Where am I coming from?  

Well, I just returned from a party at the Los Angeles Film Festival to announce 40 people that were included in this year’s Indiewire "Influencers" group that I was invited to be a part of.   I was included in a group of "early adopters" that included Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Seed &Spark, The Kickstarter film program, Cinereach, Vimeo, The Sundance Institute, Tribeca Film Institute, Slated, and none other than "Veronica Mars" – definitely good company indeed.   I’m not sure how I made it on that list to be very honest.  

One of the coolest things that happened tonight though, was that two of my fellow influencers came to thank me for what I’ve shared over the years on this blog and what it had done to help them.   I was taken aback as I often am, because this blog has always been something I’ve done for the pure pleasure of it.    I come from a background of Photojournalism which is a very small and tight-knit community where you are encouraged to give back and share with colleagues and budding photographers alike.  A lot of what we do in that world is passed down through mentors or by word of mouth…  Without it – the art and craft would simply be lost.

This blog was never started as part of a marketing plan, or part of any plan for that matter.   In fact, even though I was listed as an "early adopter" I have more often than not been a late adopter.   I didn’t start to blog until 2008, didn’t tweet for several years, and joined Instagram just a few months ago… If anything I’m a cautious adopter!

The best part of this blog has been the people that I’ve met and the relationships and friendships that have come as a result of it.  

In fact I wanted to take this opportunity to say something to all of this blog’s readers as genuinely as I can in written blog form:

I wanted to say Thank YOU.

Thank you for reading the blog, for commenting within its pages, and for contributing to it on many fronts.    I very much appreciate it. 

Simply put, I’ve tried to follow one simple rule on this blog:  write only about what I’d want to read about myself, and only when I found that something was important or relevant for this blog’s readers.    I value the readers of this blog quite a bit – and have always tried to stay as true to them (to you) as I could.

The best part of this process for me is that it’s been fun.   Sometimes cathartic.  I enjoy writing blog posts (links suck but the rest is fun:)   More often than not it’s a release of sorts – of ideas, frustrations and equally of idealism and dreams.    It’s a wonderful way to get the discussion started.

Sure – there are a few low points where I’ve wanted to shut this blog down or been über frustrated with certain details or comments.   But mostly – It’s been pretty amazing and fulfilling.   I think that if any one of us writes something of value and puts it out there – good things tend to come of it. It’s really pretty simple.   I also wanted to say another thank you to Rob Haggart and the blog hosting team that have helped keep this blog up through the occasional wave of hits.

People often ask me what the "trick" of a successful blog is, or how to make something go "viral."   My answer is always the same:   "Good content begets good results" just in the same way that a good film is all about the STORY and the proper telling of said story – not the gear it was shot with.

You make something go viral simply by doing something that excites YOU.   If that passion resonates with people – it will take off on its own.   If you TRY to make something go viral for the simple sake of going viral… it will seldom, if ever, happen.     I have always believed that readers can very very quickly sniff out any ulterior motives that others have.

Put yourself and your opinions (good or bad) out there and people will react.    It’s actually remarkably straightforward and should NEVER be a part of a marketing plan.    

Quite simply:  it has a lot to do with sharing and giving back.

Why?  Well because I don’t know about you, but I certainly didn’t get to where I am today without the help of others.   Many were mentors or teachers, others were influencers, some were competitors – but I gained a lot from the generosity of others in their time and knowledge – and even by being challenged by them.    And I guess that’s a part of why this blog exists.

I don’t quite believe that true "altruism" can exist – but if you put something out there with no expectation of ANYTHING in return:  then I can tell you that when those random "thank yous" come back to you – they mean a heck of a lot more than anything that you may actively have been seeking out.  And that’s the impetus behind this post… I’ve been meaning to write it for quite awhile actually.

There have been some bumps in the road of course.    At one point I got an angry message from a blog reader when I hadn’t responded to a question from her husband… I’ll never forget the following comment she wrote: "I’m a brain surgeon and I found the time to write you.   Why can’t you find the time to write back to my husband!"   Well it turns out my son was born that week and needless to say she never got a response.

