I just got the following email from the nice folks at flickr.

Hi chuqui,

(URL to one of my images edited)

In joining Flickr, you agreed to abide by the Terms of
Service and Community Guidelines. Flickr accounts are
intended for individual use, for our members to share
original content that they’ve created, not to sell stuff:

“Don’t Use Flickr for Commercial Purposes Flickr is for
personal use only. If you sell products, services or
yourself through your photostream, we will terminate your
account. Any other commercial use of Flickr, Flickr
technologies (including APIs, Flickrmail, etc), or Flickr
accounts must be approved by Flickr.”

http://www.flickr.com/guidelines.gne

Please remove the URLs that link to your store/auction(s)
from underneath your photos/video, any sales verbiage or
“for sale” sets, and any group discussion posts where
commercial content was shared at your earliest convenience
so that we don’t have to take further action on your
account.

Regards,

Flickr Staff

They are correct. I am in violation of their guidelines. For the record, here’s what my images say (with links unlinked):

Golden Eagle, Marsh Road, Santa Clara County, California. This adult eagle was harassed by a red-tailed hawk, which put it on the ground. The eagle sat there for a while, then did a test flight along the hill, finally took off and flew away. The hawk that chased it sat near by watching and let the eagle go unmolested once it was sure it was leaving.

If you are interested in buying a print of an image, or to license it for commercial use, they are available via my portfolio on smugmug.

Please stay in touch! You can follow my work via my blog (www.chuqui.com), Twitter, or Google+.
This image is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivative Works license. This allows you to use this image in a non-commercial way as long as you give proper attribution of the author and source. This license does not allow you to re-publish it for commercial use or to use it in an altered form without my explicit permission.

Tags: Aquila chrysaetos, California, Golden Eagle, Marsh Road, Santa Clara County, Top25

That exact language has been on my images for the last 4-6 weeks or so, I think. Very similar language has been on all my images for about the last 18 months. When I did it originally, I did it based on language I saw a good number of flickr users using. I could probably point to 100 or so flickr users doing what I do.

The question I have is this: why now? Why me when I’ve been doing this same kind of cross marketing to my smugmug site for over a year? Possible answers:

Pure coincidence. They police stuff when they notice it, and they happened to see it.
They’re starting a crackdown on this, and so if you’re one of those photographers I modeled my language on, you might expect email, too.
My criticisms on Flickr got noticed, and they decided to rattle my cage a bit.

Which one is it? Honestly, I don’t care. I’m not questioning the rule, I’m clearly not in line with their rules. Of course, if I’m not, a bunch of you aren’t either. What that means to you is up to you to consider. If you’re one of those photographers doing this kind of cross linking, you might want to be aware of this and redo your language to be conformant. I’m guessing if I remove the words “buying” and “license” I’m probably okay. Maybe.

My interest in flickr is so low now that it’s not worth my time to fix this. It’s not about being upset about this; it’s about flickr being allowed to deteriorate and stagnate to the point where I no longer care about being a member on it. There are better uses of my time, and better places to put my images.

So I’m going to go delete my flickr account. I don’t want to have a fight with flickr over this stuff, and the amount of work need to change this to make them happy isn’t a lot, but it’s more than I want to spend. The change will reduce the value of flickr to me even more, so that I don’t see any reason to bother. I was headed towards this decision anyway, this just means it makes sense to make it now instead of later.

So if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to head off and throw the switch and resolve this. Probably not in the way they expect, but the way that works for me. I apologize in advance that a few thousand images will go 404 while I make this transition. I’ll bring them back as soon as I have time to set things up for them properly on my smugmug site. .

Today’s Shared Links for October 16, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for October 15, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for October 14, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for October 13, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for October 12, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for October 11, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for October 10, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for October 9, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for October 8, 2011

opening night

It’s opening night for the Sharks. I haven’t talked much about hockey leading up to the start of the season, mostly because I’ve had other priorities. Didn’t get to camp, watched some pre-season, but I won’t pretend to have studied the league or am remotely qualified to play pundit right now.

