Category Archives: Working

APhotoEditor Is Taking The Week Off

Floating down a river in Utah. See you next week.

Anna Wintour, Behind The Shades – CBS News

Wintour is involved in every detail of the magazine: the clothes, editing the pictures and articles. She is decisive, impatient and bears a look that says “I’m the boss, and you’re boring.”

NYC Police Operations Order Regarding Photography

1. Members of the service are reminded that photography and the videotaping of public places, buildings and structures are common activities within New York City. Given the City’s prominence as a tourist destination, practically all such photography will have no connection to terrorism or unlawful conduct. [...]
2. Members of the service may not demand to [...]

NYTimes R&D

Sports Illustrated’s Slide Show Book

Sports Illustrated has a new book out on May 5th called Slide Show that examines the actual physical slides from the images that made it into the magazine. They pulled their most famous and iconic shots from their archive of more than 750,000 original slides and photographed the mount with all the writing, marks and [...]

Why Would You Quit Working With A Freelancer

Jonathan a 3rd year photojournalism student at Ohio University’s School of Visual Communication has a Business Practices class taught by Professor, Marcy Nighswander (that’s what I’m told in an email anyways). For their first assignment she asked them to contact photo editors and ask them “to identify why they quit using a freelancer’s services [...]

Talented Photographers Are 99% A Pain In The Ass To Work With

From the wish I’d said it category:
“It is no surprise that talented photographers are 99% pain in the ass to work with. They have strong opinions, are stubborn, reckless, and most of the time have an extremely bad character. But that is simply because they are constantly challenged by a reality that annoys them. Like [...]

Stephen Shore Video

What I guess goes through my mind when I’m taking a picture is I’m thinking wordlessly about how all these elements relate to each other and I’m thinking again wordlessly about finding a balance that I look for a point that seems central to the picture and when I find that point that tells me [...]

Omnicom Group’s Bad Terms For Photographers And Producers

So, it appears that Omnicom Group doesn’t want to be responsible for paying vendors if the client hasn’t paid them. It certainly seems to be the trend these days where citizens are held responsible for corporations that can’t pay their bills but an advertising agency eliminating their traditional role as financier for advertising campaigns maybe [...]

Spineless Rodale Pulls The Plug On Best Life

Honestly Rodale it’s not like you fought the good fight or anything. You saw some trouble on the horizon and quickly pulled out a gun and shot yourself in the head.
From the media kit: “Best Life teaches successful men the art of balance. Luxurious yet packed with service, Best Life guides its reader through the [...]

Choosing Photos

I got an email from a photo editor this week asking for advice in a situation that he’s found himself in at a magazine. His Art Director is an “old-schooler” where you pick your images based on physical qualities like focus and level horizons. He also has a penchant for sunny blue skies. The editor [...]

The Best Photo You Ever Made

Everyone has a “best photo you ever made” and when you’re getting started hopefully it is continually replaced by a new best photo you ever made, but at some point a picture that you made stands for a very long time (or an essay, book, body of work).
Erik Hersman was blogging from TED 2009 and [...]

Hello, I Have A New Post

For those of you who read this blog on rss or get an email with the post in it you may be reading this now simply because I’ve never written a headline like that or because you have enough trust built over time that there’s usually something worth checking out. But, what if you didn’t [...]

It’s Time To Move On

Here’s what happens when things get tough at magazines. They pull out all the past successes: the stories, photo essays, packages and the covers (oh god do they ever pull out those big newsstand hits) and go about trying to recreate the magic of the past. It’s a waste of time. The climate has changed, [...]

Daily Routines of Creative People

Working in a creative industry and being self employed takes discipline… or not. It all depends on which school of creative working you come from. Nose to the grindstone or head in the clouds. I prefer serendipitous encounters with inspiration. Gazing out the window (not the 6th ave. and 52nd one so much), browsing the [...]

Finding A Decent Story, Killing Crap and Reaching Your Potential

If you’re not familiar with Ira Glass, he’s an award winning radio (yes radio) host who presents an hour long show on a particular theme. His podcasts on iTunes are always the most popular and if you haven’t listened to one before they are highly addictive. Each and every one is a lesson in story [...]

Failure is an Option

When I worked at a magazine, every month a couple of the shoots we assigned would fail. Fail to meet our standards, fail to be interesting, fail to capture what we were looking for. Immediately we would need to either kill it and reshoot, kill the story altogether, find pickup to replace it (I worked [...]

PR Can Be Effective With Decent Photography

I’m amazed at how much effort goes into writing press releases, calling editors, staging events and how little thought goes into the photography to go with all of that. If only these companies knew how many meetings I’d sat in on where the first question after a story (or product) is pitched was “what does [...]