Upgrading the camera bag…

At some point in your progression as a photographer, you realize that new gadgets don’t make you a better photographer. That doesn’t end the gear lust — but it hopefully makes it easier to resist it. If you listen to photographers like David duChemin and Zack Arias, they also emphasize the “learn to use what you have and get the most out of it” concept, and encourage photographers to upgrade slowly and wisely. It’s something I’ve tried to take to heart.

In my case, when I bought my 7d body about two years ago, I made myself sit down and write up exactly why I thought the body would improve my work, and what weaknesses in my current gear it improved. (as it turns out, I would say I hit the justification pretty closely, too). And I told myself that once I got it, I’d stop buying gear until I was convinced I needed an upgrade and could justify it to myself objectively.

But I’ve just committed some serious gear upgrades. Thinking about this goes back to early this year but when I realized that I was likely to be leaving HP and taking with me some significant accrued vacation pay, the idea of investing that lack of vacation on the camera kit became a real option, and I started a serious exploration of what my goals would be and what my possible upgrades were.

I’ve ended up retiring this from my kit:

• Tamron 28-300 F3.5
• Canon 100-400 F4.5 IS
• Canon 30D

I retired the 30d a few months ago; I came to the realization that the difference in quality between the 30D (about four generations old) was so much different than the 7d that I could tell which body I used for a shot just looking at the previews in Lightroom. The 30d was a good body for the time, but it simply didn’t compare to the 7d, and so I tended to carry it but swap lenses to the 7d for most shots. Once I noticed that was what I was doing (it took me a while), I simply stopped carrying it. I prefer a two body kit, but only if I am willing to actually use both bodies.

It’s been my plan to upgrade the wide angle lens for a while. I’ve written about the Tamron before http://www.chuqui.com/2010/01/a-few-thoughts-on-lenses/ and it’s a nice lens for what it is, but I never really got past the “look not love” phase with the lens, and while it’s a step up from a kit lens, it’s — it’s still an inexpensive lens that’s good for some things, but not enough of the things I want it to do.

People who know me probably are suprised that I’ve retiring the 100-400. I originally didn’t plan on it, but as my research evolved, it started to make sense. it’s six years old, and it’s been used a fair amount. It spent a chunk of time with Canon for repair (twice!) after it got dropped in Yosemite this spring, and I know others who’ve had problems with dust in the lens (because of the trombone design), and some general drop in quality over time because of the normal bumps and bruises of being used. And, frankly, it’s a big, heavy beast of a lens.

While the 100-400 was in the shop, I started shooting more with my 300F4+1.4x combo, and really coming to appreciate that as a bird and wildlife setup. It is — frankly — noticably sharper than the 100-400 at 400mm, with faster AF. It is also a big, heavy beast of a lens, but any lens at this length is going to be. But what it convinced me was that my kit of lenses didn’t need to stretch from 20-400; I could go to a 70-200 and still use the 300 to do what I wanted to do. Hopefully lightening the camera bag along the way. Because of this, I decided if the money was there and the right lens was available, I’d upgrade everything.

In trying to decide what to upgrade to, I started out by deciding what my “budget is not an issue” kit would be. I quickly honed in on the following parameters:

• EF lenses, not EF-S
• L Glass where it made sense
• IS where it was available at a rational cost

These are Canon specific, but basically, these mean lenses compatible with full-frame sensor bodies (EF-S work only iwth crop sensors); the L glass is Canon’s pro quality lenses, and the IS is Canon’s vibration reduction system. The L glass not only implies top quality optics and coatings, but weather sealing, and other features seen on “pro” lenses like internal focus.

I also made one other restriction: If the lens rental places weren’t renting it, I decided that was a hint to avoid the lens because that implied that (a) it was too expensive for the quality, (b) it was too fragile, or (c) it just wasn’t that good. By seeing what Borrowlenses.com and lensrentals.com kept in stock (and I found that the mini-reviews you find on lensrental did a good job of saying what the extended reviews found around the net said, but without all of the geeky verbiage!) I got a good first approximation of what good and reliable lenses to choose from.

For my basic “any budget” kit, I quickly settled on three lenses:

• Canon 16-35F2.8L II
• Canon 24-70F2.8L
• Canon 70-200F2.8L IS II

For those keeping score at home, that’s about $4000 in lenses if bought new. In theory, a great combo. In practice, no way I was going to spend that kind of money. So I started exploring options. The first obvious option: buy used. But since one of my goals was reducing the weight of my bag, moving from F2.8L to F4 lenses would shrink their size and weight — and cost — significantly. So would making a decision to go with an EF-S lens for the wide angle.

I seriously considered the Canon EF-S 17-55 F2.8 IS. I seriously considered the Sigma 23-70 F2.8. I seriously considered the Canon 24-105 F4L IS. For the telephoto, I quickly narrowed it down to the Canon 70-200F4 (and to decide on IS depending on budget), although I must admit to be tempted by the 70-300 as well. And to be honest, I kept hearing the 70-200 F2.8′s whispering at me that siren song that said “Arthur Morris keeps saying use me with a 2X teleconverter, and life will be wonderful…”

When I finally got the logistics of the job change settled and I knew I was moving on from HP, I started shopping. Both Lensrentals.com and Borrowlenses.com sell off their gear and lensrental did their winter sale about the time I started shopping, but most of what I was interested in went quickly and before I was ready to buy. I also was watching KEH.com and B&H’s used sales to see where the right lenses were at the right price.

And as it turned out, when I was ready to buy, Borrowlenses had what I wanted. Even better, they’re local, so I could drive over and pick it up (which I did), and I’ve worked with them and have talked to them about rental options in the past, and everyone I’ve talked to about them gives them rave reviews. All of that made for an easy decision I could trust, unlike the risk that sometimes come from sites like eBay.

Originally, I hadn’t planned on buying a second body, but during this time I went shooting with a friend who happened to have the lenses I was considering, because he was ready to upgrade his body and wanted some advice. He got his advice (and new body) and I got some hands on time with some of my lens options, and we all won. He then came back later and said he’d realized he could buy the body using his Amex points, which reminded me I had some Amex points sitting bored and restless as well — and while they didn’t pay for the entire body, they let me buy it as a significant discount (so I did).

In the end, I have picked up a couple of lenses and a new body:

• Canon 24-105 F4L IS
• Canon 70-20 F2.8L IS (not the IS II)
• Canon T3i body

The more I looked around the web at what photographers had in their bags, the more I saw photographers who’s work I liked and respected carrying the 24-105. In the end, it won out over other options, even though it didn’t meet a couple of initial goals: I’ve given up on the widest part of the range (only going to 24mm, not 15mm) and it is not a smaller, lighter lens than the Tamron in any way. In fact, by the time I was done I saved no real weight out of my kit, becaues the 70-200 F2.8 is actually heavier than the 100-400 by a bit, and I also get to carry the 2X teleconverter to pair with it. I’m going ot be curious when I can go head to head between the 70-200+2X combo and the 300+1.4x combo how the sharpness compares. If it’s close, hopefully it’ll mean I can stop carrying the 300mm and maybe sell it to put away towards the 500mm lens fund or something. Too early to tell yet — with the holidays and the new job, shooting time has been basically zero other tahn some really simple test shots to verify everything’s working.

In all honesty, the amount of time I’d be working in the 15-25mm range is pretty small. It doesn’t make sense to spend a lot of cash to extend my kid to that range, not when I can rent a lens when I know I”m going to want it. So while I didn’t meet that original goal, I met my key needs, and I can add a lense to cover that when necessary at a reasonable cost. I definitely could use a 500mm more than I need something like a 10-22.

Total cost? about $2800. If you think back to the “any budget” option, I was looking at about $4000 for lenses, plus another $1500 for a 2nd 7D. By making some informed compromises, I cut that by about half, with little significant loss of functionality — and what I have is a big step up from what I was using before.

I did a little shooting with the 24-105 with the family over the holiday. I hope to go out and put the 70-200 though some serious paces shortly. I’ll talk about both in more detail as I get some images and experience with them, but with limited use, both are impressing the hell out of me.

The reason I ended up getting the T3i is more complicated; every time I go out shooting at a place like Merced or Isenberg for the cranes, I find myself really wanting to experiment with video of the fly-ins and to try shooting some timelapses. I also want to start capturing audio to try to bring the experience to those who can’t get out there. Those are things I couldn’t do with the 30d in any way; and in practice, I am going to want a unit to shoot the video or timelapses AND a unit to shoot regular images while it’s chugging away, so I couldn’t start exploring that without a second body. The T3i seemed a good compromise between not having the capability and not wanting to pay for a 2nd 7d body. Time will tell if I’m right, or if I’m any good at that stuff… But at least now, I have that option.

Well, as soon as I buy a few things, like filters and an intervalometer, and… (it never ends, right? but that’s half the fun).

So now, all I need to do is get out and start shooting again, right?

six blogs that are influencing my going into 2012

One of my projects for 2012 is going to be to ramp up my work on the blog, write more and write more in-depth pieces, and to add some new functionality and content areas that have been on the back burner for a while.

Absolutely, and by thinking about why these sites attract me, it gives me some perspective on ways I can improve my own blog environment.

The big themes?

• Taking the blog more seriously, not as a revenue generator but as a presence.
• Personality and opinion.
• Design; especially a better representation of my photos, but without making my writing a second class citizen. Few sites pull that off properly; it’s one or the other that dominates.
• And making sure the blog properly represents who I am, in a way compatible with what I do.

What does this mean for the blog in 2012?

We’ll get to that…

Five Photographers I want to be when I grow up….

I’ve been doing a lot of reflection and self-examination the last few months (it’s only a coincidence this occurred as I ended up making a decision to change jobs. really. sort of). As I noted in my look back at my 2011 goals in photography, my trip to Yosemite really got me started on an extended process of figuring out what photography meant to me at this time in my life, and where I wanted it to take me moving into the future.

That has also caused me to think about what about my photography I’m not doing, or don’t do well — that I want to do and learn how to master. Somewhat tied to that I found I had a list of photographers I keep turning to for inspiration and to deconstruct what they’re doing because what they’re doing is what I want to figure out how to do. Hence, my list of five photographers I want to be when I grow up.

Obviously, I can’t be all of them. I’ll never be any of them. But I can understand what they do and why they do it, and learn to integrate that into who I am and what I do. So here are the photographers I’m currently studying so I can continue trying to learn from them, because I believe it’ll make me a better photographer.

Michael Frye: not new to my list but still high on it. I’ve adapted his workflow as the basis for my own, and when I’ve gone shooting at Yosemite, I’ve tried to see the park as he sees it through his images, to help me learn what to look for in visualizing my own imagery. As he has time, he’s been doing a series of critiques on his blog that I find a quiet interesting and useful view into the thinking he puts into deciding how to process an image to make it the best possible image. His willingness to explain those processes and decisions has been and continues to be very useful to me and something I follow with great interest.

Jim Goldstein: Jim is probably the closest to the pure concept of what I want to be when I grow up. He’s a former high tech geek who’s made the leap into professional photographer. His photography is very compatible with my vision of what I want my photography to be.  He’s done a lot of work in social media and social marketing, as well as experimenting in ebook publishing, all areas that (now that I’m no longer tied down by HP’s “employees can’t do that” rules) I am looking forward to exploring in my own work. His ebook on White Sands was an inspiration to some of the ebook plans I’m starting to look at moving into 2012, and has some amazing photography as well as being a great example of how this new publishing form can be exploited. And he’s a very nice and accessible guy. All in all, if I were to make this jump to pro photography (which I’ve decided not to do. for now) my jump would look a lot like this.

George Barr: author of From Camera to Computer: How to Make Fine Photographs Through Examples, Tips, and Techniques and Why Photographs Work: 52 Great Images Who Made Them, What Makes Them Special and Why, Barr does a style of photography that’s very unlike anything I do — fine art architectural subjects with a strong abstract or pattern sensibility. I find what he does fascinating. When I try to emulate it, I find what I do sucks. Obviously, I need to keep working at this, but it’s a type and style of photography I want to figure out, although probably to translate more into the natural/landscape environment.

William Neill: There are two aspects of Neill’s work that draws me to it; he is a master as painting a natural landscape with light, and he has a strong vision for using abstraction in a natural venue to create very beautiful and moving images that are both representative of nature and not strongly photo-realistic. Both are at essence to me a very painterly approach instead of a more classic photography approach.  He’s also been doing some very interesting innovation in ebook publishing of his work which I recommend to you if you aren’t familiar with it.

G. Dan Mitchell: It’s not just his seeming ability to post a strong image every day (but that alone impresses the hell out of me). It’s that the images are invariably things that I feel I’m not very good at creating images of — and they’re consistently images I think to myself “I wish I’d taken that”. His images are less about iconic landscapes (think grand vistas from Tunnel View) and more about pulling out elements and bringing a focus to them. And he consistently nails a style of landscape I find I still struggle with; I seem to be able to take interesting “iconic” images of Yosemite, for instance, but getting down into the valley and making interesting images of the trees and features in the valley? That, to me, is one of Dan’s strengths, and a major weakness of mine and figuring that out will be a focus of mine in 2012. And part of that is continued study of how Dan does it so I can learn to see how he sees and adapt it into my own work.

parislemon • “They are capitalists.”

parislemon • “They are capitalists.”:

Ed Bott has this right.

The Android update (or lack thereof) fiasco isn’t really about getting users to buy new devices. Carriers actually don’t want users to get new devices — that’s a cost for them. Nor is it evil or nefarious. It’s just reality. The carriers and OEMs don’t want to deploy resources to work on these updates, so they don’t.

Worse, it’s unlikely they ever will. The interests are simply not aligned here.