So, surprisingly, I won’t for the most part.

The big question if you’re a sharks fan is whether or not the Sharks are better this season, because last season wasn’t quite good enough. I think so, but the difference between where they were and where they need to go is more attitude and experience and chemistry (as well as luck and whether they stay healthy) that it is about “better players” — and so it’s really hard to judge until we see how the season plays out. In any event, this isn’t a question that’ll be answered in October or December, but in March and April.

But I like the moves Wilson has made. More importantly, I like the fact that he wasn’t afraid to make moves, wasn’t tentative, and didn’t make minor tweaks and hope for major improvements. I really like the Burns acquisition, not just because I really like Burns, but because it’ll help keep Boyle from wearing out.

I think the west is shaping up to be a three and a half team race: I will stand up and say the Sharks should win the west and the sharks should go to the stanley cup final. I think Vancouver will fight them hard for this; I always think Detroit will have to be reckoned with, and the LA Kings worry me. There are another five or six teams a step behind that make the west very competitive, and any one of them can get on a streak and knock off the favorite. It’s going to be lots of good hockey.

In the east, I don’t know the teams as well, but what I’ve seen of Pittsburgh impresses me. Boston is going to have to fight through the Cup Hangover problem, and I’m not sure they can repeat. The Rangers may well be turning into a good team, finally. And Washington has scary talent but hasn’t shown my much yet. I think Philly picking up Bryzgalov solves their big problem, at least this year, and they’ll make some noise. But I’ll pick the Penguins coming out of the east, and it’ll either be Pittsburgh or Philly winning the eastern conference.

A few other non-game notes on hockey this year.

I’m loving what I’m seeing out of Shanahan and the changes in rules and rule enforcement so far. I was a big proponent of “first, double the length of all suspensions” to get the attention of the players. He hasn’t done that, but the new suspensions are a good step in that direction. I see that this new direction has already pissed off Mickey Redmond and Don Cherry, and to me, that means the league is definitely doing the right thing; will it have the willpower to keep at it? I think it has, and I think this means we finally have a generational shift in power among the hockey governors that understand that Don Cherry hockey is not going to drive this sport into the future. Let’s hope the luddites don’t drag it back again.

• • •

Oh, a quick open letter to a man I respect greatly for what he does, when he doesn’t piss me off for what he is:

Dear Don: Please. Retire. It’s time. you’re embarrassing yourself. More importantly, you’re now embarrassing the game and the players you pretend to respect. So let them ride you off into the sunset in glory instead of disgrace, because if you don’t, you’re going to end up saying something that will taint your legacy forever, and I don’t want to see that.

But you won’t, so the circus on hockey night in canada will continue until you finally say the one thing you shouldn’t, and you leave on someone else’s terms with ridicule. Which is a shame.

• • •

With the opening of the season, a few reading suggestions

Kukla’s Corner is the best place to get a wide view of hockey and the league, with writers on each team and on many subjects around the sport. It’s a great place to get a broad survey of what’s going on without having to track down 93 different news feeds. It’s also where Laurie is writing on goalies this season.
If you are a Sharks fan, you should be reading Working the Corners, the blog of beat writer David Pollak (and his trusted sidekick backup writer Mark Emmons). David knows and loves the game, knows the Sharks, and has created a nice dialog with the fans here on his blog and gets beyond the 300 words a night summaries we used to live with back in the “old days” of traditional newspapering.
Tom Benjamin has been writing about hockey online longer than Laurie and I have, which says something. He knows the game very well and reading his blog will make you think about the game and teach you about it. It matters not one bit that I disagree with him on many of his opinions, his views are still something you ought to be paying attention to and then making up your own mind about. It looks like he’s starting the season in good form as he takes apart Cherry’s fighting rant better than I could. Read him, he will teach you.

