an artist, you have to master the craft AND have a specific inner spark or vision that drives your work beyond the typical. Few are true artists, but in some fields, defining yourself as an “artist” is a marketing tactic used to increase your value and and improve sales. That’s not a crticism — it worked wonderfully for Andy Warhol (but is what he did art?)
Stephen King
This is a somewhat round-about way of pointing out that business of selling your work has very little to do with the act of creating it. If you don’t understand this, I can’t believe you can succeed as a business — but you may still be a great writer or photographer.
Which is a round-about way of bringing forward the idea that there’s going to be very little discussion about making great photos. It’s a given that you can do that; you can probably market yourself to some level of success if you’re craft is technically mediocre, but you’ll be constantly shooting yourself in the foot.
So this conversation is really about what to sell. It’s about how to market it so people know you’re selling it. It’s about making sure that someone who wants to buy it can. It’s about maximizing the value of your assets, and making sure that what you sell it for makes you more than it cost you to make it.
It’s also about when to give it away, because many times, the best sales tool you have is the free sample.
But the trick there is how to give it away, without, well, giving it away. Because if it’s free, why should someone pay for it?
And that issue is core to success in the internet-enabled universe, and is both a massive challenge — and a bigger opportunity.
Designing a Web Presence
It should come as no surprise that anything I’m planning for the future involves the internet.
I suppose I could decide to move to Astoria and go to work in Starbucks. That’d be a perfectly acceptable second career — and if my other plans don’t work, it might still happen. That’d take a lot less work and planning, though, so I don’t have to think about that quite yet.
What I’ve known for a long time is that whatever this is going to be, it’s going to have a strong online component, which means a well-designed and well-built web presence. I use the term “web presence” here, not web site, because while a web site is a key aspect to this, nothing stands alone in the internet any more. You always have interfaces to other services, whether it’s social networking (Facebook, twitter), or communication (gmail) or to leverage other services instead of building your own (flickr, Smugmug, Cafepress, etc).
Because building a web presence to support this second career is going to be a large and complex beast by the time I’m done, and because one option both Laurie and I are looking at in the future is “build web sites for companies in Astoria” (or “build web sites for photographers”), having a portfolio site I can be proud of is crucial, and having the documentation on the how and why of the design and build process is a useful sales tool.
Besides, the conversation I hope this generates will help make it a better and more useful site; incremental feedback and early discussion is a lot more useful in fixing and tweaking when it’s easier and early.
So this is the second track of discussion that’s going to start showing up on the blog; there is the “why” of the second career, and here, the “how”.
But neither of those matters without the most important part.
Next up: the what. Because this all has to be about something, or it’s really rather silly to do.
One thing I’m not going to do…
One aspect of figuring out what to do in a second career is understanding what NOT to do. As I noted in the intro, one decision I made a while back was that even though my hockey writing was one of the largest segments of my blog’s audience at the time, I chose not to try to make it a focus of my plans. It might have been a leg to build an income stream on in the short term, but over the longer term, it conflicted with other, more important goals (like getting out of Silicon Valley), and I didn’t see any logic in trying to building a hockey audience knowing I was going to “retire” from it at some point.
I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m interested in a lot of things. Some days I think my brain is a magpie, always looking at some new shiny thing to go and explore. there are days when I feel like I need to put a huge sign that says FOCUS on the wall over my desk, just to remind me to stick to what needs to be done and not spend a few hours “researching”. (although research is necessary and useful, but not to the exclusion of getting real work done).
One of the things I’ve been thinking about for the last year — and reluctantly putting back on the list of things I want to do but can’t justify doing — is going back to fiction writing. At one point I was an active fiction writer, and unlike a lot of them, I was selling some of it. I gave it up for a simple reason: the pay sucked, it was a lot of hard work, and I enjoyed computers and geeking at least as much as I enjoyed writing and being a writer, and computers pay a hell of a lot better.
Fiction writing is a tough market. It hasn’t gotten any better in the time I’ve been away, in fact it’s harder now to succeed as a writer than it was 10 or 15 years ago, and the pay scale is about the same. Not “same adjusted for inflation”, but pretty much the same. A few writers make really good money, a good chunk of writers make enough money to keep writing, and a huge number of writers are fighting for waiter jobs with those actors and actresses and muscians and artists who are all in the same boat in their respective fields.
John Scalzi sums it up wonderfully.
I go back to what I felt when I decided to retire from writing: I enjoy being a writer (the act of writing isn’t as pleasant as having written) — but I don’t see anyway someone who WANTS to be a writer can successfully compete in a tight market against someone who HAS TO BE a writer. And I want to be a writer, it just isn’t something that wraps me in knots at night when I’m not writing. So even though my unfinished novel has been calling to me in the interstices of the midnight hour, one of the things I’ve decided I’m not going to do — is try to go back to fiction writing.
