Know Where You Stand

I just entertained a very brief phone call from an arts organization in the Tucson area. They're having a holiday event this weekend, and need a photographer to man their portrait booth (replete with a Santa Claus).

As the offer stands, they're willing to provide a generator for the lights, and will allow me to set my own prices for prints I can sell direct to the attendees. I confirmed twice that there was no creative fee to be paid by the arts group.

No, not gonna do it. The price point would have to be somewhere around $50/print to make it worth my while to do, and no one is going to pay that for a picture of their squirming spawn with Santa.

I am flabbergasted that an ARTS ORGANIZATION would have the huevos to even consider making such a request.

So they'll pay Santa, but they won't pay the photographer. Nice, guys. Nice.

I know someone who's getting a lump of coal for Christmas this year...

On Software

I'm no operating system elitist. These days, I stick with OSX on my production machine and laptop, and use Ubuntu for my backend and general office workstation. I had experience with Windows all the way through XP.

And these days, Apple, Ubuntu and Microsoft are turning out updates at lightning speed.

It's dangerous territory, and the advice I can offer is, "don't fix (upgrade) what ain't broke."

I used OSX Tiger from about a year after it came out until nearly two years after Leopard was released. I only upgraded to Leopard in the last several weeks.

With Snow Leopard out, there's another rush to upgrade. I usually wait for a few point-release updates before I buy new software; the theory being to let the bleeding-edge folks work out the bugs for the rest of us.

Snow Leopard seemed to be an exception to that rule. It's more of a behind-the-scenes update than a full-on new release.

After toying with doing the upgrade now, the disc still sits unopened on a shelf in my studio.

Upgrades just break too much, and there is very little longer-term software support anymore.

Take, for example, industry gold-standard software like Adobe Photoshop. I bought CS3 in mid-2007 a few months after it came out. It was an upgrade from CS1.

Software barely two years old is completely unsupported in Snow Leopard. That's not to say it doesn't work, but the pitfalls sound similar to the list of side-effects on a pharma ad.

See here for a list of known problems.

Adobe has said that they won't actively develop CS3 to improve Snow Leopard compatibility; instead choosing to focus on CS4 development. From a business standpoint, it makes sense: they want me to buy CS4.

But, if you notice on that list, many of the problems with CS4 are parallel to the problems with CS3. So why upgrade? Oh, I'm sure that at some point Adobe will release a point-update to CS4 to improve compatibility, but we're supposed to sit and wait out the problems until then?

It's not like Adobe didn't have access to advance versions of Snow Leopard well before it shipped...

So, as with so many other things in life, slow and steady will again be the winner.

For now, I'm sticking with Leopard over Snow Leopard, and CS3 over CS4. It gets the job done. And I want to spend more time as a photographer than I do as an IT guy.

After all, it's the pictures that keep the business going.

The Sleeper

It's a story I've been following for a while now - AOL snapping up out-of-work journalists.

I've asked my staffer friends and colleagues at publications all over the place what their solution would be for fixing the state of the industry. Answers are all over the map, but nearly all at least touch on tearing things down and starting over.

Maybe organizations like AOL are on to something.

There's an awful lot of talent out there looking for work...

When Comments Go Too Far

This post is aimed more at the news business in general than photography.

Over the last few weeks, I've had conversations with friends and colleagues all over the country about comments on news and news-related Web sites.

An experience today has prompted this post, and my call for news Web sites to turn off comments altogether.

A paper I read quite frequently included a story about state initiatives to curb the hiring of undocumented workers and illegal immigrants being called into question in federal court.

I'm generally not a big comment-reader, as I find that on most sites, they very seldom offer anything worthwhile.

But I clicked through to take a peek. And I saw comments ranging from mild bigotry to an actual, outright call for the lynching, yes, lynching of illegal immigrants (or was it anyone from Mexico?).

To be fair, the comment was pretty quickly removed, but things can't really be unsaid.

Comments on news Web sites, from a business standpoint, seem to have done little to improve the bottom line. They generally don't add much, if anything, of value to the conversation that couldn't be published electronically in the form of a letter to the editor or guest column.

Comments are doing more to spread lies, half-truths and uninformed opinions than just about anything else. Sure, they might get the frequent commenters coming to the site, but are they clicking ads?

Many of these commenters are a part of a very vocal minority in their beliefs, and the handful come to access the ear of the masses: sponsored and enabled by a profession that is supposed to get at "truth."

I'm sure that bigots, racists, homophobes and other social degenerates drink Pepsi and drive Chryslers. But Pepsi and Chrysler are selling them a product; and not giving them an open mic after the sale.

While Pepsi and Chrysler may or may not respond to consumer complaints, they certainly don't host online forums for anonymous and oft-uninformed tirades.

So why, then, do news sites continue to do it?

In the age of the Internet, more appropriate (if disagreeing) letters to the editor can be published on the site than could ever be put in print. Why not encourage readers to write in with thoughtful, if dissenting, opinions? Require a name. Sure, they can make it up, but it's another hurdle.

Really, if folks want to put together their own "comment" pages on the Web, let them. A link to the story, perhaps a legally appropriate excerpt, and a space for comments. But the onus is on the reader to maintain, and suffer the consequences, of providing the service.

Having a meaningful and productive dialog with the public is critically important to work as a journalist. But why not funnel things away from mindless, anonymous comments and into a productive, even if unpleasant or disagreeable, conversation?

Free is 'spensive

Here's a great post about a statement Mark Cuban made about the cost of staying atop a "free" business model.

It's more about Facebook-like Web services, but it has a clear application in this line of work as well.