MyBusiness Magazine

Interview with 37 Signals CEO. 37Signals makes Backpack, the Web 2.0 app I am using to GTD "Fried built his business with a philosophy he calls 'Getting Real,' a way of thinking that inspires those with limited budgets and few resources to create successful products. While Fried's simple, streamlined approach focuses on software development, the principles apply to any small- business challenge requiring you to do more with less."

Art Beat Studio

Photographing members of the Art Beat Studio for the Wpg Foundation. Any good cause using the visual arts has my vote!

The search for A GTD workflow continues

While I am convinced that GTD will help me once I implement it fully, the real key is to find the right app that will be as painless to use as possible. I have narrowed the field to a couple Both are web based which allows me to access my "stuff" regardless what machine I am sitting in front of:
BackPack, is the first one I have been trying out for a couple days. It's a web based organizational tool, where the first 5 pages are free. I have been trying a GTD set up based soley on the five free pages and so far it's been pretty good. There is room for some inprovment and apparently it's coming.But it does has a couple neat features, including the ability to email info to the pages and iCalendar integration. Once you scale you're set up, you can pay a monthly subscription fee, something like $5 a month.

Tracks is another web based app but has been designed from the ground up for GTD. The problem is it runs on Ruby On Rails some sort of open source server database software. So the install is a bit too geeky. But once you have it running it works pretty good.

So far the advantage goes to Backpack, with the email tricks, the quick note taking, and the soone to be released calendar feature. We'll see.

Cockeyed.com presents: How Much Is Inside?

Same site as the last link, but it's all about how much is inside certain items. Funny stuff! Must Reads: Chevy Blazer, 40 ft shipping container, the ramen noodles, and one million dollars

Cockeyed.com: An Unsolicited Commercial Love Story

This a great page illustrating the dangers of Royalty Free imagery. Make sure you follow the links at the bottom to pages 2 & 3, the last entry is amazing!

LOOK FAMILIAR?

The recent PDN has an article about copycat photos. I see this all the time. Clients show up with the layout utilzing a shot they found and asking for it to be reproduced. I then have to explain how we can't simple copy the shot, we have to make it our own. It's been to the point where clients have directed models to move their appendages precisely to copy what someone has used in the layout. It's a big problem in a smaller market like Winnipeg where the budgets are tight and people aren't allowed to stretch and create their own ideas in the limted time/money they are given. Not to mention the fact that any designer under 35 doesn't know how to do a marker comp to save their life! It's too easy to cut and paste your way through a job. Here's a small excerpt:


"Photographer Joel Meyerowitz was driving around Cape Cod one day when he noticed a man wandering around a parking lot with a view camera and a copy of one of his books, obviously trying to re-create one of Meyerowitz's images.

"I finally walked up behind him and said, 'I think [the spot for the camera] is over here," Meyerowitz recounts. "He got so red in the face [because] he was caught in the act. He said he'd been sent over by Mercedes Benz in Germany to find and shoot the locations I'd shot so they could stick a car into the locations."

Meyerowitz was upset that Mercedes Benz hadn't called him to do the shoot. "I could have used that 25 grand or whatever it was," he says.

That's how a surprising amount of the sausage gets made these days in the advertising business. Copycats abound. Executions frequently re-hash someone else's work, and looking around, you can just feel the déjà vu.

Take, for instance, IBM's recent print campaign from Ogilvy & Mather, called "The World's Help Desk," which uses a series of landscape images to highlight's IBM's IT solutions for various customer types. One of the images, showing a beach from a high vantage point, appears to be the work of Italian art photographer Massimo Vitale. But it turns out to be the work of Tom Nagy, who made the image after the agency discussed Vitale's work with him. "We discussed Vitale, but I definitely asked him to mock Vitale," says Ogilvy's art director, Jennifer MacFarlane.

In fact, photographers' styles are co-opted all the time, and as long as no images are slavishly copied, it's not illegal. "It's just like trends in clothing," says MacFarlane.

But entire executions are also copied, pretty much with impunity. GSD&M's recent print campaign for Wal-Mart, designed to woo Target customers with the message that Wal-Mart has upscale merchandise (and not just basic amenities) is a visual knock-off a campaign that Sears ran back in 1993. (GSD&M recently told The New York Times that the creative similarities were coincidental.)

Malaysia Airlines' agency, Leo Burnett, meanwhile, has cloned the conceptual DNA of Air France's "Height of Pleasure" campaign from Euro RSCG, which features whimsical Elliot Erwitt-esque juxtapositions of photographic elements, such as a shot of a skateboarder, aloft over a half-pipe, who appears to be surfing on the wings of a jet far off in the background sky.

