Category Archives: Blog News

Dear Young Photo Assistant, here’s your health care

The Health Care Reform Bill that just passed the House of Representatives would ALLOW YOU TO STAY ON YOUR PARENTS HEALTH INSURANCE UNTIL YOU ARE 27! Am I yelling this, yes I am. This is great news for photographers and assistants.
via Greg Ceo Blog.

nothing has fundamentally changed

People have two eyes, ears and one mouth, ten fingers and two feet. What different? The methods they use to express themselves and the calls on their attention. I urge you to run the other way if someone tries to tell you ‘people like free stuff’ is news. Did we not [...]

And here’s the dirty secret: it was easy

“Muhammad Ali made a hero out of every single journalist,” Leifer said. “Whether you were a writer, a photographer, a television commentator, you got to cover Ali and your boss thought you were a genius. The genius was really Ali.” Jordan was an equally photogenic subject for Iooss. “It was like traveling with a Biblical [...]

the internet isn’t killing anything

If someone offers to give you half of a record company, take it. They may be shrinking, but they’re still big.
russell davies via kottke.org.

Newspapers aren’t doing as badly as you think

By the way, you can still make money publishing newspapers—even in a period when advertising has plummeted. Check out Gannett’s third-quarter earnings report. Its newspapers pulled in more than $100 million of operating income on revenues of $1.04 billion. In the first three quarters of 2009, advertising revenues were off 31.6 percent, but circulation revenues [...]

Todd Ruthven, AD, JWT Detroit, on automobile advertising

CGI has definitely found its place in advertising but has not and WILL NOT replace actual photography. I believe that nothing can replace the spontaneity and “happy accidents” that can occur while actually shooting something.
[...] When you make something too perfect you run the risk of making it look fake. Using CGI requires the [...]

An Interview with Gerhard Steidl

In the past, I had to take my own humble photography to printers, and I was always shocked to see that the printers ruined the images. Originally, I wanted to simply see my own photos printed well, instead of being angry about bad reproductions all the time – for which I then also had to [...]

Googled: The End of the World as We Know It

[Brin] has an innocent faith in the Internet and inadequate knowledge about how books are published.
Ken Auletta, via  I Want Media talking about his new book on Google.

The bigger the company, the bigger the blunder

This is why your company needs an experienced marketer on staff. Real marketing directors have an understanding of intellectual property laws. Photographs, fonts, illustrations, and other design elements found online are not free for you to use, especially for commercial purposes.
via Brand’s Anatomy.

Interview: Damon Winter

So many of the photos look so similar and every time you press the shutter you’re thinking that this photo ever so slightly improves on the last image. And the next improves the last. And you never really know when they’ll stop improving. At some point you get the photo of the day – the [...]

random links to random stories in the hopes that people will click

“It is a fascinating fact is that if you go online and visit 200 web pages in one day – which is a simple task when you could email, blogs, youtube etc – you’ll see on average 490,000 words; War & Peace was only 460,000 words.”
via Media | guardian.co.uk.

We get so fixa­ted on our own shtick

A very res­pec­ted jour­na­list once told me, “I’m always telling stu­dents, if you want to be a jour­na­list, for God’s sake don’t be a Jour­na­lism Major. Study something else, like The Clas­sics or Archi­tec­ture. That means when you start loo­king for work, you’ll be brin­ging something to the table besi­des ‘Shop Talk’.”
via  Gapingvoid.

Some young photographers who are content providers are not content consumers

“If you won’t pay to see someone else’s work, why do you expect people to pay to see your work?” ”How do you expect to make a living as a photojournalist?” ”Who is your audience?”
via  Greg Ceo Blog.

500,000 loyal, engaged users who want quality, long form journalism

More sophisticated ways of measuring usership and engagement will change focus from mass audience, Plotz believes, and that will make journalism better. Raw numbers create “pressure to produce one kind of story” that will draw hits. New metrics of engagement and behavior offer a “tremendous opportunity for Web journalism to escape the traffic” trap. He [...]

it’s not news, and it’s not hard to do, and it’s not hard to replace

No one surveying the changes the internet is bringing to the newspaper business is saying “My God, who will tell me about Big 12 football! Where will I find a recipe for spicy chicken wings!”
via Clay Shirky.

David Alan Harvey on Launching a Photo-j Magazine

“You’ve got to have something to say. It could be conceptual, or you can try to save the world as a photojournalist. But you can’t just be a technician. Everybody’s a technician. You’ve got to have an idea.”
via PDN.

Emailers are now little better then spam

While emailers sounded like a good idea several years ago, they are now little better then spam. Most of the work I get is not appropriate to any need I might possibly have, and lots of it just isn’t good at all. Plus, if the image isn’t displaying in my email window and fast, I’m [...]

He who wishes to become a painter first must cut out his tongue

We must resist academia as artists. We really must. When Matisse was near death a young man visited him and as he turned to leave Matisse said, “Remember one thing: guard your naiveté. Some day young man, that’s going to be all you’ve got. And now I’m packing my bags for the next world.”
–Robert Bergman
via [...]