Blue Planet Photography

Today’s children (and adults) are being lured away from the outdoors by technology and, to some extent, over-endulged fear. Less exposure to the outdoors, unstructured play and use of their own imagination and sitting for hours in front of a computer screen, game console or television, is being shown to result in greater instances of physical & emotional illnesses, attention difficulties, diminished use of the senses, and alienation from nature. If you haven’t read it, check out “Last Child in the Woods: Saving our children from nature-deficit disorder” by Richard Louv.

I’m involved in a non-profit, multi-agency and private cooperative called Be Outside Idaho, and have been developing a project for several months to bring attention to the issue of nature-deficit disorder (not a medical term, but one used to describe the condition) in Idaho and the region. I could use your help to make the project a success.

The project consists of creating 10 - 12 fine art photographs representing concepts and issues described in Richard Louv’s book. These photographs will be mounted and framed for gallery exhibition and each will be printed at 16×24 in limited edition of 50 each. Posters, licensing, and other products created following completion of the project will be used to help raise funds for Be Outside Idaho and the programs and products this organization is creating.

You can contribute as little as $1. Contributions of $10 and up receive prints, limited edition prints, card sets, and/or a special edition book about the project. I hope to complete shooting by the end of September or October and have the prints ready for exhibition in early 2010. For more information and to contribute, click on the graphic below. The funding period for this project is 90 days, ending August 29.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

Thank you!

What’s the future of photography? What will be the next advances in digital image capture technology? How will those advances affect the professional photography industry? According to Ramesh Raskar, associate professor and leader of the Camera Culture group at the MIT Media Lab, advances in the field of computational photography could eliminate the entire professional photography industry.

The basic design and operation of cameras has not changed much since photography began in the late 1800s. Now that capturing light has become a practice in mathematics, the process of capturing and processing a digital image allows for many more options not available with film capture. Raskar and his colleagues are working diligently to make creating a digital photograph as easy as possible and “envision a day when anyone can use a camera with a small, cheap lens to take the type of stunning pictures that today are achievable only by professional photographers using high-end equipment and software such as Adobe Photoshop.”

Digital SLRs (DSLR), according to Raskar, are expensive and difficult for amateurs to use. A computational camera, whether it’s a typical box camera or a cell phone will automatically compensate for lighting, focus, motion blur, depth of field, and perspective. Because the captured data is mathematical, further post-processing could be done to refine, create, or eliminate depth of field blur, change lighting angles, correct or alter perspective, eliminate motion blur, and create deeper focus (or determine after the fact which elements you want in focus). Future digital capture devices (will we still call them cameras?) “could exceed today’s most sophisticated technologies, overcoming what have seemed like fundamental limits. Even cell-phone cameras, which have inexpensive fixed lenses, could give amateurs the same kind of control over focusing that professionals have with a high-end single-lens reflex (SLR) camera.”

To be honest, I think the technology is cool. I remember when I was in high school imagining cameras that hooked directly into the brain to record whatever a person looked at (this was before the Six Million Dollar Man). It’s heading that direction. The resulting images and possibilities cannot be fully imagined now, but I’m sure they will be amazing and could fundamentally change our visual culture. Back in March I gave a presentation titled “The Electronic Afterlife: Digital Immortality?” about how we might preserve our historic legacy in the digital age. What will be our digital leave-behind for future generations? Advances in digital image capture, data storage, presentation and processing will allow future generations to keep a more complete record of individual lives, events, and a more accurate representation of our history than ever before. In that way, this technology is interesting and exciting.

Professional photographers rely on their technical skill (how to use and compensate for lighting differences, use of focal length, aperture and depth of field, etc.), equipment, their ability to consistently create high quality images, and the gap that creates between them and amateur photographers. These developments are worrisome for those of us making a living in this ever more competitive industry. Remember that old saying, “If it was easy everyone would be doing it”? We’re heading in that direction now. We’re already in push-button automation mode for creating and post-processing digital images and the line (technology and price) between high-end professional equipment and amateur/consumer equipment is blurring every day. The gap is getting smaller. In 10 years, will there be a professional photography industry or will the barrier to entry into this market come completely down and it will be so easy everyone (even a caveman) could do it?