• • •

A couple of words on the off-season. The hockey world lost some people in tragic ways with Derek Boogard and Rick Rypien and Wade Belak, and before that Tom Cavanagh’s suicide. It’s brought to the surface some issues that have been around for a while but can now no longer ignored or swept back under the carpet the way Don Cherry tried to with his bullshit. The information about the analysis of former player Rick Martin’s brain, which showed clear signs of CTE makes it clear this is not a new problem for the league (and is not a problem specific to hockey, either, since football and boxing also have this issue to deal with, and when baseball takes a close look at catchers, I’ll bet you’ll find some of them, will suffer from it as well).

In the Don Cherry world, hockey players are gladiators and fight the glorious fight for our entertainment — and when they can’t, they go offstage and get replaced by a new gladiator.

In my world, I have real problems enjoying a sport that leaves those entertaining me this damaged; it’s tough enough to see what ex-players deal with in terms or orthopedic challenges later in life, but now we’re talking about damage to the brain; permanent damage that affects their lives and how they interact with life.

I first wrote about concussion issues in the NHL back in 2003 and I’ve talked about it a number of times since. It’s a bit sad that it’s taken the league eight years to get this serious about dealing with head injuries, but I also understand that the medical science of understanding all of this is just catching up to the problem as well.

And it looks like the league really is taking this seriously, and I hope they find some solutions. The changes I see this year are a good start. It’s going to take the players some time to retrain themselves, so I hope the league keeps it up and doesn’t back off under the inevitable whining of the Cherry Cabal.

I struggled during the off-season with the idea of being entertained by people who will end up like Derek Boogard and Wade Belak; whether it was Jay More or Paul Kariya or Sydney Crosby or Nick Kypreos, watching these players struggle simply to have a life while fighting to recover from serious concussions made me wonder whether I wanted to continue as a fan of the sport. I now think the league is on the right track — I won’t pretend we have all of the answers, but we seem to have started, and are helping the players learn and understand. I watched an interview with Matt Cooke on the TV last night, and Cooke has been the poster child of “what we don’t want in the league” for years — and he honestly sounded like he understands and gets that it’s time to change his game. time will tell, but if it got through to him, I think the league will sort this all out.

This isn’t something simplistic “fix it now” solutions is going to solve. It doesn’t help to “fix” the game by screwing it up. Those people are just as wrong as the “leave it alone” crew. I feel like the league now has the right people and the commitment to figure it out, and I think the tragedies of the last year has the players attention. It’s sad that we needed to lose some good people to get this kind of focus on the problem, but in reality, that’s human nature. I do hope the league keeps pushing on this and figures out how to keep the game what it is — while making it as safe as possible for the people who entertain us by playing it.

• • •

One final note; as I’ve mentioned a few times, Laurie and I gave up our season tickets after 20 years; a combination of wanting to back off and go to fewer games and not wanting the hassle of syndicating them. We’ve talked a few times about it to make sure we had no regrets, and we don’t. Going to the arena 35-37 times a year was turning into an obligation, not an entertainment. Tonight we’ll be sitting on the couch watching — the last opening night we missed was season 1, because we didn’t convert to full season until year 2.

A lot of hockey — we’re well over 700 games attended in the last 20 years, when you count in road trips and our jaunts through the WHL and BCJHL and the year with the Spiders where we did 30 Sharks games and 35 Spiders games in one season (THAT was a lot of hockey).

It’s definitely nice that the season is firing up. I’m ready for some hockey. But I also find it nice that I’ll be watching it from the couch and not worrying about the drive and parking and turning 3 hours of hockey into six hours of expedition. We’re talking over what games we want to see this year. Still not decided, but we probably won’t actually get to the arena until January. Or maybe sooner — we’ll see how it goes. But definitely, just because we’re not butts in seats 35 nights a year doesn’t mean we’re not as interested as we were. it’s still the sport that we love…

So, shall we drop the puck already?

Today’s Shared Links for October 7, 2011

Moving beyond flickr

My post last week on Whither Flickr? got picked up by some other blogs and generated some interesting feedback and comments. Almost all of the feedback I got boiled down to a couple of key points:

It’s sad to see what’s happened to flickr; Yahoo hasn’t done much with it.