 

He’s half right. The carrier’s processes are built around feature phones, not smart phones. You don’t upgrade the software on feature phones, you replace the phone. Carriers put massive resources into testing prior to release, and then move on to the next thing. They haven’t (with the exception of Apple, who does it instead of the end carrier and told the carrier to butt out and made it stick) really gotten their heads around what a smartphone means in terms of incremental updates, and their processes are both heavily political and time consuming, which makes doing it hard for both carrier and manufacturer.

But the carrier business model is built around the idea of device churn and replaceable hardware. The concept of a phone that gets upgrades that extend the useful life of the phone for the end user is something that isn’t really a good match for their revenues. It’s not in their financial best interest to do things that help you keep that phone longer; not when you can really want that neat new feature and pay them an upgrade fee for the new phone instead.

And when that’s a $50 feature phone? great. churn away. But $400 smartphones? As Smartphones come down in price (as Nokia is working to do to bring them more in line with feature phone pricing) this changes, but when you’re talking about the list price of an unlocked Palm Pre or iPhone with a two year contract commit, to basically say a year later “well, you’ll need to buy into the next phone instead to get those features” may be “just business”, but it also seems somewhat evil to me. and I think you’re seeing pushback by users on it as well. The cost of the current smartphones puts it out of the “disposable” category for most of us, even if the carriers still want to sell and manage them that way.

Merry Christmas 2011

To all of you, from all of us, may you have a wonderful holiday.

A little something for Christmas Eve

Last year I posted one of my stories as a christmas gift. I wanted to point folks at it again this year, as a little something for all of you heading into the holiday.

A special Christmas gift: downtime @ Chuqui 3.0:

Merry Christmas!

 

Here’s a little christmas surprise — the story is called Downtime, and I wrote it in the early 90′s. It was at one point going to be published by Pulphouse but never made it into print. This is the first time it’s been published.

This work is not public domain. It is copyright 1994 by Charles Von Rospach. Please do not republish or post it anywhere else without my explicit approval.

A bit of history — I wrote a number of stories about your typical IT type contractor, who got into doing work for an unusual clientele;  other stories in this series that got published including being hired by God to hack Satan’s databases and working for a witch to fix her spell database on Halloween. The series was about your typical middle class normal working stiff finding out that things we consider fantasy elements were in fact true. I enjoyed twisting the standards of the field in different ways, just to see what happened, and treating fantasy as SF (or vice versa) was a writing hack I liked. These stories also tended to feature Apple computers and cockatoos, just because I could….

The intent was to write a continuing series of these stories, other future clients included an embezzling Tooth Fairy that wanted the evidence deleted, A leprechaun who lost his pot of gold at the track, Elvis and the Easter Bunny. Ultimately I thought I might tie it all together into a novel.

For now, though, it’s just a fun remnant of my writing life, and I hope you enjoy it.

2011 year in review — photography

My 2011 photographic goals @ Chuqui 3.0:

I’ve been thinking through the goals I want to set for my photography in 2011. I think I’m going to keep it relatively simple:

Push myself into new areas of photography to continue to improve my skills; specifically, it’s time to get serious about learning how to use flash, and it’s time for me to get serious about both field and studio macro photography.

I want to try to get back to Yosemite sometime this spring, hopefully when the dogwood is out and alive. I had planned a trip for 2010 at that time and ended up not being able to.

I want to get out on a photo trip to an area I haven’t been to and photographed and force myself to figure out how to shoot and then publish a piece about that area and tells its story.

I want to see if I can take at least one workshop as a way to push my skills via hands on work with someone else.

I want to take a close look at whether I can be “photoshop free”.

I’m going to do a personal quest to photograph as many species of bird again this year, and see if I can beat my 2010 number of 142 I need to experiment with video more.

And I’ll note for the record that nowhere in this list is “buy new stuff”; which doesn’t mean I won’t, but the gear needs to be defined by how it will implement the goals, not the other way around…

So that’s how I defined my photographic goals going into 2011.

I did, in fact, make it to Yosemite in May. The trip was in many ways a disaster. beyond letting myself get way too dehydrated and ending up feeling like crap (which, surprisingly, affects your motivation to do photography), I found not following my shot plan or working on my shot list, and more or less not really caring; using sloppy technique, and generally just being a not very good photographer taking not very interesting images.

And that set me down a path different than I’d expected, more or less wandering into the “if I don’t give a damn, why am I doing this? and if I do give a damn, why am I not acting like it?” — time to go examine my motivations and interests and figure out what I want to be when I grow up.

I actually put down the camera and didn’t pick it up again for about two months. There were other things going on as well (and my birding suffered during this time; I effectively didn’t bird spring migration, so my numbers this year are way down). I also sent off the 100-400 for repair when it was clear that it’d been dropped once too often. It ended up having to go for repair twice before Canon got it really fixed, and so my “go to” lens was gone for a while. When I did get back to taking images, that got me working with the 300F4+1.4x combo for bird work, which I’ve come to like even more than the 100-400, which… Well, I’m getting ahead of myself.

It wasn’t burnout; I’d love to be able to drama queen this and turn it into some interesting blog posts, but in reality, I just took a break because I didn’t feel like picking up the camera, especially if all I was going to do was point it at stuff and click, and take new images that looked a lot like all of my existing images of birds I’ve already taken images of.

Which doesn’t mean I wasn’t doing any photography. Instead, I went on a journey. The journey was really more of a “what do I want to be when I grow up?” and “what do I want my images to say? what is my personal style?”. The best way to describe it is this: David duChemin’s e-book house, Craft and Vision, has published a free book called Craft and Vision, 11 ways you can improve your photography. It is a series of essays by authors who have published other books through C&V. It is well worth your time, but in it is an essay called “Understand the Stages” by Alexandre Buisse.

He effectively defines the six stages of a photographer as:

• The Photographer has  no Artistic Intent, just record what you see. most people are doing this. (the “holiday snapshot” mode).
• The Photographer has discovered an interest beautiful images and is playing around with the camera they have.
• The Photographer has realized their lack of technical knowledge is hindering them, and sets off to learn the craft of image making.
• The Photographer realizes that focussing exclusively on technique is a dead-end, and that composition, quality of light and other intangibles are important in making a good image.
• The Photographer has finished acquiring the technical and artistic tools he needs and starts worrying about what to do with them.

Finally, the Photographer has found his voice and stopped worrying.

I read this when it came out, well after I was down the path of figuring this out on my own, but this crystallized my thoughts, and helped me realize that I’d hit that fifth stage and was fighting to find the sixth. And I still am, but now I understand what I’m trying to do and that’s helped me focus my efforts on things that can help me along that path.

I have found, for instance, that the list of photographers I read online has changed significantly. Photographers who talk mostly about geeky details have mostly disappeared from my reading list; honestly, I just don’t have a lot of interest in another 500 word note on why aperture creates bokeh. That’s not a criticism of those writers — they just are speaking to a different audience now.

Instead, I’ve been exploring and acquiring photographers who are writing about different aspects of photography, and most speccifically, tend to write about being a photographer. These days, the short list of writers I listen to most closely include people like David duChemin, Zack Arias, Kirk Tuck and folks like George Barr and the folks at Online Photographer (especially Mike Johnston and Ctein). One of the things on my list for after the new year is to explain why these people have drawn me to sit at their feet and listen.

This journey continues. The one thing you need for this shift into Buisse’s stage five and six is patience. It’s not something you solve by taking a lighting seminar, or even shooting a thousand images of a spider. As someone who’s written, I recognize it now as the photographer’s equivalent of identifying and harnessing your muse.

Along the way I ended up going through a couple of seminars, both online and both through Chase Jarvis’s Creative Live group. The first was David duChemin’s Vision-Driven Photography, and the second was Zack Arias’ Foundations of a Working Photographer. Both of these deserve some commentary at length, and that’s planned for the new year as well, but let me say now that I recommend both highly, and if you haven’t discovered Creative Live, you should go and explore their offerings. They also stream the live broadcast of new seminars free, so if you can free your schedule, you can take them in without costing you anything — but after you check out one or two, you’ll probably want to start collecting them. Laurie and I both have taken in some of the Creative Live seminars, and every one we’ve seen has been of exceptional quality. (another resource I’ll point you to is Chase Jarvis Live, and this weekend I watched his piece with Allegra Will on portfolio design and criticism, which I found fascinating. And yes, that now means you’ll see me restructuring my online setup to include a “real” portfolio, as soon as I figure out what I want it to be; and what I want to be. And so, we circle back…

The second half of 2011 was surrounded by Leo’s decision to blow up the piece of HP I happened to work with and the chaos and stress of living through that and trying to keep things operating and moving forward despite it — and ultimately deciding to move on and leave HP for greener pastures. Needless, it’s been a stressful few months, which has both gotten in the way of many of my original 2011 plans, but also encouraged me to use things like my photography as a refuge from it. So I did ultimately pick up the camera, but rather than force myself into new paths, I went back and simplified, and went back to my core of bird photography — and I spent a lot of time metaphorically examining my navel for inspiration and answers to questions I wasn’t sure how to ask.

So my goals changed on the fly, but in a good way (I think). I never did move into flash or macro, because I realized stretching into new techniques wasn’t going to solve the problem I wanted to solve — even though I recognize that once I know the solution to that problem, I’ll need these techniques to solve it. I never did do the bird listing (but it’s on the list for 2012), and I did, in fact, mostly go photoshop free, by deciding to bring in a copy of Photoshop Elements for those few times when I need something beyond Lightroom. I would say most photographers can (and should) go this path instead of paying the serious cash needed for the “full” photoshop. Maybe I’ll explain this down the road.

And as to my last “non-goal”, coming out of all of this, and when I made the decision to change jobs (and cashed in 160 hours of unused vacation), I did end up making my first gear purchase in two years. And I spent about a month planning that out and considering options before deciding what I wanted (and should) do. That is a big blog post in itself, so that, too, is scheduled for the new year; once the new gear shows up and I start putting it through its paces…

So overall, I think I’m existing 2011 in a  better spot photographically than I entered the year, even if it’s nowhere near the spot I expected to be at when I started the journey. And as I start planning for 2012 and what I want to accomplish, I’m hoping that it’ll be a really strong year for me. Assuming my CEO doesn’t blow up my organization and stuff it into limbo for months again…. And even if they do, we’ll figure it out and do something useful…

2011 year in review — the blog.

Looking back at 2011 here on the blog, I feel like it’s gotten some traction, if things didn’t exactly go as I thought they would in January. but then, who could plan for a CEO to take a shotgun to your organization mid-year, and then get left in suspended animation until someone could figure out what to do with you?

Overall, pageviews and blog traffic were up about 15%. All in all, a good year for the blog. I went into the year trying to get my writing going again; all in all, given the unforeseen complications in life this year, I think I give myself a passing grade, and hope to do even more as we move into 2012. I wanted to write some meaty, more in-depth pieces, and I think I succeeded at that. I wanted to write more consistently, and I think overall, I’ve done that as well. There are still times when life trumps blog — but I see that as a feature, not a bug.

• Once again, my piece Some Thoughts on Lightroom Keywords was the most popular entry on the blog by a wide margin.  Second was my listing of my best photos of 2010, which tends to get wide distribution thanks to photographer Jim Goldstein promoting that we all share our lists.
• My writing on backups continues to be popular; hopefully, it helps people avoid losing data. I’ll likely be updating it again in 2012, and I’d like to turn it into an e-book.
• My articles on my decision to leave flickr got plenty of visibility and I got lots of interesting feedback on them: (Change of Plans on Flickr, Whither Flickr,  and Moving Beyond Flickr)
• Finally, my five part series on using Smugmug was popular and got lots of people thinking about ways to take advantage of that system.

Other popular writing in 2011 included:

• So you want to be a nature photographer
• The ever-changing social landscape
• Thanks, Steve
• What’s been going on (where I talk about my decision to leave HP)
• Losing a Friend (on the loss of long-time house partner Archie to cancer)
• Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson
• Canon EOS 7d Autofocus Modes explained
• On filters and echo chambers
• Google+ – Lots of win, not perfect (and since then, continuing to evolve in good ways, especially for photographers)
• In defense of Gil Amelio

So as I close out 2011, I have to say, overall, I’m about where I should be, given how things ended up and what went on that was outside of my control. That’s not a bad place to be. And as I plan my way into 2012 and try to figure out what the next steps are, I think this is a good foundation to build from. But there’s plenty to do….

The new Gig — Now at Infoblox

quick note since I’ve got nine zillion things going on and no time…

I started the new gig this morning. I’m now the Technical Manager for Bloxtools at Infoblox in Santa Clara, California. Myself and my new cohort in crime (who will play the part of Community Manager) are coming in to support and build a community around these tools, and to help define a plan for for enhancing the tools and making them a more powerful and useful part of the Infoblox products suite.

What’s this mean? well, when we figure it out, we’ll know. Part of what made this an irresistible challenge was that it’s really a blank slate; great challenge, great opportunity. And it’s going to allow me to help build a new community from scratch, which I was looking to do, and get back more to my roots and be more technical than I was at HP.

Everyone I’ve met so far has been great, the company feels like a nice, comfortable fit, we don’t have CEOs randomly blowing up divisions because he’s bored, and I get to go off and figure out a bunch of stuff. I’m going to be busy for a while, but in a good way.

And then there was the money… Which frankly, HP was rather reluctant to part with, even going back 18 months when I first had that discussion with Ben and Dion…

More on all of this when I have time, and a chance to start figuring out the details…

On concussions in hockey

The NHL All-Concussion Team would win a lot of games – Puck Daddy – NHL Blog – Yahoo! Sports:

You’re probably well aware that concussions have become something of an epidemic in the NHL over the past few years. It’s not like nobody’s talking about it. But just recently, the epidemic has taken a nasty turn, targeting star players with sudden aplomb. It’s almost as though the brains of NHL superstars need a tough guy. It’s not just Sidney Crosby anymore. The injury list is littered with big names.

