I stopped in on a photo exhibit the other day. Amazing portraits done in some sensitive situations. One thing missing: the photographer’s name.
Later today there’s an event for the exhibition. In the event announcement on the venue’s blog? No mention of the photographer’s name.
And here in my writing, something missing because out of my control: the photographer’s name.
A travesty.
.:.
You need to take on projects that are
It’s become
Big projects. Taking on large tasks. That is where I have ended up. Do something every day for a year. Completely remodel the web presence, removing (deleting) content that is weak. Adding content that is strong.
Every day I am posting photographs from the past thirty years of that day. Which means I’ve got to edit at least thirty days of photographs daily. The January edit is complete, the posts soon to be live.
Biggest lesson in all of this, one month in, is to walk away when it stops being fun.
.:.
The most beautiful thing one of our children’s teachers said to us the other day, “We want our children to thrive.”
Yes. Anything that gets in the way of that will be eliminated ignored.
.:.
I watched the film Faces Places yesterday. If you give in to this film, and are lucky, you will be brought to the verge of tears by the beauty of everyday humanity and a love of creativity. Such goodness in this film.
.:.
I’ve been going through then entire archive of The Photo Show podcast. They’re all great. The beauty of this episode was the way Susan helped me remember that the career I chose has a rich history full of importance, towering artistry, and genius.
[contentcards url=”http://www.thephotoshow.org/susan-kismaric-episode-19.html”]
If my wife’s job went like mine today, she would have spent most of her day teaching to an empty classroom. Teaching – like still giving the lessons that she’d prepared – to empty seats. She would have been talking all day, with no audience.
Soul crushing.
[contentcards url=”https://bensmithphoto.com/asmallvoice/christopher-anderson”]
Thinking a lot about an offhand comment someone made about templating making things all look the same. The trade-off is productivity. Templates save a lot of time. But true, you need to use the saved time to continually refine and improve the template, and develop the next version.
My version – build a template or workflow and immediately begin producing product.
The alternative – talk a lot.
.:.
Sad to see a bunch of design work I did last year go unused today in a huge news story. And the response when I point out that it could still be used was, “see what we can do.”
Didn’t I just barely resolve to stay positive?
How do you, in a positive way, address a mistake, or point out an improvement?
The answer can’t be to swallow your concerns/ideas and not say a word, even when you’re on vacation all week and aren’t necessarily interested in logging in to fix something.
How do you say nothing when your work is thrown on the floor and ignored? You really shouldn’t. The realization is that more and more, um, that’s about all I’m going to type right here…
.:.
Thinking of moving everything back to a WP multisite config. Maybe.
.:.
I also started thinking about this year’s UNPA contest. Never mind that we still haven’t announced last year’s winners. Never mind that last year was full of drama. Never mind that I had planned to follow a friend’s advice to walk away from the gig and not “take that kind of sh*t from anybody…”
I was thinking this morning that, in my 2018 positivity, it would be easy to stick with it and put together a crazy cool photojournalism competition where everything from entry to judging was transparent.
I’m always about to walk away or run a marathon.
Hard to give up 17 years of tradition that recognizes the best work in the state.
[contentcards url=”https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-12-07/how-rodrigo-duterte-turned-facebook-into-a-weapon-with-a-little-help-from-facebook”]