Meanwhile, Crew Creative Advertising's poster for the 2005 Universal Pictures movie "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" looks like the identical twin of an image shot previously by Tony D'Orio for Leo Burnett and its client, Altoids.

"For an instant, I thought of doing something about it, but I didn't think it would go anywhere," says D'Orio. "To prove [intentional copying] would be impossible." So he decided to let it go. "I guess imitation is the highest form of flattery," he says. "I think it would be foolish to get bitter and angry. It's best to say, 'Well, those who are important know where it started and those who don't, so be it.'"

The list of copycat ads goes on and on, as if we've reached the end of the visual universe. Clearly, though, there are always new creative ideas. The advertising competitions prove that again and again. The problem is that so many art directors and photographers, highly compensated as they may be, have resigned themselves to the recycling business. Lack of time, changes in the creative process brought on by new technology, and insecure clients are all to blame. But so is a certain lack of daring and self-respect on the part of creatives.

And they get away with it because the industry doesn't hold them accountable. As it turns out, the legal and ethical boundaries of plagiarism are so fuzzy and subjective that it is difficult to hold anybody accountable. But nobody wants to challenge the status quo, either, for fear of being labeled a crank, or worse, a troublemaker.

It's not surprising then that the urge of so many people in the industry is to brush off the issue. Asked about the IBM ad, Massimo Vitale's rep Bill Charles was adamant: "Let me tell you this: that's not Massimo, and you know it's not Massimo." He conceded, however, that "it's easy to see how they could have used one of Massimo's pictures in the layout." (MacFarlane says they didn't—and didn't need to-because Nagy "knows who [Vitale] is.")

Charles adds, "This whole thing about people grabbing pictures from portfolios, and off the Web sites to use them for comps—it's just a known thing. Everyone knows that everyone does it.… It used to bother me more, but I realize it's just the nature of the beast, and I'm flattered by it.

Creative veterans weaned on marker comps assail computers as a crutch that stifles creativity. "Your concepts have to come from a clean sheet of paper," asserts Todd Hoffman, a group creative director at BBDO/Chicago. "If you sell a client on a comp that's hand-drawn, you can evolve it as you go."

By contrast, when the comp is built around a photograph, Hoffman explains, "All the client sees is a finished ad. They don't see that it's a starting point" that allows for additional creative input from the photographer who ends up getting the assignment.

It's a recipe for plagiarism, but clients are now wedded to it, because it takes uncertainty out of the process (and saves time).

"Occasionally we can still show drawings, but it's hard to present an idea and say, 'Well, it's not exactly like this, but this is the overall feeling,'" says O & M's MacFarlane.

"The difficulty is that clients are a visually uneducated group. It's a rare client who can accept that we create our own picture from the idea, without shooting to the comp," says freelance producer Philip Pavliger, who was previously an art buyer at McCann-Erickson in San Francisco.

Agencies end up hiring photographers to copy comp images, and not infrequently, either. Photographer Jeff Sedlik says that practically every comp he's asked to shoot these days comes with a photo rather than a rendered drawing. "Very often [the client] wants it tight [copied]—and increasingly so," he says. (Ad agencies even ask photographers to copy stock images, he notes, because it often costs less to assign the shoot than to license the stock.)

Creatives, clients and photographers are all complicit, which means plagiarism is everyone's responsibility, and, therefore, nobody's. How can anyone be held accountable when everyone can point the finger at someone else who is just as guilty?

Still, the problem isn't necessarily inevitable or intractable. There are compelling self-interested reasons for everyone involved to change their behavior. Clients might get better advertising, for instance, if they insisted on creative originality from their ad agencies, trusted the agency's expertise, and rewarded the results.

For creatives, doing original work (logically) is simply a matter of self-respect. "You can feel it" when an ad is a knock off, says Hoffman. "You may not be able to put your finger on it, but you're like, 'I've seen that image.' Then you just kind of blow it off as not very good. In the long run, it hurts the creative who is trying to build his book. They're not going to get the next job."
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Canadian Living

Shoot done for article in Oct's Canadian Living

EOS Holga

A hack to mount a Holga lens on a DSLR. I'm seeing more of these little tricks and hacks. The goal is to take a camera that produces results perhaps too effectively and and "dirty" them up with some low tech hacks. Technology is nullifying the "hapapy accidents" that lower tech methods used to give us. Lensbabies, Lomo's, Holgas, are all ways of getting back to those moments where you're a little surprised at what you get.

