I went to google to find reviews on Jesh De Rox’s colorshift actions. The first four pages of google results were all on stealing his actions. Page after page of forum posts as people asked “Where can I find these” and others shared links to Russian websites. People where shameless on both sides of the trade. These actions cost $145 and probably constitute a reasonable percentage of this gentlemen’s livelihood.

I’ve worked in the video game industry for many years. Here in Austin, Disney is currently forcing their salaried employees to work six day work weeks, twelve-fourteen hours days Monday thru Friday, allowed to work only eight hours on Saturday. All salary employees, most with families, no overtime, no extra benefits. If the game isn’t successful, many will be fired after working on this title for 2+ years, the last year in crunch mode.

And people will steal that game with no shame, like they steal Jesh De Rox’s work.

My father has a good friend who’s married to a Chinese woman. She downloaded a copy of Avatar from a Chinese website for free. When asked if it was stealing, she said “No, because I’m smart”.

It’s smart like you outrun the 7-Eleven clerk after you rob the place. Smart, like I steal $12 out of her purse when she’s not looking. Or smart, like I punch her in the face and take her money. If I knew the cops wouldn’t arrest me, why not punch her and face and steal her money? It’s just thief and what you get away it. There is nothing smart about it.

I’ve watched Zack Arias’s online photo critiques and he’s pretty negative on their use. It’s enlightening to watch a professional review an image. As he reviews a website, he can recognize the exact action used on the photo. When you realize a pro can look at an image and say, “Oh, you pressed the Vintage-80s button in your action package”, you seriously pause. It’s like putting an amateur sicker on your photo. A mistake I could easily have made.

Still, not everyone can be a rock-star commercial photographer that produces only a few great images a month. Like Zack says, everyone sucked at some point in their career. You camera doesn’t have a Richard Avedon button.

A wedding photographer that reviews thousands then post-processes hundreds of images each week needs tools. I suspect in more cases than not, the client wants a particular look and that look is a cliche to many photographers.

I met a professional photographer in Singapore that never edits his commercial work. He provides all the raw images to the client and requests that his name is never used. After ten years, he was bitter. The client would never select an images he liked, and after awhile his coping mechanism was to stop caring and ask the clients not to use his name. Clients seemed happier. Work continued. His current passion was micro-stock. Only in stock photography could he maintain his standards and create work he’d put his name on. Commercial jobs were strictly work for money.

I don’t want to become that guy.

I completely hear Zack’s comments on actions, but I immediately think of that Singapore photographer and his commercial jobs.

I’ll probably purchase an action package at some point, more as a tool to learn photoshop. Help answer, how do they do that? Then continue making my own way.

I saw a review for a Leica camera that went something along the lines of “A good $800 camera, with a $1200 red dot on the front”. I’ve never used a Leica, would enjoy the opportunity, but I suspect a portion of loyal following comes not from the quality of the image, but the form factor of the camera.

Smaller is better.

Richard Avedon once expressed his regret that the camera had to exist at all. It got in his way, and I believe he held the camera at chest height, so the camera wasn’t blocking his view. To get his images, he wanted to talk with his subjects. I suspect the early Annie Leibovitz hid behind her 35mm film camera, that’s the impression I get from her book and documentary. But I digress.

There is something wonderful about the shape of old 35mm film cameras. The size of DSLR’s suck, they’re huge, gather attention, require a good bag, and so on. I own a Canon G10 and I often take that rather than my large 5DMKII. Yes, part of that is not wanting to look like a camera geek, yet those small cameras have advantages. They don’t distract your subject, sense of nostalgia, your presence can be subtler, easier to be anonymous when you want to be. With a smaller camera, it’s easier to let the gear be secondary to your vision.

Canon has the G series, and a smaller camera called the S90 I believe. Then there is new micro four-thirds camera, and of course the Leica.

A good small camera is a wonderful thing.

Yuri Arcurs, an accomplished microstock photographer, stated in one of his online videos that his normal acceptance rate was between three and six percent. Ansel Adams said his goal was to capture a dozen decent images a year. Good images are reclusive. Rare. The wrong composition, wrong light, a moment to late, a moment to early, a missed expression. I’ll leave the topic of spray-n-pray or turkey-shoot photography, where people take thousands of pictures because digital is free, for another day. I don’t think this selectivity has changed much between film and digital.