I finally completed transfer of my newsletters to a new provider, got a design made up for 2 of the newsletters, began rebuilding my mailing list, and sent out 2 campaigns (one for each completed newsletter). The provider I selected to go with is MailChimp. I almost went with Vertical Response, but they didn’t have the one feature I wanted (discriminating unsubscribe). I have 4 newsletters I send out; a monthly newsletter (Blue Planet Photography Newsletter), a bi-monthly (PhotoCrawl), a quarterly (Workshops), and an occasional (Gallery shows). With Vertical Response, if a subscriber unsubscribes from one list they are deleted from everything and to be re-subscribed they (not me) have to contact customer service to be reinstated. I was told they are working on correcting that, but not within the time frame I needed.

MailChimp allows subscribers to select the interest groups they want to subscribe to or unsubscribe from, update their email address and other fields (If I have them available). I can also integrate Google Analytics (just getting that started also). I can use MailChimp’s templates as is or modify the layout with their simple and easy to use editor. Photos and graphics can be edited online using Picnik, resized in place, or uploaded from my computer ready to go (or combination).

Pricing is good, too. If you have less than 100 addresses, you can send emails free (up to 6X/month). Other options are pay-as-you-go and bulk ($10/month for 0-500 addresses and unlimited sends/month up to $240/month for 25,001 - 50,000 addresses). Pay-as-you-go starts at $9 for 300 credits (1 credit = 1 mailing to 1 email address).

I find the integration of the sign-up form, unsubscribe, forward-to-a friend, archives and other notifications very easy to accomplish. Automated reply emails and pages hosted by MailChimp can be customized to match the colors and appearance (mostly) of your website to minimize the feeling you’re yanking your visitors all over the web (swinging from tree to tree as MC might put it).

It took a day or so to get used to the new interface at MailChimp, understand how to make changes to templates, import graphics and HTML, but once I got the hang of it things went smoothly. I had to contact customer service three times and each time they were prompt, patient, and friendly. The tutorial videos are well-done and treat what could be a dry subject with humor.

Overall, I’m pleased with the performance and ease of use so far. The one thing that is lacking that Emailbrain allowed me to do, is drill down on individuals who opened and clicked. I would like the ability to know exactly who opened, unopened, clicked (and on what link) so I can direct other contact information to those individuals if needed. I’ll be requesting that, as if they probably haven’t heard that request before.

For small businesses (and larger ones), non-profits, and individuals, MailChimp has the features and convenience to make the newsletter/email campaign process enjoyable.

You can view my archived newsletters (just the 2 I’ve sent so far) Here. If you have comments about the newsletters or MailChimp, I would appreciate them.

It’s not just a photography thing, creatives all over experience this at one time or another, some more than others. The client who wants to “make a deal”. Here is a very well done video illustrating some of the pitches creatives get from clients. A “friendlier” variation of the Harlan Ellison video.

I like PDN, but the mag has been getting some bad raps lately for being somewhat hypocritical in it’s reporting practices. On one hand reporting misuse and abuse in the photo industry and on the other hand participating in misuse and abuse. I also have some issues with their sometimes sloppy editing/proofreading, but that’s a minor gripe.

Back in March, PDNOnline wrote about how photographer Stephen Mallon was having issues with AIG and US Airways who were trying to suppress the release of the photos he shot of the recovery of Flight 1549 from the Hudson River.

This month, PDNOnline continues with more drama related to censorship (removal) of the US Airways logo from photos as a condition for publication by Mr. Mallon. That, in itself, seems kind of ridiculous primarily for the fact that anyone who’s watched, read, or listened to the news or any talk show worth it’s reputation, knows Flight 1549 that crashed into the Hudson River was a US Airways flight (or could very easily find that out with a simple internet search). So, what’s the deal? If it’s US Airways trying to save face it’s not going to work. People will just interpret it as an attempted cover up, an embarrassment and/or attempt to dodge liability. It happened, everyone knows about it.

However, in the process of illustrating the logo removal, PDNOnline “borrowed” the altered and original photos from a blog that, according to text in the PDNOnline article, “probably copied them without permission”. So, as PDNOnline calls the kettle black what are photographers to think? What is the photo industry to think? What example is PDNOnline showing to the world and up-and-coming editors, photographers, designers, publishers? PDN and PDNOnline have a responsibility to their readers, the industry, and professional photography. It’s not a cheesy celeb rag or tome of alien abductions and bat boys, it’s a magazine that’s supposed to represent the photo industry.