Suddenly, it seems, concussion talk is everywhere around hockey. I’ve been having multiple discussions with people I know about it.

Crosby works his butt off to come back, takes another hit, and is out again. Suddenly, nobody really knows when or how he’ll be back. Or what’ll happen after the next hit. The ghost of Eric Lindros hovers over the league’s move visible player.

And now Pronger goes down. And stays down. Pronger, whether you love him or hate him (probably, both), never stays down.

Out for the season, is Pronger’s career over? – The Globe and Mail:

This is mid-December. NHL playoffs generally stretch until nearly the end of June. So in the opinion of the two specialists who examined Pronger this week – and diagnosed him with “severe” post-concussion symptoms – they do not believe his condition will appreciably improve enough in the next six months to permit him to play again this season.

 

This is not a new problem. Just ask Eric Lindros. Or Brett. Or Nick Kypreos. Or Jay More. Pat LaFontaine. Paul Kariya. Wanye Primeau. Fenando Prisani. Adam Deadmarsh. Scott Stevens. The list goes on, and on and on. I first wrote about concussions back in 2003. I’ve written about it on and off since (2004, 2004, 2005, 2007, 2007, 2009, 2009, 2011 ). I remember going all the way back to the Cow Palace years and talking to the Sharks medical staff about concussions, back when everyone was first trying to get a handle on all of this.

We’re going to continue to write about it into the future, because injuries are part of the game, and given that the core of the game of hockey is the physical (and violent) collision, injuries are not going to stop unless we fundamentally change the game. Which means to fix this, it has to stop being hockey.

But what’s happening now is I’m having conversations with other fans that are some variation of “I’m uncomfortable being a fan of a sport where player’s health and life are damaged for my enjoyment”. It’s a question I’ve struggled with myself. Along with the uncomfortable question of just how you stop injuries to the head when you allow two players to drop gloves and pound each other in the face. Fighting is an elephant in this particular sitting room, and one that has to be grappled with as part of the solution — and I say that as someone who enjoys a good fight during a game.

KuklasKorner:

Even the most passionate hockey fan would be hard-pressed to remember a time when so many stars were out with concussions.  It’s almost as if the scrambled brain epidemic is getting worse, even though body checking is seemingly at an all-time low.

I’ve always been of the opinion that virtually nothing can be done to combat concussions.  Nothing, that is, outside of banning body-checking altogether.  It’s simply impossible to avoid violent collisions in a game played at such a high speed.

And this has become a hot button within the media, bringing it a lot of visibility and commentary.

That is, in fact, part of the problem.

Let me rephrase that.

This is a complex issue. There is no “concussion problem”. There are lots of problems that end up causing or caused by concussions. And there  are “problems” that get raised as part of this that actually make it a lot harder to see the real problems.

One of those “problems” is simply the media making this a high profile issue. It creates a perception that things are a lot worse now than they have been in the past. It gives something Mike Milbury to rant about. It generates headlines. Sometimes, those headlines get in the way of seeing what’s really happening.

Roy Macgregor, I think, gets to a core part of the current “problem” with the media frenzy going on:

NHL’s all-concussion team would be lock for Stanley Cup – The Globe and Mail:

It matters not how concussions are happening – head shots, fights, accidents with sticks and pucks, running into one’s own teammate – they have become an increasingly polarizing issue in today’s hockey. There are as many sick of the issue as there are those wanting the issue addressed – even the media has started sniping among themselves – with the only sure truth being that concussions aren’t going to go away even if they cease to be mentioned. They are, sadly, increasing – or, at the very least, the recording of them has.

 

“Maybe now it’s everybody is more careful with the head injuries,” suggests Boston captain Zdeno Chara, himself out with a knee injury.

“It’s more serious and nobody wants to risk it, so everybody is taking time to make sure they are good before they play again.”

It’s unclear that there are more concussions in hockey today than there were last year or three years ago.

But a lot of things have changed. Our understanding of concussions and the long term health implications is increasing. Some of the recent brain studies, including those of Derek Boogard, that show significant brain trauma, is bringing home the fact that there are problems here that in the past were mostly ignored. It’s not a new problem, some of the NFL brain studies are showing this same brain damage in players going back into the 70′s. I expect if you did brain studies of some of the physical players and fighters of the 60′s and 70′s NHL, you’d  find the same.

The NHL has a long history of “shake it off, get back out there”. Hockey players have a high tolerance of pain, and traditionally play though injuries almost beyond comprehension. Even five years ago there was still a culture of “just got my bell rung” and players got back out there.

The league has made huge changes in the last two or three years. The rules for checking players for concussion have become a lot more stringent. Our understanding of concussions in general has gone up massively. Players have been educated on concussions, and, frankly, probably scared by what’s going on enough to stop doing the macho thing and playing through these “bell ringing” incidents that even a couple of years ago they would have ignored.

So the number of RECOGNIZED and REPORTED concussions is going way up. This isn’t necessarily that there are more concussions, but they’re being more reliably diagnosed, and the league is more careful about tracking them, and giving players less leeway to come back from them early or ignore them and play through them.

So some of the spike is better diagnosis, and better treatment, and better understanding. And the media looks at raw numbers and turns that into a crisis, which makes it harder to see the real problem behind it.

Because, don’t for a second think I’m using this as a way of saying there’s no problem here.

It’s a problem without simple solutions. I think the league has gotten serious about understanding it and solving it to the degree it can. I wish it’d hit this point of urgency five years ago, but I have no issue with the league’s response now (and honestly, five years ago, I don’t think concussions were well enough understood to do some of the things that are being done today — but I do think we could be farther along the path towards solutions than we are).

There’s been work done on improving the safety of the arena — such as the rounded glass installed this year to deal with hits like those that injured Max Pacioretty. The arenas that had the immobile seamless glass have been upgraded to use more flexible (and much safer) boards and glass — anyone remember when that glass was first installed and Mike Modano had his head smushed into it, going out for a significant time with a concussion?

Research has shown hockey helmets actually don’t help much with concussions, and work has been going on to improve head protection. New style helmets are coming onto the market that improve on this problem. Other hockey gear has evolved over the years from being protective to being an effective weapon against other players, especially changes to elbow and shoulder pads, which have added hard shells and rubber knobs that can be used against a player in a check (I once saw Marty McSorley with his shirt off; his shoulder pads were little more than a couple of slabs of leather — he had traps to die for. Today’s shoulder pads look like something stolen from a bad japanese Manga movie).  The league has been working to replace this gear with less damaging hardware, elbow pads without hard caps and less — offensive — shoulder pads. Those safety changes have to get the approval of the players union as well; let’s not forget the players union is the group that has stonewalled mandatory visors choosing “personal choice” over “let’s try not to lose too many eyes” — right, mattias Ohlund and Brian McCabe and Jamal Mayers? — so getting safer gear into the game takes longer than we might hope).

And the rule changes. Rule 48. The OHL just banned hits to the head. There were calls for the NHL to do the same. It didn’t — and they were right to take a more specific approach (but I’ll leave arguing this point to a different article, later); the players are getting it; retraining them takes time (and some will never learn, and as they become problems for the team, they’ll find their careers ending — but if Matt Cooke can figure it out, pretty much anyone can). It’ll take some time to see just how effective these changes are in reducing concussions. It seems to me that it is — but the problem right now is that this real reduction is obscured by the increased recognition and reporting, so it’s hard to see what the difference is. We’re judging numbers based on two very different standards, and trying to make comparisons.

My gut tells me the league is on the right track and making progress; I do think there’s a lot of work to do. I disagree with the view above that nothing can be done here. Lots has been done, is being done, and there’s lots more to do. That’s a defeatist attitude, and probably the most important change being made right now is educating the players and helping them really understand concussions, both to get it through their occasionally thick skulls that making hits that cause concussions is a stupid and dangerous thing — but even more so teaching players that ignoring concussions or playing through them is even MORE stupid. Retraining the league and players that it’s okay to say “I can’t go” isn’t sissifying the game, it’s protecting the future health of the player.

The league can only do so much to stop concussions if the players don’t take them seriously. The big change going on in the league now is that education process; getting the players to understand and accept that they don’t have to “skate it off” when “they got their bell rung”. As this change in attitude gets ingrained in the players, when the players really learn it’s not okay to headhunt — that’s when concussion numbers will realy go down. That process is ongoing, and I think we’re starting to see the effects — the early effect is MORE concussions being reported and MORE man-days lost to them and MORE headlines bemoaning the concussion crisis. But players moving into a situation where they’re safer, and where they’ll be healthier in the future for understanding this now.

Right now, there’s a lot of noise about concussions. That’s good — that’s driving awareness, and that is, if nothing else, motivation to the league to keep looking for ways to make this problem better and the game safer for the players. the tradeoff there is that hockey is inherently a physical and violent sport, and injuries are inevitable — the only way to take injuries out of the game is to ruin it.

That is not, under any circumstance, an excuse to ignore injuries or to think you don’t NEED to find ways to make the game safer. The league has a difficult set of compromises to make on this, and right now, I think they’re doing an overall good job.

We also need to remember that some of this noise is because we’re making progress – because lots of what used to be swept under the rug is now visible for all to see. And that’s the first step in removing move of it to the dust bin of history where it belongs. And this process is not something solved by snap decisions; it’s going to take time, and research, and commitment. which right now, the league seems to be committed to.

And ultimately, I think it means the end of fighting in the game, because at some point we are going to have to come to grips with the reality that we can’t say it’s unacceptable to target the head of a hockey player — unless you take your gloves off for a fight.

But that’s an argument for another article at another time….

After 5-4 win, Pavelski’s thoughts on booing…

After 5-4 win, Pavelski’s thoughts on booing: “”I think guys kind of take that and know we’ve got to play better. It’s kind of a bottom level for us” | Working the Corners:

(Longtime Sharks fans with good memories will remember that during the 1996-97 season — one of the franchise’s low points — head coach Al Sims basically said the fans weren’t booing his players enough, that a team that would go on to finish 27-47-8 had it too cushy here. Classic stuff. Let the record show that season was the only one behind an NHL bench for Sims, who was succeeded by Darryl Sutter).

And back in the day, one of the continuing amusements of the arena were the signs put up by the fans, the most consistent sign lady being none other than Rene. And that statement by Sims led to one of the best, where the players skated out to start the game, and there sitting at the end of the arena was a sign that said:

“We’ll boo, but we won’t enjoy it”

Which, I heard through the grapevine, really, really pissed off Al Sims. Which, honestly, kinda made it even better.

But I think of the Al Sims era, short as it was, as when the hockey fans in San Jose first started shifting from “oh, god, we have hockey, this is great!” to “man, when are they going to stop sucking and win?”. So maybe Sims had a hand in convincing Sharks fans to stop being quite so tolerant of bad hockey.

Doug Wilson: “We believe in this group and we believe in this staff”

Doug Wilson: “We believe in this group and we believe in this staff” | Working the Corners:

And GM Doug Wilson, who never comments directly on any kind of speculation, still managed to make it crystal clear that he supports his coach.

 

“We believe in this group and we believe in this staff,” Wilson said. “We look forward to this team playing up to its capabilities.”

If you watched the game Tuesday, you undoubtedly heard the pointed criticism of the Sharks by the Versus analyst tandem of Mike Milbury and Keith Jones. Some of their comments about the Sharks’ lack of energy also are rehashed in the print/web story.

When asked about the criticism, several Sharks were careful to say that didn’t want to respond to things that they didn’t actually hear. (And frankly, that’s very smart of them.) But they disagreed with the idea that lack of effort has been the Sharks problem of late.

“I know how hard we’re trying out there,” Logan Couture said.

Thornton and Clowe added that they try not to listen to the chattering on television.

Based on having watched the Sharks forever, and how Doug Wilson GMs this team, when Wilson says this, what he really means is “it’s time for you guys to get your act together, or I’ll get it together for you”. The Sharks are starting a 6 game homestand (they won tonight, playing occasionally inconsistently but putting it all together to finish strong and winning going away). My bet: if they aren’t at least 4-2 on this homestand, Doug Wilson shakes up the roster and makes a trade in early January.

And probably should, if they don’t shake out of this — whatever it is. I agree with the team about how hard they’re trying. What they aren’t doing is playing smart. What they aren’t doing is sweating the details. That shows most visibly in the penalty kill, which is ludicrously bad given the talent here. And the penalty kill is 90% hard work, and 20% sweating the details. They’re two steps out of place, they’re one step late, they’re missing an assignment — all things that happen once in a while, but not things that should happen constantly.

It’s as if for some reason their heads aren’t consistently in the game. concentration lapses more than lapses of effort. There’s no real excuse for it past the first ten games of the season. By then they should know each other.

The last couple of games looked like they were finding it, but it wasn’t there consistently. Tonight, they got it in the third period and finally got the motor running on all cylinders. The question is, will they keep it going next game? One period is a good start, and got them a good win. But the lack of consistency is making this team both fascinating to watch and immensely frustrating to figure out.

And Wilson’s public show of support is really an indication his patience is wearing thin.

This is not a coaching problem. This is not an effort problem. This is not a conditioning problem. This is a problem of focus and concentration. And those are things only the players themselves can solve, individually.

What’s been going on…

Thanks for your patience while I was having my little fun here on the blog. hopefully you were at least somewhat amused. Perhaps your curiosity piqued a bit.