I have so much invested in Flickr (images, links, time, sweat equity, etc), I’m really hesitant to switch services.

I sympathize with that latter; 750,000 page views and counting, and many people I’ve come to know. But at some point, you have to realize that continuing to invest in it because you’ve already invested in something is a bad investment.

I have thought about this a lot, and I’ve decided at that point. At the same time, I don’t think deleting my Flickr account or going “cold turkey” is a smart response, either. So instead what I’m considering doing is putting Flickr on hiatus. My current thought is that soon I’ll stop posting new images to Flickr (probably around the time I hit 3,000 images on the service, which is coming fast); I have about six months before I have to pay for the renewal on my Flickr pro account. When it comes due, I can make a final decision, but I’m planning on renewing it one more year, and leave what’s up there in stasis.

And that gives Yahoo and Flickr time to shake things up and get back on the innovation track. I have to be honest, I’m not hopeful at this point. But the cost to give them time is small, and works to my advantage as well, because that gives me time to take advantage of what I have built up on Flickr while rebuilding a replacement for it on some other service without feeling like i have to rush it, and to give the rest of the net (especially search engines) time to find and start using the new links on the new site. It’s a strategy that seems to work for this situation, with minimal downsides.

So what’s next? the “buy or build” decision. do I build out chuqui.com to host this stuff? Or do I use a service? and which? I’m a big fan of actually doing stuff, and not spending my time hacking and maintaining things to do stuff on where it makes sense — which comes from waking up one day realizing all I was doing was administering things that I no longer had time to use. So I fall on the “buy” side. I’ll host this on a commercial service, not a homebrew.

Which leads to the next decision: since I already use Smugmug, do I extend that or do I use some other service? I took a look at Picasa, because it’s a known alternative to flickr in groups I interact with and because of the coupling with Google+, but it simply doesn’t have the look or features I want. I’ve also been exploring 500px. I like the potential, but it’s not intended to be a volume image site, and it’s suffered some growing pains and stability, and so I’m wary of committing to more than dabbling there. I’m looking forward to seeing how the site grows up — but not making it a primary hosting site yet.

And honestly, I like smugmug, and the folks who run it. It makes photographs look good, it’s nice and flexible and has a good, solid back end. In the time I’ve used it system stability has been exceptional, and the smugmuggers I’ve gotten to know have been great.

So smugmug it is. But the reality is, my current setup on smugmug won’t scale. So that means (sigh), I’m going to have to tear it down and rebuild the architecture and library of images from scratch to be more flexible and handle a much higher number of images. So I’ve been spending some time figuring out how I want to build that structure, and here’s what I have.

I”m publishing out of Lightroom using Jeffrey Friedl’s plug-in and the publishing interface (which is stateful) instead of the export/upload tool (which is not). That means if I make changes to the image or metadata it gets uploaded in place. It can be a bit of a hassle to get set up right, but more than worth it. But right now, every gallery is its own publishing channel, which seriously limits flexibility.

This new publishing architecture uses a single publishing channel for images, plus specialty channels for the wallpapers, one for each size. Everything else is handled via smart folders that key off of keywords.

HINT: metadata rocks.

This implies I can do pretty much anything by careful use of keywords and metadata, and setting up galleries to recognize that as needed. And change it around as my fickle character changes it’s sense of aesthetics and architecture.

What I wanted was fairly simple, conceptually. One stream of images that I split on the fly into three pieces: a limited number of “portfolio” works (best of the best), my complete stream, since I use that to fill out trip slideshows and for things like ID records of birds on birding trips. stuff that I’m not afraid to show folks; but stuff that isn’t the gosh wow special stuff I’d want to sell you if I were a pro. That differentiation is the reason I kept two photo sites in the first place, one for my “social/casual” photography, one for my “serious/pro” work. I wanted them separate. I STILL do, but now I’ve been working out how to do that using a single photo system rather than physical cloistering. A third stream of images are personal, aimed just at myself or Laurie or my family, or some limited group. Via keyword, they’d get uploaded, marked private, and distributed via private/password protected gallery. My feeling was that as long as I was designing this, I’d design this in rather than build up yet another publishing channel I’d regret later. Because metadata rocks, once you commit to using it.

