Hey Peeps,
A change up here. I ask you questions. You, in record numbers, flood to the comments sections and crash Shifter with your insightful and poignant answers. I’m curious about a few things. I have many more questions, and I’m thinking about doing a lot more of these simple, audio and still based posts. I am also dog sitting. He smells. He snores and my house is now covered in white dog hair. He has no respect for anything I do. I do yoga he lays down on the mat. I take a shower he sits and watches. I leave the room, he barks until I return. I’m losing it. Most thoughtful question gets something in the mail from me.
Comments 26
I’d love to buy a new compact film camera but, of course, I can’t. Why don’t camera manufacturers offer a limited run of one of their film cameras? Decide on a number of cameras that need to be made to make it commercially viable, offer the camera to the public, and when the run has sold out, make the cameras. Film photography has a solid base of users but if no new cameras are made, sooner or later there will be no working cameras left to put the film into. A Leica Minilux or Nikon 35Ti would be a dream.
Mike.
Author
Mike,
Won’t happen. The only way any of these companies will survive is to get you to buy the latest model. And do that every year.
Daniel, won’t happen, I know. I’d just finished looking for a small film compact when I read this post.
The problem for film is the perception that it is a dead, finished, process. We know that it isn’t.
Digital just doesn’t do it for me. Looks like it’s another Leica for me. New M-A.
Mike.
Author
Mike,
I feel the same. At some point I won’t have choice, but for now I still prefer to use what I have and work with film. Also, can get soemthing like an FM2 for almost nothing. Get a 50 1.4 and you are ready to go for about 5% of what the Leica will cost. I have an FM2T and 50. It’s MINT. I could sell my Leica gear and put 10k in the bank. Use the Nikon.
What blub should offer?
Blurb needs to offer the ability for people to offer coupon codes to their books. This of course would come out of the markup we put on our books, but this would be a great way for us to entice our viewers directly.
Blurb can also benefit from a 6×9 trade book in landscape orientation. I love the 6×9 trade book size, but also love the landscape orientation for my photographs. I did a project and tried laying it out on Blurb’s 6×9. I ordered a copy and wasnt very impressed with the portrait book and the landscape photos. MagCloud offers something similar to what I am looking and I have one being delivered tomorrow.
What about your website?
I love the clean layout and it is great for reading, even your longer posts. One thing that I would change is your lightbox. When I click an image to view it bigger I would love a cleaner window. The current one has a strong Polaroid print feel. But that is my personal taste. It functions well for me on both Windows/Chrome and OSX/Safari.
Cheers!
Author
Thanks Justin, much appreciated.
I still have white hi-top. Might still be wearing them (right now). Anyway, how about writers? Especially thinking about this since I realized Sally Mann, in addition to being a phenomenal beyond belief photographer, was also a really really great writer.
Author
Great idea! Working on authors!
Daniel, I particularly like your ‘Read’ posts. You are a very good photographer and also a very good writer (a rare combination). Your travels in New Mexico and South America are a world away from anything that I have experienced (Europe) and I would love to read extended essays from these places. My attention span can take it – honest. The essays could also form the basis of a book?
Mike.
Author
Mike,
Good to know. Working on a SA book now actually………thanks for the feedback.
I don’t care where the content comes from, only that it comes. Consolidate if you want. Since I RSS feed both sites it won’t make any difference to me.
I’m not using Blurb, because I’m stuck in the wrong life. Need to work on that though. Maybe I’ll pull out my FE2 and shoot something. Any comments on the expense of film vs digital? Maybe that’s been covered, and maybe that’s not even a good topic here. So you can ignore if needed.
I haven’t delved too far into shifter yet. What I always find interesting (and maybe you cover), is the story about the art. Why it is important to the artist. When I see photographs, they are too easily digested and forgotten IMO, but when you understand the story or the why, things have much more shared meaning.
Author
Hey John,
Yes, the process is very interesting to me as well. I love to know why people do what they do.
Dan, I’m going wherever you write man! I really enjoy your point of view and see a lot of parallels in my own journey. Same age, from the south ( north LA), still love film.
I made a few trades thanks to you too. I’d rec. adding Landscape to the options if possible.
Best,
Echard
Author
Echard,
That’s great amigo. Thank you! I hear you about landscape. I feel the same. Finger crossed.
I don’t really have any clear ideas for shifter. Maybe a way to identify new-to-me content? Because of the way you have the multiple categories, I often worry I’m missing new stuff that’s… somewhere else? I think this is mostly an illusion, though.
Blurb products. I’d like the ability to buy book parts. Give me a bunch of pages so I can bind them. Give me a finished bare text block. Make me a box, a case, a slip cover. Imagine if I could make ten pages, and you made ten pages, and some guy named Fred made ten pages, and we could shuffle them together and bind them.
Print me pages I can fold and sew.
Also give me cheaper shipping 😉
Content? Interview students? Show me where art is going.