Although I’d like to. But I don’t HAVE to — and that’s something everyone should be brutally honest with themselves about when playing the “I want to be…. ” game. “Want to” isn’t a success strategy. In a creative industry, if it doesn’t come from somewhere deep inside, if the hunger isn’t there, chances are you won’t succeed, because someone who is driven by that hunger is going to fight for the same opportunities, and they’ll win most of the time.
Thoughts on the Second Career
As I noted the other day, I expect posting frequency on the blog to go up soon. About this time last year I started serious planning on my “what’s next?” project — that being my long-term look at how I want to make the shift into the second career. I see a time where I’m not going to want to work in Silicon Valley and hack high tech 24×7 (gasp), but I certainly have no plans on retiring.
The elevator speech: I want to earn a respectable income from my home office in Astoria, Oregon without telecommuting.
Yes, you could potentially contract and consult from there (although if I were going to do that game, I’d do it from Ashland or Medford — like, it sometimes seems, half the population of those towns) but that’s not the point. At some point, I know I want to get out of the Silicon Valley rat race and do something else. The question is — what?
I want to emphasize something: this is a long term (3-5 years) thing; in fact for about the last 15 years I’ve been keeping (with more or less intensity) a 3-5 year plan. That’s the first lesson in something like this: planning is good, because it helps you map a path, but it should also be flexible because as you do the planning, you’ll change your mind, new situations come up, the unexpected happens. For me, the planning on the second career wasn’t so much about implementation, but on understanding where I wanted to end up and to influence decisions now that will make it happen someday. And occasionally, after a really bad day at the office, as a way to keep my sense of humor and sanity. Well, okay. My sense of humor.
Now, the day for that second career is closer. I’ve known for a few years roughly what I wanted to aim at here. Various decisions I’ve made over the last couple of years have been driven by this long-term planning. My move of the blog from Typepad back here to chuqui.com was because I knew I wanted total control over my online environment, and I wanted it under my own domain name for branding purposes. I chose WordPress because I really like that tool as a platform for it’s flexibility and the community ecosystem that exists around it (my second choice, even thought I’ve occasionally described it as sportfishing off of an aircraft carrier, is Drupal, and the drupal community has done a really nice job of cleaning up issues that bothered me back when they couldn’t even run the Drupal site on the Drupal 6 release).
Another decision I made was shutting down the “Two for Elbowing” blog on hockey and de-emphasizing my hockey writing. I did that for a few reasons; originally, that blog was supposed to be for both myself and Laurie to write about hockey (“two for… get it? heh. heh.). Laurie’s life took her in other directions and it turned into a solo gig (although the hockey world is missing out on a damn good hockey geek, and I’m not talking about me); as a solo, I much preferred putting all of my writing into one place (the branding thing) again. Also, think about my long-term goal: moving to Astoria. Building an income around writing about hockey and the Sharks and moving to Astoria conflict. Just a bit. Besides, there are plenty of good hockey writers out there now, and if I was 25 (instead of 50+), I might take a run at doing something like what Rich Hammond is doing with the Kings. Instead, I made a decision to enjoy hockey, not sweat about what to write about it — and I only write when I want to. This is a feature, not a bug.
I’m firmly convinced that what Hammond and the Kings are doing is the future model for journalism in pro sports as the newspaper business continues to evolve and implode. NHL teams that haven’t figured this out yet should take a close look and find a good beat guy to bring on board and nurture. The Sharks could do a lot worse than hiring Dave Pollak and bringing him in-house, for instance. Having been writing about hockey online since before the Sharks existed, I do sometimes wish that the online environment that exists today had existed 15 years ago, but it didn’t. Sometimes timing is everything, and understanding that is a key aspect of designing success into your plans.
To succeed in ANY career path, not just a second career, it’s important to know what NOT to do, what not to sidetrack yourself on, what not to invest time and money in. That may be even more important than knowing what to do, in fact, because that’s how you stay focused and moving in the direction you want to end up.
In any event, this is the first in a series of articles on the idea of a second career and my thoughts and plans. I’m hoping this becomes a conversation, not a lecture; I’m doing this in public both because I hope you find it interesting and learn from it to help refine your own plans and ideas — and because I hope you will help me improve my own ideas and fix the flaws in my thinking and make my own second career success happen as well. I hope you find this interesting and useful; I know I’ll learn from your feedback and comments and end up the better for it. Together, everyone wins — and how can that be bad?
So, onward. The future starts today.