On an architectural basis, this seems to fit both my short-term needs and give me flexibility to scale in the longer term without having to tear it down and starting over again; always a good thing to consider. From what I can tell, smugmug architecturally handles what I want to do; I still need to do some experimentation to make sure it actually does things the way I want, and to find the places where it doesn’t, so I can adapt or find workarounds before I lock this in place.

Architecture is only part of the answer. Display is the other. I can get the images onto the system in a usable way, but can I make them accessible in the way I want, looking the way I want?

This is a place where Smugmug looks to be somewhat weak. Limited hierarchies in gallery structure, and without deciding to do a full monty design to the site pages, the displays are usable, but not extraordinary. But actually, that’s okay, because the full monty design is possible, and if I choose that direction, I can circumvent the hierarchy limitations via the design of the custom pages. So it’s solvable, even if it’s not without some significant customization.

That to me is an acceptable requirement; I want the key pages of the smugmug site to better replicate the blog design anyway, and I may well choose to move the primary photo pages to my main site and use smugmug primarily as a back end. Or some hybrid form with a custom front page and significant content on chuqui.com that depends on the smugmug galleries for image display.

those are decisions yet to be made. I’m starting to experiment on that now. right now, what I want to do definitely seems possible. It seems to be both long-term scalable and flexible to allow for significant changes without a “tear down and start over” moment, at least for a few years. And smugmug’s proven itself reliable enough to be the underlying service.

So right now, that’s the direction I’m headed. Next step is to finalize the architecture and start implementing; then start work on the design and customization aspects. Fortunately, I can do this in stages, and it won’t be worse than the status quo along the way. and the end result will, I think, be a big step forward.

Well, at least in theory. Now, to go make sure the design really works in reality….

My thoughts on Steve in the Guardian

Since I’ve written about Apple for the Guardian in the past, they reached out and asked if I would again.

It’s now live on their site, and I wanted to point you at it and include a copy of what I wrote here:

Try to imagine today’s society if Steve didn’t exist. Can you? The Apple II. the Macintosh. The mouse. Making computers accessible to non-technical people in general. Reinventing the music industry with iPod and iTunes, over the express wishes of the industry. Beginning a similar reinvention of film and video. Revitalising animation with Pixar. Reinventing the personal communication industry with the iPhone. And most recently the iPad. He was a fundamental part of so many societal changes, any one of which would make most people’s careers.

I am who I am today because of Steve, through the companies and the products and the technologies he fostered; more importantly, because of the people he brought in and mentored who turned into people that mentored me. Because of the thinking and attitudes he promoted and inoculated that became key parts of what I’ve become. I’m the person I am because of Steve and what he did, the opportunities he created, and the attitudes and expectations he baked into those around him.

I almost ran over Steve once outside of Infinite Loop 1 as I was coming in for a meeting and he popped into the street without really looking, [iPod division chief] Jon Rubinstein and [iTunes chief] Eddy Cue in tow. He almost returned the favour once as he drove in to work as I was in the same crosswalk.

Steve could be a tough and very intimidating person, but as much as he demanded of others, he demanded more of himself. He was involved in one of my projects at Apple, and I used to watch the team scramble as Steve reviewed ad copy hours before a launch and mark up changes. He was that involved in the details, and he was always right.

Now Steve has left us, but his memory and his legacy live on, and they will continue to drive and shape the world we live in for years to come. Nobody can replace Steve Jobs – he was unique. Each of us can choose to do something to fill a small part of the void he’s left. If we do, we will help fulfil the legacy he started in trying to make the world better for all of us. I am a better person for having lived under his influence, and I can never pay that back, but I can try to carry that forward in his

Today’s Shared Links for October 5, 2011

The Passing of an era and a hero

T hero

Words don’t fail me often. they do now. Here’s what I wrote back in August. Rest in Peace.

