I’m making a few changes here and there. The first is that I’m posting more short form content—but not here. I’ve fired up journal.duncandavidson.com over at Tumblr again. That’s where I’ll be doing most of my short one to five paragraph blogging for now.
As to the rest—long form writing and photo galleries and more—that will come soon. For now, journal.duncandavidson.com is the place to keep up with me. More to come…
For what seems like months, it feels like I’ve been holding my breath. Not voluntarily, mind you. Totally against my will, I’ve felt an anxiety like nothing I’ve known before. Every action seemed both monumental and inconsequential. I had to be here and there, do this and that, and attend to details. Yet, really, I wanted to run and hide and not come out.
In late 2008, my sister Joli was diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer. A type of lung cancer that doesn’t come from smoking. It had already spread throughout her body.
Treatment started immediately and—for a while at least—it worked well. The stats gave her around a year, plus or minus (mostly minus, honestly) depending on which stats you looked at. She beat that with the help of all sorts of treatments. Radiation. Chemo. Experimental pills. But, eventually, the treatments stopped being effective. The most horrible thing about watching a cancer like this kill your sister is that you can’t give up hope, yet hope is something that you can’t drum up in large doses. Evidence and facts work against that. But still you hope. And pulled between the two, eventually you can’t even breathe.
You can pretend to breathe, and you do. But you don’t. A bit of oxygen manages to leak into your system somehow. Enough to keep you going.
After being in Dallas the last week of January, watching my sister in the hospital, my even that last little bit of oxygen leaking in stopped. The cancer was eating her blood. She couldn’t maintain platelet counts. She was living because of transfusions. I watched the doctors do a bone marrow aspiration on Joli to determine if the cancer had gotten there.
It was.
They sent her home while I was still in Dallas. With oxygen. Transfusions continued. No further treatment other than pain management, however, was an option. It was just a matter of time. On Febuary 6th, I got the word that they had started morphine. I was driving to LA to go to TED. I sped up. I raced down the 5 to get to LAX and fly to Dallas to see her one last time. I could sneak in one more visit. But, even though I was blowing speed limits out of the water—I’ve never driven so fast for so long—I wasn’t fast enough. While still in the Central Valley of California, I got the call that she had died.
I checked myself into a hotel. And just… I don’t know. Stopped.
The next morning, I had to decide what to do. Fly to Dallas or go to Long Beach. My sister had donated her body to medicine, so there wasn’t going to be a funeral. No cremation. No macabre viewing. I was happy with her choice, but it meant that I had to live with the fact that I wouldn’t see her again, no matter what. The family was scattered, gathering later in the week. So, I just headed to Long Beach. I decided I had to keep living. I had to do the things that made me myself. I had to do that because I know that’s what I’d want her to do if the situation were reversed.
My week at TED was manic/depressive. It sucked to work so hard, yet I found that keeping so busy was great medicine. I cried when people talked about how cancer was affecting their lives. I helped lead a standing ovation for cancer researcher William Li, even though it certainly isn’t the place for a staff member to help instigate such a thing. I was a wet mess behind the camera when June mentioned that a member of staff had lost their sister to cancer from the stage. I had a hard time shooting the rest of that session.
The undeniable blessing of being at TED last week, however, was that I was surrounded by proof that life was meaningful. People doing great things. People looking for hope where there shouldn’t be any. People fighting to figure out how to keep the human race vibrant and rich over the years to come. And I was surrounded by the support of all of my friends on the TED staff. No matter what was going on, how busy they were, there was always a time for a hug and a moment from all of them when it was needed most.
I executed probably my best live stage work ever last week at TED. My mind, however, was never far from Joli. Nor her family. Her children. Her mother. Her husband. I dedicate all of the work I did there to Joli. I know that she would have loved to be there. To see the things I saw.
As soon as the event was over, I was on the first jet I could catch to Dallas—where I am now. Because of the nasty weather this last week across the east and south—along with the NBA all-star game in Dallas—it was almost impossible to get a flight that night, but I did even though it took paying cash for a one-way first class ticket. An extravagance but worth every penny. I made it. I’m here. I didn’t have to wait another day to be here. I was able to meet my family while they were still gathered here.
I miss Joli, I know that her life was a good one. She did lots of good things. She saw a big chunk of the world. She had a lot of fun, even during the times when things were stacked against her. And she has, as part of her legacy, four great children—my nieces and nephews—that will take that spirit forward.