If you haven’t figured it out (perhaps by reading this article, or perhaps this one, or even noticed that I made Techcruch for some reason I can’t fathom) today was my last day at HP/Palm/webOS GBU. Because we didn’t announce that I was leaving until the day before it happened, I couldn’t exactly talk about it here on the blog. I felt talking about unrelated stuff was — it just seemed wrong to carry on about apertures or unrelated topics with an unseen elephant standing in the room, but I didn’t want the blog to go completely silent for too long, because that in itself raises questions and gets noticed. (as an aside, I got my name mis-spelled two different ways in those three articles. I’m amused, and even better, it allows you to easily track where all of the “me too” sites go to do their “original journalism”).

I felt strongly that the developers should hear about this  from me, on the forums and hear it that way first. In this day and age of the internet, that’s surprisingly difficult, but we pulled it off. As it turned out, the timing of my change ended up tracking right up against Meg’s decision on the future of webOS and the webOS teams, and that made this even more complicated.  But Meg was willing to step up to fund webOS and give it a life in Open Source, and now everyone back at the office is trying to understand how to make that work.

I fully support that decision, and I look forward to cheerleading the effort from my new place on the sidelines. Now that I no longer have to speak the company line and try to avoid pissing off my bosses by improvising, I can say I think this is the best opportunity for webOS, and Meg has convinced me she understands what is going to be needed and how commitment it’s going to take. That she has worked closely with Mark Andressen (an HP board member) on this decision gives me a nice comfort level that they get it. That doesn’t mean that success is a given, only that an honest opportunity has been created. It’ll be up to the people in the webOS teams to grab the opportunity, engage the community, and everyone run with it. I think they can.

None of that changed my view that it was time to make a change (and to answer a question I’ve been asked a dozen times this week — “if this decision on Open Sourcing had come sooner, would you have stayed?” — the answer is, frankly, probably not, but part of me would have found the idea tempting); I’d been in that role for basically three years without any real change in responsibility. I was ready for more, or different, or something. That was something Richard and I had been talking about going back into late spring, on and off. When Leo decided to split off PSG and blew up HP in bizarre ways, taking out the webOS hardware teams as (as far as I can tell) collateral damage, that kind of put any talk about career paths on hold, and that holding pattern ended up being infinitely long. Once Richard decided that he couldn’t stay and ended up moving over to Nokia, it was clear to me that my situation wouldn’t be resolved for a number of months.

I know Richard and I would have worked out some growth path that would have kept me there; Leo’s decisions made that impossible. For the first month after Leo blew things up, I was telling recruiters to leave me alone. After that, being in limbo got rather stressful and my belief that we’d end up in a good and stable place (and with jobs) kept shrinking. Recruiters kept calling, and I started listening, and this one company caught my eye, we talked, and the rest is, well — it’s what’s next. I’m not going to go into details yet (sorry, Arthur); I’m going to enjoy my time off and relax a bit. there’s plenty of time for talking about that.

I will say that it is (a) not Nokia [but the day Richard joined Nokia, I rang him up and said “let’s talk”. we did, at some length. But I was fairly far along the process, and I felt it was a better direction for me to go. But of all of the places I chatted with, Nokia was my second choice and I likely would have gone there if I didn’t take the job I did — I think there’s some really interesting challenges and potential there). The new gig is also not in the mobile space (I’m headed back into an enterprise-oriented situation, and yes, it’s community oriented). I’m ready for a break from the politics of phones and carriers and similar joys, too.

In the short term, I’m going to spend a little time with my birding and my camera, with christmas (and christmas shopping), and doing some prep work. I’ll be starting the new gig next week, to sit down and get a start on mapping plans and strategies, and then off for christmas with the family. then back in January in with both feet and onward into whatever this is going to turn into.

(and in case anyone really cares, I’m thinking of headed down to Struve Slough and Jetty Road on thursday, and spending all day Friday out in Panoche Valley chasing mountain plovers and chukars for my life list. Plans which may well change, but you never know; and I’m seriously considering a saturday run out to Merced and San Luis NWR for a shot at some sunset work and the fly-in. Or maybe not….)

There’s plenty of blog fodder here to keep us busy, too.

To everyone on my old team at HP, and all of the folks I worked with there — thanks for everything, for making it a fight worth fighting and helping me enjoy being there even on the bad days. I’ll miss you all. To all my devs — thanks for your time, your energy and commitment, and your willingness to let me get away with saying “I don’t know” or “I can’t tell you” way more often than I wish I had. You made everything worth it, and you did great stuff. Please continue that in the future, because I’m rooting for you all, even if I’m not part of the fight any more.

And now, onward.

Today’s Shared Links for November 28, 2011

• Wrong on the Internet

why?

Because.

Today is this kind of day.

Today’s Shared Links for November 27, 2011

• Startups Are Hard. So Work More, Cry Less, And Quit All The Whining
• Copycats
• Wrong on the Internet
• The Birder Thought Process
• Delayed Migration in European Waterfowl

Today’s Shared Links for November 26, 2011

• Photographing the San Jose Sharks vs. Chicago Blackhawks
• Splendour in the Grass
• The Dream of a Dying Albatross: More Powerful Work from Chris Jordan
• Appreciating Anne McCaffrey
• My Twitter Retweeting Policy
• Why Must Orcs Die? [Signifiers]
• Fire Up the Goalie Time Machine: 100 Years Ago
• "Do it right." A re-post by request. Thank you, Dave. Initially posted 11.01.10
• The Readable Future

Today’s Shared Links for November 25, 2011

• → You Guys Are Millionaires Right?
• Required Reading 11.25.2011
• The Bifurcation of Reading on the Web
• For Yahoo (And Me, Too), Time Is Brain
• An Introduction to iPhoneography

Today’s Shared Links for November 24, 2011

• Against the Fire
• Happy Thanksgiving, Everyone!
• William Shatner PSA Regarding Turkey Fryer Fires

Today is a day for family…

It’s thanksgiving here in the states, a good day to not write blog posts but to spend your time with family and the ones you care about.

So instead of writing something pithy or geeky, I’m going to spend the day with Laurie, and the rest of our family — Manon, the calico of little brain, and Tatiana, our little princess.

See you all later.

Today’s Shared Links for November 22, 2011

• EPUB 3: Building a standard on unstable ground
• Tuolumne River Canyon Below Glen Aulin
• Pro Tip: Calculating Unknown Star Trail Exposure Times
• Writing
• What a Photograph Is and What It Ain’t
• We’re Not Drowning In Photography, We’re Getting Rich
• Apple’s Greg Joswiak describes Apple’s four principles of success
• The beast must be fed

Today’s Shared Links for November 21, 2011

• We’re Not Drowning In Photography, We’re Getting Rich
• 26 Development (And Design) Books You Might Enjoy
• The State of Social Sharing With Fred Wilson, Roger McNamee and More (Video)

Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson

I’ve finally finished Walter Isaacson’s book on Steve Jobs. Having worked at Apple through much of the time covered in the book, I was curious how my view of the time and events matched up with this — the official — version, and to try to get some perspective on the man behind all of this.

I’m happy (and a bit surprised) to say that I found nothing in the book that was demonstrably wrong compared to reality as I remembered it; this is no sanitized, “remember me fondly” hollywood bio; Steve seems to have played fair with Isaacson, and Isaacson played fair with Steve.

You get Steve unfiltered. The book brings clear a complex man; not easy to work with, but not evil. Just — insensitive. I can speak to many people who cursed having to deal with him at times; and after, loved him for having brought out the best in them along the way. The Steve in the book matches up well with the Steve I came to know through living in Silicon Valley and working at Apple. He was an exceptionally intelligent person, but more so, an exceptionally intuitive man who could make that jump directly from point A to the end point, and wasn’t afraid to take those leaps without endless masses of data to justify them. He was also right often enough that he was allowed to do this, even though this can be a scary way of operating to people who aren’t strongly intuitive.

And yet I found myself fighting to get through the book. Unlike some of Isaacson’s other works, this book feels flawed and somewhat lifeless.

I don’t think this is Isaacson’s fault. Unlike some of his other biographies (I especially loved his book on Franklin), the material here is new, it hasn’t been given the benefit of time to smooth off the raw edges or any chance at perspective and consideration that helps us understand what really matters in the essence of the man. I also get the feeling that since so many of the other people involved in this book are alive, Isaacson stepped carefully through various minefields; it feels like there are punches being pulled, that people are being careful — but may not even realize it’s happening. The frustration that Bill Gates showed at some of the comments Steve made is one place where this breaks through, but even there, I think both sides watch their words, knowing posterity was watching, and I think that “carefulness” invades many of the relationships in the book.

That’s inevitable in a book like this, and I’m not criticizing Isaacson for it. I do feel like he was still grappling with the material, still really trying to get his head around the material and Steve and how to write the book, and the end result is that parts of the book, especially later parts, are missing the perspective and analysis I expect from this author. This is a book that would have been better suited to a year of incubation, giving him more of a chance to ponder and polish.

It is, however, a massive and fascinating source of material about Steve, Apple, and Silicon Valley at a seminal time where the people and companies here changed society in so many ways.

My criticisms here are minor — give the book a B-, maybe (where I’d give the Franklin book an easy A-). If you’re at all interested in what has gone on behind the keynotes and product introductions, then this is a definite read for you. But there’s a bigger, better book on Silicon Valley and Steve to be writen, but one that is going to need five or ten years for us to understand Steve in the larger context and let time help us see him after time salves some of the raw emotions so many of us have felt in the last few months.

This is a good book, but not a great book. It is, I think, the best book Isaacson could have written right now, and it’s definitely worth your time (but also go grab the Franklin book, to see Isaacson at his best).

(addendum, added later, but before publication:

One thing that struck me in reading the book was Jobs saying he wanted the book to exist so his kids could read about him and learn who he was. In similar situations, very few of us would think to call up Walter Isaacson and tell him to write our biography. Steve did (and Walter did, because he’s Steve, and this is an important book about an important person). But it seems to me there’s a deeper meaning to this; while most of us would solve this problem by sitting down with our kids and talking, at some level, Steve realized he couldn’t, that he just wasn’t wired that way. I also get the impression that because he insisted on this book being honest, and his flaws weren’t hidden or glossed over, that at some level this book was in Steve’s way also a way of acknowledging he wasn’t the greatest father in the world, and in the kind of act only someone like Steve would do, apologizing to his kids for being what he was, in public. And I think that sums up the Steve we’re seeing in the book: a very complex person who both had flaws and recognized them — but couldn’t overcome them. He was who he was. And he couldn’t just sit down with his kids and explain himself or say I’m sorry. But he could stand up in a very public display and do that — which if you think about it, is a very powerful way to show that you really mean it when you say “i’m sorry” for being what he was to them.)

Today’s Shared Links for November 20, 2011

• An Open Letter to Simon and Schuster CEO Carolyn Reidy
• Fall In Yosemite
• Ginger Rodgers had to do everything Fred Astaire did only backwards and in heels…..

Losing a Friend…

As if life hasn’t been — interesting — enough the last few months (gee thanks, Leo), a couple weeks ago we saw that Archie, one of the cats, was starting to lose weight and seemed to be sleeping more. We kept an eye on him, and a bit over a week ago got him into the vet to get checked out. The last week has been more or less an endless stream of talks with the vets, visits to the vets, tests, waiting for test results, and generally stressing out and all of the things involved with waiting and not knowing.

Friday, we finally got the results back from a test that gave us a definitive answer, although not the one we wanted; Archie had advanced intestinal cancer that had clearly started spreading. We made the tough call and said goodbye.

Archie’s been our companion for over 14 years; if we forged his kennel papers he’d pass for a Maine Coon, but he was a feral rescue and we know mom looked nothing like he did. He had that feral “run first” timidness, and wasn’t particularly friendly to strangers, but once he got to know someone, he was a helpless lap cat.

We’re now a one cat family, and honestly, that cat prefers that, so we won’t be bringing in a kitten now.

We are going to miss him greatly, but from what we can tell he was never in pain and never suffered.

So it hasn’t been a fun couple of weeks here in Chateau Plaidworks. if I’ve missed an email or been slow to reply, I apologize. Hopefully, with the holiday arriving, we’ll get our batteries recharged a bit and get back on it.

Today’s Shared Links for November 19, 2011

• 12,225 Mile Road Trip Around America in a 5-Minute Time-Lapse
• Mobile Gatekeepers
• So ya think ya want to be a Bird Photographer?

Why is this image worth talking about?

Here’s a shot from my archives that I wanted to publish today. The image is from a November trip to British Columbia (yes, we did vacation up there in the middle of the rainy season. Yes, hockey was involved). This is the Mill Bay ferry, about to take us back from visiting friends in Duncan to our hotel in Victoria.

Nothing special, really. So why am I posting it?

It’s the oldest image in my Lightroom library. I took it ten years ago today. I took it on my first real digital camera, which I bought on that trip. It was the Canon PowerShot S100, about the size of a pack of cards, which I bought in Portland at the start of the trip at a camera store for about $600, if I recall correctly.

So today is my ten year anniversary in digital photography. And this image is the start.

Back in the ancient of days, I would help my dad once in a while as he would shoot talking head pictures for the newspaper he owned using a Rolleiflex.

In high school, I shot a Nikon, mostly tri-x, mostly sports and yearbook work, and spent a chunk of time in the darkroom doing my own developing and printing. None of it was remotely notable. And then I dropped it.

For a while, I shot film again, using a Minolta 5xi, then a 7xi. Lots of Velvia. That’s all in a box in storage right now; I had then digitized to Photo-CD at some point, but today, the quality of those consumer photo-CDs is such the images aren’t usable for me, and I haven’t gotten around to re-digitzing them. Not even sure how good they are any more.

While at Apple, I actually bought one of the first generation Quicktake cameras (remember those? no, didn’t think so).