Then there are the random thank yous and those do mean a lot.    A few months ago I was leaving the Ace Hotel  in NYC with a couple of friends and someone ran out, shook my hand and said "thank you for what you do" and as the words "you’re very welcome" were coming out of my mouth, he literally ran back to what I believe was his job at the hotel.   Those moments stick with me.   I welcome you to give this blogging thing a try.   "Giving is always better than receiving" the saying goes…   And I believe that every single one of you has something to contribute to the community at large. 

You may have noticed that at the end of 2012 I had 17 blog supporters…  Last year I did my best to have 3 posts up every week and to nourish this blog as much as possible.   I also put up a lot more "gear" reviews because that’s what people seemed to be reading when I followed the stats.   And that took a few people to help me shoot and edit videos, as well as to create links etc. and that cost me quite a bit in terms of time, energy and of course money.    Luckily I found 17 wonderful companies to help sponsor that but in the end it became a bit of a production – and I found myself working for "the man" a bit.   The irony was:  I was "the man."  

So at the end of last year, I called 13 of those 17 supporters/sponsors and let them know that while I still wanted to keep a close relationship with all of them – that I would not be soliciting their sponsorship for the blog this year.   It was simply too much work and I felt like I might be taking this blog thing in the wrong direction.  Simply put:  the blog became "work."

I still stay in touch with all of them very regularly, but I’m now much happier, and I’ve gone back to writing when I feel like it – as opposed to a self-imposed schedule.   There are a lot of things I am focusing on already, and several "big" ideas that I’m working on now that relate to improving the indie film community in small and one can dream: big ways – and I’ve never been quite as happy.  More to come on that at some point.

Another thing you’ll see a bit more of in the upcoming months:  I’ve started to "make" stuff.   I’ve been working with others to invent or to help create tools that I need for myself in the film or photography world, and that I want to make available to others out there because I’m pretty sure they will fill certain important voids.    As some of you know I’ve worked with several large companies over the years as a consultant / advisor.    Now I’m moving into making my own little gadgets and cutting through a lot of the delay and red tape that comes with working with large multi-national corporations. 

I’ve always been pretty trepidatious about putting my name behind products – but when you see what these things are, I think you’ll like many of them.   These are simply things that I need to myself – to do my job better.   Some are just wonderful silly little gadgets that we all need, while others are a bit more interesting… kind of like MōVI interesting…

Others are products that I have found out in the market that for some reason are below the radar – even though they are incredibly useful products.  So I hope you’ll welcome these new "things" as they come to this blog.  

I will make one promise to you on that front:   I will only put stuff out there that I myself need and use and would buy – and only quality products that I can stand behind.   I’ll also be making short and sweet disclaimers on the site about products that I’m involved in so that there’s no confusion out there.

Well that’s it for tonight – I appreciate it if you made it this far.   As I said I’ve been meaning to write this for awhile.

Thank you again for reading this blog and for contributing to it in the comments section and the nearly 13 million visits.   I hope to be doing this for years to come no matter where this crazy business leads us.   And if you’ve been on the fence about starting a blog… or making a contribution to the community in some way, I say: go for it!   You never know where it might lead you to…  I certainly didn’t.   

I’ll leave you with a quote from an old favorite book of mine:

“The way you get meaning into your life is to devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning.” 

― Mitch Albom, Tuesdays With Morrie

This week the Chicago Sun Times made what might just be one of the most clearly shorsighted decisions in its history:  they let go of all of their photography staff.

Keep in mind that were are in the HEYDAY of photography.  

We collectively take more photographs every 6-9 months now than have been shot in ALL OF HISTORY.    Instagram / Flickr / SLRs / Mirrorless cameras and of course Smartphones have been VERY busy uploading pix for all to see.  

Yahoo! has estimated that 880 BILLION photos will be taken in 2014.

Today 27,800 photograpsh are uploaded to Instagram every 60 SECONDS.  

Not impressed?  

Try 208,300 photos on Facebook per minute.

And yes:  100 hours of video uploaded to Youtube in those 60 seconds.

So:  if you’re a 50-65-year old managing editor or publisher at one of the country’s GREAT newspapers and in an industry that is clearly shrinking…  Where people are subscribing less often, and getting their news more and more often from Facebook or Twitter… What do you do to stand out?