The perils of pricing

At October 5, 2011
By Chuq Von Rospach
In Computers and Technology, The Writing Life
3

Authorial Stickiness and Self Publishing | The Passive Voice:

I’ve been buying and reading a number of self published books of late, primarily because of the price point of $.99. I find that the $.99 price point overcomes a lot of reservations I might have about a book. One thing I did notice, as I was going through my purchases, is that I don’t have a lot of repetitive authors I’ve purchased at $.99.

I wondered what other readers were doing and what kind of stickiness these self published authors were having for readers. The $.99 price point is a “try me” price point and because none of the $.99 self published books I’ve read, except from established writers, have encouraged me to go back and buy more of their books. I find myself more curious about other books at $.99.

Over in my “other life”, I find myself talking to developers about pricing on a regular basis. Apps on a device and ebooks share a lot of common aspects, and one of them is that pricing is still very much a black art being guessed at by people more skilled at the craft of creating the product than marketing it. I said about this time last year that app developers and authors have a lot in common and can learn from each other, if only we could figure out how to make the right connections. I still think so, and I’m still looking for those connections. As I’ve been exploring getting back into writing and what it means to self-publish my writing, I really see those similarities with what the app developers I support are going through.

I still have more questions than answers, though.

But one thing I continue to be convinced of is that the $.99 price point is poison. Here are some of the reasons why:

Right off the bat, you remove any opportunity to use pricing for promotion. Since you can’t go below $.99 without going free (if your platform lets you do that at all), you can’t do any kind of reduced price promotion. Even if you price at $1.99, you leave yourself an option do to a temporary price cut and use that in some marketing. If you start priced at the bottom, you lose any opportunity for pricing flexibility or “half price, this weekend only!” promotions.

I think the $.99 price point sets an initial expectation that the value proposition of your product is that it’s cheap. It’s very hard to convince customers to value something you don’t value. Again, even a small price bump to $1.99 is an indication you think it is worth something more than the generic stuff being schlepped out of the bargain bin.

One of the long term promotional keys here is cross promotion; your new works promote your older works and drive fresh sales of your backlist. I’m a believer that the backlist should be priced at some discount to your current work. Look at the video game console market. Hot apps come out at $50, five months later are re-released at $20. It gives you a chance to remarket at the new price point and create new promotions, and attract a new audience with fresh marketing. It also helps differentiate the new work from the older. You can’t do any of this if you start pricing at the discount price.

So my recommendation is to always avoid bottom fishing. Give yourself some flexibility on pricing. It’s effectively impossible to raise prices, so if you start at the lowest possible price, you’ve killed any flexibility. You give birth to it in the bargain bin, you’ll die in it.

That MAY be an effective technique in some cases; if you are, for instance, writing “generic” genre fiction in a field like romance where you’re trying for the “just looking for the next story” crowd, that may be the only way to get noticed. In that case, though, I’d wonder if you could ever create a name recognition or brand that would make any of that audience look for your next book, unless it happens to be the next book when they happen to be looking for something. It might be worth experimenting with a bargain bin piece to see if you can cross promote them onto a more expensive work, but my gut says that’s unlikely.

But I’m not sure I want to play in that mosh pit. If you look at what happened to the photo stock industry when microstock hit it, it seems to me that playing that game is living on the razor edge of the margin waiting for someone to change the game out from under you. Not how I’d want to build my career (and one reason why I’m not interested in the microstock market for photos, either).

I have trouble believing that the $.99 price point ever lends itself to being the place where you maximize revenue; unit sales, maybe, but not revenue. and unit sales doesn’t pay the rent.

So that’s what I tell my developers. Start at a higher price point, and work on the marketing to help customers understand the value. it gives you pricing flexibility for promotion, and it gives a perception that you see value in your work. If the primary reason someone buys your work is because it’s cheap, I find it hard to believe you’ll ever find an audience that values your work enough to turn into a repeating customer, or that you’ll ever build enough of a backlist sale to make a revenue stream that’s viable to support your time investment in creating your works.