I hate the fact she’s gone. But, in the process of accepting that fact, I’ve started breathing again. And breathing is good. I’ll use that breath to do my own life’s work. To travel. To see things. And, every time I see something gorgeous or amazing in the world—every time I go somewhere new—I’ll probably stop and think, “Wouldn’t Joli have loved to see this!” And yeah, she would have.
The last week has gone by in a blur. Eight days ago, Greg and I were talking about what we needed to do to finish up our soft launch and get Luma Labs out into the public. Those discussions were in vain as we’d already planted the seeds of what was to come. You see, we’d taken off the password to the website so that friends and family could let their friends order and we could continue our ramp up to a full launch.
I really should have known better. It was like leaving a drum of gasoline sitting in the middle of the street without a top and a box of matches sitting next to it. As friend told friend, word spread. We saw the order volume ramp up a bit over a day or so. Then, midday Monday, hits on our site and our order volume exploded.
John Gruber had linked to us on Daring Fireball.
I’m insanely happy it happened. John’s kind words about the Loop are high praise indeed. They set things into motion. We got follow-on links from Gizmodo, MacWorld, Laughing Squid, and Hivelogic. As much as it meant that we were going to be in scramble mode for the next few weeks, I can’t have asked for a better way to launch. Well, more accurately, to be launched.
Really, I shouldn’t use the word launch. It wasn’t a launch. It was an out-and-out escape of the product. That’s what it was. Plain and simple.
So, there we were. Standing there at Barista looking at our iPhones. For a moment, we just babbled incoherently and made guesses as to the amount of traffic that was inbound. Then we did what had to be done. We threw out the game book we thought we were using. We called up our suppliers and manufacturing partners and shifted our supply chain into high gear.
Luckily, we have greate partners. Greg did a great job finding some of the best shops anywhere. The company that cuts the parts for our shoulder pad does custom production runs for the aerospace industry. Our sew shop works with the locally based sporting apparel companies. They’ve got our backs and we’re really happy to have them on board.
Now, a bit over a week later, we’re closing the gap on our orders and will be on top of things very soon. We’ve put together a quick and dirty video showing the Luma Loop in action. And, we’ve already re-started our plans to produce much more polished video that shows the Loop and how it works. There’s also some exciting movement on some of the other things we’re working on.
Exciting times. I can’t wait to see what comes next.
This last weekend, Mike Clark and I pushed a big revision to the Daily Shoot website. The core new feature of the website is that it aggregates and displays photographs that people Twitter in response to the daily assignments. It knows how to pull thumbnails from Flickr, The Best Camera, SnapTweet, TwitPic, TweetPhoto, yfrog, and imgur.
All a photographer needs to do to have their photographs included is post a tweet that mentions the @dailyshoot user, the assignment hashtag, and a link to a photo. For example, the following tweets resulted in the first five thumbnails in the screenshot above.
Note that you don't have to address a tweet directly to @dailyshoot. Just a mention, hashtag, and url anywhere in the tweet will do the trick. This makes it easier to submit assignments directly from applications like Best Camera.
Of course, now that we're grabbing the data directly from Twitter, we're taking things a few steps further. The site lets you browse photos by assignment or by photographer. While Mike and I were putting the finishing touches on this rev, I kept clicking around to see what different photographers had produced and was consistently amazed and proud. People are coming up with some really great photographs in response to the simple daily assignments that we're kicking out.
Finally, we've got a way for you to suggest assignments. We've also added an RSS feed to pull assignments, both current and past. We're hoping this last feature will find its way into some interesting places. For example, wouldn't it be cool if the iPhone camera application you used showed you today's Daily Shoot assignment? Now, it should be as simple as pie. (BTW, if you are interested in doing some integration, get in touch!)
Thanks to Patrick Lenz and Urban Hafner for some of the code that's running in the latest site. And many thanks to Mike who pulled everything together and made it all go. And lastly, thanks to Heroku for their platform. It's a joy to make webapps when the deployment process is so seamless and smooth.
In January of 2007 during the iPhone launch, I was working on a gig for Apple with Daniel Steinberg at MacWorld in the Developer Pavilion. The official job I was shooting turned into this ADC Developer Pavilion mini site. We wrapped up our gig one day and on the way out, I noticed something interesting around the iPhone displays. I'd seen several photos of the iPhone in its case, but I hadn't seen any of the more interesting story: the people looking at the phone with interest, awe, and more than a little lust.
I was off the clock, and the show floor was about to close down, but I knew I had to make a few shots. So I pulled my camera back out, switched up lenses, and rolled off a few dozen shots of attendees scoping out the phone. This was one of those shots:
It turned out to be one of the most widely used photos I've ever taken. Unfortunately, it was used by all those places that don't pay, don't ask permission, don't give credit, and put their own watermark all over it after snagging it from Flickr. But that's neither here nor there. The photo got around and showed up in an incredible variety of places.