The appropriate word for this was “toy”. Expensive toy. And a toy that got even more expensive when someone decided to remove it from my car without permission (on a different trip to Vancouver, of all places). Add in the cost of the new car window, that camera cost me over a grand…. and the images were crap, but it was a fun geeky thing.

I stopped shooting film; it cost more than I was willing to spend, and I wanted to focus my time and energy elsewhere. But for some reason, digital photography spoke to me. I had no intention of getting serious about it, I just thought I’d get a camera and play and take vacation photos, like my dad.

How time flies.

And how technology flies. Think about it. For what I spent on the S100, you can buy a T2i, or a Canon G12 AND a bunch of memory cards and a bag….

I started shooting raw in 2006, when I bought my first Rebel. I haven’t looked back. I’ve had a ball. I’m having a ball. And I look forward to having a ball with the camera for years to come. And maybe, once in a while, shoot an image worthy of being shot.

Here’s a quick challenge to other photographers out there. What’s the oldest image you’ve left in your “keeper” file? and why that image? And what about the journey that got you there, and from there to here?

Today’s Shared Links for November 18, 2011

• Lens Review: Canon EF 70-200mm f/4L IS
• Protein, Not Sugar, Stimulates Cells Keeping Us Thin And Awake, New Study Suggests
• UserVoice, Which Powers Customer Engagement Tools For Meebo, HootSuite & More, Raises $1 Million
• Wisdom of the Ancients
• Being Less Fat
• Photo Attorney Receives a DMCA Take Down Notice!
• Borrowlenses.com Responds!
• Why Google gets no respect (from developers)
• iPads and responsive design

Today’s Shared Links for November 17, 2011

• Protecting goalies now to pay more later?
• An Inexpensive Speedlight Studio
• Now a Soap Opera, Heavily-Backed SOPA Copyright Bill Gets New Bipartisan and Popular Opposition
• 100,000 Players for 60 Days [Traction]
• How Quickly a Camera Bag Can Be Stolen

Visiting Merced Wildlife Refuge

William Henderson at Hold the Eye Images has a nice piece on Merced Wildlife refuge

Merced Wildlife Refuge, a photographic treasure – Hold The Eye Images:

I spent a couple of days at the Merced Wildlife Refuge. The purpose was to check out the Sandhill Crane which comes in the fall and stays through the winter. These birds are big, loud, colorful, and fly in large groups. They feed in fields during the day and spend the night in water to avoid predation. At dawn, they leave their nightly water refuge to feed in the fields. These movements are big events with up to thousands of birds moving  twice a day in mass. Merced is a smaller venue for the Sandhill at this time of year, and never approaches Bosque de Apache, in New Mexico but it has advantages. The fog at this time of year creates some landscape drama early in the morning just before dawn. Here are early morning landscapes from each morning.

 

 

I think he does a good job of catching the essence. It’s not a huge refuge, but it’s become one of my favorites. As has become a tradition, Laurie and I will (weather permitting) be doing our black friday “get the hell out of here” trip to Merced and San Luis NWR (morning in SLNWR, lunch in Santa Nella, afternoon and sunset at Merced).  If you’re in that area, a trip to San Luis is worth it because of the difference in habitats and a chance for Tundra Swans, which don’t seem to show up in Merced.

If you want a sense of what you can see there, check out his images, and then wander off and browse through mine as well.

Merced NWR is a couple of hours from downtown silicon valley, and I find it works best as roughly a half-day trip. I’ll usually target either dawn or dusk and spend a few hours on site, doing two trips around the auto-tour; the first to scout and see where everyone is and what the most interesting action is going to be, then a second trip to focus on the hot spots. Of course, anything that happens on that first trip, I stop and photograph, but there’s nothing quite so frustrating as spending 40 minutes trying to get decent shots of cranes deep in the refuge only to drive down the road a bit to find them standing on the road… Not that this would EVER happen to me. nope.

Highlights this time of year will be the Sandhill Cranes, Ross’s Geese (above) and/or Snow Geese, some Greater White-Fronted Geese, raptors (golden eagles are somewhat common and bald eagles show up as well) and owls (I usually find roosting Great Horned about 80% of my trips) and lots of waterfowl. It’s typically a great place for White-Faced Ibis, for instance.

While Dawn can be great there

carry Deet. Just sayin’. It doesn’t seem to be as bad for sunset.

I’ll try to get there a couple more times between this trip and February, when it starts to wind down, hopefully a dawn trip and one more sunset trip. If you want to stay in the area, Santa Nella is on I5 and centrally located near the O’Neill Forebay, San Luis NWR and Merced, and this area is fully of areas to explore. Also Los Banos, or Merced itself (but which is somewhat are the far side of all of this for me).

Today’s Shared Links for November 16, 2011

• Sunset Wave Against Rocks at Pietras Blancas
• Nature, Creativity and Seeing Plus
• No, He Doesn’t Have a Point
• Continuous Feedback
• "Greater Choice" – Late last night, I linked to a blog post … (MG Siegler/parislemon)

Today’s Shared Links for November 15, 2011

• The Think of It Versus the Feel of It
• Trey Ratcliff takes on travel guides with gorgeous new iPad app
• The iPad Version is Here!
• 9 Amazing Apps for Night Photography
• Perfectly Dead: Here’s this weird thing…
• Life Affecting Photography
• You Want Me To Do What To My What?
• How COPPA Teaches Children to Lie
• A memory of a time immersed in photography.

Notes from the Commish: My Take on Lucic and Ryan

Welcome to the latest ruling in “Notes from the Commish” where I as the Commish of the NHL (in my universe) and my Vice President of Disclipine Barfy will pontificate upon the state of the game .

KuklasKorner : Hockey:

69.4 Contact Outside the Goal Crease – If an attacking player initiates any contact with a goalkeeper, other than incidental contact, while the goalkeeper is outside his goal crease, and a goal is scored, the goal will be disallowed.

 

A goalkeeper is not “fair game” just because he is outside the goal crease. The appropriate penalty should be assessed in every case where an attacking player makes unnecessary contact with the goalkeeper. However, incidental contact will be permitted when the goalkeeper is in the act of playing the puck outside his goal crease provided the attacking player has made a reasonable effort to avoid such unnecessary contact.

I was watching the game when Lucic rolled through Ryan and started the kerfluffle.

Now, of course, Buffalo is demanding Lucic get suspended.

Regier is adamant Lucic should be suspended for the hit. Lucic will have a hearing today at 1 p.m. to discuss the first-period play in which Miller was knocked to the ice and his helmet was knocked off.

I sympathize with Buffalo. It sucks that he got injured in the play. My take on it is simple. Watching Lucic, it seemed to me he saw he was coming down on Ryan and decided “oh, heck, I’ll take the two minutes”. and did.

Honestly? I don’t blame him.  To some degree,  blame Ryan for being so sure there was going to be no contact that he was completely unready for the contact when it came. Yes, Goalies are “not fair game”, but that was a classic situation where the two players both had a legitimate reason to fight for the puck, only Ryan was so sure he was “safe” he never thought that Lucic would actually challenge him. He did, and Ryan went down and went bang.

I’m sorry, but my view is that this was caused because goalies have decided they are TOO privileged, not that they need to be protected more. Ryan should have been more aware of the chance of contact, and if he was worried about it, either not been so aggressive about going after that puck, or been ready for it. I think Lucic deserved two minutes for the hit, but I don’t think the hit was anything significant, nor do I think he deserves a suspension. I think goalies have to get over thinking that nobody can touch them at all, and have some responsibility for contact, even if we don’t go back to the “if you’re out of the crease, you’re fair game” concept.

Ryan seemed to believe that because he had some control of the puck that Lucic would peel off and not touch him at all. I find that concept both naive and a negative one for the sport overall. I’ve seen goalies chase out after a puck to break up a breakaway by submarining the oncoming player out beyond the face-off dots and haven’t heard anyone call to suspend the goalie for that, so honestly, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

My hint to goalies: if you’re going to wander out away from the blue paint, expect some contact. Ryan didn’t, and when it came, he wasn’t ready. In this case, Lucic clearly made a decision to go for the hit, but think about it: if Lucic instead didn’t see Ryan and hit him inadvertently, Ryan would still be concussed. And that’s why this isn’t a case for “more protection for the goalies” or “suspend Lucic until he rots”, it’s instead time for goalies to stop thinking nobody is allowed to touch them, “fair game” or not, and get back to a mentality where they realize contact is going to happen, and either not be so aggressive thinking this special protection will save them from their actions, or be ready for the consequences and take the hit.

Sorry, Buffalo, but this is more your goalie’s fault than Lucic’s.

(and updated — the nhl agrees with me on no suspension, which came out after I wrote this, but before it was posted)

Today’s Shared Links for November 14, 2011

• DeKloutifying
• Mono Lake Grasses
• Jaw-Dropping Time-Lapse Shots of Earth
• Fun with portraits. Audience in tow.
• A faster Web server: ripping out Apache for Nginx
• How Can I Help You?
• → Why the Lumia 800 is the first device I would switch to from an iPhone
• http://technologizer.com/2011/11/13/49780/
• How to enjoy hockey when you really don’t understand hockey

Today’s Shared Links for November 13, 2011

• Zynga, Equity & Tough Decisions (Adam Nash/Psychohistory)
• SF Bird Encounters – The Mural
• → Google Reader redesign: Terrible decision, or worst decision?
• Great Days for America
• First Light on Zabriskie Point Hills
• How to Convert EPub Books for use on Kindle

Today’s Shared Links for November 12, 2011

• Follow the Money
• Stop Making Apps
• Long Roadmaps
• Why the Leaders of Established Companies Dismiss the Threat That Destroys Them
• Cooking in zero gee
• Making Sense out of Sensor Sizes

Today’s Shared Links for November 11, 2011

• A Strange, Sad Day in Journalism: Romenesko’s Resignation
• Widower Wednesday: 10 Years Later
• Yosemite–Winter Wonderland
• Marshall Kirkpatrick stops writing about startups, starts one instead
• The DeanBeat: After Steve, will Apple press its advantage in games?
• Guest Post: John Camp
• Lessons From the Failure of Flash: Greed Kills
• In Which I Select a Current GOP Presidential Candidate to Vote For
• It’s Bigger Than Ashton

Today’s Shared Links for November 10, 2011

• Shifting Costs Elsewhere
• It’s a Winner!
• Getting Photos from Lightroom to an iPad is a Lot Harder (to Do Well) Than You Think; Here’s How
• Omelas State University
• Penn State

Today’s Shared Links for November 9, 2011

• Reasons why the social graph deserves to die
• Yosemite Nature Notes – Episode 17 – Black Oaks
• What a fascinating three days! High level conference imaging.
• Enormous copper mine in northern Chile
• Thoughts on ebooks triggered by the appointment of Andrew Savikas as CEO of Safari Books Online

Publishing to Smugmug, a geek’s view (Part 5)

Welcome to the final piece in this series on geeking lightroom and Smugmug.

To close this series out, I wanted to talk a bit about Smugmug smart galleries and ways I’d like to see them improved.

In practice, the implementation of Smart Galleries is pretty good. Because you can chain smart galleries together and create a gallery with interim results to use to create a final gallery, there’s very little you will be unable to do if you’re willing to think through building your selections and exclusions.

I ran into one bug which is fairly easy to work around: that a smart gallery with multiple EXCLUDE selectors doesn’t seem to work right. it almost looks to me like the 2nd EXCLUDE causes the system to throw all of the exclude clauses out. Other than that, the system worked as I expected it to.

It would be nice to see the size limits (1000 images for a smart gallery, 5000 for real galleries) increased, but to be honest, I can’t honestly say I think it’s a significant limitation. In practice, I only ran into this first limit twice, both for galleries building interim selections, and in both cases, it was easy to find an alternative way to solve the problem.  3,000 and 10,000 would work for me for years. 1,000 and 5,000 work fine for me as long as I remember to think about them.

I would like to see more than five selectors on a smart gallery (ten?). It would reduce the need to create interim result galleries. I would also like to see smart gallery selectors get smarter and allow a more flexible logic, especially mixing AND and OR logic (“include (fred AND jane) or (jerry and elvis)”). There’s a tradeoff here: allowing more complex logic is going to create more opportunities for people to get themselves into situations they don’t understand why it’s not working.

I would like to see some new ways to do selections, such as “all images in any gallery in the ‘birds’ section”. Alternatively, I would love to be able to create a smart gallery of all images in “this gallery” that are not shown in any smart gallery (the “which images are missing” gallery). One place I had to think through doing things was my mammals: there’s no easy way to say “all mammals, except “these” and “these” and these”) because of the 2-exclusion clause bug, and then soon after, the 5 rule limit.  ended up solving it by re-arranging my keyword nesting in Lightroom, but that means my sea otters and sea lions aren’t listed as mammals. It’s a minor thing, but it annoys me a bit, because I’m kinda picky at times.

This all starts looking like a relational database schema after a while, and I have to sometimes resist the urge to over-normalize the design. But if you think about it, smart galleries look a lot like views, and the selection criteria start looking like triggers.

I’ve noted a couple of things that people ought to be aware of before they start doing this.

First, all of your stats will show up as being tied to the real gallery, so you won’t be able to see analytics on which smart gallery the image was actually seen in. If you want that kind of data, you’re going to be unhappy, because there’s no way to get it. For me, this is fine. If that kind of detail on how people are finding images is important to you, this strategy won’t work.