Author
Andrew,
One thing I want to do is clean up the look. I think I’ll get rid of the slide show on the homepage and just have “recent posts.” That way you see what is new. As for Blurb. A great wish list, but probably not going to happen. I think the easiest way to think about this is by thinking about a number. Last year we shipped somewhere near 1.5 million unique titles to almost 70 countries. So, anything new is a big deal. I could see a new trim size perhaps, new materials but probably not the parts. However, a great idea on a small scale with friends around the world….
Yeah, it’s tempting to say “aww, c’mon, all I want is for you guys to pull stuff off the line at different points, I’m not asking for anything *new*” but I’ve spend 25 years building products. There’s pricing and marketing and documentation and “how the hell do we ship a stack of loose pages?” and a thousand other questions that cost real money to answer and real work to get done before you can have a Product. And then three weirdos like me would actually buy it.
From the other side of my life, then, where I have a family and some kids and a bunch of snapshots of them, how about this:
Give me a way to dump a pile of photos in someplace, and make me a decent book out of them. Chronological by EXIF data please, and don’t pick a template first and crop photos to fit — lay the photos out properly.
For extra credit, do some face recognition and do light cropping but preserve faces, try to group events together (recognize birthday related objects, maybe?) and give me a smart wizard/dialog that lets me interact with the layout engine. If I could spend 20 minutes giving directions and hints, and get a really good job done on 300 snapshots, I’d be super happy.
Basically EVERYONE out there has some sort of “autobuild” which will take a pile of photos and make a complete useless mess out of them. Idiotic crops, so you have lots of foot pictures. Haphazard ordering. But I can pick an Art-Deco theme, so, that makes it OK?
I’d like to give you 300 photos and have the software figure out there there are 2 birthday parties, a christmas, some trips to the beach, and some baby pictures, and then give me options like “pure chronological or by-event?” and then let me drag and drop in some decent interface to correct orderings and event-grouping, and THEN do the layout (so I’m not trying to fix ordering inside some book template) and also do the layout in a non-crummy way.
That might actually move some product, I dunno.
Author
Andrew,
Man, that’s a take. I like it. What you described is what most people are facing. A year of family and a need to make sense of it all. Simple, clean, etc. It’s a tall order, but thank you for sending.
I’ve written a little about this stuff on my blog, and was inspired to write up a second essaylet on the subject, here:
http://photothunk.blogspot.com/2015/06/the-future-of-imaging-ii.html
There’s a link to the first essay, which overlaps a bit. I think there’s a very clear opportunity for some startup to get cracking on this! Where are all those eager kids?
Author
Andrew,
They are too busy on SnapChat?
Hey Dan,
Haven’t run into you in Santa Fe in a long time. We’ve met in Jerry’s LR class and various other events. I was just searching google for “oversharing” and your blog post was one of very few that came up! Wonder why there’s not more being written on that subject? 🙂 I looked at some of your older posts and the new site as well. I just followed you on twitter and would like to stay informed about what you’re up to but it’s not easy! I don’t want email notifications I’m way too out of control with the amount of email I receive, I don’t regularly check twitter, I can subscribe via Feedly but I rarely check there…sorry to say this to you but the way I find out about blog posts and articles I want to read is by seeing them posted on Facebook. My suggestion (selfish I admit) is to have a Facebook page just for your blog or for Shifter rather than a personal account. You can post there when you have new material to share, wherever it is you decide to share it and people who follow the page can be notified. If that doesn’t work for you…and it probably doesn’t which I understand, my comment to your site developers would be to make it easier for readers to find new posts. Hope our paths cross sometime this summer I have no one else to talk to about oversharing! You’re one of very few who are interested in this subject haha.
Author
Hey Cathy,
Great to hear from you. I saw the follow on Twitter. I’ll do the same. As for FB. Never, ever again for me. I fear it’s the feed or newsletter I will be sending out maybe once a month. I guess if you aren’t regularly coming back then I need to make better posts!
Blurb:
I would love to be able to get proof prints for the larger more expensive books & paper. I usually have to waste the money on a test copy ( or 2 ) to get acceptable exposures on all pages of my book.
I would also love a black & white only print option to avoid color shifts in B&W photos with a color printer.
Author
Joseph,
Both great suggestions, thank you.
Dan,
shifter:
•they named authors already, would be great. My 50cents of input: why not get someone ( no no, not me) out of this 1,5million/70countries Blurb titles and show him/her to your audience?
•your audio is already perfect, keep’m coming with those sound bites, just open the mic and let the world flow in, whereever, whatever it comes from
Blurb
My 5th yearbook is on the printer right now. Bookwright made the difference: it’s easy, it’s quick. One suggestion: make those photo imports thumbnail upper bar looots bigger, makes choosing a lot more comfy, I’m guessing too much now if the keeper is also one for the printer…
Author
Reiner,
Hey, most of the people I interview are Blurb users..most not all. I try not to spend much time talking with them about Blurb specifics otherwise people think this is a marketing site. What I DO talk about is books in general. And the thumbnail idea is a good one. Thank you.