Coming off the week that wasn’t, with my sore semitendinosis- that is a hamstring muscle for those not anatomically acquainted, I had backed off the mileage a good deal. Was supposed to have completed 51 miles total last week but only got in 36-missing a whole speed workout and taking a little off a couple other runs just to make sure the hamstring didn’t get worse. Moral of the story, don’t try to break in a new pair of (different) shoes during your highest mileage weeks, and don’t run your recovery runs any faster just because you can!

So trying to put it all back together again after being out of town I did get my 10 in on friday, and that left sunday, where I had forgotten I had signed up for and paid for the NYRR long training run. 18miles, not the 20 that was on the schedule, but coming off the potential injury I thought, if I can make it, all will be well.

Well that was before the weather decided we needed 2 inches of rain on sunday.

When you do these long runs the objective is to maintain an even pace, to keep your heart rate where you want it, and to try out different clothing and feeding options to see what works. They are dry runs for marathon day. Did I say dry? The other possibility is that you get up race day and Noah is waving at you from the Ark saying, “I warned you….”

Worst Case Scenario. I suppose toads raining down is one possible WCS but unlikely, rain or wind or heat or cold is more likely, assuming you aren’t dealing with injury, GI issues or flu. So the rain Sunday morning was WCS #1, steady rain and wind. I decided to leave as late as possible to avoid standing around at the start, and also I decided not to drop a bag since it was going to get soaked anyway. Just show up and run. I left the ipod at home, left the gels at home, so lets just see if I can deal with Gatorade Endurance formula for 18 miles and nothing else. Not that I really like that stuff, salt and HFCS blended with a hint of artificial lime. It looks like radioactive toxic slurry and probably is. But it is what is on the course officially. You can carry your own, but I would really rather not on race day. The fuel belts, the gizmos, I would like to leave most of that behind except for the garmin. I didn’t even wear the HR monitor although I probably should have just to see where I was.

Prospect Ave. had only one other crazy person at 6am when I boarded. One other person at DeKalb. Union Square is where most of the zombies got on, and more up the East Side to 103rd Street where it was a frontloading half mile to the start. I didn’t even bother to get in my right corral, I just lined up at the end and we were off.

So it is wet. A steady soaking rain. You don’t really know what to wear, it was borderline warm enough I think to lose the jacket but it worked for the NJ marathon so I wore it, plus a zensah short sleeve shirt. It is sort of like wool in that it stays warm when wet, but it also stretches, so eventually it was hanging down like a skirt. Not a great result. I think what you want is a single layer that has some warmth when wet and also some wind stopping ability. I have not found it yet.

Periodically, you let your arms fall to get rid of tension in your shoulders. As you do, water rills down off your fingertips like a garden sculpture. You feel water being squeezed up between your toes forcefully as you run along. This for two hours and thirty nine minutes, or three loops of the park. But somehow you get it done, and this being the third “twenty” miler in the schedule it is not so bad. My splits were not fast, but I was never working that hard, even to the end. I think with the rest before hand it sort of approximates what it will be like running after the taper and with others around to support you.

There is one twenty left on the schedule next week, and the Staten Island Half after that. I also want to do a “last ten miles” which is up First Ave and down Fifth Ave into the Park to see what the hills are really like.

We are at $1490/2500 for TFK with one month to go. All you fence sitters time to donate.

From Ms. Deane- photographer Ӧzant Kamaci has two projects, Pause, and Landing. From the statement:

Pause

In ‘pause’, the work depicts the juxtaposition of powerful machines which are symbols of advancement and technology against nature which is widely accepted as precious and untouched. The medium of photography provides a visual dichotomy of reality and illusion through the aesthetics of plane and tree and their spatial relationship. Planes behind trees as individual objects are familiar and common, but when combined and interrelated, the viewer moves to a new space to behold the unexpected.

Obviously I really like these- I like the scale distortion, the idea of a plane caught in a tree like a kite you might say, the unexpected visual merging of two graphic entities. I could see variations on this where tail markings and other insignia become part of the result. I also like how you can have an idea and someone else will have a similar idea but a completely different take on it. There is no end to the difference you can generate.

Early on I had some failed attempts where I was playing sort of in this garden:

But the results are completely different. And I didn’t have all the technical things worked out.