Today’s Shared Links for October 4, 2011

Visiting Moss Landing

I had a chance friday break free from work — no meetings and some work I knew I was going to do over the weekend but didn’t have to be done during work hours — so I hauled out the gear and wandered down to Moss Landing Harbor. This area is the entrance to Elkhorn Slough, and Monterey County birders will recognize it as Jetty Road, which is a big shorebird area on the road that heads out the jetty protecting the harbor. As it turns out, the tide was very high and at its peak, so there was little shorebird habitat and fewer shorebirds, but this is the home of a large group of sea otters, has regular haul outs of harbor seals, and has become the home of a permanent bachelor pod of california harbor seals. I’ve been fascinated by this group recently, so I’ve gone down there a couple of times to explore photographing it and trying to figure out how to describe it.

I also wanted a chance to try to replace the relatively poor images I took last trip down with the 100-400, now back at Canon to be looked at some point. Instead, I hauled out the 300F4+1.4x combo and went to see what I could find.

How to describe a Bachelor group of California Sea Lions? Well, they’ve “adopted” a piece in the harbor, what was formerly the visitor dock. Now, it’s entirely covered by a layer of sea lions — easily 100+ animals, piled in on top of each other and packed as densely as they can get.

The group consists of bachelor males; typically younger animals. The primary goal when on the dock is to catch some sleep. Anything that interrupts that sleep typically generates conflict. A sea lion haul out is 90% watching them do nothing, and 10% watching a few try to find a place to grab a nap while all of the lions around them either get out of the way or argue with them showing up, depending on the pecking order. So there’s always noise, sometimes a lot of it, as the sea lions yell at each other. Occasionally they fight. Mostly the posture. Sometimes the fights can get vicious. If you look at the lions you’ll see a number of them wearing scars, and it’s not uncommon to see some blood. Notice, for instance, the blood on the mouth of this guy:

Photographing this group for me means zeroing in on the conflicts. This is a tricky place to photograph, because if the sun is out the light is from a bad direction and you can get nasty shadows and massive dynamic range to deal with. Still, with some planning and thought, I think it generate some really dramatic images.

And sometimes, you see something different. Like this boat bumper that’s been converted into a pillow:

Overall, the group today was pretty mellow and quiet. Even better, the wind was such that I was upwind of them — that much animal density can get rather pungent — but still, there were some animals jousting for location, and they’re just fun to watch.

The harbor seals were there, hauled out, but in locations that weren’t conducive for photography. Oh well.

But lots was happening. This time of year, the harbor hosts some good sized flocks of terns; today I found both caspian and elegant terns hanging out on one of the breakwaters. As the tide turned and started flowing out, it brought schools of small fish, and the terns went fishing:

Terns fish by what can only be defined as a kamikaze dive. They see a fish under the surface, tuck their wings in and drop like a rock, and then hit the water. They end up fully submerged, grab the fish before it can leave, and then take off again with it.

A Brandt’s cormorant was also fishing near me, and did so quite successfully:

And then there were the otters. Most of them were asleep in a raft; I counted 34 individuals in the main raft, and up to 40 individuals in the harbor. I didn’t notice any carrying kids. One of the otters, bless him, was having a shellfish buffet near the sea lion docks, making getting some nice shots of him almost embarrassingly easy:

I swear to god, these animals mug for the camera. Look at that face. When otters hunt shellfish and need help opening them, they will bring a rock up from the bottom and place it on their belly, and then beat the crap out of the clam to crack it open. They do this — enthusiastically:

The otter did this at least three times near me, bringing up scallops or mussels, breaking them open and then munching away. After that, he wandered off, evidently full.

Overall, for only spending about 2 hours there, I was able to grab a nice number of images on a wide variety of subjects. You can see the entire set of them in this slideshow.

Today’s Shared Links for October 3, 2011

Back in the Saddle….

