Category Archives: Photography

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 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.