The price of fame and fortune.

 Photography  14 Responses »
Aug 102009
 


I was reading this Bloomberg article about celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz. I would imagine that some might want to attain such heights as she in regards to fame and fortune, but I’m not in that camp; however, there is a dark side to it.

In order to keep her enterprise going she had to borrow money, $24,000,000 (yep! 24 million dollars!) from a ‘lender of last resort’. Any time that you have to go to the last resort, it seems that the boat is already sinking and there are others who are smart enough to not want to board that particular craft! She used the copyrights to her art as collateral, then when she wasn’t able to make payments, she became uncooperative in getting the copyrights transferred. She also didn’t want to let real-estate agents have access to her properties that were for sale. I wonder what she was doing that required a loan of $24 million dollars?!

One of the problems with gaining fame and fortune is the fear of losing those same things. It seems as she is struggling with this impending loss and now even the fruits of her creative endeavors are in danger of going away. Her art!

I thought about that after I read the article this weekend and wondered how I’d feel about it. I’d like to think that I’m not so attached, but I know that there is some attachment there. I could stand to lose all of the material possessions, I think. I really believe that all I need is a decent place to live, food, and water. Of course, anything above that is unnecessary, but certainly nice to have.

As for the art, there is more of an emotional attachment … but then again, as long as I have a camera, I could make more art! They couldn’t take that away.

 Posted by at 12:35

The simplicity of it all.

 Photography  10 Responses »
Aug 092009
 


Many interesting shop windows in downtown Charleston!

This weekend I find myself alone. Not a problem. I made the choice to be alone this weekend. My wife and son came down on Thursday for a brief visit and returned on Friday. The last two weeks have been pretty brutal at work so a drive to Charlotte was not in the cards. I must say that I’ve absolutely no problem being alone anymore. I rather like my company!

Yesterday’s plan was to get up early, go explore downtown Charleston, shoot a few rolls of film, come back, develop the film and get into whatever else I could get into for the day. As it turned out, I did just that. Also, I downloaded and played with Soundslides for about 4 hours, went to the grocery store, cooked a roast, some black beans, and a few other things. I’m ready for the week. :-)

Also on my list was to start reading this book that I ordered a month or so ago: The Portable Thoreau. I finally started reading Walden. What a wonderful story and lots of great insights. The book is so thoroughly quotable that I could spend the entire post just quoting from it, but I won’t. ;-)

The childish and savage taste of men and women for new patterns keeps how many shaking and squinting through kaleidoscopes that they may discover the particular figure which this generation requires today. The manufacturers have learned that this taste is merely whimsical. Of two patterns which differ only by a few threads more or less of a particular color, the one will be sold readily, the other lie on the shelf, though it frequently happens that after the lapse of a season the latter becomes the most fashionable.

Of course, he was talking about the clothes of the time and how important it was to ‘keep up with the current fashions’. Naturally, you could substitute anything for ‘clothes’: cameras, lenses, etc.

Almost exclusively, though not totally, for the last 3 months I’ve been shooting film. I’ve shot about 30 rolls (450 shots), scanned in 140 of those shots. I’ve used one camera, Mamiya 645e, one lens, 80mm f/2.8, and have decided on one film (Pan F Plus) and one developer (R09 – Rodinal one-shot). It is really amazing, to me at least, how much simpler this makes things. No longer do I even need to consider what I will take with me, which lens I’ll use, which ISO, etc.

I’ve been reading Andreas’ blog and see that he his a big fan of prime lenses and tends to find one, currently his Sigma 28 mm f/1.8, and stick with it. Perhaps he carries a couple with him; I don’t remember, but the whole one lens, one camera thing is really working for me. It’s simple!

 Posted by at 17:16

Soundslides

 Photography  14 Responses »
Aug 082009
 

Yesterday, I asked if anyone knew of Flash-like software that could be used to create a slide show with music or audio attached. I got some really good suggestions and had a look at each one of them. As Earl correctly pointed out, there are some free pieces of software already included with the Mac Book Pro. I took a swing at IMovie and, while it did what I wanted, I still wanted something a little different, something specifically for doing this type of thing.

