So uh.. hi. Long time no write. A very long time indeed. Long story short I’ve gone and broken myself and I’m having a really hard time getting back on course.

Burn Baby Burn

Those that know me know I get involved in my work. I care about what I do, I like to think I’m pretty decent at it and it keeps me busy,

Unfortunately due to changes at work over the last few years – some of which I can’t discuss , others that it wouldn’t be appropriate for me to discuss – its been keeping me more and more busy to the point where, without quite realising it, I’ve let it consume me.

After a long period of waiting for it to get better I finally had to admit that I was entering fairly late stage burn out. Now I’ve seen others I know go through burn out – its not pretty and I know some that have hit the wall extremely hard, some even to the point of requiring hospitalisation. I’ve not hit that point but in retrospect I’ve probably come close a few times.

Not Just A River In Egypt

Ah denial. Occasionally a useful resource bu oh so more often a trap for the unwary. For a long time I thought I was everything was OK and generally speaking things for me are. I’m not in significant debt, I work reasonable hours and our home is a place of our own – something I’m very aware many folk in my generation are not quite so lucky to have.

Oddly knowing that my life was better positioned than many others only served to help compound the denial. After all with how well everything else was going how could I possibly be having issues?

Loss Of Self

As you can probably guess things aren’t OK. While I’m not totally broken and I still manage to hold my work and general home life together, I’ve completely sacrificed my personal hobbies. For a while I made the mistake of doing some personal hobby stuff that was far too close to what I do at work. This only compounded the problem.

As a result I haven’t taken any photographs worth a damn in probably about two years, haven’t done anything with LEGO for longer and certainly haven’t written any blog pieces either. On the upside I have managed to watch an awful lot of Netflix. (Side note on that I’d just like to say the return on investment for the Netflix monthly cost vs the original material they produce is absolutely excellent).

I’ve accrued just a stupid amount of holiday time, to the point that I’ve exceeded the threshold my works policy allows. I’ve started taking off a day a week to ease myself back into knowing how to do this “time off work” thing but its not always easy. If there’s anything to learn from this post learn this – not taking time off work is really, really stupid thing to do. You earn that time off, damn well take it. Do not make the same mistake as me.

The “D” Word

I saw someone mention the other day (I’ll try and see if I can remember the source) that the term “burnout” is often used in tech circles to mask depression. To somehow soften it, remove it from it being so bad. I have to say that’s a pretty astute observation.

There’s absolutely no doubt that late stage burn out is a form of depression. Shares many of the hall marks and opens a dark pit of anxiety and dread that feels all but impossible to escape. Your sleep cycle breaks down, ability to socialise vanishes and your own health erodes. Fast.

Out Of Cheese Error

So yes its time to start slowly turning this burn out ship around and get myself back. I was thinking about setting a list of “must do tasks” but after thinking that through for a bit longer I would likely fall in the trap of not reaching those goals and declining into a funk once more. This is a non ideal outcome.

If anyone has hints, tips or stories of thing that have either helped them out of a similar situation, I’d really appreciate it. Asking for help is not something I’m particularly good at so lets see if I can start there with something to improve on.

Meantime I’m looking at doing some beginner camera courses and get myself back into photography. Maybe if I approach this with some sense things will slowly click back into place.

No one is actually dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away – Reaper Man

My first exposure to Pratchett’s work was when I was 15 and a friend loaned me Guards! Guards! which introduced my to Samuel Vimes who has remained my favourite Discworld character ever since. Vimes isn’t strong, smart or powerful. Hell when we first meet him he is a drunken wreck of a man and yet he grows. He has a sense of right, a burning cynicism and at times barely contained rage which power him through life. This spoke and continues to speak to me. The man has style, a dark and cynical style but style none the less.

Sometimes it would be nice to be wrong about people.” -Commander Samuel Vimes

Pratchett also managed to humanise death. When I was a kid I had become terrified of death. I would have nightmares and wake up in horror that’d I’d be dead. The Discworld had Death as a character right from the very first book and as they series ran on he grew and “experimented” with being human as we do every day. Don’t ask me how but this helped quell the fear and while the concept of dying isn’t exciting I no longer fear it, merely accept that it will happen and hopefully on my own terms, Terry Pratchett’s experiences in this and his championing of peoples right to die with dignity have been a great inspiration.