Fast forward almost three years. My friend Jason Hunter just pointed me off to this Verizon DROID Pretty video where they are trying to set themselves apart from the iPhone. Here's a screen grab from the first few seconds of the video where the announcer asks, "Shoud a phone be pretty?"
It's better produced in the way you'd expect a staged shot to be. After all, they weren't working with strangers on a show floor. The models are hipper and don't have conference name tags. And it has a blingy post-production background. But the similarities are obvious aren't they? Three people, two on the left side, one on the right. The three most dominant people in my photo are all males, but many people thought the second from the left was a female and, sure enough, the second from the left in the Verizon add is a female.
I'm kinda speechless right now and I'm not quite sure what to think of it. Whoa.
In a case of exuberant experimentation, Dan Benjamin and I are going to live stream the recording of the next episode of Tack Sharp. Through magic that Dan knows all the details about—and which I remain fairly clueless about—we’ll be recording live. You be able listen into our session raw and unedited as well as possibly ask questions and give us feedback as we go. Afterwords, Dan will edit the resulting take down into the normal podcast as usual, so don’t stress it if you can’t make it.
It’ll be happening at 1PM EST/10AM PST this Sunday, November 22nd on the Tack Sharp Live page.
The other day, while I was flying from San Francisco to New York and enjoying free WiFi, Mike Clark and I got to chatting on iChat about photography. During the conversation, we got onto the topic of practicing. More importantly, practicing every day. It's a bit of long held advice in the photographic community that practicing every day is a good thing. But, frankly, it can be hard to catch a little inspiration to shoot every day.
Mike said something along the lines of, "I wish there was a way you could give me an assignment every day of something to go shoot." My first reaction was that'd be nice, but how in the world do we do something like that and make it work. I've played around with these thoughts before for the book I'm working on (slowly), and my editor has been a big proponent of sorting out how to get the daily practice message out, but I didn't have an immediate answer as to how we'd be able to do this in the real world.
Then, as we chatted--me at 37,000' and Mike in his office--the wheels in both of our minds started turning and we started brainstorming. By the time the flight attendants came by with lunch service, we'd hatched a plan to stack up a bunch of daily assignments on a Twitter account feed daily by CoTweet.
Thus was born @dailyshoot.
The rules are simple. We post a daily photo assignment. If you're inspired, and we hope you are, you'll create a photograph with whatever camera you have, upload it somewhere, and respond to the assignment tweet with a link. That's it. Simple.
Within 30 minutes of launching @dailyshoot today with the assignment of "red", we've had lots of people start following and even five people submit their photos. Another red dawn by D'Arcy Norman. This Best Cam shot by Joel Zimmer. A shot of a red car by Bruno Miranda. Full Sodium by Mark Jones. And, this photo of a dart board by George Mason. Hopefully, by the time I submit this post, there will be more. And tomorrow, when another assignment is posted, I'm betting we'll have more photographers joining in.
The point of all of this isn't to try to whip out a daily masterwork. No, it's to get photographers out and about every day. To break the friction barrier between not shooting and picking up the camera to start shooting. Because it really is all about practice.
Update: In just the first 10 hours or so since we unleashed this onto the world, we've had what I think is phenomenal feedback. We've got over 300 @dailyshoot followers and loads of people posting pictures they've taken. Already, several of you have made great suggestions like sorting out a mashup to be able to see photos people take and setting up a Flickr group. We'll sort out where to steer this ship going forward, but we're pretty proud that we're already accomplishing goal number one: helping a bunch of photographers get out there and make photographs every day. And, if you want to see all the photos that people are linking up, just do a Twitter search for @dailyshoot. That's what we're doing.
I’m in the middle of what is shaping to be one of my craziest travel months ever. It started three weeks ago with Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. Then came eComm Europe in Amsterdam. And then, last week, I was in Mysore for TEDIndia. I’ve been living through lots of stories, making loads of photographs (over 16,000 at TEDIndia!), and racking up the miles.
And my travels are only just a bit over half way done.
Tomorrow, I’ll be photographing NewTeeVee in San Francisco and then I’ll be jetting off to New York to shoot Web 2.0 Expo NY. After it’s all done, I hope I remember my name.
First, however, I have to get there. I’m currently stuck at PDX due to a mechanical problem on my aircraft. It’s shaping up to be the longest airport wait of the entire trip, and I’m only flying 550 miles to SFO. But hey, the Wifi works and they don’t block sites such as Flickr like they do in Dubai, so it could be worse.
