Category Archives: Professional

Professional posts, of a public nature.

NYC Pride Celebration – 2015

A lot of words are used to describe the Pride event that happens most late Junes in the United States.  For this particular Pride, which carried the added gravitas of having a recent Supreme Court decision in favor of the rights of folks to marry one-another regardless of their sex.

As far as adjectives go to describe the feeling of Pride this year, some fit well, but one word fits BEST.  I like celebratory, I like triumphant, I really like jubilant, but I love EXULTANT.  It was an EXULTANT Pride, with rainbows everywhere, love everywhere, Pride everywhere.

Slowly falling in love with New York.

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On Job and Career Stagnation

Reflecting on my career as a government contractor in the DoD, I feel as though SAIC/Leidos didn’t value me as much as AppNexus values me as an employee. AppNexus is invested in my growth and demonstrates it through training opportunities, educational incentives and growth opportunities.

A piece of advice, free, from me to you: if you’re in a job that won’t train you, won’t improve you, doesn’t invest in your success and doesn’t seem to value that humans can learn, grow and change, do you yourself a favor and find a different job.  It’s easy to clock your 8 hours and collect your paycheck, but you’ll probably find that the domain you practice has passed you by while you’ve been asleep at the wheel.  When you finally decide to leave, you’ll have a difficult time finding something new because all of your skills are old or irrelevant and all of your experience applies to the world 10 years ago.

TL,DR; Don’t stagnate at your job just because it’s comfortable.

On Apple and Aperture

I’m normally very deferential to Apple Inc.​, having become accustomed to their particular ecosystem, offerings and lifecycle over the last 10 years or so. I paid full-price for the original release of Aperture, and that’s proving to be a mistake.

It’s beginning to look like Apple is abandoning the battlefield with regards to a professional photo asset management and image editor application. I’ve used the new Photos for a bit, and it lacks a lot of features and capabilities that I would need to continue using an Apple platform for my photos.

This leaves me in a sticky situation, that of vendor lock-in. Any migration away from Apple’s platform presents difficulties in preserving any post-processing steps such as exposure changes, color-balance shifts, crops, and a multitude of other types of edits.

To free myself from that lock-in, I would either have to re-edit the pictures and hope that they vaguely resembled the original sets of edits that were originally presented to my clients, or I would play the odds of hoping that none of my clients ever wanted reprocessed images. A very long-shot would be Adobe riding in on a white horse with the ability to migrate edits from Aperture.

On a more holistic level, this has really soured me to Apple and their claim to offer professional-level A/V tools. No professional can afford to perform a wholesale platform migration every 3 years, and no software company should ask there customers to do so.

Photography for Free

I’ve only been in the photo industry for about 6 or 7 years, but it’s really interesting to reflect back on the changes that have happened, even though nothing technologically revolutionary has happened (such as historically significant shift from film to digital).

One thing that is particularly interesting is the effect that market pressures have had on the industry; faster, cheaper, easier. In NYC, one of the fashion and art capitals of the world, I regularly see requests for free/”exposure” photography where the artists already-existing copyrights are offered back to photographer as compensation for the work.  Harlan Ellison has some very well-put thoughts on the subject:

“Pay me.”
“By what right would you call me and ask me to work for nothing?”
“How dare you call me and ask me to work for free?”
“The only value for me is if you put money in my hand.  Cross my palm with silver, you can use my essay.”
“I sell my soul, but at the highest rates.”

I have to believe that some of these requests get some poor photographer to do the work, because they are so pervasive and recurrent and offer such a high value to the person receiving the work for free.

Tell me, friends, have you ever performed a professional service for free?

Note: The rules and realities are different for some charities and benefits. A gig for a friends non-profit charity is completely different than commercial product photography.

A New Beginning.

The recent move to New York City (henceforth referred to as “NYC”) has inspired a lot of changes in my life.  A more-minimalist living style, less “stuff” and clutter, and a leaner lifestyle in general.  I think that this website is a reflection of that, a distilled and condensed version of my online presence, managed through the Power of The Internet.  Websites and content-management have changed a lot since I set up my last website.  Virtual private servers are a real, feasible service offering!  That wasn’t the case, previously.  I’m also enjoying WordPress (as opposed to MoveableType, which was a MONSTER) and its integration to the GoDaddy platform.

Those comments being said, I look at this site as a new beginning, something that I can use to chronicle my growth in this new city as a professional photographer, an IT/IA expert, and someone with a lot of learning to do.  To new beginnings!