What can the harvest hope for, if not for the care of the Reaper Man? – Death

Far be it from me to link him only to the Discworld series. Nation is an fascinating book, written amazingly well and should be on everyone’s bucket list of books. I can not begin to describe just how well written and engaging it is. His collaboration with Neil Gaiman on Good Omens pays off well too.

“DON’T THINK OF IT AS DYING, said Death. JUST THINK OF IT AS LEAVING EARLY TO AVOID THE RUSH.” – Good Omens

My favourite thing about Pratchett’s work is that every time I re-read them I find something new. As a grow up and learn new things I start to spot more references I missed the first time around. It took me over a decade before I spotted the Dr Strangelove reference in Jingo (I won’t spoil it for you).

Taxation, gentlemen, is very much like dairy farming. The task is to extract the maximum amount of milk with the minimum amount of moo – Vetinari

If Pratchett is right, and I’m damn sure he is, and a person never really dies until the ripples they create in the world fade away then we will never truly lose him. He has become the ripples, part of the story of the human universe and will go on for as long as we do. Vale the honourable Sir Terry Pratchett, adventurer into the unknown country.

That was the thing about death. When it happened to you, you were among the first to know – Men at Arms

Who Is Australia Post?

For those not familiar with it, Australia Post is your classic previously government owned and operated mail service turned business enterprise with a natural monopoly. I would link you to the actual Australia Post website but it turns out they are subscribers to the inane “you can’t link to us without written permission” school of thought of which I have ranted about before. Screenshot snippet from their T&C below:

Yes it’s 2015 and their website team still think that magic legal mumbo jumbo can stop people linking to them. Good luck with that guys.

Back on track, so essentially in recent years Australia Post’s income from letters has been declining (as you might expect as the internet age progresses) but they should have been well placed with their natural monopoly to make a killing on parcel delivery and for a short time they did.

But then it all seemed to go a bit wrong for them. Despite their good initial positioning they seem keen to engage in a slow death spiral composed of the twin vortexes of continual price increases coupled with what seems to be increasingly poor customer service which for most people is all about delivery.

You Want Us To Deliver? HAH!

Most Australians will tell you that using Australia Post for getting parcels delivered is an exercise in frustration. Actually sending the parcels? Pretty easy. Getting the package most of the way? They can even get that mostly right even if it is comparably slow and with very poor tracking (at least in my experience). The actual last step of delivery from your local post office to your door? That they seem to have have been going out of their way to avoid that wherever possible in the last few years.

While I only have the evidence of what myself and others I know have experienced to go on it would seem that Australia Post has made a habit of hiring the lowest cost contractors for parcel delivery which has lead to an apparent decline in service.

If you’re unfortunate to have a particularly bad contractor for your area you might see things like I did at a previous address where they will drive up to a mailbox with “missed delivery” slips already filled out and fling them into the mailbox without any attempt to actually deliver the parcel. Sure you can complain about it but its a long, long process and unless you actually have them on video doing it, don’t expect action.

The Rage Inducing Letter

At our current address of the last two years however things have been pretty good with Australia Post deliveries. We get a reasonable but not huge amounts of parcels and until recently there has been no indication of any issue. On the occasion where a package that required a signature couldn’t be signed for they left the missed delivery card at the door which was fine. That happens.

And then without warning just a few days before Christmas (2014) we got the above letter. Note how it talks down you, the customer, as if whatever the issue was your fault. Had we put a new gate in place or suddenly purchased a rabid guard dog then sure it’d be our fault but now they won’t deliver because it was “outside guidelines”? What guidelines? When did they come into effect? Why were we not warned before hand? We didn’t know. The letter came with no extra material to explain it. There was no issue tracking ID we could use and unsurprisingly that close to the Christmas break we had neither the time nor inclination to chase it up immediately.

Once into the new year we finally got an answer out of them. According to Australia Post they have “always” had a guideline that contractors can not deliver to a location from where they can not view their van for “mail security reasons”. As our door is around the back of a block of apartments this apparently means they just flat out won’t bother to deliver to our door any more despite it not being a problem for the last two years.

I can only assume the delivery contractors are now fitted with explosive collars that detonate if they go out of line of sight from the laser tracker on their van or something. Surely it wouldn’t be because their contractor just can’t be bothered delivering any more? Or maybe even more cynically Australia Post is trying to reduce load on the delivery side of things and wanting to offload us onto the parcel locker service instead?