Second, I have noticed a few cases where updating the galleries locked up or broke the site for short periods of time. It looks like while a smart gallery is being updated by the hidden background processes there are some locks put in place or the data is inconsistent. These inconsistencies tend to be very short lived, but they are visible to the end user. This implies that if you’re doing significant updates that affect many of your galleries, you might want to split them up into smaller chunks, or time them for when things are quiet (like start the publishing push before going to bed). If absolute 100% “my site is never funky” is a requirement, this strategy might not work for you. In all cases where I did see this, it seemed to involve significant sets of updates (> 100 images being pushed that rippled across the galleries) where it seemed like the gallery update daemon was trying to update the galleries while a previous run was still updating them. And in all cases, the glitches fixed themselves and went away within a few minutes of the publishing push finishing. And on the vast majority of publishing pushes (95% of them) I never saw a thing, so this is a minor case at best.

Overall, when I started this, I wasn’t sure if Smugmug’s smart galleries would hold up to what I was trying to do. I found they handled the abuse I threw at them just fine. Now that I have this up and running, it’s my greatest hope I won’t need to re-think how I publish things for at least 3-5 years; and rearranging the furniture using this strategy is easy and mostly painless. It takes a little bit of work to get set up; it saves a lot of work over time. I can live with that kind of investment.

Today’s Shared Links for November 8, 2011

• Things Change
• How to Relate To and Learn From Other Photographers
• There’s a meme that says when it comes to funding…
• How To Get Started With Animal Tracking
• Finding Peace in Nature Photography
• Is Klout crossing the line when it comes to privacy? (Mathew Ingram/GigaOM)
• Is Klout crossing the line when it comes to privacy?

Publishing to Smugmug, a geek’s view (Part 4)

Welcome, as we start winding down this series on geeking lightroom and Smugmug.

So, now that it’s all ready to use, what sort of things should we do?

Since so much of what I do is nature/animal and landscape photography, most of my galleries are oriented around displaying animals and locations. When I set up my bird areas, I set them up to match the standard Taxonomic lists that the birders and scientists use. In lightroom, that means setting up a keyword for a grouping, and then nesting the species inside it. In smugmug, you then set up a smart gallery like this.

And what you end up with is this:

For a location, the same:

It’s not always obvious how to break things up. What I’ve ended up doing is using significant locations (like Morro Bay) or in some cases, counties (like Santa Clara or San Mateo County). And for a location like Morro Bay, where I’ve done so much birding, it seemed to make sense to split it up between my bird images and my non-bird images:

Another common use for me is to set up a gallery to use as a slideshow for a specific trip.

I decided to set up some special galleries to focus on specific photographic styles and techniques,like Silhouettes or Black and White images. To do this, just set up the keywords in lightroom and tag the images that fit those styles.

You can do pretty much anything you want in that way: create a folder of specialty keywords in Lightroom for whatever interests you — whether it’s black and white landscapes or pictures that include a person’s left foot. There are no wrong answers, but this is a way to define your interests in any way you want, in Lightroom, and display them in Smugmug via a few matching Smart Galleries.

It is, however, only as good and complete as your key wording and metadata is. And frankly, mine needs some work (but I knew that… and I’m putting some time in a few days a week now that I have a good reason to make it happen)

How about a gallery of your most recent images — but only from a specific publishing channel? I did not want my wallpapers showing up in “most recent”, so the standard one offered by Smugmug didn’t work for me. Instead:

Limit it to 100 images, and set your image sort to “sort by date posted” and “descending”, and the 100 newest images magically show up.

nice thing about this setup: the links don’t break, even after that image is no longer “most recent”.

Or how about my best images? A great use for that “5stars” keyword:

That keyword drives this gallery. The gallery drives the images that show up on the front page of my Smugmug site. And whenever I add an image via the keyword, or decide to downgrade an image when I reconsider, the site reconfigures automatically. No need to remember which parts of the site I need to change.

You can do pretty much whatever you want. Once you start working with it and you get a feel for the capabilities, the options, as they say, are endless.

Publishing to Smugmug, a geek’s view (Part 3)

We continue looking at how to set up your lightroom and Smugmug collections to work together in ways that will make your life easier in the future.

But first, a note on limits.

Thanks to a commenter I’ve been told there is a hard limit of 5000 images in a Smugmug gallery. That isn’t a problem for me, but it does help me with a decision I’ve been delaying, which is what to do with personal images — family things that may be in private galleries and in many cases password protected.

The combination of the 5,000 image limit and that the private “all images” gallery being very findable (it’s obscure, not secure) leads me to think that images that you want private need to be in a separate channel. Since you also don’t want those images adding to that 5,000 image limit. So when I decide to put together my “family and friends only” section of the Smugmug site, they’ll be in their own publishing channel with appropriate restrictions.

For me, the 5,000 limit doesn’t worry me. If I ever grow my published Smugmug collection to that size, I can guarantee I’ll have images in that collection that I can un-publish and remove from circulation without missing them. If I ever get to a point where I have 5,000 images where I honestly can’t live without showing off any of them, then I can probably afford to pay a geek to build me a custom site to show them off from the royalties. Whether this limit bothers you or not is something you’ll have to figure out before you decide to implement your Smugmug account like I’ve done here.

Now, onward towards finishing off the site.

As you grow your lightroom library, and as you start doing more with keywords and metadata and taking advantage of that information in your image publishing, one challenge you’re going to have is keeping all of that data straight and accurate.

You can make yourself crazy looking through things and seeing if you can find errors. You can wait until people report them.

Or you can use Smart Collections to build in some error checking and diagnostics into your Lightroom system to help you find and fix problems while they’re small. Smart Collections are your friend.

The “star” problem is a common one you’ll have as you you work on your images. Since Smugmug doesn’t look into your EXIF or give you access to the star ratings in their smart gallery, you have to translate some of that EXIF data into keywords so that it can be seen by Smugmug. I use a set of keywords “1star” “2stars” etc to do this. The trick is to make sure that the keyword version of that data matches the EXIF data.

Over time, I’ve built some “diagnostic” collections that are intended to help me find images that are “out of spec” or where certain sets of data don’t match up with expectation. These collections help me make sure I’m following my processing workflow — have I geo-encoded everything? Do they have captions? Do they have keywords and titles? Have I rated them? This helps me dive into sets of images where I might have missed a step or forgotten something. Note that I haven’t yet come up with diagnostics for “good title” or “intelligent caption”, just the existence or lack of one, but it’s a start.

Over time, you’re going to rethink some of your initial decisions. What if you rated an image 4 stars, then downgraded it to 3? or vice versa? To have that properly show up on smugmug, you have to change the keywords, too. Imagine how much fun that is over time…. Yeah — so if you try to handle it manually, you’re going to find it a hassle. Or you’re in a hurry and decide to update it later, or forget. Then what?

Smart collections to the rescue.

For each star rating, I’ve created two diagnostics. The first one makes sure that if I rated something “N stars” that I’ve also assigned the keyword to them.

The other one verifies that anything assigned an “Nstars” keyword has the appropriate rating.

As long as all of those galleries show zero members, your library is in sync. If one of them has members, you simply select that collection and Lightroom brings them forward, and you can make a bulk change to fix the problem. This also implies that you can ignore the star rating keywords until the end of your processing and then assign them in bulk, meaning managing these becomes almost painless (now, if only Lightroom had macros that would automatically do this for me…).

When you don’t need them, close the folder and they don’t even take up screen real estate. Building in a few of these key diagnostics can go a long way towards keeping your metadata clean and your image collection firing on all cylinders.

As I’ve experimented more with smart collections, I’ve found you can do a lot of things that help you understand your images and your photographic habits.

Want to know which of your cameras you generate keepers with? Or what ISOs you use? Or your lens preferences?

Once you start playing with Smart Collections, you’ll find them a useful tool for peering into your image collection and finding out things about it, as well as finding problems — and even tracking down those images you know are in there somewhere, if you can only find them.

Today’s Shared Links for November 6, 2011

• Hey, entrepreneurs, we’re living in a bubble

Today’s Shared Links for November 5, 2011

• The Problem of Pricing

Today’s Shared Links for November 4, 2011

• Here’s the secret to Amazon’s, B&N’s tablet strategy
• How to Overcome the Problem of ‘Inadequate’ Gear
• Hitting it big in the App Store … or not
• 3 Years later… “Mobius” and the Canon C300 / C300PL
• Essential Keywording Tips and Strategies for Photographers

Publishing to Smugmug, a geeks view (Part 2)

In part one of this series, I walked through setting things up so that Lightroom and Smugmug were cooperating in getting images published from your catalog onto the net. At this point, however, all I have is one huge gallery named “all images”, and even worse, it’s unlisted and private so nobody can see it.

So far, not very useful. But here’s why I did it this way: by creating a single gallery for all images, and a publishing channel  that means any updates I make to the image can get pushed to Smugmug in place. This implies that links pointing to these images should never break, unless for some reason I unpublished or republish them.

That’s the theory, at least. And by setting it up this way, as my site grows and I try out new things or reconfigure how I want it to look, the changes should be invisible and the underlying link structure should not break; this means I can redecorate or rethink my gallery structure at will without worrying about 404ing links out in the real world, and without having to tear it all apart and start from scratch the way I am doing now — at least for a few years.  I’m trying to not only handle my needs now, but to plan for growth, plan for re-invention and plan for stability — and hopefully not feel like I have to throw it all out in two years when I have some neat new idea on how all of this should work.

The way this is done is through two items: keywords and smart galleries. Within Lightroom, you are (or should be) tagging all of your images with appropriate keywords, good captions and titles and other metadata that describes the image. You ARE doing that, right? Good.

Smugmug smart galleries allow you to define what images should be in a gallery based on a formula, rather than by individual selection. One implication of this is that when you upload images later that fit a gallery’s definition, they will magically show up in that gallery, so you don’t have to upload the images and then spend time sorting out what should go where. Set up your keywords right, define the galleries to use them, and then the site will configure itself.

As an example, have some elephant seals from my Piedras Blancas trip. Aren’t’ they cute?

Typically, my nature images are all keyworded with the same general info; I geotag them (using Google Earth and Jeffrey Friedl’s Geo-encoding plugin). Smugmug’s smart folders in general can access that info I also keyword in the location, using a hierarchical country->state/province->county->city->location, so I use that data to locate an image into a regional gallery. I also include the species and where appropriate common names and the latin name of the animals I’ve photographed. There are ways to simplify your life in Lightroom so you don’t have to remember tagging in all of this info one at a time, which I cover in a previous blog piece I wrote called Some Thoughts on Lightroom Keywords. Taking advantage of keyword synonyms is a time saver, once you figure out how you can take advantage of them. Once you have the keywords set up, publish the images and head over to smugmug.

Within Smugmug’s gallery settings is a section called “smart gallery”. It’s going to look something like this:

For this gallery, I include all images in my “all images” gallery, and then exclude “two star” images, and then restrict images to only those with the keyword “elephant seal”. If you go take a look at the gallery, you see the result.

One of the nice aspects of smart galleries is that you can use them to create subsets of your images, and then use those subsets to help create other smart galleries — they nest. So off in my private gallery area, I’ve taken all of my images and created a subset of them of just my “two star” images, and I can use that to exclude those images out of smart galleries.

I need to do it this way to get around a limitation of smart galleries: they can only hold 1,000 images. Because of this, I can’t create a smart gallery of “3, 4, and 5″ star images, because it would only grab 1,000. Instead, I can create a gallery of the images I don’t want (in my case a relatively small number of low quality images) and filter them out of the main gallery.  As far as I can tell, real galleries have no size limit (at least, I haven’t found it yet). This 1,000 image limit in practice will only affect galleries you create as interim steps to getting your final image galleries, but if you don’t keep it in mind, it’ll bite you.

Smart galleries have two other limitations you need to be aware of: each gallery can only have five selectors. The logic is also limited to matching either ANY rule, or ALL rules. There’s no capability to do something like (“4 stars” or “5 stars” AND “Elephant Seals” or “Sea Otters”) or more complex logic selections. That a minor thing, though, because you can work around it by creating private galleries that collect things, and then merging them together in the final, public gallery.  By chaining a series of galleries together and hiding them in a private gallery, you can create a smart gallery that does almost anything. It takes a little work and some planning, but ultimately, it’s a very powerful and flexible system.

If you look at the private gallery I use to stage these things, you can see I’ve created a couple of special “collectors” just to tie various keywords together. I then merge them against “all images” to exclude wallpapers, which gets me the images I want.

I did run into one logic bug in smart galleries that created a few pain points for me. They don’t seem to work right if there are multiple “EXCLUDE” rules. For instance, if I wanted to create a gallery of images from “Morro Bay” but exclude the birds. This should work:

• INCLUDE gallery “All Images”
• EXCLUDE gallery “Two Stars”
• INCLUDE  keyword “Morro Bay”
• EXCLUDE keyword “Birds”

Except it doesn’t. you end up with the wrong set because it seems to lose track of the exclusions and returns too many images. The solution for me was to only use one EXCLUDE in any definition, and if necessary, use a special collector gallery to create a set of images, and then exclude those images in a single step in the final gallery. Because of this, that bug’s a minor inconvenience.

One of the potentially useful pieces of data that smart galleries can not access is the star rating, and in fact, almost none of the EXIF data on an image is usable in smart galleries. Instead, you need to set up keywords. I’ve added “2stars”, “3stars” etc to all of my images to give me access to those ratings. This creates a few complications in making sure your data is consistent.

Fortunately, Lightroom to the rescue. In the next segment of this series, I’ll explain how you can set up some checks and balances within lightroom to help you manage your keywords and keep your data consistent without a lot of hassle or pain.

Today’s Shared Links for November 3, 2011

• Rose, I’m Trying to Resonate Concrete: The Greatest, Smallest Moments of Doctor Who
• A Rep Who Makes Apps
• The Big Idea: Richard Kadrey
• This Could Only Happen on Live Radio
• SAN BENITO COUNTY BIRDING: Heading to Panoche Valley, California?
• Striking It Rich In The App Store: For Developers, It’s More Casino Than Gold Mine (Chris Stevens/Fast Company)
• → Faith No More
• Speaking of disruptive technologies and generational disconnections…

Publishing to Smugmug, a geek’s view (part 1)

I have been off under the hood of my publishing setup working out the gory details of how to get all of my former flickr images onto smugmug in a way that’s usable, and to create a publishing setup that will scale without having to be torn apart every time I have a new idea of how I want things to look.