Well if you’re incredibly myopic:   you lay off your entire photography staff.  

That’s forward thinking.   We’re clearly not in a visual age… teenagers are clearly READING 300-1,200 word articles on newspaper websites on a regular basis… 

And to put the cherry on top:   you give iPhone lessons on how to take better snapshots to your REPORTERS.

Listen, I worked as a staff photographer with some of the BEST reporters/journalists in the world at The New York Times for nearly a decade.   And those reporters (back then) never took the value of a good photograph for granted… and that was BEFORE the internet truly took hold (I started in 1999.)

But there’s one thing I can tell you:  reporters (with key exceptions of course) are wordsmiths and great storytellers – not visual journalists.   And even if they can take GREAT iPhone photographs:   they’re going to blend in with all of the other millions of photographs on the web, and that is the problem.  That’s the end result here, because they’re primary goal is to collect quotes and notes for their articles – NOT the "Decisive Moment"  - as it should be.  

And then, if you’re the managing editor or publisher of your newspaper, ask yourself:  why in the world will people want to LOOK at my newspaper when I have equal or lesser photography to what people find on Instagram?    Again: in a world that is increasingly going towards the visual over the printed word… why make such a move?

My mentor Ken Irby (who threw me out of his office when I was 17 for not being ready to work at Newsday… and later married me to my wife a decade later) wrote the following words today about one of the icons of photography who has more talent in his finger nail than I have in my entire body – photographer John White formerly a Staff Photographer at the Chicago Sun Times:

The Sun-Times plans to rely on reporters to take photos and videos and has begun mandatory “iPhone photography basics.” Its decision is just the latest example of a disconcerting trend in American media: professional photojournalism is being downsized and devalued, with news organizations increasingly turning to wire services, citizen-submitted content and independent/freelance contributions.

The elimination of an entire photography staff is fairly uncommon among daily larger newspapers, but it’s not unprecedented. In 2008, Newsday terminated its 20-person photography staff and then allowed them to reapply for new multimedia jobs. It comes as no coincidence that Tim Knight, who’s now the publisher of the Sun-Times, was the publisher at Newsday when that transition was implemented.

I’ve been watching the print industry ensure their demise with similar moves for more than a decade now.   Time magazine let go of their most talented veteran journalist starting in 1999…. and they have seen their pages and advertisers decrease to the point where their magazine is now paper thin – as a direct result of those decisions.  it didn’t take a genius to call that one.   Poor content = no readership.   You don’t need Einstein to help you with that one.  Newsweek:  gone – no print edition anymore.

Now I’m witnessing the same happening at newspapers around the world.   And our collective culture is suffering as a result.   White in his usual eloquent way said the following with the help of Irby’s introduction:

He also worries about readers, who will no longer be able to experience “the most important ingredient of communication and understanding” in quite the same way.

“Humanity is being robbed,” he said, “by people with money on their minds.”

I couldn’t agree more.   It’s painful to see change at times – but change is necessary and inevitable, notably in these technology-driven days.  

In this case: it simply wasn’t.   Photography staffs are usually less than 5% of a newspaper’s staff… At the New York times there were about 30 staff photographers for approx 600 journalists on staff if my memory serves me well… is that REALLY where you want to cut?

I think not.  

Let’s hope other publishers brush up on their current trends before we see this happening again at another great institution.  

Remember:  while you may not read newspapers, they are the fourth estate… they are the ones that keep an eye on government, corporations, the economy, education, science and do investigative reporting and keep us informed… people who tweet simply don’t have the resources.

Don’t take the contributions newspapers make to our society and quality of life for granted – ever.

And as to the discussion over multimedia/video being more important than photography… Ask yourself what images you have burned in your memory from the past decade…  and then ask yourself if you can name one single "multimedia piece" by name that you recently saw on a newspaper’s website…  you probably can’t (although there are some amazing ones that have been produced.)

And that’s the point:  photography is just as important today if not more than it ever has been.   Not a time to cut yourself at the knees as an organization, let alone all the way to the marrow.   If you do:  you’re insuring your irrelevance and giving loyal readers who are holding on yet another reasons to stop subscribing.

