ART

February 18, 2011 by Scott MacQuarrie | Leave a comment

ART

I really like Seth Godwin’s blog. It’s not directly related to photography, but many of his posts certainly relate to business and the business of photography. He often posts things that relate well to Art in general and today was an excellent example of that..

For myself, I have always defined Art as something created to invoke an emotional response in the viewer, but Seth’s definition works very well..

Seth’s Post:

Art is what we call…

the thing an artist does.

It’s not the medium or the oil or the price or whether it hangs on a wall or you eat it. What matters, what makes it art, is that the person who made it overcame the resistance, ignored the voice of doubt and made something worth making. Something risky. Something human.

Art is not in the eye of the beholder. It’s in the soul of the artist.

You can reach his blog here and read it directly, sign up for a feed, or have it emailed to you. For myself, his is one of a handful of blogs I get emailed to me directly, so I don’t miss them, even when I am not in a position to search the web (we used to call this traveling :-) ).

Posted in Art Tagged , , |

Imaging USA 2011 – Conclusion

January 23, 2011 by Scott MacQuarrie | Leave a comment

Imaging USA 2011

Well, as all good things must, the 2011 imaging USA conference has drawn to a close.

The weather in San Antonio has really not been great, but today arrived with bright sunshine and warm temperatures.  Finally a day to enjoy in San Antonio. My first seminar wasn’t until 1pm, so I roamed along the riverwalk to see what I could see. This was the first really interesting photographic day at the conference. The rest had been cold and foggy. Cold I can shoot in, but fog really takes away a lot of details.

Just outside my hotel

The Alamo

Does your downtown look like this? It does in San Antonio

Seminars ran from 1pm until 6:30 today and I was planning on hitting all of them. For me, the seminars are the reason I come to this conference. The trade show is interesting, but it doesn’t make any sense to spend thousands of dollars traveling to try to save hundreds of dollars in purchases.

After the seminars, the closing party was held by Kodak. This was a fine event and followed the theme of the next conference – New Orleans. There was plenty of pulled pork and black-eyed peas to enjoy. The music was great and it really was a fine event.  I’m looking forward to New Orleans, as I have never been there, but it has always sounded like a very interesting place.

I am presently making my way back to Toronto, currently waiting in Chicago for my next chariot for the final leg of the journey.

Highlights of the conference:

  • Great speakers
  • Excellent opening and closing events.
  • Great location.

Low lights of the conference

  • Strange decision to not run seminars while trade show is running
  • Some seminar rooms were skinny and deep, which made it hard to see the stage. In fact, it felt like a hallway.
  • Too many great seminars happening at the same time.
  • Seminars starting at 7am to avoid the trade show – and then nothing but trade show until late afternoon.
  • United Airlines for ripping off the handle of my checked bag – thanks.

Recommendations

  • Run seminars and the trade show at the same time. The seminars are secondary to the trade show, so the trade should just deal with seminars happening at the same time.
    • This is a big one. To put it in perspective, I would still attend with no trade show, but I would pass if there were no seminars.

Next year, Imaging USA takes place in New Orleans. I have never been there, but this is also one of the four unique American cities according to Hemingway. I am definitely looking forward to it.

Posted in travel Tagged , , |

Imaging USA 2011

January 16, 2011 by Scott MacQuarrie | Leave a comment

Imaging USA

I am currently deep in the heart of Texas in one of my favorite North American cities, San Antonio.  I am told that Hemingway called it one of the four unique american cities (San Franciso, Boston, New Orleans, and San Antoio). Althogh I have been unable to find the quote, I can belive it. This really is an interesting place.

I try to go to the Imaging USA conference every year. It’s put on by the PPA, which is primarily wedding and portrait photographers, but the conference is applicable to any professional photographer. Although the vendor area is quite interesting, it is the presentations that drive me to attend. The chance to hear some of the best photographers in the world discuss their work is whole reason I’m here.

As well, I’ve also found that conference trip in January is an excellent time to step away from work, life, and other day to day distractions and take some time to reflect and think. Besides recharging the batteries a little, it’s a great way to take a “big picture” look at things. I consider this so useful, I might even start taking a “reflection” trip every six months.