I think they might have worked best printed large from 35mm negs.

In training you have three variables, volume, intensity and frequency. Volume is the how far, intensity is the how hard, frequency is how often. Depending on how you combine these elements you can produce different results. All seem to lead to being tired however.

I was thinking of photography too, your mind wanders off a lot when you are tired. You could describe different kinds of photographers or kinds of photographers with volume, intensity and frequency. Volume would correspond with the amount of work produced, for example, stock shooters produce a high volume of work. Intensity could describe the effort required to make an image. A high intensity photographer might be like Gregory Crewdson. Low volume, but high intensity, with the film lighting, etc. Frequency would describe how often the photographer gets to make images. Crewdson in the last example, would have low frequency. Editorial photographers used to have high frequency. You could also say the intensity was moderate, and the volume was low, usually a page or several pages. Advertising photographers would generally have Low Volume, High Intensity, and Low Frequency. Paparazzi would have High Volume, low intensity and High Frequency. You could make venn diagram or a scatter chart to plot us all!

Well in my training we are nearing the highest volume, the highest intensity, but moderate frequency. I am not running twice a day like olympic hopefuls. And those highs are relative, about one half or one third what serious serious runners do. And I’m getting my butt kicked.

I did mile repeats again on Thursday. Going in this is the workout that I really don’t like, but coming out, it is something that is very satisfying. I think it has to do with how well signposted the workout is. You have a 400m oval. Two straightaways, and two curves. A mile is about 4 laps or 1600m. The workout called for a warmup, 2 miles, and then 4×1mile @7:00/mile. This is nearly a full minute faster than my planned marathon pace of 7:54/mile, which yields 26.2miles in 3:28:23, or sub 3:30:00. Loyal and devoted readers will remember that my first marathon in rainy Long Branch NJ clocked in at 3:49 and change. So this goal of sub 3:30 is pretty ambitious.

There are all sorts of predictors of marathon times, I won’t go in to them. One of them is a recent half marathon time. My last half was the Brooklyn half in late May, which was three and half months ago. Taking that time the prediction is 3:38:00 or so. How to find those 8 minutes? Speedwork.

So this is the drill. I do the warmup and end up back at the RedHook track ready to go. Another high school age group is doing 400m repeats and nasty situps. A football team is scrumming on the inner field. Round we go. The splits are 1:45, 3:30, 5:15 and 7:00. You then get a 800m cooldown before the next interval begins again. Somehow the body knows exactly how fast to go to get around this oval in 1:45. Don’t ask me how or why. It might have something to do with the fact that my heart is pounding out of my chest and I can’t go any faster but I think it is that mental fight or flight thing again. Your body will only give you enough to do what you ask it to do. So I have these goal times already in my head. It will not give me any more. Dumb body, thinks I am being chased by a cheetah and might have to run for miles. So as long as I just stay ahead of death, that is ok. If it thought I was being chased by an old lady on a motorized scooter I guess I’d get 15 minute miles?

These are the splits: first interval 6:52, second 6:55, third 6:59, fourth 7:02. This is only the second time I have run this workout, and it surprises me how close that is. Well the first one is too fast but that is understandable. Perhaps more telling is the rest interval which grows each time, I take my own sweet time to do the 800’s in-between. They are the coaches little gift. I suspect a real coach would not let me take a full five minutes between the third and fourth interval but it has been a long week my friends.

So as I said, you hate it going in, but clocking the last interval, those numbers when you see them on the clock, 1:45, 3:30, 5:15, 7:00 become your little friends, they tell you actually doing it. You get cozy with the pain because it tells you the worse it gets the closer you are to the end. So you sort of bend yourself to it. I did raise my hands at the end in sweet victory, or perhaps trying to relieve that cramp in my side , probably reaching for the imaginary beer I was fantasizing about at the end just to get me through, but it felt better than running a twenty even, which is just long slow death. This is more like wedging a brick against the accelerator and going over a cliff death. Whee!

43 days till NYC Marathon. I live to paint the world red it seems.

This weekend is the Queen’s Half marathon which is most known for it’s inaccessibility from the outside world. There is a bus at the ungodly hour of 5am to get us all there. And no, this is not more punishment, actually it is a relief, the “official” workout was 16 miles, this is a piddly 13.1, and features water stops, gatorade, and maybe some dancing bears. It is a gift really.