While the parcel locker service is undeniably useful, particularly if you work in the CBD for an organisation that does not allow personal mail being delivered to the office, the whole damn point of paying for delivery is that it actually gets delivered. To the location that it was paid to be damn well be delivered to. End of story.

Never mind the thousands of locations in our city alone these “guidelines” suddenly mean can’t get deliveries. On our street alone which is not all that heavily built up I can count at least thirty residences that fall under this “no delivery for you!” guideline. Oh and if you want to see what other guidelines might exist that might “prevent” your parcel from being delivered to you? Well they won’t show you them. These are guidelines for the contractors and thus don’t seem to be publicly available on the Australia Post website for consumers to read (not that we could link to them anyway right?) nor has a copy been offered to us by Australia Post representatives. For all I know the guidelines state that parcels can’t be delivered if your door is the wrong shade of green or if the moon is waxing gibbous.

Solutions?

Well if you believe the letter somehow we the consumer are meant to resolve this, I assume by organising to have our apartment block placed on a giant lazy susan so we can rotate our door to the front upon delivery arrival. We’ll get right on that.

Or we could simply choose, where possible, to use any one of the commercial parcel delivery organisations that compete with Australia Post, none of whom seem to have any issue at all about delivering to our door. Furthermore most of them seem to be happy to reschedule delivery on a missed one rather than make us traipse to their location, guess which odd opening hours they are using and wait in long lines when they actually are open.

So great job Australia Post, keep up the fine work of isolating your customer base, increasing expense and generally kicking yourselves out of the market.

Here endth the rant.

Another year done and alas not one as full of photography as I would have liked. However Jim Goldstein is once again running his “Your Best Photos” blog project and I do have a few I’m happy with.

The one above is a Golden Stag Beetle that flew onto our balcony just a few days before the end of the year. Was very co-operative with the camera although the iridescence turned out to be trickier to capture than I thought it would be.

New year, new lens. In 2014 I decided to get myself a circular fisheye lens as I’ve always wanted one. The Sigma 8mm fisheye lens was reasonably cheap and has been a steep learning curve. This shot was an early one of a domed walkway area in the Block Arcade, Melbourne.

The next three shots were from a failed attempt at a photo365 in 2014. I just didn’t have it in me to do it and will be looking for some other challenge this year which I can hopefully work around my life which is some flux at present.

Fun little shot with some LEGO bits and pieces that turned out better than I expected.
A yarn bombed set of iron rods I found in one the many alley ways in the Melbourne CBD.

A macro shot of a masquerade mask with narrow depth of field that bokeh’d rather nicely.

Towards the end of the year I was fortunate enough to get enough time and spare cash together to head to Queenstown, New Zealand for Scott Kelby’s World Wide Photo Walk which was a fair bit of fun. The first of my two favourite from that trip was surprisingly not from my DSLR but rather my phone:

And the other was of a plant making its way through the pebble beach on the lakes edge.

A few other shots from the year. First up a wasp resting on a leaf.

A shot using a ring flash from my last photowalk of the year. I’m very pleased with how the detail of the insect came out.

And finally a shot from a lucky little walk I took on a whim where I happened to arrive in the gardens with frost still on the ground allowing for a really fun series of shots.

Worldwide Photo Walk 2014

I’ve been on a few of Scott Kelby’s Worldwide Photo Walks over the last few years, always local events and I haven’t had the guts to upload my photos for the competition side of things. This year I decided to take myself out of my comfort zone and used the WWPW2014 event to do it. How? Head somewhere different, shoot something different.

Queenstown, New Zealand

So a quick look over photowalks that had been registered in easy/cheap to travel locations turned up a small one registered in Queenstown, New Zealand. I had been to New Zealand once before on a short work trip but didn’t get to see much of the place. Many of you may know Queenstown as its reputation for being an extreme sports destination but I was more interested in the landscape which friends and family had described to me as being beyond stunning. The WWPW2014 nicely fell into the Queenstown off season allowing for a reasonably cheap combination of flights and accommodation.

The Walk

I kind of suspected this might end up being a solo walk as only three people, including myself, had registered for it and an attempt to contact the walk leader a fortnight before hand was met with silence. Sure enough come 7AM on the day no one was at the start point. Just me enjoying the sunrise. After waiting for 30 minutes I set off on my own but was pleasantly surprised to run into the other registered walker, Philip Green.

