Category Business & Industry

Entries 715 Total

Arresting (App) Developments

May 23, ’13 10:39 AM

If you haven’t seen it and you’re a fan of the Arrested Development series, you have to head over to NPR’s web site to see this insane, inside-joke app they created.

Then, head over to the Poynter Institute where Andrew Beaujon has interviewed it’s creator, Adam Cole, who says it started as a bit of a hobby project.

And for all those university kids who think their science classes aren’t very helpful, I give you this excerpt:

(Cole’s) schoolwork in biology came in handy: “My undergraduate thesis was about mussel beds, so I was very used to filling out endless spreadsheets with data.”

Journalism uses everything it can to tell a story – cameras, lenses, pens and spreadsheets.

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Start Selling Journalism

May 16, ’13 7:48 AM

This may be the best ad campaign I’ve ever seen for a news organization … Nail has created a campaign for the Providence Journal and it is brilliant.

(For mobile viewers, the video is in Flash, sorry about that.)

(Thanks to Seth Siditsky for the lead.)

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The Perfect Portfolio

May 15, ’13 3:11 PM

Over at the National Press Photographers Association’s web site, Jim Colton has put together a series of posts on building the perfect portfolio.

In the third part of the series, he quotes MaryAnne Golon of the Washington Post:

You need to care deeply about every image in your portfolio. If you don’t care about your pictures, why would anyone else?

Damn straight …

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Leading Off Changes

May 15, ’13 3:02 PM

The opening pages of Sports Illustrated have featured some of the best sports photojournalism of the week for years. The new director of photography at the magazine, Brad Smith, is moving towards changing that format for one that tells stories with a lot more depth.

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Adobe Moving to Full Subscription Model

May 8, ’13 9:27 AM

The news came out a few days ago that Adobe will not release a seventh iteration of its Creative Suite software, instead moving to a subscription model called Creative Cloud.

And then my email, Twitter, RSS and Facebook accounts all exploded with rage about how THOSE GREEDY BASTARDS DON’T UNDERSTAND I NEED TO PIRATE THEIR SOFTWARE SO I CAN DO MY OWN CREATIVE WORK AND HOPE IT ISN’T STOLEN, AS WELL!!

Or something like that.

Adobe has essential moved to a pay-as-you-go model – you want Photoshop for a month? That’s $20. (Or thereabouts, there is some confusion on the costs of all this, but that seems to be the generally accepted number at the moment.)

As photojournalists, Photoshop – even in its massive overkillingness – is still the standard. If you bought a fully, appropriately licensed version of it (because, OF COURSE you would NEVER pirate it or claim to be a student) you’d pay about $625 for it.

Let’s say you run it for two years before doing an upgrade, that puts you at $31.25 a month. Now, the upgrade is less at about $200. So, the next two years end up costing you $8.33 a month. Over four years, you’ve spent $18.17 a month to license (not own) Photoshop. And you may have skipped an upgrade.

Under the new plan, Photoshop is going to cost you … $20 a month. Or a small coffee every 30 days. And all those smart folks who in their businesses charge equipment rental fees to clients? You can now charge them for software rental, too. And mark it up.

So, to sum up: If you’re starting out, you can shell out $625 for Photoshop CS6 right now and be locked in to it for however long you want to run it. Or, you can shell out $20 a month and get all the updates … and, for the next four years, your monthly cost will be about the same.

Can we stop freaking out now?

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Building Connections

May 5, ’13 2:48 PM

The International Center of Photography has announced their Infinity Awards recognizing outstanding achievements in photography. Eight awards were given and MediaStorm produced films on each of the winners.

David Guttenfelder’s is a great look into how his work out of North Korea has come about. If you mouse over the right side, you can see the play list and watch his. (Of course, the Jeff Bridges one is worth watching, too.)

That quote at the end, about building connections, is why we do this work.

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Photographic Privacy

Apr 24, ’13 9:00 AM

The laws regarding our ability to make photographs in public places is pretty clear here in the United States. Across the ocean, though, the French are struggling to redefine privacy.

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Why Student Stories Matter

Apr 23, ’13 2:47 PM

Former Boston University student Johannes Hirn shot a story several years ago about an immigrant who wanted to box his way into America. That immigrant was Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the two alleged bombers from the Boston Marathon.

I just hope the site the Boston University News Service is linking to has licensed those images …

(Thanks to Prof. Denise McGill for the link.)

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Why the Photographer Matters

Apr 22, ’13 9:41 AM

I don’t talk much about shooting weddings here, but I know a lot of my students and readers either shoot or think about doing those happy day photos. There’s a lot of value in it, both financial and creative.

But you don’t want to get too creative, if you can call this creative – the Daily Mail has the story of a wedding shoot come completely wrong.

Of course, the bride says of the photographer, “She said she was a pro.” Which leaves me wondering if they looked at a portfolio or checked any references …

(Thanks to Scott Powick for the link.)

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The Kiss, and Camera, That Counted

Apr 21, ’13 7:12 PM

This is one of those weeks where I wish I had $60,000 just sort of hanging around. An autographed print of Alfred Eisenstadt’s V-J Day celebration kiss is going up for auction in Austria along with the camera he used to make the photo in 1945.

I am not one to collect things for the sake of collecting them, but to have Eisie’s camera? The one that made one of the most iconic images of all time?

Well, let’s just be glad I co-signed on this house with my wife …

(Thanks to Greg Mironchuk for the link.)

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