Really.

A long time ago I mentioned my friend Steve Guttenberg. Not that one. Steve is a freelance writer and artist and likes to hook up extremely expensive audio and video equipment in his apartment and relax to aural nirvana. He has been feeding my vinyl craze. And my TFK craze. Recently he got an absurdly expensive turntable, the googlifonic kind with a moonrock needle. He played it for me. It went to eleven standing still. I in turn have been setting him up with photoshop techniques and he has gone a very long way in two years. He photographs, and then, well, I’m not sure. This comes out…

Dancers

The part I haven’t told you is that Steve really can’t see that well. He is legally blind. A birth defect left him with impaired vision, but as a child he used to stare at the sun wide eyed because the colour effects that he was seeing were irresistible. The resulting scars on his retina made things worse. But that didn’t stop Steve from eventually becoming a movie projectionist in New York in the Eighties. Did I mention that when you meet Steve, he will tell you a story. And then another. Possibly a third. All fascinating. You see, you want a paranoid projectionist! Focus! Steve brought binoculars into the booth to see better. So he was constantly on the lookout for blurry images. It makes sense if you let it.

Montauk #3

Digital cameras for Steve are like bionic eyes. He can see things very close up. Like a computer monitor from about 3 inches. And also an LCD on the back of a camera. Viewfinders are useless to him, ah, but on a preview you can magnify your picture…10x or more. All of a sudden, distant details are visible. Steve literally takes pictures to see what things look like. Which is by definition, is what a photographer does. And very Winograndian.

The Corner

We are up to 30% of my TFK pledge. More contributors to come.

Over on the Resolve blog this quote from Marc Asnin

I also think you should dress for who you are. I don’t know if people still do that, but when I was a kid, you had to get dressed up for everything. I’m not saying show up as a slob, but you know, I’ve had some interns show up in suits. I’m like, listen, never wear a tie to meet me. You’re in the photo world in New York now. No one wears a tie, man.

So what do you think? I have had to wear a tie but once-photographing in the New York Stock Exchange. Not even in the White House was I required to wear a tie, although I was shooting behind the scenes and not at a State Dinner.  I have had to photograph a lot of ‘Guy’s in Tie’s’ (GITS) and generally felt for them on hot days.

So do only Wedding Pro’s wear ties?

(mad man Thom Browne)

This morning I got a letter from William Schmidt, deputy managing editor of the NYT. My hand trembled as I opened the envelope. (there was no envelope) Maybe the “Weekender” is coming in a new Coach Edition with matching leather gloves for smudge free reading?

TO: ALL FREELANCE PHOTOGRAPHERS

This is a reminder of The Times’s policies on digital manipulation or other alteration of photos.

As you know, under the contract you signed for The Times, you warrant that any photo submitted for publication “will be original and unaltered (unless it is a photo illustration, pre-approved by your editor and fully disclosed in caption information materials).”

The Times takes this obligation very seriously; the integrity of photographs and other material we publish goes to the heart of our credibility as a news organization. The prohibition on unauthorized alteration of photos applies to all sections of the paper, the Magazine and the Web site.

This passage from the newsroom’s “Guidelines on Our Integrity” explains our rules in more detail:

Photography and Images. Images in our pages, in the paper or on the Web, that purport to depict reality must be genuine in every way. No people or objects may be added, rearranged, reversed, distorted or removed from a scene (except for the recognized practice of cropping to omit extraneous outer portions). Adjustments of color or gray scale should be limited to those minimally necessary for clear and accurate reproduction, analogous to the “burning” and “dodging” that formerly took place in darkroom processing of images. Pictures of news situations must not be posed.

In some sections, and in magazines, where a photograph is used to serve the same purposes as a commissioned drawing or painting – as an illustration of an idea or situation or as a demonstration of how a device works, etc. – it must always be clearly labeled as a photo illustration. This does not apply to portraits or still-lifes (photos of food, shoes, etc.), but it does apply to other kinds of shots in which we have artificially arranged people or things, as well as to collages, montages, and photographs that have been digitally altered.

If you have any questions about what is permissible under the rules, please consult the assigning editor.