I downloaded Adobe’s trial version of Flash and was a bit overwhelmed at how much you had to go through to put together a small presentation. Certainly, it is powerful and full featured, but it was way more than I wanted to deal with and, at $699, much more than I was willing to pay. After reading a tutorial on Flash, at the very end it had a statement: Because so many people wanted to know how to do a slide presentation using Flash, we did it, but we prefer to use Soundslides. To quote their website:

Ridiculously simple storytelling

Soundslides allows storytellers to concentrate on the story, rather than the application. Created for journalists and other storytellers on deadline, Soundslides is designed to make quick work of slide show production.

So, taking them at their word, I downloaded the demo version. They’re right! It is very, very easy to put together a slide show complete with music or audio. Very easy! And, the price is right! $69.95 for the “Pro” version. I will be making a purchase today!

All told, it took me several hours to put together this one minute slide show and that is not because of Soundslides. I didn’t have what I needed to do things properly. I had the photos and an idea; however, I didn’t have any music, so I spent a bit of time searching for some that I could use. I ended up here, listened to quite a bit of really good music, and selected this piece: Mark Koch Trio – Falling Down.

One of the ‘constraints’, if you can call it that, of the Soundslides is that it make the slide show the exact length of the music. Well, the song that I selected was about 5:37 long, so I needed something to edit the MP3. I searched and found Audacity, an open-source sound editor. This allowed me to edit the music down to 1:12 and include a fade at the end. Audacity had a dependency on another library called LAME. LAME is an open-source MP3 encoder. You only need this if you intend to save as MP3. After I got all of that stuff, I was ready to go.

I imported my pictures into the project, ordered them (drag and drop), added the sound track, and then adjusted the sliders to correspond to certain parts of the music where I wanted my photos to transition. That’s about it. I exported the files, uploaded them to the web server, and used Soundslides embed tool to generate the HTML needed to show this inside of the blog. For those of you who are non-technical, I’m sure that this sounds like a lot, but it’s not so bad. :-)

Assuming that I have an idea and some music, the next one that I put together should be pretty easy! It’s worth a look and at 10% of the price of Flash, it’s quite a bargain. It does only one thing and that’s put together these types of presentations. That’s all that I need. I’ll keep the other $630 in my pocket! Thank you very much!

It’s great to have another creative outlet!

 Posted by at 13:24  Tagged with:

Mac Flash-like software?

 Photography  9 Responses »
Aug 072009
 

I’ve become quite found of the NY Times One in 8 million stories. So much so that I’d like to try my hand at something similar.

Is this a Flash site? Is there something in Mac-land that would allow me to do something like this, combining photos and audio into such a presentation. I think that it really enhances the overall power of the images.

Chris Klug asked a good question: Why not just use Flash? Well, umm, because like all of the rest of Adobe’s software, it’s in the $699 range and I don’t have that kind of money to release to ‘play around’.

Thanks for your input.

 Posted by at 15:07

Tired

 Photography  10 Responses »
Aug 042009
 


Just a cute baby photo for you guys and gals. I took this one this past weekend when I went on a much, much, much too brief trip to the mountains.

Here at work things have been, shall we say, busy. We are at the tail end of something resembling a death march. One of those things where no one worries about anything until the end. Then everyone wants to have an opinion on how the software should look and operate. Then, it’s up to the developers, who have been asking for requirements for nearly a year, to make it happen … no matter how many hours it takes. Here is an excerpt from an e-mail that I received last week:

We need to get this resolved today and do whatever it takes to get this system to the point it is ready to demo. If that means working from 6am when the lab opens until midnight then that is what needs to happen.

In my e-mail, I was referring to the fact that we have no testing documentation because we have no functional requirements … therefore, what are we testing against? No good answers except: “You write the test plan!”. Interesting, putting the fox in charge of the hen house. Have the developer write the test plan? WTF? Oh well. So that’s what I’ve been doing. 15 pages of use cases so far!