Philip turned out to be a very knowledgeable and friendly Queenstown local and it was a blast doing the rest of the walk with him. We did the walk was planned along the edge of Lake Wakatipu and into the botanical gardens. Despite the lack of a group it was a pretty good time. I should mention that Philip runs a wine tour business called Appellation Central which if its run anything like how he conducted the walk is more than likely an excellent experience.

Here are the shots from the walk I thought were worth showing:

Philip got this great shot of a Black Shag that seemed to pose nicely for him as we sat there:

#WWPW2014 Black Shag at Dawn in #Queenstown – Philip Green @QueenstownWine pic.twitter.com/wds3embmw8

— Philip Green (@QueenstownWine) October 11, 2014

The Day After

As I was in Queenstown for the weekend I had booked myself a bus tour with the BBQ Bus out to Milford Sound (misleading name as it’s actually a fjord) which happily turned out pretty well. A lot of tour companies won’t run a tour if only a single person is booked but these guys were more than happy to do so for me anyway and I got a great trip with an awesome driver, Marty.

Marty as it turns out is a passionate wildlife conservationist who had played a pivotal role in helping save some of New Zealand’s most endangered bird species. He provided a great deal of detail about the area, was highly informative and amazingly helpful. A truly generous man with his time.

Milford Sound is one of the wettest places I’ve ever been and has hundreds of tiny waterfalls, low lying mists, sheer steep walls as befits a glacier carved valley. Not being a landscape photographer none of the shots I took I felt really did the place justice and if you’re ever in the area I’d highly recommend visiting it.

Planning For Next Year

So was the effort of going to New Zealand for WWPW2014 worth it? Absolutely. Despite the low turn out and the short time I had there it was a pretty great experience. Met some really nice people, got a few decent shots out of the literally hundreds I took while there. All in all not a bad little trip.

The question now is do I do it again for WWPW2015? I’m thinking yes. Pick another walk out of town and head there, maybe with a larger group this time around. Get out of my element, see some new places and just try to enjoy it. If I get some good shots out of it then even better.

And for those of you wondering if you should be involved in WWPW2015 even if you have no interest in the competitive side of things I highly recommend giving it a go. It’s more about meeting other photographers, talking with them and sharing ideas. It may also encourage you to try something new, which isn’t easy for a lot of us but the pay off can be worth it.

“…gives consumers help to find licensed digital services which are availed in Australia across the film, music, TV, books and games industries and sporting codes“

Basically it was presented as one stop listing for Australian consumers of places they could legally buy, download or stream digital content. Or as the Australian Home Entertainment Distributors Association CEO, Simon Bush stated to ZDnet:

“The lack of availability is no longer an excuse [for copyright infringement]“

But there’s just one small problem Simon. No one can find your site. And it’s all your own fault.

How To Interweb?

So why can’t anyone find this site nearly a month after launch? Is it due to hackers? Terrorists? Conspiracy by search engines because they love pirates (actual statement you occasionally see from the copyright holders)? No it just seems that the people they’ve hired to operate the Digital Content Guide website are not entirely competent. It all comes down to these two lines:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

That’s the current robots.txt file of the Digital Content Guide. It’s looked like that since launch day and I’ve been periodically checking on it to see if it has changed. What does this mean? Well they’ve told every search engine bot that obeys robots.txt protocol that they are not allowed to index this site. At all. All the big players in the search engine space obey this setting and have dutifully not indexed the site. Which is why Google shows this when you try and locate the site on its name directly:

Now hiding the site from search engines is handy where you’re in development and you don’t want it out just yet. Typically you’d set this option, then come launch day change it to allow indexing of your content. What I suspect went wrong here is the website operators forgot that step of their launch list and have more or less ignored it ever since.

The Easy Fix

Just so we aren’t accused of being just nasty mocking people, here’s the fix guys. The Digital Content Guide is a WordPress site (like this one). Just head to your Dashboard, down to Settings and into Reading. Find this tick box:

Untick it. Save. Done. Seriously that’s it. Problem solved.

Why This Matters

While it’d be easy just to laugh this off as “ha look at the internet newbies!” and chortling to ourselves, this lack of understanding when it comes to important internet concepts has massive implications given what the same groups represented by this website are demanding.