Sincerely,

William E. Schmidt
Deputy Managing Editor
The New York Times Newspaper
Division of The New York Times Company

The gloves will have to wait. But they have come off. Obviously some battening down of hatches is going on after the Edgar Martins débâcle. It is to be expected. It is also the first time I have ever gotten any official direction in writing with respect to “a policy” on alteration…well corporate communication is always an oxymoron. I did know what was permissible out of common sense. You wonder who doesn’t? As for that bit about consulting your editor if you have a question, well, in my experience Photoshop is most useful to them as a box to make the monitor higher. Raw converters, high radius sharpening, LAB colour, moire, curves vs. levels, shadow-highlight, none of this is going to get you more than a wha? Honestly, it is not their job to understand digital capture technology or be digital referees. Their job is to understand pictures and make intelligent assignments. They do this very well.

Part of the reason I was approached by the Times to do work for them was that I was outside of the newspaper world. I had not cut my teeth on newspapers, I did not go to J-school, I had never shot a grin and grab nor a high school soccer game. I don’t have that memory bank of solutions to photo problems that go through a 24mm lens close to the subject if you know what I mean. Which is not to disparage what journalists have to do. There are necessary limits implied by the mandate, I will get back to that.

My development in photography had come totally through editorial magazine work, and the editors that were calling were also veterans of that world. Their learning curve was steep also. While some may have had experience on newsmagazines or financial reporting, none had significant newspaper backgrounds. But the sections I was being assigned to were not “news” sections, it was feature fare like Dining, Arts, Style. I was not being asked to “report” on anything. I still got chastised early and often however for my scant captions. I figured the less I said the better. I did not want the responsibility of reporting, since I am not trained. My mandate is to take the intelligent handoff from an editor and make good pictures in my style. That’s what they wanted me for. Which is not reporting, probably not journalism, and may or may not be reality either. By the standards above, almost everything I was assigned was a photo-illustration, in that I directed people, moved furniture and generally futzed around until I got the photograph that I wanted, whether it was a portrait, a still life or interior. This is standard editorial practice.

In some sections, and in magazines, where a photograph is used to serve the same purposes as a commissioned drawing or painting – as an illustration of an idea or situation or as a demonstration of how a device works, etc. – it must always be clearly labeled as a photo illustration. This does not apply to portraits or still-lifes (photos of food, shoes, etc.), but it does apply to other kinds of shots in which we have artificially arranged people or things, as well as to collages, montages, and photographs that have been digitally altered.

“Illustrations of ideas or situations” might encompass any situation where I was present and made choices about photographing a person or group. But portraits and still life gets a pass evidently, unless the “people or thing” is “artificially arranged”, which takes me back in a circle to almost all portraits and all still life. I am no clearer after this clarification. (secret answer: there may be no answer to this for newspapers, read on…)

Tangential to that, (going somewhere, I promise) my cable provider has seen fit to scramble the location of the channels, I now have C-Span and NY-1 in the low digits. I am enjoying the Wendy Williams show for the first time. How You Doing? Fine, thank you, and getting up early on Sunday mornings for my long runs means that I get back around 10am, just in time for Richard D. Heffner’s excellent program “An Open Mind” broadcast from SUNY somewhere upstate, NY. For the last two weeks he has been interviewing Alex S. Jones, an authority on media issues, Pulitzer Prize winner and former New York Times staffer through much of the eighties. He has a new book out called “Losing the News” “The Future of the News That Feeds Democracy.” Here is an excerpt from chapter one, “The Iron Core”:

Imagine a sphere of pitted iron, grey and imperfect like a large cannonball. Think of this dense, heavy ball as the total mass of each day’s serious reported news, the iron core of information that is at the center of a functioning democracy. This iron core is big and unwieldy, reflecting each day’s combined output of all the professional journalism done by news organizations — newspapers, radio and television news, news services such as the Associated Press and Reuters, and a few magazines. Some of its content is now created by new media, nonprofits, and even, occasionally, the supermarket tabloids, but the overwhelming majority still comes from the traditional news media.

This iron core does not include Paris Hilton’s latest escapade or an account of the Yankees game or the U.S. Open. It has no comics or crossword puzzle. No ads. It has no stories of puppies or weekend getaways or recipes for cooking great chili. Nor does it include advice on buying real estate, investing in an IRA, movie reviews, or diet advice. There is nothing wrong with any of these things. Indeed, pleasant and diverting stories are far more appealing to most people than the contents of the core, which some find grim, boring, or riddled with bias.