So, while I’m stuck, I’m going to take a few minutes and throw out a quick set of updates and random thoughts I’ve been having.
The LumaLoop
First, the strap project that I’ve been working on with my business partner Greg Koenig is just about to come to fruition. We’ve got a finished design. We’re able to produce in volume. And, through a test program that I snuck out on Twitter earlier this month, we’ve proven we can ship. We’ve gotten lots of feedback and we know we’re on the right track here. Even better, we’re almost ready to open it up to the public. The product is called the LumaLoop.
Some of our test recipients have published their thoughts about the LumaLoop. Check out Ted Leung’s writeup, @gnb’s tweet, and BWJones’ Flickr write up. Thanks to all for their awesome thoughts, both in private and in public.
So when is it available? Our To Do list is very short at this point. Look for it by early December.
The Website
Part of the reason I’ve been quiet on the blog here—in addition to all the travel—is that I’m working out what my main website should be. What photographs should be part of my portfolio. How it all should go together. So, my meager free attention for web stuff has been going in that direction. I’ve given myself a personal deadline to have a real portfolio of some of my best work, including some of the photos I made in India, up by January 1st. It’s an arbitrary date, and I may blow it, but I’m going to try not to let that slip. I think I’ve worked out what the next evolution is in my business as a photographer and the website is a key component of that going forward.
India
My short time in India was awesome, inspirational, and humbling. It was a totally amazing experience. Throughout my career as a software developer, I’ve worked with outsource groups in India and learned a lot about their culture and how they work from afar. Being in India, even the glossy version of India that is the Infosys campus in Mysore, crystalized those lessons and brought them home in a way I wasn’t expecting. Indian time is fluid. Agreement isn’t always what you think it is. And great things are possible even if they’re not accomplished in a way that makes sense to the mind of an American.
Beyond the simple lessons of learning a tiny bit more about India by being there, being in the middle of TEDIndia meant that I met more Indians from more walks of life in a week than I might have in months of travel. Filmmakers, lawyers, photographers, sailers, singers, developers, musicians, farmers, scientists, politicians, doctors, inventors, and teachers. It was an intensely fascinating cross section of people who are moving India into the future. I may still be quite fuzzy on what it’s like to wander the streets and markets of current-day India, but I got a crash course in where India is going in the future and what the people that are in the vanguard of that movement are like.
My only regret about the trip is that I wasn’t able to spend more time. Alas, I’d already had booked gigs the week before and after TEDIndia. Hence, part of my crazy travel schedule. However, I have an address book full of new friends all over India and I plan on using it when I return.
Photographs
For a quick photographic overview of TEDIndia, check out the TEDIndia Highlights set on Flickr. Also, check out the Web 2.0 Summit Flickr set and the eComm Europe Flickr set.
Dan Benjamin and I have returned to the microphones and have brought TackSharp out of hiatus. It's a leaner, meaner TackSharp now and, for the time being anyway, we're just focusing in on getting content out to you. Subscribe or update in iTunes or hit up the website and download the episode.
Since the moment he got his iPhone, Chase Jarvis has been snapping like mad living up to the meme of the best camera is the one you have with you. If you couldn't guess, I totally agree with him, having been pushing out a lot of iPhone photography myself. Well, now he's gone and pushed up the game by collaboration with some software devs and putting together both a new iPhone photo processing application and social website.
The application is definitely nice. It features several push button filters that give great looks. And, in a twist, the filter sets work as a stack and you can reorder them on the fly if you want. Once you've got the photo you want, the app manages pushing it to Twitter, the Best Camera website, and Facebook for you. One of the neat features about the Best Camera website is that you can see what filters photographer applied to the photograph.
For a 1.0 app, it's got a high amount of fit and finish. The only functional thing I've seen that you need to be careful of is the maximum size you process images at. Working with full size images really drags things down. It's better to stick to 800x800 or so. I'm just about to dart off a suggestion list to Chase for the next version (including *cough* metadata handling), but you can bet I'll be using Best Camera a lot.
Read more about it on Chase's blog entry about the Best Camera.
Today, the folks over at frog design unleashed the 11th issue of their design mind magazine. The theme of the issue is The Substance of Things Not Seen and is covers the TEDGlobal conference through the eyes of frog design. They worked with the TED team and, as a result, the issue features quite a bit of my photography from the event, including on the cover of the magazine and the website.