When I hear a photographer said they have thousands of good images, I feel a tad disconnected from that person. But when someone says they might have one or two good shots, I feel a kindred spirit.

As a follow-up to that, I’ve heard long time professional film photographers talk about looking through the viewfinder and knowing they nailed the shot. I completely believe them. But how they know? The viewfinder is such a small portal to see all the details. Where does that confidence come from?

I highly recommend everyone watch the twelve minute long movie entitled The Third & The Seventh. The cinematography is cliché and it’s purely visual, but the thing to realize is that this movie is 98% CG and one guy did all the work over the course of a single year! When you realize what one amazingly talented person can achieve today, I sort of shrug my shoulders at Avatar’s “next generation step”.

As I walked away from Single Man, I had a moment of clarity when I realized the gay genre is pretty reliable for a sad story with movies like Brokeback Mountain and Far from Heaven. Another genre that’s reliable for a depressing two hours would be the heroin genre. There is Requiem for a Dream, Basketball Diaries, and Trainspotting. Maybe we can make a gay heroin movie that starts and ends with the main character crawling into a fetal position and sobbing Game Over Man, Game Over. That would make for a great Saturday evening. If I had an extra two dollars, I could add the new sarcasm punctuation mark here.

While studying photography, the name Diane Arbus came up a few times. Some of her work is online and certain images, like the twins above, stuck in my head. Still I didn’t feel compelled to research her further. The images were interesting, but from a more photojournalistic approach rather than an artistic style I wanted to study. Similar reactions when I read Robert Frank’s The Americans. While browsing Flickr, one photographer’s work that captured my eye is Federico Erra. I was intrigued when he mentioned a big inspiration for his work was Diane Arbus. So I ordered Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monography, it was reprinted twenty five years after the original (1972 and 1997).

Honestly, I’m not sure exactly where the inspiration comes from. It’s art in the sense of capturing the emotions of her subjects, but I wouldn’t use the word beautiful to describe her images. The subjects in good percentage of the book are freaks, flipping through the book is almost voyeuristic. Beauty, not really. Intentionally trying to provoke or shock the viewer, probably. Fascinating, yes.

Not to take away from Arbus, but the setting alone is fascinating. Some of her images are iconic, but for others I wonder if most photographs from the sixties in New York City by a competent photographer, viewed in 2010, would be interesting. You almost can’t go wrong.

The next book will be more fashion / beauty.

This is my first real attempt at compositing. I cringe a little, because it didn’t come together as cleanly as I envisioned in my head, but I still like the overall image. My uncle Tom wanted a band shot for his ‘jazz-like’. Location was a local park, not exactly ideal jazz, but I did the best I could. I replaced the background behind the cornfield, added a reflection, from another image, in the upper right. You have to start somewhere. Would like to know how to composite that cornfield better.

I’m both excited about the upcoming release of Apple’s tablet and nonchalant, practically disappointed before it’s even been released. I consider this an educated reaction rather than flippant because for me, it’s seems highly unlikely this generation of the tablet can kill off the Kindle.

The excitement comes from the fact that everyone knows someday we will have fully functional tablets, and whatever is released is a solid step in the right direction. A big challenge with tablets is input, and Apple has the capability to truly innovate here and it will be exciting to see what they produce.

At the same time, we don’t have the content yet, check out this preview of a Sports Illustrated Table Edition. We have a catch-22 with regard to platform and content, Apple’s release might give the content providers enough of a market to do something new. However, the killer app for me is digital books. I want the eReader market to sort itself out and ideally a tablet computer will beat all these dedicated devices. Once that happens, we will have the tablet we’ve been dreaming of.

Destiny
Fate – Leave Nothing
Leave Nothing – Michael Mann directed

I enjoyed the commercials for the video game series Gears of War more than the actual games. The songs chosen for the commercials went from nowhere to the top ten list of iTunes, brilliant music selection.

Gears of War – Mad World
Gears of War 2 – Last Day
Gears of War 2 – Rendezvous

It’s a massive book, I’ve only spent a little bit of time last night exploring the images, but I will spend many hours exploring this tomb in the coming weeks. He’s won a ton of accolades and is quite famous, so I’m not sure what I can add.

Few images in this book are already familiar to me, so the overall book value is good since it’s new to me. If some of his work appeals to you, I suspect the entire book will appeal to you. $50 well spent.