GTD

I bought the book, thinking I'd try it out. I had no idea of the cult status GTD has. Just google it, I dare you! "GTD� is the popular shorthand for 'Getting Things Done�', the groundbreaking work-life management system and book by David Allen that transforms personal overwhelm and overload into an integrated system of stress-free productivity."

Human Space Invaders

what I want to know when I watch this amazing video is the following: How do you convince that many people to sit still for that long?!?!

Adobe Labs - Project: Lightroom

Windows users rejoice! Finally,7 months after the Mac version of Lightroom first appeared, the Windows version is now upon us! To be honest I haven't played with it much since the very first of the beta for Mac. It didn't really feel fully baked for me. But the beta has gone through afew more iterations so I am gonna try it again.

Applied Arts Photo &Illustration Annual

The new one just arrived. Big thick and smelly of ink, it's always fun to get these. Equal parts inspiring and disheartening. So much great work being done in this country. But it's kinda tuff to see the work shooters in TO get in comparsion to what we have here in Winnipeg. Oh well, we continue to fight the good fight

FlyakiteOSX

Between this link and another one here everyone who wonders why I use Macs, can get a feel for them online. Not completely accurate but fun to play with, these flash based replications of the Mac OS will give you a rough idea. But nothing beats the real thing.

The Unwanted Child

Just finished working on a 8 min video with the working title of the Unwanted Child. I was too busy working the video camera to take many snaps, but this is Josh, our lighting guy standing in front of the forge set. It's suppose to be a large industrial forge buring red hot that someone is fed into. It looks amazingly real but is a collection of cardboard bits of wood and paint. I'll update as the project comes together, but other than working the camera, my involvement in this project is done. Kinda different than what I usually do.

*UPDATE* I fixed the typos, thanks Jeope for the heads up! Freudian slip I guess!

Victoria Hospital

Some portraist from the Victoria Hospital

Jeans brand pays $200,000 for bad-boy photographer - Fashion - Entertainment

Terry Richardson gets this kind of money and shoots it with a point shoot! He's got it all figured out!
Jeans brand pays $200,000 for bad-boy photographer - Fashion - Entertainment: "Jeans brand pays $200,000 for bad-boy photographer"

Don't hit this link!!!

One of the scariest downloads in Canadian Internet history. I DOUBLE DOG DARE YOU to hit this link. But I will NOT be held responsible for the outcome! You've been warned!

David Lynch: Lumi�re et compagnie - Google Video

Hopefully you can see think before it gets pulled down.

David Lynch: Lumi�re et compagnie - Google Video: "This is David Lynch's 55 second short filmed with an original Lumiere camera. 40 international directors were asked to make a short film ... all � using the original Cinematographe invented by the Lumi�re Brothers, working under conditions similar to those of 1895. There were three rules: (1) The film could be no longer than 52 seconds, (2) no synchronized sound was permitted, and (3) no more than three takes. Having seen all of the results (including Spike Lee's pithy effort) Lynch's film is unquestionably the most interesting. It makes me wish he would shoot an entire film with this stock. Remember while watching that all the effects are in-camera and there is no cutting for scenes. "

www.biancanygard.com

Shots we did in Falcon Lake Ranch are up on their site.

Capture NX trial version released

If you shoot raw files with Nikon, you should try this full functional demo.
Hit the link to find the version of the demo you need.

I can't say I am impressed with the performance. In many ways Capture 4.0 is EASIER to work with, which is saying ALOT! The biggest deal breaker for me is the fact that it can not process anything in the background. You want to save a file as a Jpeg, you can't let it chug in the background, you sit and wait. I haven't figured out how to batch process a group of files. Every time I try, the program freezes up. The things I DO like is the control points and the edit list, which is like adjustment layers. Overall the GUI is a bit clunky and takes soem time to wrap your head around. Perhaps more time will change my opinion but I can't see how this program is gonna work in a real production enviroment.

AppleInsider | Woodcrest to power Apple's next-gen Mac Pro desktops

What does this mean? It means the next gen Apple desktops will SCREAM!! Me want already!


AppleInsider | Woodcrest to power Apple's next-gen Mac Pro desktops: "Apple Computer has selected dual-core Xeon server processors from Intel Corp. to power its next wave of high-performance professional Mac Pro desktops, AppleInsider has confirmed.