I can't tell you how totally stoked I am about this. When I was studying architecture and design in the 1990s, I totally would have done anything to intern at frog. To later in life get the chance to serendipitously get the chance to collaborate with them—even if it's just having my photography used in their design magazine—just thrills me to no end.
I can't wait to hold the print version in my grubby hands!
A few weeks back, Chase Jarvis hosted another Seattle photo enthusiast get together. He put out the call on Twitter and in a matter of minutes, the number of slots available filled up. After all, people up in Seattle know what these things are all about. Photography. Trying new things out. Pushing oneself. The chance to play with gear that you've never worked with before. And, lets not forget the ever-important camaraderie over drinks afterword.
The venue for the event was an indoor skatepark. This gave everyone a chance to work with athletes doing their thing with strobes to freeze motion. For most of the people there, it was their first chance to really see what was possible when you combine high-power high-speed strobes with action. Strobes that can keep up with cameras motoring along at 8+ frames per second. I dove in and shot as well, but mostly I hung out with several of the attendees and we talked about how to set up shots, pick and angle, and nail a shot. I watched some kick ass pictures come up on many a digital SLR back.
So far, I've been lucky enough to trek up to Seattle for two of Chase's events. He's done a few more over the years and from what I hear, they've all been awesome. So far, I've not seen anything else like it anywhere else in the country and that's a shame.
To be sure, part of the secret sauce is that Chase has been super generous with his time, access, and staff. He's also got a kick ass studio to retreat to after the shooting ends to party it up in. But, really, I think this sort of thing should be possible to do anywhere. All it needs is somebody—or a few people—to get together and sort out how they want to reach out to photographers in their area. It could be anywhere. New York. Albuquerque. Kansas City. Sacramento. Anywhere.
The day before BizConf started up a few weeks ago, I set up and hosted a small little photowalk. I knew that there were several attendees that were avid photobugs—after all, I was there to talk about photography—so this was another chance for us to get together and go take some photos. As it turns out, the timing was just a bit too early in the day and we had a bit smaller a turn out than I anticipated. Much smaller. It didn’t matter. CJ Kihlbom and I set off and made some photos.
It was a really quiet afternoon on the beach. The hotel staff were packing up the beach umbrellas for the day and everyone was migrating towards whatever their early evening had in store for them.
As a result, other than a few horse riders and other stragglers, we really only had empty beach chairs to keep us company. I was going to try to do some high-key portraiture if I could find some willing people on the beach. Since there were none, I just shot beach chairs instead.
After walking the beach and chatting about life, the universe, and photography, we had just a few minutes before the opening party kicked off and all the other attendees arrived. So, we shot some photos out front of the hotel. I got a bit into the fountain and went for the abstract with high shutter speed, backlit water, and wide aperture.
Of course, after we wrapped up and headed over to the party, we ran into what seemed like a dozen or so people who were bummed that they had missed out on the photowalk. What can I say? Maybe next year, we’ll be able to round people up a bit earlier. Assuming, that is, that Obie and crew have me out again!
You can check out CJ’s photos over on Flickr. Start with this photo and go from there.
It’s impossible to give generalized advice about what kind of camera gear to buy. Everyone’s needs are different. Some people want to make pictures. Others want to buy the best possible thing and are afraid of making a “mistake” and ending up with the wrong thing. If you keep in mind that the primary purpose of a camera is to make photographs and not to serve as an object d’art in and of itself, then you’ll be a lot better off. All that said, I’ve recently been asked what an appropriate system to buy is given a budget of $2000. Since this number has come up a few times, here are some general thoughts.
For a budget of two grand, you can get into some pretty serious gear. Gear that would have had the most jaded of us filled with lust only a few short years ago. More importantly, you can put your hands onto gear that will let you get photographs every bit as good as the best out there, once you master how to use it and develop your own photographic vision. Sure, there are some specialized bits that are out of your budget, but you don’t need to worry about those until you know you need ’em.
There are two big questions, really. The first is whether to go Nikon, Canon, or one of the other brands. The second is how important zooms are to you.
For the brand question, there are pros and cons either way. Really, it’s sort of like the Windows/Mac/Linux debate. Some people are just more in sync with one or the other. I shot Canon for a decade. I now shoot Nikon because my own professional work has taken me into one of those very specialized corners of photography where it became worth the price of switching systems. I love my Nikons, but I can tell you that for the majority of the photography that most people do, all the major brands do well. My advice is to try them all out and see which one feels more “right” to you. If you don’t sync up with your camera, you won’t use it. It’s as simple as that. I have to constrain my own opinions to Nikon and Canon as that’s what I have experience with, but that shouldn’t stop you from buying a Sony if that’s what you really want.