Right now there is a lot of heavy push from the entities behind this website to introduce tough new anti-piracy laws in Australia wanting everything from blocking piracy websites outright to getting access via other proposed data retention laws to information that would allow them to directly sue supposed copyright infringers.

While little to no focus has been put on availability or cost issues surrounding digital content in Australia (something I’ve written about previously) there has been a huge push for technical solutions instead from these major stake holders. The Digital Content Guide was presented as a sort of halfway measure to alleviate complaints about availability and access but when the site has been online for a month and they haven’t noticed this very simple stuff up, you’ve got to wonder if it is really meant to be useful to the average Australian user or if it was just a PR exercise to make it seem like they were making the effort.

Add to this the shellacking the Digital Content Guide got at launch time for not being a terribly useful resource to begin with (see here and here) combined with the fact it doesn’t seem to have been updated at all (for example the eBook section is still empty despite plenty of legal sources for these in Australia) it really does look more like a half hearted PR exercise with no real expected future use.

Yet these are the guys that want to have special courts, laws, rules and even technological barriers put in place despite showing that they either don’t know or care how the internet operates. This is deeply troubling, especially when they seem to have such a sway over current discussions.

I firmly believe that copyright holders and creative minds should be reimbursed for their time and energy. I have quite a large (and legally purchased) movie collection. I do not condone copyright infringement in any form but the idea you can solve it through purely technological and legal means is ludicrous. Listen to your audience, change your business plans to meet new demands. Don’t waste your money on websites that you have no intention of people be able to find instead.

Update Oct 23rd 2014

It appears someone either found this article or finally figured out how the robots.txt works and the Digital Content Guide now actually appears in search results. Shame they still haven’t bothered to update the sites content however (e.g still nothing listed for purchasing eBooks).

After a long hiatus from taking photo walks I finally got my gear together over the last weekend and set off on a nice frosty morning to the Melbourne Royal Botanic Gardens with a little visitor.

The visitor was unplanned and part of a small group of LEGO minifigs I grabbed as I left for the morning. This little hooded figure was among them and by chance happened to work very well for the day, so I decided to do a little shoot throughout the gardens.

The two frost covered ones I really like and unfortunately as the minifig was travelling in my pocket throughout the day it got progressively more covered in dust and lint. Note to self for next time – bring supplies to clean up the minifig before each shot.

Adobe Listened

Yes you read that right. It would appear that Adobe did the single most sensible thing a company could do: listened to the feedback and then, much to a lot of peoples surprise, started implementing changes that went a long way to addressing those concerns. They’ll never be able to please everyone but they’ve made some really good moves to allay concerns.

The Photography Plan

Very shortly after my first rant, Adobe announced an introductory plan for photographers compromising of Lightroom and Photoshop for $10/month. The only catch was the plan was only going to be available for a short time. Until they extended that time. And extended it again. And finally during the Creative Cloud 2014 announcements they finally decided to make it a permanent plan option.

This one single plan essentially addressed 90% of my rant. The cost was reasonable, it supplied exactly what most photographers want and it provided all the benefits of the creative cloud system in terms of easy upgrades over time. So I signed up.

Next Steps

So what convinced me to jump from the photography plan to the $50/month all applications plan? Put simply, a change of requirements. My girlfriend had started a new university course which involves graphics work and web design. As a single Creative Cloud membership allows for installations on two computers this meant upgrading to the full plan so she could access Illustrator and other tools actually made complete sense. We sign both our PCs in, she can install the apps she wants, I can use what I want and with the costs and requirements split across two people make the overall product quite reasonable indeed.

As a tangential benefit it has also allowed me to play with Adobe tools like Premier and After Effects which in their previous box suite incarnations were far too ludicrously expensive for me to even think about obtaining and working with. Now as long as we budget the money for the yearly subscription there’s a lot more open to us.

Retaining Access

During my rant I made this statement:

Spent countless man hours creating that Photoshop file? Making all those tags and keywords in Lightroom to effectively sort your collection of photos? Well all that will be useless unless you keep paying. Each month. Every month. Forever.