You’ll notice that this blog may be a bit text heavy…  I was going to add a photo to this post.  But since the Sun Times doesn’t think we need them – does this blog?   Does this blog post feel like it’s missing something?   I can state with relative authority that the pages of The Chicago Sun Times will never be as rich as they were just one week ago.

 As many of you may know, I was an editorial and commercial photographer for nearly two decades prior to moving into the world of motion.     I’ve recently gone back to shooting still photography as often as I can in fact and I’ve put up a new fine art site that (click HERE) that displays a selection of some of my more successful photography and quite a bit of new work as well.

There’s something very magical about picking up a still camera with only one lens and going out for a walk, a drive, or a trip to somewhere unknown without much of a plan at all, let alone cases of gear and a crew to help you.

I’ll share with you an anecdote from my days as a staff photographer at The New York Times.    I remember running into a big film set in the streets of New York City and having the following exchange with the cinematographer once he locked eyes onto to my still camera and I onto his fancy Panavision camera, and we engaged in conversation.    I told him who I was working for, and that I was driving through the streets of New York on the lookout for a front page image that day (I’ll paraphrase the exchange…):

Him:  "Wow.   I’m so jealous of what you do… you get to go out and shoot whenever you want, wherever you want, all alone."

Me: "Are you kidding??!   You have all of these incredible tools at your disposal!   All of these lights, cast, extras, crew, cranes and lenses!  I’ve always dreamed of that!"

Him: "Well sure… but someday you’ll understand…with that comes a bit of loss in terms of freedom if you will…"

Truth be told, I didn’t understand then.   I have always wanted to go into the world of film since I can remember.    But now I do understand what he meant a bit more…

 One of the most amazing aspects about filmmaking is the ability to collaborate with others.   To work with crew members and specialists in a lot of different fields in an effort to create an incredible scene with every single detail within your control.   I cherish the experience of preparing for a shoot and being on set today as my very favorite thing to do on this earth – at least on a professional level.    But there is something to be said about the relative freedom that still photography affords all of us…

I experienced something new about 2 years ago, right after shooting a short film with a crew of around 60 near Death Valley.   I went back by myself a few weeks later to Death Valley and shot a series of stills.   And I made this one image and something struck me.   I was LITERALLY one of 2-3 people within a very wide area.   There wasn’t a single car driving in the desert below ALL evening let alone the road I was on.   It was as close to being all alone on this earth as most of us can find in these modern times – at least in the U.S.   The headlights below are that of my own car in fact (w/ some safety cones and lights put out a few hundred yards behind it in case someone drove up..)   The image was lit by  moonlight.

I remember being struck at how magical photography can be.  And that after 20 years of doing it!   How magical it was to literally experience the sky rotating around you as you watched the stars change over the hours.   It makes you feel very free, very independent, very small and gives you tremendous perspective on where you are in this world, let alone in the galaxy.   It has the ability to give you both a good dose of humility and also the energy to dream big, and to let all of your troubles melt away.     You realize how small all our problems are and how the cycle of life, earth, sunsets, moon rises etc. go on day after day no matter what you do or don’t do.    And capturing that with a simple camera and a tripod, without a soul in sight is pretty darn magical.   No deadline pressures… no people to please… I now understand what that DP meant nearly a decade earlier.   I see the need for both disciplines in my life.   There’s a reason they call it the photography "bug."

To that end I welcome you to check out the new site, and some of the new work (I’ve shot a bunch since the site was being designed and will likely update it quarterly.)   You’ll see quite a bit of aerial photography (which I came to specialize in) which is one of my absolute favorite things to do.    You can also check out the following video (that I posted on this blog a few weeks ago) that captures my philosophy on photography, a video that a lot of people have told me they enjoyed.    Lastly – all of the photographs you see on the site are available as signed archival fine art prints should you be interested in having one on your wall.  I hope you enjoy the new site –  I know I’ve enjoyed picking up the still camera again tremendously.

A special thanks goes to Sarah Weissman for taking on the endeavor of editing a decade’s worth of work and to Rob Haggart and the entire APhotofolio team for helping put up a very elegant site.