Now, as far the zoom question goes, the primary benefit to zoom lenses is that they are much more flexible to use. It’s quite handy to be able to go out the door with a single lens on and take a variety of shots without changing lenses. It’s also the most affordable way to get a good wide angle shot on your camera. But, that flexibility can be a crutch. As well, most zooms—at least those that don’t cost almost two thousand dollars—are limited in how wide an aperture you can use. This affects your ability to use selective focus. On the other hand, if you have a significant other, the convenience of having a zoom means that the camera may be more approachable for them to use. High spousal approval factor is always a good thing.
So, where does that leave us? Here are a few combinations to consider:
Using either of these setups, you’ll get a decently performing zoom which can go reasonably wide and you get two good prime lenses to explore wider apertures with. The 35mm is the “normal” field of view on a DX/APS-C size sensor. The 50mm is a good portrait lens on DX/APS-C.
Why not the Nikon D5000 or the Canon Rebel T1i? They’re both good cameras, certainly. And, if you want to save a few hundred dollars, they’re certainly a good way to do it. But, in my opinion, the control sets on the D90 and 50D are better suited for taking over manual control of your camera and making it do things your way. When you drop down a level, the controls are more optimized towards the camera to do more of the decision making for you. Me, I like more control. It just feels better to me. However, if you get in the store and decide you like the feel of the D5000 or the T1i more, you should certainly go for it and save a few dollars. You’ll still get great images out of either the Rebel or the D5000.
Why two primes instead of just one lens and a prime? Mostly because I think that working with the normal size 35mm lens is a good way to improve as a photographer. I added the 50mm lens simply because it's a great deal and on a DX/APS-C camera, it turns into a nice portrait lens. If you just want one prime to start, go with the 35mm.
Why did I leave out other alternatives like the Olympus E-P1 or the Panasonic GH-1? Simply because I don’t have enough personal hands on time with them. I am totally smitten by size and form factor of the E-P1, however, and think that it’d be a totally nice camera to get and learn with.
Finally, as I started out this post, it’s really hard to give generic advice. Everyone’s needs are different. If you look at these recommendations and say “but, but!”, then you’re already ahead of the game and are making decisions based on the criteria that is important to you. Congrats! Go with it! That’s the great thing about modern SLR systems, they give us lots of choices.
I’ve talked a bit about what it was like to be the main stage photographer at TEDGlobal 2009, but there’s a lot more to getting the job done than just showing up, snapping pics, and posting them. In the case of both TED events I’ve worked on—TED 2009 in Long Beach and TEDGlobal 2009 in Oxford—it’s taken a team of talented and dedicated people to get the job done
For starters, at TEDGlobal 2009, there were two primary photographers. I was on the hook for covering the main stage. Equally important, however, was the work that Robert Leslie did shooting everything that happened outside the main room, including the social events, parties, and the atmosphere around TED. Both of us blurred these lines a bit. Robert shot some in the main room when big things were happening, such as the Prime Minister’s appearance. I shot some coverage of the parties. But, for the most part, this divide and conquer approach worked well to bring you complete coverage of the event through the TED Conference Flickr stream.
I should stress that neither Robert or I were “primary” or “secondary” shooters in terms of a pecking order. We both had our zones of responsibility and we both tackled the jobs at hand. When we were in the same area, we even tended to make sure we were taking different angles so that if something happened, at least one of us would be in a good position. It was a great way to work.
Robert and I spent all of our time either shooting, moving to the next event to shoot, or trying to eat a bite as we zipped off to wherever we were needed next. The good news is that we didn’t have to deal with the hundreds of Gigabytes of image data we created. Instead, we handed our cards off to the media team who had a fleet of machines setup to deal with our output. For time critical photos, we had Karen Eng, to quickly zip photos from wherever we were to the media room and get them ingested into the workflow. For slower priority photos, we’d drop cards off as they filled up, typically when we were also looking for a bite to eat.
Karen wasn’t just the bit of glue that kept cards moving smoothly between the media room and Robert and I. She also communicated valuable bits of information back and forth, helping to keep things coordinated. For example, when there were important times to get photos back to the media room, she’d let us know when those were. She also provided helpful status updates to the question—always on my mind—of how well the photographs I was delivering were meeting expectations and needs. Throughout, she kept things light and fun with great banter while making sure to keep an eye on the things that I couldn’t.