It has no editorials and does not include the opinions of columnists or op-ed writers or political bloggers. These things are derived from the core. They are made possible because there is a core. Their point of departure is almost always information gleaned from the reporting that gives the core its weight, and they serve to spread awareness of the information that is in the core, to analyze it and interpret it and challenge it. Opinion writers pick and choose among what the core provides to find facts that will further an argument or advance a policy agenda. But they are outside the core, because they almost always offer commentary and personal observation, not original reporting.

Inside the core is news from abroad, from coverage of the war in Iraq to articles describing the effort to save national parks in Mozambique. There is news of politics, from the White House to the mayor’s office. There is an account of a public hearing on a proposal to build new ball fields and an explanation of a regional zoning concept that might affect property values. There is policy news about Medicare reform and science news about global warming. There is news of business, both innovation and scandal, and even sporting news of such things as the abuse of steroids. An account of the battle within the local school board about dress codes is there, along with the debate in the state legislature over whether intelligent design should be taught as science. The iron sphere is given extra weight by investigative reports ranging from revelations that prisoners at the county jail are being used to paint the sheriff’s house to the disclosure that the government is tapping phones without warrants as part of the war on terror.

Alex feels we are eroding this Core, and are at risk of losing it altogether. The core cannot be maintained in any type of “free” way. Basic reporting is like digging ditches, rarely any glamour involved, you are not going to get an intern to go to Afghanistan for free to do this. It requires resources and commitment over the long haul. Notice also the distinction he makes between original reporting and opinion and analysis. Without the core, you cannot have the rest.

…So I get this email this morning reminding us all about the standards and practices involved and it makes me think-how do you square this circle? In other words, in trying to create a product more interesting to more people newspapers have enlarged the scope of their coverage well beyond the confines of the iron core that Alex talks about. Tthey have done this for a long time, except with staff photographers. Lately they have seen fit to hire outside the choir you could say. Which gets you Edgar Martins, an art star who has no connection to print and obviously no concern. Or it gets you Nadav Kander, (who I love) and a set of completely manipulated portraits that passes muster because as I read above, portraits and still life can be called photographs, except when they are photo illustrations. So is it not a photo illustration to completely change and insert a background? The Magazine, the website and the Newspaper all have to adhere to the same standard according to the letter above. If I am confused, imagine the lay reader.

Newspapers seem to be trying to have their cake and eat it too. The mandate to create compelling (which you can also read as trendy, fashionable, provocative) content may not always coincide with the mandate to report facts. When you start to mix up this iron core with sections from Agronomy to Zymurgy, (just leave my astrology thank you!) when you start to look outside the J-schools and newspaper ranks for editors and creatives, and when the pressure of the bottom line starts to pinch, then you get mission “creep”.  Profit and ambition can compromise integrity, and the reader loses faith in the core itself. News becomes confused with info-tainment.  Reporting start to look less like truth and more like the opinion of the newspaper owner.

We now are awash in opinion, mine included. I have no solution here but wanted to draw attention to Jones’ writing and his “core” idea. I believe that accountability reporting as he calls it is essential to our democracy. You are not watching your city council, but you know someone is. Dutifully, so that one day there is a paper trail, and a story can emerge of corruption or improvement. Technologists like to posit that the camera phone, the citizen journalist and the very transparency of information on the internet can provide what newspapers currently provide. But you cannot expect bloggers to be able to withstand the lawsuits that even a simple investigative piece could generate. Certainly that lone blogger could “tweet” for help but this is a naive fantasy. I heard Eric Schmidt of Google gush that the simplicity of fact checking on the internet means that politicians will have a harder time lying in public. Guess he has not tuned into C-Span lately. Maybe he needs to rescan his converter box to make sure he is getting all the channels…

A whole post and I only mentioned running once.

Do you remember? The very first night of September? Love was changing the minds of pretenders, while chasing the clouds away…

Above: Stack o’ promos to go out. Don’t accuse me of being cynical about this photo business…

TFK UPDATE:

Thanks to some recent donations from the  Mr and Mrs. Jackanory, Mr. and Mrs. Bumble, and Mr. and Mrs. Wright, we are sitting over $600 of $2500, that is more than 25% of the way there!