There are two ways to get images from Lightroom to Smugmug. I expect most people use the export command, either by writing images to disk and then using the smugmug uploader, or by using a plug-in that goes direct to smugmug. There’s another capability of Lightroom that takes some extra work to get going, but once you do, gives you a lot of flexibility and power — the Publish module. There’s a good overview of why the Publish module is your friend on Jeffrey Friedl’s site. The big difference: you create a continuing relationship between the image in Lightroom and the one published, so changes to that image or its metadata can be republished in place on the site without the pain and suffering of tracking them down and fixing the manually. Reprocess an image to make it better? Revamp the keyword and caption? With the publish module, flowing those out to the site(s) where the image is published is painless. Using export, they go into the “I need to fix these some day” pile, to be forgotten…

So you really want to publish instead of export. It takes some work go get running, but it’ll save you a lot of work over time. Given this, though, you want to set up the publication structure up right from the start, because otherwise, you’ll fight the limitations has you figure out what it is you really want to do in displaying your images. My original setup was to create a publishing channel for everything; one for each size of wallpaper, one for egrets, another for hawks, one for landscapes. I ended up with something like 30 publishing channels. And then I wanted to do a “best images” set. Problem: none of these channels easily share with each other.

Smugmug has the capability for smart folders to mix and match from uploaded images, but I found trying to mash different channels together to be a challenge. And then I decided to stop using flickr, and suddenly I was going from ~250 images on Smugmug to 2500, and I created a lot of new ways I wanted to display (and exclude) images.

It was clear the existing setup was not going to scale. So it was time to do something else, which meant — start over. Which means — breaking links. Which is bad. So if you’re going to build something like this, think about how it’s going to work and look when it’s twice as large. Or 10X as large. How do you grow it without breaking the links in the future?

The publishing module does that for you, if you set things up right (i.e., NOT the way I did it originally). Having just worked through this exercise, I thought it would be useful to show it to everyone, to give you ideas (and hear from you new ideas that I can borrow and add to my setup).

If you go to my smugmug site, you can take see the results. My original hope was to create two publishing channels, one for wallpapers and one for my images. The original flow for the publishing looked something like this.

As it turned out, I needed to create a publishing channel for each size of wallpaper. The interfaces between Lightroom (on my laptop) and Smugmug ended up looking like this:

The reasons we need separate publishing channels for each wallpaper is a bit obscure. I need to explain a few things to get there, so bear with me.  To set things up to publish to smugmug, first log onto smugmug and create the galleries you want to upload to. Then download and install Jeffrey Friedl’s export to Smugmug Lightroom Plugin (and throw Jeffrey a few bucks to thank him for writing it). Once it’s installed and enabled, you can create channels in the publish module which lives in the left sidebar of Lightroom:

(you will note my “all images” gallery is private. I’ll explain in a bit)

Right click on the service, and you can bring up the configuration dialog (dear Adobe: the UI on all of this kinda sucks. love, chuq). Most of the configuration is pretty straightforward.

A fe things to note; I’ve created a custom naming that tags everything uploaded to smugmug as having been uploaded there. It mostly is to help me keep straight where animate was intended. You can also set up a publishing environment and hook up multiple galleries to it, and manage them from lightroom. I’ve found it’s much more flexible to upload to a single gallery and display using smart galleries on smugmug, which I’ll go into later.

One option you have here is customizing or adding boilerplate to your caption or titles. I’m taking advantage of this to add a standard text block to each caption, as seen here. This capability has a lot more functionality than i’m using; it’s well worth exploring.

And here’s what I’m uploading.

You can have a publishing channel check what’s in the folders on Smugmug and try to connect it back to your lightroom. If it can, it saves you reloading and uploading that stuff. In my case, it was just as easy to start fresh and work from an empty gallery.

Note that there’s no watermarking. For the main gallery, the watermarking is done on Smugmug for the display images, because otherwise, the watermarks would end up on prints or licensed images.

That’s different with the wallpapers. There, since we want the watermark on the downloaded images universally, we do the watermarking on export so the “master” copy on smugmug is watermarked.

Because the watermarking I’m doing is simple, I’m using the built in watermarking tool. For more complex watermarking setups, I’ve used the tool LR/Mogrify, which I really like when I want to do things like borders and the like on an image.

One of the — quirks — of lightroom is that you can’t really set an explicit size of an image until you export it. That’s why I ended up with three publishing channels for wallpapers. I needed a separate one for each sized wallpaper, because otherwise, I have no way to make sure they’re sized correctly. The wallpaper processing allows me to set up the format (3:4 wallpaper) but I can’t render to the explicit size until I export. Hence, every size of wallpaper is its own export channel. This both makes sense, but creates complications, but I can’t really argue that this is wrong. In the context of all of this, it makes sense.

Once you get to this point, you’re ready to publish. Drag some images into the publishing channel you created. If yo go into grid mode (“G” in lightroom) and select the publishing channel, it’ll give you a sense of the state of the channel, showing you which images need to be uploaded, which have been updated and need to be re-uploaded. It’s a handy quick look to see how your lightroom library and your published galleries sync up — and this is one reason why lots of publishing channels are a problem, because you need to look at and sync each separately — lots of channels is its own set of complications…

And once you get your images online, they’re in one big gallery, waiting for you to do stuff with. How?

That’s next…..

Today’s Shared Links for November 2, 2011

• 10 Tips On How to Build Your Photography Empire
• What Artists Have a Right to Expect
• My internet-based photography business
• Wildlife Photographer Spotlight
• Badwater Salt Flats, Evening
• One last jaunt up into the mountains.
• Don’t leave that goalie on the shelf!

Today’s Shared Links for November 1, 2011

• Remarkable tale of how Apple boss hired unknown musician for iTunes (Andy Meek/The Daily)
• A Guest Blog by K. W. Jeter

Today’s Shared Links for October 31, 2011

• Aperture or Lightroom Doesn’t Have to Hold ’em All

Today’s Shared Links for October 30, 2011

• On Dennis Ritchie: A conversation with Brian Kernighan
• What do writers owe readers?
• It’s Time For Google To Let Google Voice Live Up To Its Promise
• The Most Effective Habit For Entrepreneurs
• Stokes and Stokes: Field Guide to the Birds of North America

Today’s Shared Links for October 29, 2011

• Edition Zero Lessons
• Oh Shit, I’m A Racist
• Yosemite Unseen V: Mount Hoffman
• Upgrading to iOS 5 and WiFi Syncing
• External Link: Why We Don’t Cover Rumors
• When Ads Feel Wrong
• ★ Apps Are the New Channels

Today’s Shared Links for October 28, 2011

• On the death of book publishers and other middlemen
• Marg: Princess Warrior’s Greatest Hits
• Ave Water Bottle Photo Shoot
• When Pre-Visualization meets Reality
• More Than a Story About Paper Wasps
• Call it a Comeback: Nokia Now Makes the Coolest Phone
• Double-dipping

Today’s Shared Links for October 27, 2011

• Pondering Salton Sea restoration
• OccupyAppStore
• “I’m Rob Fucking Ford!” (or: The Mayor, the Ambush and the 911 Call)
• Nobody Gives A Damn About Your Klout Score
• Lonely hunter. Better hunt.
• Rick’s Rant for Jamie Hubley

Today’s Shared Links for October 26, 2011

• Lead Bullets
• Humboldt Bay Jetty Displays the Black Turnstone
• Thinking About Lenses
• My Marketing Adventure: Part 2
• Using the toys. Making art and making money.

Today’s Shared Links for October 25, 2011

• Comparing the iPhone 4S Camera
• Think You Don’t Need to Focus? Think Again.
• Beating earnings though layoffs and divestitures is the height…
• TakeTheInterview
• Special Ansel Adams Gallery Print Sale!
• Follow the Leader

Today’s Shared Links for October 24, 2011

• A focus on the stuff that matters most
• How to Provide Social Media Support to an Executive
• The Steve Jobs celebration that even Steve would have loved
• Full 60 Minutes Interview with Steve Jobs Biographer Posted Online
• Tweets from Gettysburg
• On Parenthood
• Groo News

Today’s Shared Links for October 23, 2011

• (Founder Stories) Instagram-Backer Steve Anderson: Forget The Billion-Dollar Exits
• Steve’s Final “One More Thing…”
• Why I Am Not Running For President
• Yosemite Valley Fall Color
• Who left the wake-up call for November 1st?
• Ten Ways to Shoot Better Portraits.
• → Serving at the Pleasure of the King
• Photography vs. Image-making

Today’s Shared Links for October 22, 2011

• A cultural thought experiment
• Teachers Wanted
• The Lytro and George Eastman’s Vision

Today’s Shared Links for October 21, 2011

• The Iroquois kidnapped new genes
• Musing about the cloud and enterprise cost allocation
• HP’s Chief Strategy And Technology Officer Shane Robison To Step Down Nov. 1
• So you want to write JavaScript for a living? [repost]

Today’s Shared Links for October 20, 2011

• Make your photography blog compelling
• Has Microstock Photography Had Its Day?
• Fight! Fight!
• Random Thoughts and upcoming speaking engagements
• How to bring good design to a platform
• Intermediate Tips for Better Photography
• Mono Lake Rainbow by Greg Clure
• 11 Hilariously Hacked Road Signs

Today’s Shared Links for October 19, 2011

• Sigma 120-300mm f2.8 Lens Review
• 'Expose to the Right' is a Bunch of Bull
• New Blog
• Autumn Has Finally Arrived in the Eastern Sierra
• Mary Meeker and Tim Cook on Tablets
• Performance Anxiety. Photographically speaking.
• San Francisco State of the Birds report
• A trip through the seasons

Today’s Shared Links for October 18, 2011

• Now hiring: companies move away from outsourcing to control their IT destiny
• App Update is Ready; Fall Color in Yosemite
• When a Good Print goes Bad
• Jorge Quinteros puts me in his Photographer Spotlight
• Thinking about change
• Difficulty of Life After Hockey

Today’s Shared Links for October 17, 2011

• iPhone 4S video compared to Canon 5D MK II
• Control Your Background
• Beware the Trolls

Change of plan on flickr

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:

1. Pure coincidence. They police stuff when they notice it, and they happened to see it.
2. 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.
3. 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

• Lost in Translation
• When I think of what it takes to succeed, I think of this…
• Lodgepole pines on Yellowstone’s Dunhaven Pass
• Utah, West Desert
• DIPietro’s injury: How can we avoid these in the future?
• The Big Year: Our Movie Review
• In The Ring: Problems, Problems Everywhere

Today’s Shared Links for October 15, 2011

• Serving at the Pleasure of the King
• The World’s Movie Camera Makers Have All Quietly Stopped Production Of Film Cameras

Today’s Shared Links for October 14, 2011

• Santa Barbara Zoo Attracts Wild Bald Eagle
• Twitter Friends—Muir Woods and Bird Views
• Just Win, Baby
• Review: The Big Year – Movie
• Getting Ready for the Big Print Job
• Schoolhouse Ruins, Rhyolite
• Female Super-Hero Characters and Sex: Creators Explain How Comics Can Do Better
• Editing Your Portfolio

Today’s Shared Links for October 13, 2011

• Dennis Ritchie: the giant whose shoulders we stand on
• Dennis M. Ritchie 1941-2011
• Holy Cr*p Is Photography Different Now!
• Kodak going bankrupt? Where will our film come from?
• iPhone Print Offer Q&A
• Yes, those new HP Pavilion boards are livelier – safer, too – and, yes, a team can benefit from that

Today’s Shared Links for October 12, 2011

• Quick Impression
• The Gamification
• The Form and Function of Comment Systems
• via Buzzfeed

Today’s Shared Links for October 11, 2011

• Lens Genealogy
• Questions I ask when reviewing a design
• 5by5: Thank You, Steve Jobs
• Amazon Publishing Launches Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Imprint
• Photographically Speaking, Hot Off The Press.
• Replacing an iMac

Today’s Shared Links for October 10, 2011

• Mashable Community Guidelines: Commenting Do’s & Don’ts
• The Making of an Image: Sunset Sky and Autumn Aspens, Wyoming
• A Strange Sort of Prison, a Strange Sort of Freedom

Today’s Shared Links for October 9, 2011

• Steve Jobs
• 5 ways to wring more revenue out of your mobile apps
• Disposable Computing and the new Kindle

Today’s Shared Links for October 8, 2011

• Nobody Cares
• Initial Reaction
• SAN BENITO COUNTY BIRDING: PANOCHE VALLEY

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

• The Rundown
• ☞ Communities and Control
• Two Minutes With Steve
• These Are the Voyages… (Very OT)
• What Changed? What Remains?

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

• How To Select Bird Seed Mixes
• Lori Komejan at San Francisco Lion House
• By any other name
• How Hard is it to Attribute?
• 10 things Apple didn’t announce today

The Passing of an era and a 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

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

• HDR is technique, not style
• 10 big-picture questions for Apple today
• Pseudonymity will increasingly disappear
• The New iPhone Is Coming and I Don’t Want It
• Capitol Peak Autumn Sunset
• Moneypuck Again
• When web standards fail us
• Growl 1.3 now available on the Mac App Store
• Artist Jonathan Alderfer describes National Geographic’s new Field Guide to the Birds of North America

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

• Writer Beware and “The Write Agenda”
• End of the road.
• Tim Bray’s Nudge about Wikipedia and Photography
• Some Wine Country Photography from last Weekend
• → HTC vulnerability exposes private data to unprivileged apps on its Android phones
• Bodie State Park, CA #Lensbaby too!
• A Year with Sigma
• Birding Oregon's Central Coast
• Chase and Zack on Developing Your Photographic Style
• Go Forth And Conquer
• Using Ebooks to Save on the Price of Review Copies

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.