I’m a freelance photographer and this kind of behavior certainly could make it more difficult for me to justify my complaints against misuse or infringement of my photographs if a trade publication doesn’t follow the rules. “Hey, even your industry publications don’t care about copyright, why should we?”

That’s probably enough said on that. Is this a societal thing? Do people just not care anymore and “good enough” is good enough? I hope not.

Almost 2 years ago I started sending out a monthly newsletter. It was designed to send out in Outlook via my email list of former students and other interested individuals. Then, along came Outlook 2007 and it all came crashing down. My old HTML mail format didn’t work and I didn’t want to spend the time to learn what went wrong and build a new one.

I looked around to see what was being offered in terms of email newsletter providers. I looked at the newsletters I was receiving and their origin. When I went to the provider’s website I was, at that time, mainly concerned with cost since I wasn’t sending out 1000s of newsletters (less than 100…well, less than 50 at that time) and didn’t want or need to pay for that kind of bandwidth.

I ended up with a provider that I’ve used for about a year and a half. I was happy, generally, with the online template creation tool, database management, statistics, and overall feature availability. The price was reasonable as well.

Then, I began having issues with emails to legitimate subscribers (some of whom had been receiving the newsletters just fine) being rejected, bounced, spam trapped, etc. Even to some who were 2X opted in. When I brought this to the support team, they looked at it and told me it was fixed. When I looked at the deliverability stats, sure enough, all emails got delivered with zero bounces. However, when I started hearing from regular subscribers that they hadn’t received my newsletter I looked deeper into it to discover their address has been marked delivered, but unopened. I knew this because they are friends, knew my newsletter schedule and when to expect it, and/or had a spouse that received the newsletter but they didn’t get theirs.

After several tests involving existing subscribers (some I had unsubscribe and resubscribe in case there had been an error somewhere in the process) I suspect the provider made a tweak that shows all emails delivered but doesn’t record the bounced and spam trapped emails as such. They are listed as delivered and unopened. The recipient never got the newsletter yet could receive an email copy of the newsletter directly from me. That nonsense I can’t have, especially if I’m paying for the service.

So, I’ve been spending lots of time looking at email newsletter providers and I think I’ve decided on one. I’ll be making my decision this weekend. Some of the criteria that went into my decision are:

1. Segmentation. There should be an easy way to break the mailing list into segments based on interest. I send out 4 newsletters currently, all at different frequencies, and need an easy way to create mailing lists based on the selection of any of those newsletters by subscribers.

2. Opt-in. Most providers have a 2x opt-in process and customizable sign-up form. I need to be able to create a form that is simple and easy to fill out yet offers the flexibility for subscribers to select multiple newsletters and for the form to match my website.

3. Opt-out. Subscribers should be able to opt out of any newsletter without affecting their subscription status for other newsletters they may be subscribed to. One service was very promising, but if a person unsubscribed from one newsletter they were unsubscribed globally. To get reinstated, the subscriber needed to contact the provider, not me. Nope. I need to be able to manage that from my end and/or give that option to the subscriber.

4. Customized email templates. I would like to be able to customize the newsletter template or upload my own template rather than use a cookie-cutter template that makes my newsletter look like all the others that are out there.

5. Stats. There should be a good deliverable of statistics from the provider: delivered, bounced, opened, clicks, who opened, who didn’t open, who clicked and what. Anything else is gravy.

6. Cost. As I mentioned, I don’t have 1000s, not even 100s (yet) of subscribers, so I don’t need to pay $200+ a month (or $200 a year). I really like the pay-as-you-go offerings that allow me to grow into a larger mailing list without helping pay someone else’s mortgage. The plans I’ve seen and will probably go with are $9 per 300 or $10 per 500 emails. For my mailings, that would probably last me 2 months or longer and still give me some extra in case I wanted to send out something special.

That’s a broad overview of where I’ve been the past couple days. I’ll post another update when I make a final selection and give a more detailed rundown of where I came from, where I went to, and how easy or hard the process was/is.

Photographers starting out, photographers who don’t understand or make use of copyright, and potential clients who aren’t sure how copyright works will benefit from viewing this video presentation by PACA (Picture Archive Council of America) counsel Nancy Wolff. The video is a bit over an hour long, but it needs to be to cover the complex aspects of copyright. It’s worth the viewing.

Copyright Education - Legal Seminar with PACA Counsel Nancy Wolff