Once the photos were delivered to the media room and ingested, our photo editor Mike Femia took over. Seated at his workstation with a huge 30" screen and wielding Photo Mechanic, he split out the incoming files into appropriate groups, applied captions, and then sorted out selects to push to all of the various places they needed to end up. One of these destination was the Flickr stream. Another was the TED Blog, which needed fresh photos to illustrate their coverage of the event. For example, here’s a shot of William Kamkwamba as it appears on the blog:
Simply splitting photos and pipelining them between Flickr and internal users is tricky enough. But, there was a very important third destination for our photographs: the global news organizations. As part of the workflow, Mike was also sending out images to a site where various news organizations would pick them up and run with their stories about TEDGlobal. Here’s a shot of the same image from above of William Kamkwamba as it appeared on the BBC website:
Let me tell you, I’ve seen my fair share of workflows and this one is right up there at the top as far as all the requirements pulling at it. Public web distribution via Flickr, team blog support, and news distribution. I wish I could say that some single tool just made this easy, but when it’s at this level, it’s not about tools anymore. It’s about having all the right people in play. The guy who made sure to keep all of use co-ordinated and running smoothly, while at the same time working with the video team, was Michael Glass.
For most of the conferences I shoot, I’m working solo and juggling the responsibilities of photographer, photo editor, and publisher. But for a TED conference, there’s no way that would work. It took all five of us—Michael, Mike, Karen, Robert, and myself—operating within the much larger group of people putting on the conference to cover things. Even so, at the end of four days of non-stop photo creation and pipelining, we were all smooshed. It took giving it all we had to get things done. It was one hell of a team. I was honored to be a part of it, and I can only hope to do it again!
I’ve been in Oxford, England for the last week working the TEDGlobal 2009 conference. While this conference was smaller in terms of attendee numbers than TED 2009 in Long Beach, it was still the same kind of event in every other way. 4 action packed days across four different venues filled with 13 blocks of main sessions, 2 TED U sessions (for audience members to present at), and evening events galore. In other words, it was just as challenging a shoot as any other TED.
This time around, I was the main stage photographer. That means that it was my responsibility to get great shots of every single speaker that took the TED stage to give a presentation. No pressure. On top of that, due to the sheer volume of photographs this kind of event generates and the multiple uses they were put to use for—the TEDGlobal 2009 Flickr stream, the TED Blog, and released to the media—I had to shoot a RAW+JPEG workflow so that the media team could quickly route releasable images to the various sources. It is only now, after the event has finished, that I’m even getting a chance to start looking at the RAW files I took.
To enable the RAW+JPEG workflow and try to get the best possible JPEG files from camera, I set my D700s up with a vivid picture control setting with one click less saturation. Active D-Lighting was set to normal. And, I set the white balance using a ExpoDisc to pull a pure white point from the main stage lights and then added one click more blue to it to compensate a bit for the warmth of the minor lights and the bounce fill off the big red carpet under the speakers. The media team and I went back and forth a bit to arrive at these settings, and I’m probably going to prefer the processing I can do in post off the RAW files, but it was a very workable solution given all the time pressures involved.
It’ll take a bit of time, however, to get to the photos that I’ll want to try working up for my portfolio. I’ve got about 400GB of data to dig through. Something like 25% of that total is made up of the in-camera JPEG files, but still. It’s a monster amount of data to sift through.
Another interesting challenge in this event’s photography was the fact that we had the current Prime Minister of the UK on stage during the first day in a surprise appearance. His presence on-site brought with it a set of security rules that had to be followed by the staff and there were some special notes that applied to photography. By no means were these rules onerous or out of line, but I did have to do a bit of pre-planning for my positions before and during the session as well as my movement between those points. I certainly didn’t want to add “Tackled by the PM’s security detail” to my list of TED stories.
By the way, I know that many of my UK friends have loads of negative things to say about Gordon Brown. I thought, however, his TED Talk was well considered and well given. The message he gave on stage (without a teleprompter, by the way) is a good one and worthy of consideration, even if you’re not a supporter of the man or his party. I digress however, and I’m certainly not wanting to get started on a political discussion in the comments. Suffice it to say that photographing this particular talk was definitely a highlight of the week. One of many.
In any case, after this week’s work, I’m totally knackered, as the locals say. More to come... But first, I’ve got to recover from a long week and process some photographs.
After hearing other people talking about fasting before international travel to help alleviate jet lag and seeing posts about it, such as this Boing Boing post, I decided to give the Argonne National Labratory’s Anti-Jet-Lag Diet a try for the trip I’m currently on. The commercial Anti-Jet-Lag Diet site has quite a bit of information how you implement the diet, but the short summary is that you fast through most of your travel day, then break the fast at breakfast time at your destination. This trick helps reset your hunger cycle which then helps everything else transition more easily.
