Category: Blog News

So rather than complain about the introspective nature of photobooks or the endless discussions on the nature of work, we should not follow others but should instead go out into the world and find work that interests and inspires us on its own account, not the account of others. And if we can’t see that work, or find that work, if it’s not available to us except through the word of others, then perhaps we should just let it pass us by. If you can’t touch it, it’s not really there.

via Colin Pantall’s blog

More than any other USPS customers, publishers are feeling under the gun because USPS claims it loses money on the Periodicals class. Its latest numbers show that Periodicals revenue covered only 74.9% of the class’s costs in Fiscal Year 2011, down slightly from 75.4% in FY2010.

via Dead Tree Edition.

I’ve found the last couple of years the most difficult since I started out – but not fatal. Can the new opportunities replace the fading print market and collapsing library sales? Probably not for everyone. However, many of the old rules still apply. Quality and originality still have value. Niche specialisms are always in demand. Surviving as a freelance in the digital age requires new skills and an openness to new markets, but it is possible – and at least the scrabbling around should feel familiar

via BBC News.

1. Please understand that book publishing is an organized hobby, not a business.

The return on equity and return on time for authors and for publishers is horrendous. If you’re doing it for the money, you’re going to be disappointed.

via The Domino Project.

most big businesses do not allow the time, resources or culture to benefit from the failures necessary to develop an innovative, entrepreneurial streak. He claims: “To get anywhere near achieving a culture of creativity that can make your business stand out, you need people who are more excited by what is possible than they are scared of looking foolish if they are wrong.”

via Marketing Week.

When people are being true and honest, even if they don’t obey the rules, people respond to it. There’s no replacing A, talent, and B, fully inhabiting that talent and doing what you think is a fucking good idea. There’s no replacing that.

via PDN.

You don’t need to give up what you love in order to be commercial. The trick is to take what you love and make it commercial.

via Screenwriting Tips… You Hack.

I will often leave many versions of an image up on my studio wall for days or weeks and the ones that get “tired” get taken down. Those that keep speaking, keep surprising, are the ones I select. Really strong photographs can never be owned or fully understood formally, narratively, or intellectually. They resonate outside the edges of the frame, and continue to speak over time.”

— Jocelyn Lee, in an interview with ahorn magazine, via The Great Leap Sideways.

Homeland Security issued a directive that confirmed it is legal to video record or photograph federal buildings.

Police in New Hampshire continued to use their state’s wiretapping laws to arrest people recording them, even though the charges never stick.

A Miami man was told he was guilty of a felony for photographing a whale.

Police in Long Beach, California admitted that they are trained to harass citizens who are not taking photos of “esthetic value.”

A little-known law in Washington D.C. was exposed, which allowed police to arrest people for standing in one area for more than five minutes taking photos.

Pennsylvania cops continued to hold on to the myth that they could lawfully arrest people on wiretapping charges who record them in public.

And many many more on pixiq.com

Click to make bigger.
Source: www.ispwp.com

No…anything is game these days. Recently National Geographic ran a series from my Echolilia project and, due to their standards, they wanted to use the raw files, unretouched. We agreed and ran them unretouched, and I don’t think anyone noticed the difference. It’s so easy to get wed to perfection and sometimes, in the end, no one notices.

via Commarts.com.

While the digital age has brought a nearly insatiable demand for entertainment news, that hasn’t translated into a bonanza for paparazzi, Woody says. Major media companies are increasingly involved in the celebrity news business, building up their own paparazzi outfits, buying up smaller ones or paying less for independent images.

via CNN.com, thx Jeff.

Rejection as a whole is not a great reason to run out and self-publish. I mean, think about it: “Everyone else hates it, so why not punish readers with it? To the Resentmentmobile!” But — but! — sometimes, the overall pattern of rejection does indicate value in self-publishing. Getting a lot of those “it’s good, but I can’t do anything with it” rejections tells you that the risk-averse industry isn’t willing to, duh, take a risk. So, you can absorb the risk and self-publish.

via terribleminds.com.

…when people tell you they don’t have the money, they’re lying–they just don’t think it’s worth the money.

Your job is to show them that it is.

via Now This is Cool….

Consumer Reports started its Web site in 1997; by 2001, it had 557,000 subscribers. That number has grown to 3.3 million this year, an increase of nearly 500 percent in 10 years. It has more than six times as many digital subscribers as The Wall Street Journal, the leader among newspapers.

And in August, Consumer Reports started generating more revenue from digital subscriptions than from print — a feat that must make it the envy of the print world struggling to make that transition. Even more amazingly, Consumer Reports has enjoyed success on the Web without losing print subscribers — those have held steady since 2001 at around four million.

via NYTimes.com.

The photo was an unexpected hit that I took from almost 35,000 ft. over Florida, flying from New York City to Palm Beach with—of all things my—iPhone 3GS, and tweeted it out upon landing. I didn’t realize the impact of the photo or the rounds it was making in social media until a few hours later when I looked at my Twitter mentions and all the personal messages I was receiving on Facebook. Next thing I knew, I was being interviewed by media outlets from all over the world, and my photo was on almost every evening news program. I am still in search for that perfect job that many thought would be offered to me after the photo caught fire.

via LightBox.

It amazes me how some people who call themselves photographers consider their work to be amazing, when their photographs, in fact, aren’t so hot. And at the other extreme, some purely humble folks make astounding photographs without a sense of how good they are. There is little correlation between talent and ego; they are independent qualities.

via Mike Davis Blog.

Don’t worry about being better than anybody you know personally or whose work you admire. Simply try to be better tomorrow than you were yesterday. You are not so much in competition with others as you are with yourself. Be your own toughest critic. Show only your best and develop your self-editing abilities so you know just what your best is.

— Bill Allard

via The Photo Society.