I wasn’t the only one with this fear and it would appear once again Adobe listened and actually responded. Not long ago they posted a blog entry on what occurs to Lightroom after your Creative Cloud membership ends. The answer was surprisingly straight forward and essentially went:

• Lightroom will continue to launch
• You retain access to the catalogue with all your tags etc
• You’ll be able to keep managing your photos with Lightroom
• However the Develop and Map modules will become disabled

This isn’t too bad and would appear to be a decent compromise. You retain access your catalogue that  you have worked so hard to organise and they disable the component they hope you will pay for again to use. There is of course those that still demand they get the full application and for the meantime it appears Lightroom will still be sold as a separate boxed application for those that want it that way.

Dark Clouds

It hasn’t all be sunshine, rainbows and lollipops for the Creative Cloud. There’s been the security compromise that required users to reset passwords and in some cases get new credit cards issued. There was the extended outage that caused larger media corps that relied on Creative Cloud apps for constant production major pain as they couldn’t meet deadlines.

Finally from my perspective there has been the Creative Cloud desktop management tool/launcher. All the actual Creative Cloud apps themselves (Lightroom, Photoshop, Illustrator etc) have worked without a problem since they were installed by the central control software launcher has been a major pain.

It has been slowly getting better but along the way it has caused no end of swear words to be issued. Every few months it seems to break and get itself stuck. I won’t update an app or it will act like it can’t log into the cloud. The Adobe forums are littered with people experiencing these problems. The worst bit about this has been what you need to do to fix these problems. Most commonly Adobe support gets you to download and run a somewhat arcane fix it tool which to date has so far fixed precisely nothing for me.

After that they generally get you to located and delete/rename a cache file. This perturbs me as the last thing you really want the average user to be doing on a machine is poking around deleting/renaming files as one false move could leave you far worse off. This “solution” however has fixed thing for me a few times but I can’t help wonder if it’s such a known problem, why exactly hasn’t the underlying problem been fixed? Or at the very least provide an easy system that does the delete/rename for the user.

The final solution and the one that seems to occur most of the time is just reinstalling the Creative Cloud application. The good news is this doesn’t require reinstalling the actual products themselves, the bad news is it is time consuming and the Adobe website seems to go out of its way to be a pain in the rear about downloading the newest version.

Cloud Acceptance

Overall I’m surprised and reasonably happy with the change Adobe has made to handling the Creative Cloud and just generally impressed at the effort they are putting into customer satisfaction especially in light of their near monopoly in some of the areas Adobe applications cater for.

Is it perfect? No. Has it lost the one size fits all approach? To some extent yes, the new permanency of the photography plan attests  to their acceptance of consumer demands. They have made progress and each little change so far has been well worth accepting it as a useful set of tools.

Towards the end of late last year I  was in a deep photography rut. I wasn’t feeling the excitement or confidence in myself as a photographer and was looking for a way to revitalise those feelings via.. something. I wasn’t sure what. I ended up settling on doing another photo-a-day (photo365) project as I had done one back in 2009/2010 which I enjoyed and got a lot out of. So come January 1st I confidently decreed it was time to do so again and away we went, onward to excitement & confidence!

And… Nope.

It started off well, I made a few good photos, got a bit of the interest back but I very quickly found I was starting to not just dislike the project but actively hate it. It took some time to figure out why this was but in the meantime I stubbornly continued, taking a least one photo a day until I finally had an epiphany. The reason it wasn’t working this time was because this style of project wasn’t what I actually needed.

The photo365 worked the first time around because I was still very new to photography with a DSLR and being forced to take a photograph every day was a good way of getting me used to it. It generated interest in various styles and ultimately became one of the major factors in why I so enjoy macro photography today.

Instead of producing good shots like I intended to, I was mostly producing mediocre, poorly thought through and rushed images. A few great ones here and there but most of it, to be quite frank, was crap. I can be quite a stubborn person and I could have just continued on and finished the project but this time around I decided no. It wasn’t working, time to can it. So I did. Stop taking a photo a day, pulled down the posts from this blog and removed all but the best photos taken during that time from my smugmug gallery.

Failure Is Always An Option

Decision made, it was time to just move forward right? Well I’m afraid it wasn’t quite that easy, I felt even worse than before, that I had failed at what I wanted to do and generally moped a lot. I thought about writing why I quit the project but even that I’ve been staring at for over a month and not been able to fully admit to my own failure. Until a few days ago when a curious memory popped into my head.

A few years ago I was lucky enough to be sent my employer at the time to attend DEF CON® 17 in Las Vegas and while wandering through talks on botnets, social engineering and tutorials on lockpicking (which was actually a lot of fun) I quite by accident wandered into a talk entitled “Failure” given by Adam Savage who you may know from the ever interesting Mythbusters series.