It’s currently Saturday night and the conference does not officially start until tomorrow. However, there have been pre-conference courses going on for the past three days. The pre-conference and pre-conference courses are another good reason to be here. If you are pursuing a CPP designation, the training courses that happen during the will be a huge help. For me, since there are no PPA regional groups in Canada, this is also where I wrote my CPP exam.

The trip down

Since it hasn’t started yet, I’ll wait to tell you about the conference itself and discus my trip here.

I usually book my conference trip in the Spring, so by the time the conference actually comes around I have usually forgotten everything about my reservations. Thank goodness for calendars and email reminders.

Although, I like San Antonio it’s a hard place to get to from Toronto. There are no direct flights, which means not only having to change plans. It usually means a small feeder airline out of Toronto. If you think traveling with photo gear is hard, try some of the tiny planes. Not to mention the challenge of 6’4″ me trying to fit into a plane designed for people no taller than 5’8″. I don’t fly in these planes, I wear them :-) .

We are having a yellow-orange-purple with blue strips alert in Toronto, so I was advised to arrive early for the extra security checks – including the possible patdown. Dutifully, I arrived 2 and a half hours before my flight and found myself waiting at the gate 30 minutes later.

Luckily, Toronto now has free wifi in the airport, so I found the nearest Starbucks, loaded up with caffeine,  broke out the laptop. A welcome change form the past, where they tried to charge some serious coin for a bit of connectivity. I recently acquired a portable battery unit form Hypermac, which can power up the ipad, iphone, and mac book I travel with. My mac air is a little light in battery capacity, to this makes a real difference and give me some serious running time. You can find ut more about them at here. I love mine.

Cramming myself into the little plane proved challenging not just for me, but for my luggage. I have been considering some rolling luggage for my camera gear, but I am not sure of this plan now. Everyone with rolling luggage was forced to gate check it before boarding. My camera bag just fit into an overhead bin, but it was a close thing, as they were considering gate checking it. I am going to be checking out the luggage vendors at the conference with this in mind. Luckily a and my luggage got to ride in comfort. As well, during my planning earlier in the year, I was smart enough to pick one of the solo seats giving me a window AND an aisle.

I changed planes in Washington, DC, which can sometimes be a problem, but we arrived in plenty of time and it was a relaxed trip to the next gate and my next flight. This time one a full sized plane :-) . I was also thinking went I booked this trip, as I upgraded to the more legroom seats.  Its a little weird when you book this far in advance, as I didn’t remember this until I was checking in and seating down. It’s like a pleasant surprise preset for yourself.

I discovered that my hotel has free wifi, but only in the lobby. Normally a real pain, but the Westin has a pretty impressive lobby and the furniture there is better than my room.

Unfortunately, it has been a rainy misty day that wasn’t the best for walking around the city, but the weather is supposed to be above 20C and sunny by Monday…..

More to come,

Scott

Posted in travel Tagged , , , |

It’s Alive!

January 13, 2011 by Scott MacQuarrie | Leave a comment

It’s Alive!

After a very painful week, my website is back online and actually working properly. Almost exactly a week ago, I was informed by google that my website had been hacked and was redirecting visitors to some malware sites. Scanning software showed this was a sophisticated hack with malware code throughput my website.

After spending a unemployable evening trying to fix this myself, I called in the experts at www.securi.net. As promised they had everything back together within 4 hours of my contacting them. I watched them run a vast collection of specialized software to clean everything out, which reaffirmed my decision that this needed tools I did not have myself.

After that, everything looked fine, except my photocrati 3.1 theme stopped working. This was the reason behind the less than attractive website you may have seen here last week. I spent two days with their tech support, whose response was a combination of “we don’t have any idea what’s wrong”, “you should use our hosting service”,  and “It’s your service provider, not us. Not happy was I, as at least this new them environment of theirs should be able to perform a configuration check to tell what might be wrong instead of simply failing silently.

I spent an evening with my service provider’s tech support, who concluded that everything looked fine on their end, but could not support wordpress (and, in their defense, never claimed they could).

Classic. None knows what the problem is and each thinks it might be the other’s fault. I spent a day dealing with this nonsense until I decided two things:

1) I would nuke everything from orbit replace the entire environment, DB, wordpress, and themes, and

2) If this failed, I was done with photocrati and would look into other options.

So last night, I went through the time consuming process of nuking everything, then reinstalling everything fresh.