Chuq
Footnote on Astoria: For those not familiar with Astoria, it’s about 2 hours from Portland on the coast, and it’s a very nice, small, homey town, but has some really nice places like the restaurant Baked Alaska and Cellar on 10th that make it more than a small rural town — and it’s well located to a lot of great photographic opportunities). It might not be Astoria (I’m really falling more and more in like with Morro Bay, for instance, and I love the northern Oregon Coast so it could be anywhere from Astoria to Newport…), but that’s a nice placeholder for what I’d like to do.
Small, inviting, not urban, on the coast, lower cost of living but with some nice amenties and close to civilization when I want it. The kind of place most Silicon Valley Geeks seem to wish they lived, unless they’re the hard core urban type. I’m not, but Vancouver tempts me to convert…
Comment behaviour: How far is too far?
According to Greenbaum’s blog post (which was mirrored on his personal blog), someone posted a comment on a story in which they used a colloquial or slang term for female genitalia. It was deleted, but then was reposted. Greenbaum says he noticed that the comment alert from WordPress showed that it came from a nearby school. So Greenbaum called the school, and they asked him to send them the email with the comment, which he apparently did. About six hours later, he says, the school called and said that an employee had been confronted and that he had resigned.
Am I the only one who thinks that doing this goes way beyond the normal course of editorial behaviour?
via Comment behaviour: How far is too far?.
There’s been some interesting commentary on this case — but there are some aspects that I think haven’t been addressed very well yet. It’s a more complicated situation than many have considered, and the answers really aren’t clear cut.
Here’s my take:
There are really two separate issues here.
Did Greenbaum over-react by reporting this person to his employer?
Yes — but.
Yes, he did. In the grand scheme of things, reporting a violator back to their host is a serious thing because it can have serious implications — like getting someone fired. Which effectively happened in this case. So it’s a last resort thing. Before you do something like that, I prefer taking many other tactics first:
- Delete the post
- Warn the User
- Ban the User (and ban the IP and/or IP range as necessary)
- Make it clear that if it doesn’t stop, they’re going to be reported
If those all fail, or if for some reason aren’t possible, THEN you start considering going back to the user’s host for support in making the behavior stop. As far as I can tell, only the first was tried, so a number of (to me) necessary steps were skipped. This could have been ended with much less serious ramifications, and wasn’t.
However, here’s the butt:
- The post was deleted, and the user insisted on putting it back. The admins made it clear it wasn’t acceptable, and the user decided to overrule their authority. This user was far from innocent here.
- Once the user is reportd back to their host (and I use that term carefully, because it’s many times unclear if it’s an employer or what, and to some degree it doesn’t matter if it’s an ISP or a boss or whatever), it’s out of Greenbaum’s control. The rest of the escalation to losing the job was the result of actions of the host (i.e the school, or this person’s boss). None of that is caused by Greenbaum (directly) or his fault, beyond that he should have been sensitive to the fact that his action in reporting might have caused other actions to happen.
So, you know what? I think Greenbaum’s transgression is a lot less serious than the user’s transgression in reposting his vulgarity after it was made clear it wasn’t welcome. I would have tried other tactics to cut the abuse, but let’s not forget that it was abuse, and it was repeated abuse after the site made it clear the posting wasn’t welcome. Whether you shoot over someone’s virtual bow one time or three times is a minor thing in the scheme of it.
The user’s fault in this problem was a much bigger problem than Greenbaum’s reaction.
But what about the school? They’re the group that took the complaint and escalated it into a situation where the person lost their job. None of that is Greenbaum’s fault. Was the school wrong for turning this into a termination issue?
I’m not so sure. It’s easy to say they over-reacted, but let’s not forget:
- This person did this using the school’s network
- It looks like he did it while on duty at the school – while he was being paid by them.
- He likely was on a school-owned computer
- He was (I’m sure) under some kind of employment contract with behavior clauses. The school very likely has acceptable use standards for computers and networks, and for all we know, also personal use restrictions (which this would be a violation of).
- So while this cascaded into a situation where someone lost their job, it’s not at all clear that the details of the action were the cause. We also don’t know if this person has a history of previous violations of work rules that might have been part of this. Has this person been warned about this kind of behavior before? We don’t know. It could well be from the school’s view that this was a “last straw”. We don’t know.
And those complications are why I believe reporting back to the host is something not to be taken lightly; once you do, the final outcome is not really under your control. On the other hand, the person who could have prevented this was the user who posted the vulgarity — either by not doing it in the first place, or by stopping after it was deleted the first time, or by being smart enough to not do it from his employer on company time and company equipment. He had plenty of opportunities to not turn this into what it was; Greenbaum had one.
And it’s not as simple as many of the folks commenting on it want to be. Real life never is…
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