For this particular trip, I lightly fasted on Tuesday—restricting my intake to about half my normal calories. Then feasted on Wednesday. I didn’t totally pig out, but I did follow the suggestions of having a protein-dominated breakfast and lunch with a high-carb dinner of pasta. Thursday was my travel day. I was up in the early AM, but skipped breakfast and had a super light lunch. Then, on the SFO-FRA leg of my journey, I put an eye-mask on and went to sleep right after take-off from SFO.
It took a lot of willpower to sleep through dinner on this flight. I’d upgraded to business class with miles and everything smelled yummy indeed. But, luckily the seat was also super comfy so I was able to power nap through dinner and then for almost 7 hours. It wasn’t solid sleep by any means. I was up a few times to drink water and use the restroom and such, but otherwise kept an eye mask on to force myself back to snooze mode. Finally, at 6AM CEDT and still a bit west of the UK, I let myself free of the eye mask and had myself a 20g protein bar followed by a ham and cheese omelette that was served as breakfast. I then goofed on my laptop until we landed in Frankfurt. Exactly the opposite cycle of eat then try to sleep that is the norm on long flights.
The result has been very nice indeed. I hung out all day with my good friend (and host for these first few days of my European trip) Patrick Lenz. Around mid-afternoon, I got a little slow. There was a bit of an urge for a nap. But it wasn't that head-spinny I'm a zombie and have absolutely no idea which way is up kind of thing. Not at all. It was just like wanting a nap on a lazy day. I didn’t give into it and was up and fine till 10PM local time.
This morning—the day after arrival—I woke up at exactly 6AM local time hungry for breakfast. Better yet, it felt like morning instead of some other time of day. Perfect. The rest of the day has gone pretty well. I’ve had a few spells of feeling like I stayed up really late last night. I certainly haven’t been 100% all day. I’ve had a few moments where I actively had to engage my brain to focus on a task at hand. I even did let myself nap briefly in the afternoon. But, I have to say that this is the easiest time zone transition I think I’ve pulled off in recent memory. Compared to previous trips, my second day in time zone has felt more like the fourth or maybe fifth day of previous trips.
As I write this, it’s 11PM in Germany. 10PM in the UK where I’ll be working this next week. And it feels like bedtime. I don’t have that bizarre it’s dark outside yet my body knows that it’s 2PM in the afternoon back home feeling that is so typical of jet lag. Paint me happy indeed. Of course this is only one barely-competently implemented experience with the diet. The real proof can only be found in repeated experiences and will probably vary from time to time and person to person. But, it does seem that it’s worth a spin if jet-lag kicks your ass as bad as it’s kicked mine in the past.
My pal Willie Abrams twittered earlier today that his EF 50/1.8 is stuck on his Rebel XTi. On the one hand, if you're gonna have any lens stuck to your camera, the thrifty-50 isn’t the worst you could do. On the other hand, it’s exceedingly strange that there would be a problem in the well established EF bayonet mount. These things have been pretty well worked out over the years.
Turns out, however, that he’s not alone. This isn’t an isolated issue. Here are a few links:
In that last forum thread, there’s a reference to a screw on the lens side of the mount that can come loose and jam things up. Seems relatively reasonable. But has anybody else run into this with a Canon thrifty-50?
Dan Benjamin, my friend and co-host of the currently on hiatus Tack Sharp, has been cooking things up in his mad scientist laboratory in the hidden submarine that he keeps off the coast of Florida. Earlier this week, he released Overlapr, a tool that tells you how many friends and followers two Twitter users have in common.
For example, who know that half of the people that follow me also follow @gruber?
Certainly, if you're trying to divine the meaning of life based on follower and friend overlaps, then this is definitely a tool to help you out in your pursuit of that. But, what’s interesting to me is what Dan might do next now that he’s playing with social graphs. For example, take the overlap of people that Dan and Gruber are following and then compare them to my following list. Maybe there’s a recommendation engine in there... or maybe not. Who knows.
Earlier today, I got to hang out with Derrick Story and spend a bit of hands-on time with the Olympus E-P1 and form some opinions about this camera.
It’s been a bit since I talked about the camera strap project that Greg and I have been working on. There’s a reason for that. Greg’s been in hardcore research mode checking out more materials and techniques and I’ve been...
Short links are everywhere these days, thanks to Twitter and others. But, they have several structural problems. Here's a modest proposal to fix up those issues, if only CMS vendors and blog engines go along.