Strangely, it takes a little bit before wordpress uses all the data restored from an old database, so my pages didn’t work until 15-20 ,minutes after the backup was restored.  The most time consuming task was restoring and recreating all the galleries, as this wasn’t backed up with the backups. I need to look into this, as it should.

Now, the site is back up and working with about 95% of the functionality before, but I am a lot happier than I was at this time yesterday.

Now I can get back to Photography :-) .

Posted in website Tagged , , , , , |

Hacked

January 9, 2011 by Scott MacQuarrie | 1 Comment

Hacked

You may have noticed that the formatting of my website is a little screwed up. Unfortunately, my site was hacked and we are still trying to clean up the mess.

It looks like parties unknown decided to breach the security of my site in order to redirect people to a malware site. My first knowledge of this was an email from Google telling me my site had been blacklisted. Of course, my first response was to treat this email as spam, but no links were included in the page. When I went to the google webmaster site, I really had been blacklisted.

Not a good day.

Several security scanners showed that I had multiple areas of corruption and the redirects were embedded heavily through the website. Subtle, as the website still worked, but present nonetheless. After several fruitless hours of trying to fix this myself, I called in a security team who cleaned out the website with a collection of tools they have developed.

So, my website is back up and no longer blacklisted, but we are still cleaning up the mess around here…..

Posted in website Tagged , , , |

All the Best

December 29, 2010 by Scott MacQuarrie | Leave a comment

All the best of the Holiday Season

To all my friends and clients,  long known and newly met, I just wanted to wish you the very best of the holiday season and in the coming new year.

I try to use the holiday season to reflect on the year that passed and  plan for the year that has yet to be. This past year has been very challenging to everyone, but there are often surprising highlights. Sometimes we just need to take  notice of them.

Although, there as been no lack of issues this year, many of them unexpected and unusual, this has also been the most successful year so far for ZWCX Photography in both projects accomplished and for business in general.  I’ve had the opportunity to bid on larger and more varied projects. I’ve also had setbacks and failures, sometimes in unexpected areas.

I try to remind myself that the important thing in life is not about getting knocked down, but in getting back up again. Failure can be a guide towards the idea that works rather than a negative statement about yourself. Failure is a learning opportunity, not an act of fate against you. Failure is the fuel you use for success, not the wall preventing you from reaching it. Failure is often an opportunity in disguise.

If you, like many of us, had to stare failure in the eyes this year. Use it, learn from it, perhaps life is just pushing you in the direction you should have been following in the first place.  Do not allow it to define you or break your spirit. Make changes and keep going.

“If you’re going through hell – keep going”  Winston Churchill

May 2011 be a better year for everyone

Posted in Business

Magic Trackpad

December 13, 2010 by Scott MacQuarrie | Leave a comment

Magic Trackpad

Well, if you use a larger Apple monitor you’ve probably discovered one of the problems with this plan. Trying to move the mouse form one side of the monitor to the other is a complete pain. If you add a second monitor, the irritation is even more so. The Mac mouse is great, but it’s just not designed for moving around this kind of screen real estate. I thought I would just have to live with this little fact until I bumped into the magic trackpad.

This little $69 device looks and acts like a larger track pad for your system – but there are several important differences. First, it appears to understand acceleration much better than a mouse and moves from side to side quite easily. It’ roughly the same length and tilt as the wireless keyboard, so it’s easy to reach and feels like an extension of the keyboard instead of another device. It’s wireless, which means you can place it where ever you want – and not necessarily the same as the keyboard.  It also supports a variety of gestures. So much that I have kept the back of the box around to reference them.

I found myself quickly using this device instead of the mouse. In fact, I am not using my mouse at all anymore. The learning curve for the switch is almost non existent and quite obvious. Although I still use my Wicom tablet for precision editing of photographs, I found I can do a lot of work with the magic trackpad instead and with much greater ease than the mouse.

This is a product well worth checking out and a rather inexpensive experiment as well. I recommend it.

Posted in equipment Tagged , |

SAP Pays the piper

November 29, 2010 by Scott MacQuarrie | Leave a comment

SAP Pays the Piper

I see more and more photographers either giving away their copyright or not bothering to take some of the simple steps required to defend it.  I have received looks of confusion about the recent Canadian legislation to strengthen the protection for Canadian photographers. I have even heard, more than once, that copyrights have no value.