The 64-bit chips -- formerly code-named 'Woodcrest' and officially unveiled by Intel last month as the Xeon 5100 series -- pack a 4MB L2 cache and run at speeds of up to 3.0GHz on a 1333MHz front-side bus. "

Memo to the Public Relations Department. In the Pipeline:

Worth reading all the comments and the follow up post. I can relate to this struggle, coming off two days of photography the Victoria General. I didn't use gels, and yes I did a lot of people standing by beige boxes. It's always a fine line between cliche and representing visually what the public think of when you say "lab" "After seeing a recent in-house promotional brochure, I'd like to issue a brief request on behalf of my fellow researchers. This is addressed to all professional photographers: please, no more colored spotlights.

I know that you see this as a deficiency, but scientists do not work with purple radiance coming from the walls behind them. Not if we can help it, we don't, and if we notice that sort of thing going on, we head for the exits. In the same manner, our instruments do not, regrettably, emit orange glows that light our faces up from beneath, not for the most part, and if they start doing that we generally don't bend closer so as to emphasize the thoughtful contours of our faces. When we hold up Erlenmeyer flasks to eye level to see the future of research in them, which we try not to do too often because we usually don't want to know, rarely is this accompanied by an eerie red light coming from the general direction of our pockets. It's a bad sign when that happens, actually.

I know that your photos have lots more zing and pop the way you do them. And I'm sorry, for you and for the art department, that our labs are all well lit (with boring old fluorescent lights, yet), and that we all wear plain white lab coats (which tend to take over the picture), and that our instrument housings are mostly beige and blue and white. It would be a lot easier on you guys if these things weren't so.

But that's how it is. And when you get right down to it, you're actually doing us a disservice by trying to pretend that there's all sorts of dramatic stuff going on, that discoveries are happening every single minute of the day and that they're accompanied by dawn-of-a-new-era lighting and sound effects. We'd rather that people didn't get those ideas, because the really big discoveries aren't like that at all. It doesn't make for much of a cover shot, but if one of us ever does manage to change the world, it'll start with a puzzled glance at a computer screen, or a raised eyebrow while looking at a piece of paper. Instead of getting noisier, everything will get a lot quieter. And if there are any purple spotlights to be seen, we won't even notice them. . .

Update: A follow-up post is here"

Airport addicted from Think Tank Photo

my new camera bag came today from Henry's. Pretty fast, sadly Henry's has the Cdn exclusive on this product. It's deep enuff to hold my D2x with the wifi adapter and the Manfrotto plate. It holds everything I take on location with room for more. The laptop, and all the little doo dads you need these days. So now with the extra room, I can take more gum with me I guess. :-)

Tricks for remembering names | 43 Folders

Some great tips. Believe me, when you're in a job like mine, where you can meet somewhere between 40-60 in a full day of shooting, the name thing is important, especially when you want to get them to do something for the camera.

More great Low shots

Rob has some great shots of Low's concert. Check em out!

Folk fest Birds Hill

Folk Fest 2006

Another amazing year. The shots: Low in the firefly palace, this blurry shot seems to sum up the moody sparse reverb of their sound. The Indian Duo (sorry I dont' have the names handy) This is at the very end of the last raga. I always sit close cuz I love to watch the interaction between the tabla and the main player, and the little rock start flourishes they add to the performance. Cuz in India they ARE stars! Seeing Ricki Lee Jones on main stage last night was as close to a musical religous experience for me. Her effortless ability, the voice as timeless as ever, and the songs, I can admit I was tearing up at it all. I was a fan before, but now comes the respect. The telling sign is when a gaggle of other perfomers seem as excited as the crowd, she's been a major influence. The last image is of Taraq. Combining Inuit throat singing with live dance mixing, this seemed to really point how the concept of folk music is changing. Technology is everywhere, where even 8 years ago people were upset when the former singer of Mouth Music came and sang with the same setup! Taraq preserves an accident tradition and moves it forward. I knew she would rock the house cuz she was on Bjorks last one, and sure enuff,people were blown away!

Grace Hospital

Day in the life of the Grace Hospital. We walked around and captured scenes.

Big group shot

I always crinnge when I get the layouts for a big group like this. More odds someone will blink, not to mention you have to get everyone to smile at once. This one turned out ok, with only a bit of photoshopping on one kid.

One Day Only: Be A CBC Employee at the CBC Shop: Inside the CBC

One Day Only: Be A CBC Employee at the CBC Shop: Inside the CBC: "rom now until 9:00 p.m. PT, the CBC Shop is offering everyone the opportunity to get the full employee discount (30%).

CBC employees, who already get the 30% discount, today only will get free shipping on any size order if you use the coupon code below.

These offers expire today at 9pm Pacific time.

To get this deal, use the following coupon codes at checkout:
insidethecbc: 30% off
insidethecbcfreeship: Free shipping"