When I started working to get the blog going again, I thought about what to call the time off. Not vacation, clearly. Hiatus? the Interregnum? My Dinner with Andre?

Words have power. Defining something with a word is as much an exploration of understanding that thing as it is actually defining it. And ultimately, I realized this was simply “time away”. No great, drama queen defining title. I just had other priorities in life.

Yosemite Chapel, Yosemite National Park=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+To download a low-resolution version of this image, right-click on it. The low-resolution image is free to use and is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivative Works license. This allows you to use this image in a non-commercial way as long as you give proper attribution of the author and source. This license does not allow you to re-publish it for commercial use or to use it in an altered form without my explicit permission. If you wish to buy a print of this impage or license it for commercial use (you will receive a full-resolution, non-watermarked jpeg), you can do so in the store by clicking on the Buy button.

I needed to unplug from the camera for a bit; I came back from my Yosemite trip tired and dehydrated but beyond that, I was unhappy with both the quality of the work and even more-so the attitude I took to it. Some of that was the dehydration, some of it was being mentally tired, but it was something else, too. bad attitude. I was stale. I crawled in a box and went and shot the same old stuff the same old way.

I wasn’t happy with myself. I wasn’t happy with the results. I wasn’t happy with the trip. It set off an internal discussion about what I really was trying to do and be as a photographer, or if I really wanted to. I came home, put down the camera, dove into work and buried myself in the TouchPad launch, and didn’t touch the camera for six weeks. didn’t even unpack from the trip. The gear just sat there in the bags, where I left them.

I didn’t miss them.

I was going through the paces. not pushing myself. Not really caring about the output. Not trying to get better or grow. I needed the break. So I took one. I had plenty on my plate, and pushing down the path I was on was going to lead to burnout.

Sometimes, the best thing you can do is nothing. That is an incredibly hard lesson to learn. I have always been one to commit myself so that 100% of my schedule is busy. No, I’m lying. Ask Laurie. I typically commit to 110% and think I can make it all happen by simply grinding through. And typically do, somehow. but I’m not 25 any more, nor do I really want to be.

Mostly, though, I needed to step back and give it a break. I’ve had very little real time off since 2007; when I have taken time off, it’s been 3-4 days here or an extended weekend there, and it’s almost always involved some intensive photo self-assignment. I realized I’d pushed it as hard as I could and pushing wasn’t working in moving things forward any more.

Funny, but it’s very hard to stop pushing. Everyone talks about the 10,000 hours, the 10,000 photos. It’s true. But nobody seems to talk that once in a while, you have to stop and let it age. The best flavors of wine come not from the crush, but from letting it sit and age, alone in a dark cave waiting for the right time.

At some point, you don’t need to focus on the technique of photography as much. I know how the cameras work. I know how to push buttons in Lightroom. I’m at that point where I go out on a shoot, and without really thinking, set up the camera and scout the location and go looking for the right images for the situation. I’m far from done improving my technical geekery; I have a laundry list of things I need to work on, from really getting to understand flash and lighting to figuring out why I struggle so much in the midrange landscape finding images that don’t bore the crap out of me.

That’ll always be true. It’s not the gating item any more. Instead, I came back from Yosemite realizing I needed to figure out who I was, what I intended to be. Or even if I wanted to be.

And then a few weeks ago, I wanted to go shooting. So I did.

And right now, I’m back behind the camera. I like the work I’m doing again. I think it’s primarily very familiar shooting, but it feels like I’m taking a different take on familiar things. I’m framing different. I’m seeing the subject fresh. I’m enjoying it again.

That does not suck.

A question I’ve asked myself for a while. What is my goal? WHAT IS MY MISSION STATEMENT?

And it’s one I continue to not really have an answer for, even though I know what the answer is. But knowing the answer and explaining it are very different things, and I continue to work my way through that. And that’s part of an entire discussion of its own.

Today’s Shared Links for October 2, 2011

Today’s Shared Links for October 1, 2011

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