Strangely, corporations are pushing hardest to remove copyright protection from individual creators. Well, perhaps not so strange, as they are well aware of two things:

  • Visual content is critical to media success (either still or video). Even the Wall Street Journal, notorious for no photography, has changed its tune to include visual reporting.
  • Intellectual property is the most valuable asset of all

If you were not sure of this second fact, the recent court decision against SAP should place things in a very clear light.  SAP is a large software company that help large corporations automate their business. They are a competitor of Oracle, but was also involved with third party Oracle maintenance and training.  This is where you pay SAP for a support contract and training instead of Oracle, presumably for less money.

Well, it seems SAP was downloading copies of Oracle and using them without paying, in other words copying their software without the right to copy (copyright). Oracle sued SAP and the result was a 1.3 Billion dollar judgment against SAP. Yes, billion. This is the largest copyright penalty ever imposed. Oracle certainly knew the value of their copyright and SAP just had it explained to them very clearly.

You can read more about this case here.

Photographers face this problem all the time, where someone downloads and uses our work without paying or even considering the photographer at all. The value of copyright means we can force them to stop. The change we need to copyright is to increase the protection of creators, not decrease it.

Corporations certainly understand the value of copyright, that’s why they are pushing so hard to weaken the laws that protect our property.

It’s very true that you really only have the rights you are willing to fight for. If you create photographic works,  or create anything really, you need to consider the laws that protect you carefully.

Posted in copyright

OK Now what?

November 18, 2010 by Scott MacQuarrie | Leave a comment

Now What?

OK, I’ve signed onto my trip to Antarctica, something I have wanted to do for a very long time. Now I need to get ready. This is not a regular trip, as it’s off to the highest, windiest, coldest, and remotest place on the planet. Although, it’s not going to be winter there with -80C weather, it’s still going to be -6C to -10C.  It’s also going to be by boat from the edge of Argentina onwards.

Now, I have traveled all over the world (Antarctica is the last continent on my list), I’ve traveled with the huge amount of gear a professional photographer requires, and I’ve spent plenty of time in and around the ocean. I grew up in Nova Scotia and am a certified scuba diver. However, I think this trip is going to require some special attention.

My three areas of focus are:

  • Personal equipment and clothing for me
  • Camera equipment and accessories
  • Physical conditioning

Now, I am not in bad physical condition, but this is going to be a very physical adventure. Besides the challenges of traveling by plane with photo gear, I am based on a boat for most of the trip. This will also include traveling by Zodiac to go onshore. As well, the days there are about 22 hours long with only a couple of hours of night. This means I am not going to get a lot of sleep while I’m there – nor do I want much. I think it’s time to look into a more serious conditioning program than I have in the past.

The camera gear question is more complicated. I need to decide what to bring and how to protect it from the elements. As well, the question of spares is even more important, as nothing can be replaced while I am there.  I expect to be producing an unusually large number of photos, so even storage is going to be a challenge. The boat using British, two pronged plugs at 22v and 50 hrz, so I need to make sure everything can either support it or I can convert it.

My personal equipment needs some attention as well. Clothing and related equipment if the primary challenge here.  I live in Canada, where the weather is worse than Antarctica in the summer, but it’s still a challenge. I will be spending a LOT of time outdoors and I need to worry about wind and water.

I’ve started my research and exploring my options, but I haven’t solved a lot of these challenges yet. I’ll update things here as I progress with my preparations. I also have the upcoming Canadian winter to test some of my solutions before the real thing in Antarctica.

Posted in Antarctica

Antarctica

October 27, 2010 by Scott MacQuarrie | Leave a comment

Antarctica

The far side of nowhere……The end of the world (and then some)….One of the remotest places on this planet….

….. and my vacation destination……. :-) .

I have wanted to go to Antarctica for almost 10 years. Unfortunately, it’s remoteness also makes it difficult to reach. I’ve even considering signing up for a one year tour. I’ve wanted to go to Antarctica for longer than I have used a DSLR.

Now, not only am I going to Antarctica (and completing a life goal of visiting all the continents), I am going with a boatload of photographers, including a healthy collection of world class shooters. I am stoked, to say the least.

Although the trip is not until November 2011, there is plenty to do to get ready. I am going to be documenting my preparations for this trip here, including some of the challenges involved. Needless to say, I am going to take pictures, but I am also looking into shooting a little video (for my own use) on the trip as well.

More to come…….

Posted in Antarctica