The talk (embedded below) given by Adam explored the idea of failure was being a positive thing and a learning experience rather than a totally negative and to be despised pit of despair. He goes over a few of his own stories of failure and describes emotions very similar to what I was going through now.

I remembered that the time thinking this talk was awesome and clearly it made enough of an impression that I squirreled it away to be referenced at such a time like this. I rewatched the talk and cheered up immensely. Failure was an option, I just needed to figure out what I really needed to achieve.

From Decay Comes Life

So there was the moment of zen. The acknowledgement that while yes I had failed good and hard, it wasn’t for nothing. I had simply learnt that what I needed now wasn’t a daily grind of taking photos it was to sit down and think about what my weak spots were and how to move forward.

Instead of shooting each and every day it was time to look at things like planning shots, actually learning how to better post produce my photos and get back into my love of taking photographs of critters of all kinds. I’ve started back into it and while I’m still feeling at a low eb of confidence things are moving forward, with a recent photowalk netting this photograph of a wasp

So here’s to the learning experience that is failure. I highly recommend watching Adam’s talk and thinking about what you want to achieve and accepting that failure at something is not the end of all things, not even close.

While this move will be seen by many as merely another note in the funeral dirge for traditional media, the particularly heavy emphasis on firing their photography talent raised a bit of an alarm bell for me on another front.

Not only will this certainly mean a drastic drop in quality of photos in the various Fairfax publications and the continued support of Getty images, a company that notoriously provides very little royalties to photographers themselves but it also raises the question of why would any Australian photographer ever want to be involved with Clique ever again?

What The Hell Is Clique?

The “Clique Photographers Association” sells itself as an association for amateur photographers to help them learn, get some nice discounts and ultimately participate in photography challenges which offer the opportunity to be published in Fairfax papers, The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald.

Clique is partnered with big names such as Canon Australia and Adobe, combined with the relatively low fee of $50 ($25 if you’re a Fairfax subscriber) makes this appear a pretty good deal and overall it probably is. However with this most recent announcement one can’t help but wonder…

Less Clique More Trojan Horse?

I have to admit I’ve never really been comfortable with Clique and for that reason I’ve never made the move to join it despite the potential it offered. The copyright section of the Terms & Conditions never really sat well with me.  Don’t get me wrong it’s no an out and out copyright grab (like some competitions) and they very explicitly state the copyright remains you but you do grant Fairfax (‘the Organaiser’) the following:

However, each participant grants the Organiser (and its related bodies corporate) an irrevocable, non-exclusive, royalty-free, worldwide licence to deal with participants’ images (in any format):

a. for any express purpose identified during the Program (including to publish any winning images on the Organiser’s digital platforms and in print.
b. for any implied purpose associated with the Program (including publication on any closed network associated with the Program or for the purposes of providing feedback in relation to an image);
c. for the purposes of promoting the Program.
d. The Organiser will endeavour to contact the Participant to inform the Participant when and how their image will be used in relation to the Program.
e. Participants’ images will not be stored on the Fairfax Media photographic data base – Fairfax Digital Collections (FDC)

For the avoidance of doubt, the foregoing licence entitles the Organiser to reformat any image for the purpose of publication or display.
You will not bring any claim against the Organiser for infringement of your moral rights in the image.

It’s not the worst I’ve seen but it gives them a lot of free reign to do what they want with your photo and you get to pay them for the privilege. Neat trick.

This Won’t Clique

Which leads us back to the firings announced today. Now that Fairfax management has shown they see photography as burdensome expense they can better replace with stock images (and I’m betting more “crowd sourced” material as well) why exactly would any amateur photographer in Australia want to be a part of Clique? Seriously?

Will Canon Australia or Adobe raise concerns about this? How can they continue working with Fairfax to further educate photographers when Fairfax seems unable to see the value in doing so? Indeed what is the future of Clique in this bold new stock images first world at Fairfax? Will it even remain in place until the end of this year as planned?

For me I won’t consider Clique any further. I won’t support an association run by a corporation that seems unable to support the people that make up that association. There are far better places to interact with photographers and while they might not offer the publishing possibilities of Clique, I’ll be happier knowing they actually give a damn about photography.