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

• Amazon “Punches Apple Hard” With Kindle Fire’s $199 Price
• Is Kickstarter the best solution for independent creators?
• Disrupting The Photocopier Business
• The very first document we put together when forming OATV…
• Fall in Yellowstone’s Lamar Valley

Today’s Shared Links for October 1, 2011

• Ideas
• Pronghorn in the grass, Yellowstone National Park
• Brutal Honesty
• Facebook Is Getting Too Damn Complicated [OPINION]
• Sierra Nevada Aspen Hunting and the Weather

Today’s Shared Links for September 30, 2011

• Trees and Granite Cliffs, Evening Light
• Mist Trail Hikers, Yosemite National Park
• Hotels
• What I learned about writing from being an extra
• Helmets Don’t Prevent Concussions
• Fire: Yosemite Weekly Photos 9.29.11
• Rejects From the Critique Pool
• Extending Enyo HTML5 Support

Whither Flickr?

So I ran into an issue of Flickr that I’ve run into in the past, but this time, at a time when it annoyed me enough to not let slide. I ran into one too many of these:

A bit of research indicates flickr does this to you when you update images in place. It rewrites the display images to new URLs and breaks the old ones. But it does so in a way that doesn’t actually cause an error, because they show you an image that says they can’t show you an image.

And so basically, there’s no way to update an image in place without breaking your links, and no way to find those broken links, because Flickr doesn’t pass them along as broken. So sitting on my blog are dozens of these, because when I reprocess an image to improve it, or update the metadata or caption or keywords and republish, things break. And there’s no way to find them and fix them other than a hard, manual check of the blog postings for non-broken broken images.

Which I’ve noticed for a while without really thinking about much, except I just went through and republished basically 100% of my flickr library to update captions and fix some images, and to sync out updated keywords. So now basically everything is broken. and Flickr is helping me by showing a holder image, but not reporting an error, so my blog’s broken link checker sees them as fine.

and I’m wondering, why, flickr, do you see this as GOOD BEHAVIOR? and have for a long time? At the very least, can’t I have an option to turn this off and get the 404, if I ask nicely? (well, no. sorry).

So I’m annoyed at Flickr. And that got me thinking — every community at Flickr I used to contribute to is at best moribund; unless it’s a community oriented towards gaming interestingness, flickr seems dead. they haven’t innovated well the last (mumble) years at all. The site is stagnated, image display is way behind sites like Smugmug or 500px. They haven’t innovated the community at all. the site is tired and increasingly uninteresting.

So why am I still using it?

I can’t answer that question. Originally, I split my flickr and smugmug sites between my “professional” and “everything else” collection of images. But since I have no plans to go pro any time soon, is that a necessary distinction? Was it ever?

So now, I’m having a big discussion with myself: do I migrate everything to  Smugmug? Do I move off flickr to Picasa? Do I use something else, like rolling my own or using something like OpenPhoto? Do I leave it alone?

I don’t know yet. but I’m definitely leaning towards a major restructure of smugmug to include all my images and using smart collections to handle the “serious” portfolio. It looks very do-able with some work.

I’m going to chew on this a bit. I’m interested in your feedback. OpenPhoto looks interesting — it was passed along to me by a friend — but I’m not sure that’s the direction I want to go right now. but I want to look at it further. I’m probably going to think about it a week or so, and then decide what to do (if anything). Maybe I’ll stop being annoyed at Flickr again. I dunno. But if I’m going to whack this particular mole, I might as well do it in a way where I can make this problem go away forever. I just want to make sure I know what new problems I’ll be creating for myself…

Today’s Shared Links for September 29, 2011

• The Life of Derek Boogaard
• Basics: Six Categories of Snap Criticism
• Introduction to Digital Printing Part II
• David duChemin & Jeremy Cowart Workshops on Sale!
• What’s Your Angle?
• Developing muscle memory and fluid technique is almost as important as developing a sense of purpose.

Today’s Shared Links for September 28, 2011

• Natural-looking nature photography and color
• Birds by Abby Diamond
• Salt Beings
• Sean Avery, intolerance and the NHL
• In Obese Mice, Exercise Eases Arthritis, Even Without Weight Loss
• San Francisco Bulls hold downtown press conference to formally announce new team for 2012-13 ECHL season
• Totem Heritage Center, Ketchikan
• Developing Your Photographic Style: Excerpt From A Chat with Zack Arias

Sell Netflix to Amazon? That Might Be Crazy Enough to Work

Sell Netflix to Amazon? That Might Be Crazy Enough to Work:

This whole Netflix-Qwikster split had a fair number of people wondering if Reed Hastings had lost his mind.

Hastings is no dummy, though, so there’s got to be some sort of method to the perceived madness. Industry analyst Michael Pachter wrote in a note to clients the very same thing; that there’s “a method to their madness,” reports MarketWatch.

Pachter’s theory? Netflix could sell its streaming business to Amazon, a company with deep pockets that’s been aggressively trying to make inroads with its digital content offerings. It’s done well with digital books, it’s still trying to get its footing with digital music, and perhaps now we get to see how big it can go with movies and TV. And what better way to go big with streaming movies and TV than to buy the company best known for streaming?

I don’t agree with this logic, for one reason. Netflix is a very useful brand; they wouldn’t attach the brand to the part they intend to sell. so the intent, I think, is to keep the streaming, because that’s the part branded as Netflix moving forward.

I do think there’s a good reason to do this that I haven’t seen others talk about. It comes back to two key points:

First, I think pretty much everyone agrees that at some point, streaming is going to disrupt and kill mailing DVDs out via the post office. So if Netflix doesn’t disrupt itself, someone else will do it to them at some point. It takes a brave company to make the decision to take itself on and take a short term hit to implement a long-term strategy, so I give Netflix major kudos for being willing to take this step, whether or not it succeeds.

Second, Netflix has struggled to convince the studios and media owners to license for streaming. Early on, the streaming service was layered on top of the physical Netflix to bootstrap it. Now, it’s mature enough they’re shifting gears to make it independent, even though in the short term this hurts Netflix and its revenues. Why?

Because in the old model, revenues were co-mingled with both services. It’s easy for studios to downplay streaming and not see a reason to license to it. Now, in this new setup, the physical DVD revenues and the streaming revenues are completely separate, and negotiated separately. the Netflix team can look at the studios and say “here’s the money you’re going to get from selling us DVDs” (and see how it’s dropping?). And here’s the money you can get from licensing for streaming” (and it’s going up). It makes a clear, pure financial statement to the studios they can’t argue. it doesn’t mean they’ll buy into it immediately, but no longer can they claim ambiguity about where the money comes from, or financial shenanigans about how it’s generated. Both forms of media will be accounted separately, and Netflix can use that to negotiate and leverage with the studios to get that material into the streaming part of the company.

So to me, this is part of the Netflix strategy to convince the studios it’s time to get serious about licensing for streaming. It’s going to mean a short term hit to the company, but in the long run, it sets Netflix up to own the market for streaming video the way it owned distributing DVDs. And if Netflix doesn’t do this — someone will do it to them.

give them credit for being willing to take the hit. Few companies would.

Today’s Shared Links for September 27, 2011

• The Falling Photo Bubble
• The Reasons Your Photography Blog is Failing
• Own Your Digital Home
• Photographing Joshua Tree National Park
• There are times when the EP3 doesn't do what I need from a camera…..
• Introducing: Joan Slonczewski
• Light and dark. Sharp and soft. The palette of expression is personal.

What if Steve Jobs was the CEO of a Camera Company?

What if Steve Jobs was the CEO of a Camera Company?:

Suppose Apple hadn’t abandoned its digital camera business. What effect would Steve Jobs and his team have had on the cameras we use today? Photo enthusiast Karim Ghantous thought about this recently, and came up with the following list of things he thinks Jobs might have pushed for:

• Filter threads would have died out 20 years ago

• There would be no under-performing lenses and all would have neutral or pleasant bokeh.

• DSLRs would not have an LCD on the top panel. Professional DSLRs would have fewer features (e.g. no ‘art’ filters etc.).

• They would allow third-party software ‘applets’ for such things but the applets would never be allowed to move, delete or modify captured images, nor would they be allowed to interfere with the camera’s controls.

• Pro bodies would have always had dual SD card slots.

• Lenses would allow manual focus and zoom but would not have aperture rings (as is the case now) Materials used for construction would be chosen on the basis of best suitability.

• Plastic would not be shunned by default but not used for the sake of cost-cutting; transparent ceramics might be used as well.

• No more 3:2 aspect ratio. All sensors would be 4:3 with optional 16:9 mode.

 

What do you think a Jobs-led camera manufacturer would promote?

 

Interesting ideas, but it kinda misses the core of Apple under Jobs. Apple doesn’t cater to the professional, but instead enables the consumer. So there would be no pro bodies.

Instead, there would be a really good consumer camera. And honestly, doesn’t the iPhone 4 already pretty much define where the consumer part of the industry is going? I think we already have the answer to this question.

Today’s Shared Links for September 26, 2011

• Saving Images from the Brink of Extinction
• The Myth of the Myth of Talent
• Indie Spotlight: Dominique Palombieri
• Is the print dead? Was analog photography really about print? Is digital a different medium altogether?
• Central Coast and Napa Journal

I think I’m back. at least for now…

I seem to be returning back to to the world of the blog. Apologies for the relative silence, but life’s been really busy, and something had to give. I decided it was better for the blog to take a break than for me to jump off a bridge….

It’s been a strange year so far. After my May trip to Yosemite, I knew I was going to go into a busy time as we prepared to ship the TouchPad, and so I figured free time was going to be sparse. I was right, plus I just felt worn out, so as it turns out, I only picked up the camera once between May and August, and it’s only been since mid-August that I’ve been trying to get out and bird and shoot again on any kind of schedule.

One thing I hadn’t planned on was that the TouchPad sales would be as challenged as they were. One thing I definitely did not expect was that our CEO would blow up our division and send it out behind the shed to be shot, only to later see the board take our CEO out behind the shed and shoot him as well (footnote 1). To say it’s created a bit of a chaotic and stressful time for people within the webOS world — well, that’s no surprise to anyone, right? And a week ago, they laid off a chunk of the webOS family (but I and Developer Relations are intact; still, it’s never fun, and it’s not easy for anyone).

We’re still waiting to hear how all of this is going to settle out, but I’m now sort of in a holding pattern until I hear more.  So it’s gone from acute stress to chronic minor stress.

On top of that, mom decided she needed to replace her computer, which meant a couple of weeks of pulling the hardware and software together, getting it all set up, and then a pair of trips down to SoCal to set it all up and get her running on it (and then going back down to fix the Wifi network and a few things that didn’t work right the first time).

I’d been thinking of taking a bit of time off and going somewhere quiet to recharge the batteries, but the SoCal trips fixed that. right now, not exactly sure when I’ll get a chance to pull some time off, so I’ve been trying to do other things to recharge the batteries (like avoid the blog, not stress over writing, etc….). And now, the fall weather is hitting the Oregon Coast, and I’m not sure whether it’d make sense to head that way as I was thinking, or if I’d spend the trip watching it rain from the hotel room. Hmm.

Oh, and the dishwasher retired. We have a new one, a Bosch, which we really like. and me knee and I had a bit of a fight, but I finally declared a draw. Which sort of made going on the trip mythical for a while….

So it’s been a crazy year, now finally settling down into a dull noise (I hope). at least pending the next corporate restructuring. Until then, I’ve started getting out and walking again, I’ve started carrying the camera again, I’ve been spending time in Lightroom again, and birding, and now I’m finally feeling like I have the time and energy to support writing regularly for the blog again…. We’ll see how well I do. No backlog of articles to buffer a busy day, but plenty of things I want to write about.

We’ll see how it goes. but if aliens beamed down and destroyed corporate HQ tomorrow, I don’t think I’d be surprised at this point.

Chuq

(footnote 1: no, really. we didn’t shoot him. we drove him out to the farm where he can run free and be happy with all of the other corporate CEOs that have lost their jobs to major compensation payouts; payouts which, I note for the record, the 500 ex-webOS staffers didn’t get… combined).

Today’s Shared Links for September 25, 2011

• Facebook tracks what you do online, even when you’re logged out
• Small Trees and Plants, Granite Slabs
• A Moment in the Storm

Sandwich or Cabot’s?

Most non birdwatchers think that birding is all about grabbing binoculars and going out and looking at things. But as you get deeper and deeper  into it, it’s an activity that gets geekier and more technical than you might imagine. At the geekiest level, you end up reading things like this:

Sandwich or Cabot’s? | North American Birding:

Molecular phylogenetic analyses based on concatenated mitochondrial and nuclear DNA sequences indicate that Sterna sandvicensis acuflavida and Sterna sandvicensis eurygnatha are more closely allied to Elegant Tern Sterna elegans than to the European Sterna sandvicensis sandvicensis (Efe et al. 2009). An analysis based on CO1 sequences, with more individuals of each taxon, also recovered this pattern and identified several diagnostic substitutions for each clade. Garner et al. (2007) reported several differences between S. s. sandvicensis and S. s. acuflavida in juvenile plumage, first winter plumage, first summer plumage, adult winter plumage and adult summer plumage, and some of these may be diagnostic.

I dare you to say that fast three times.

I’m happy there are those out there worrying about this stuff, but for me, I’ll just grab my binoculars and go somewhere…