Now This is Cool...

The good side of this is that it made the planning and production side fairly painless on my side. Due to the nature of how I was shooting, I would be forced to keep the lighting fairly simple and portable. There were no elaborate sets, nor would I need to worry with shooting permits for any of the multiple locations we shot at around Atlanta. What I did have to concern myself with was making sure I got things right for them since the planing and production side was anything but painless on Coke's side. This involved them arranging for us to shoot at each location, paying numerous employee's / models to work with over the course of the shoot, and even pulling a brand new Coke truck off the road along with one of their drivers for a day. 

Thanks for sharing, Keith!

LEBANON William Simone, a local photographer and business owner, died Tuesday night, May 15, 2012, in Lebanon.

This is no mere shop. It’s clear at once that you’ve entered the cavern of a collector of gargantuan, if not uncontrollable, curatorial appetites who has fashioned a bombastically seductive retail environment that is also a private museum and lair. It’s a deep, narrow space organized as a sequence of themed chambers. There are packages, bottles, boxes, toys, lights, pictures, gadgets, gas masks and clocks, printed ephemera by the truckload, crazily overstocked side rooms devoted to bathroom and kitchen wares, and somewhere far away at the back, beyond the vintage porn pictures and the life-sized anatomical model with removable organs, is a retro clothing room and possibly even other wondrous departments that I never reached.

I have an affinity to this sort of thing. My office contains a lot of toys and artifacts from the world of trinkets... including a tiny green dinosaur that moves from shelf to shelf seemingly by itself.... hmmmm.....

This collapse was rooted in the vast amount of foreign debt carried by Iceland. Only 10% of the total credit in our system was in our local currency; 90% was in foreign currency or inflation-linked loans. With depreciation of the krona, these loans increased in size.

Iceland has a small, open economy where most goods are imported. Depreciation of the krona does not, therefore, lead to a direct increase in the competitiveness of the country because all imports immediately rise in price and exports are more or less fixed. We have learned, painfully, that you cannot devalue a country to prosperity, and it is virtually impossible when all loans are more or less in foreign currency.

Now, four years after the financial collapse, Iceland remains in a tough spot. People’s income has dropped by about a quarter in real terms since before the collapse, but their debt has almost doubled. So how do we find a way out?

posted without comment...

If you devote a large part of your life to making writing, art, or any other creative work that doesn’t have as its end result a clearly commercially viable product (i.e., I’m not talking artisanal pickles or ombre tights or short stories about middle-aged couples who go to a party and leave vaguely dissatisfied + maybe there’s a Holocaust reference in there) (jk about that last one, kind of), you are going to either need to figure out how to get paid for that work by somebody — the government, your audience, some kind of patron — or you’re going to have to figure out something to do with the remaining portion of your time that doesn’t make it impossible to have enough hours or mental real estate remaining to do that work. I’ve read many variations on the theme of “everyone makes it work in her own way,” but though that’s kind of true, there are still underlying themes of every artist’s super-unique story that we ignore at our peril.  

I like this article.

You should read the whole thing.

via APhotoEditor

Without going into it any further (and risking pissing people off), I'll just say I think the film vs. digital situation in feature films is part of a larger cultural battle—that neither side really needs to "win." I don't mind that other people get Avatar and The Avengers; do they really need to mind that I get The King's Speech and Winter's Bone? (You can thank me for not making a bad pun just there about throwing us traditionalists a bone.)

A worthwhile article, in any case. Might even have something to do with still photography, on some tangent or other, although I'm not going to stretch it that far myself.

Yeah... not sure either must win, but a darn shame that there is such a divide.

However, I know damn sure where I stand. Give me a "King's Speech" or a "Man on Fire" over "Avatar" and "Titanic" any damn day.

And while I love certain illustrative photographers, I have no intention of shooting like that, nor will it hang on my wall.

At least at this moment on this day in May. I reserve the right to change my mind at any time, for any reason. Heh.

And delusional self-regard aside, I wanted to execute this very modestly, to keep the stakes (and thus the price) low. I do not think of the result as an alternative to a physical object, and did not approach it as such. It’s a different category of thing that can exist only on the newly extended continuum that digital durability makes possible. A different sort of object might have entailed working with paid professionals to edit, proofread, design, technically massage, otherwise perfect, and maybe even promote it. For that matter, a different sort of project might have needed to result in a physical book, a form of object I still very much believe in.

Oddly, Greek representatives in Brussels have hinted that they may soon be in a position to settle their debts and have puzzled the French and German banks that hold their loans by asking if there is any discount for cash.

The younger the person you ask, the less likely it is you’ll find that link between wanting to know what’s going on and grabbing a paper or opening up a news website. They use Pinterest to figure out what’s fashionable and Facebook to see if there’s anything fun going on next weekend. They use Facebook just the same to figure out whether there’s anything they need to be upset about and need to protest against.

Seriously.

Schools selling journalism degrees should be investigated for fraud at this point. I'm serious.

And I just spoke with a young lady who is $83K in debt, working as a waitress and waiting for a chance to work at 'journalism' job (her words).

Problem is... there aren't any.

And the trend is going down down down.

To understand tech-company life cycles, you can skip the Harvard Business Review. Instead, study "Citizen Kane." And "Death of a Salesman." And "The Anatomy of Melancholy." And the Old Testament.

And while you're at it -- if, on the eve of Facebook's $100 billion IPO, you really want to grasp tech investing -- "120 Days of Sodom."

I think there is a strong wind a brewin'... and it may be a blowin' down a mast or two, mateys...

Of course... WTF do I really know about anything?

Well, I know enough not to have purchased "GroupOn" stock... heh.