Back with yet another long list of answers to your long list of questions. Remember, I’m one person with one opinion. Take it for what it’s worth.
1. 1:50 Vanity Publishing rant. (Long overdue)
2. 9:20, Booksmart vs Bookwright
3. 11:14, How to gain access for long-term story about post-war militarization.
4. 15:52, Are photographers best when they are young or old?
5. 17:09, How do we deal with litter?
6. 21:15, Is there room in publishing for non-portfolio images?
7. 23:17, Any AG23 updates?
8. 26:58, Any insight into finding story ideas?
9. 28:35, Kodak? Fraud? Will they sell off film division? What about pharma?
Comments 11
Thanks for the AG@# information Dan! Looking forward to obtaining a copy. American Dirt is awesome. Read it a few weeks ago. The opening chapter blew my mind and I was hooked.
Author
Paul,
It’s a good read. And a good story.
Make that AG23. Sorry, It helps to let go of the shift key when typing.
Good stuff. I hope the person pursues the militarization project. I don’t shoot as many protests these days (I type that as if I had a long career documenting that stuff vs. being an aspiring flailing documentary photographer with a blog), but I always pointed my camera at the excessively militarized police forces. Really started to pay attention to that in – maybe the early 2000s? – after I read Bacevich’s The Growing Militarization of the United States. I might have the title a little wrong. Everything started becoming a military problem. The defund the police argument (probably a bad choice in phrasing) is getting at that issue with police. We shouldn’t be using them to respond to everything. People aren’t great at discussing nuance and complex issues anymore – everyone wants to tweet rage.
Ahh speaking of Twitter…I’m glad you regularly discuss what the internet is doing to our minds. I’m a hypocrite – I’m not resisting as valiantly as I should, but I’m aware of the problem. Deleting social media and twitter a year ago might save me yet.
Dan, knowing your love of Australia and Tim Tams, thought you might enjoy this video by Beau Miles. Wouldn’t be surprised if you know him.
Author
Scott,
That is a fun little flick. My wife rides too, and is a total gamer, but does not ride hard or fast. She makes a lot of noise and there is a lot of movement but little of it goes forward at great speed.
Also, please keep posting these here because I have resolved once more to never open the YT platform again. I know I’ll break that resolution when I need to remember how to do something in Photoshop or Premiere. That site feeds on our worst online impulses like IG FB and Twitter. The paid version is probably ok, but I don’t see myself going that route.
Author
Scott,
It’s a black hole of bad decisions. I will keep posting here.
Dan and Shifter community – I’m adding a question here. Thought about emailing Dan, but 1) I hate abusing email – I know Dan is vigilant about responding 2) I like throwing things out to the Shifter community.
I just opened a new zine in Bookwright. I shot a lot of live music and back stage (I shot the performances to improve my access to the back stage) photos in Seattle from 2016-2019. I really enjoyed it, but I recognized fairly quickly that I was never going to be able to pour enough heart and commitment into it to get good. Still, great memories, met amazing people, and I have some work I’d like to move off the damn hard drives we never look at.
Going back through the archive has been a grind, My keywording isn’t consistent enough to do queries without worrying about missing photos, so one by one I went. I took a break at 1 January 2018. I did a couple of rough culls on the 2016 and 2017 stuff, and I’m going to put then into a Blurb trade book. I’ve included WAY too many photos. That’s ok, this is for me, and maybe a few extra copies for a few bands.
I promise I’m getting to the question. I think I went about it the wrong way. I exported that boat load of photos as JPGs at 80% quality. I’ll now start adding them into the trade book, fooling around with fonts and layouts.
But that’s a lot of storage space I just used for a duplicative (word?) effort. Do any of you use the Lightroom plug-ins or another plug-in that skips that export process? Pros and cons either way?
Author
Scott,
Storage is an issue for anyone amassing huge amounts of data. Anyone who tells you otherwise, in my experience, isn’t being truthful or is trying to sell an approach to lifestyle that makes them look like they are in total control. The best people I know in the world, the absolute best archivists, are constantly tweaking their storage solutions and all are paying more than you would imagine. Nature of the beast.
No doubt. But for your books, do you export your photos to a folder for upload into Bookwright, or do you work straight from a plug-in that allows you to skip that extra export? I could be over thinking this!
Author
Scott,
export to desktop, import into Bookwright. I don’t make books from Lightroom. I do, however, use our plugin for InDesign.