So, of course, we’ve been working every day from 7:00 AM until 8:00 PM. There is absolutely no reason to work until midnight! We are all tired, a bit cranky, and ready for this to be over with. It should be finished tomorrow … we hope. I’ve had precious little energy to expend on photography, but I miss it.

It’s things like this that make me think KNOW that I need a plan of action to get out of this madness called software development. It’s ran its course. Time for something new. I just have to figure out what that is.

 Posted by at 17:11

A whole year later!

 Photography  8 Responses »
Aug 032009
 


Today is August 3, 2009. One year ago, I made my inaugural voyage to Charleston, SC. I had been through Charleston a number of times before, but had never stopped by. It was always a pass through situation.

My initial ‘deal’ was a 3 month contract. I figured I’d drop in for a bit and be home by Christmas. Well, the market didn’t exactly improve that much within 3 months, as a matter of fact, it got worse. There were more job losses! I decided to sit tight for a bit.

I remember when my first day when I got my badge. It had an expiration date of 8/3/2009. I remember looking at that date with as much disbelief and disdain as one might have when viewing the above bug crawling across one’s favorite food. I’ll not be here a year, I thought. No way! So, here I sit, in Charleston one year later. I guess that I was wrong. :-)

Though it has been tough, in some respects, it has been tremendous in others. I’ve grown so much as an individual and, for that, I am very thankful. My alone time, most times, does not equate to loneliness. I’ve gotten a chance to grow up in some areas that I needed to.

BTW, the bug shown above was a very polite bug. He found my son, Pedro, quite to his liking. Pedro picked up him and let him crawl on his arm and hands. When he tried to let the little guy go, he kept clinging on and didn’t want to leave. Finally, with a shake of his arm, Pedro convinced him to fly away and alight somewhere else!

 Posted by at 14:39

The Leica mystique!

 Photography  13 Responses »
Aug 012009
 


I have never shot a single photograph using a Leica. Why? Quite frankly, the prices are way out range for what I’m willing to pay. Yesterday’s post talked about the value of a photograph in the market. After writing that post, I was cruising along and saw a post on The Luminous Landscape about the Leica S2 prices being announced.

I was floored, to say the least! The S2 body costs about $23,000 USD! Lenses go for a minimum of $4,500. So, to get started, you’re looking at about $27,500 minimum excluding any taxes and shipping. Let’s call it $30,000. Ouch!

I had never even heard of an S2 and was even more surprised when I saw it on DP Review and it looked like your everyday DSLR. Upon further reading, I see that it has a 56% (1.56 x) larger sensor(30 x 45mm) than a standard full frame DSLR (24 x 36mm). To put this into perspective, I did a little math of my own. OK, to be fair, I’m not comparing apples to apples, more like apples to potato chips, or something. Anyway, my Mamiya 645e, has a surface area (45 x 60mm) 3.125 times of a standard full frame camera. So, basically, this camera is somewhere between a 35mm and a medium format camera. So, I’m thinking, it must not be just about the sensor.

So, what is it about the Leica that it has a cult-like following? What is it about a film camera, the M7, that can still fetch $2,000+ on the used market, when all others seem to be selling for peanuts? Is it the imagined association that if I buy a Leica, I’ll be a decisive moment photographer like Henri Cartier Bresson? Is the Leica build quality so legendary that it commands top price always, regardless of what others are doing in the market? I don’t know!

One thing that I do like about all of the Leicas that I’ve seen. They simplify the camera. Even this new beast, the S2, is pure camera, no fluff, it seems. If you look at the pictures, you’ll see very few buttons, dials, and extraneous controls. Now, compare that to the Canon 1Ds Mark III!!! Talk about confusing! There’s not much to get in the way of your picture taking with the Leica! I find that appealing, but not $30,000 appealing!

If any of you purchase one, you’ll have to let me know how it feels! :-)

 Posted by at 10:02
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