Ok this is not the way you use this…

Its supposed to go in an iPhone- its called “Square” and it allows you to accept credit card payments over your iPhone which are then deposited nightly to your account. They take 2.5%, which I think is low compared to standard merchant services accounts in the major banks.

I’ve often thought and written about how the whole financial model of professional photography is busted, if you think about your daily life, you rarely if ever get to walk out of any store, professional office, toll booth, school, even church without laying down you hard earned CASH in one way or another for something you received. The kid at the local neighbourhood lemonade stand ain’t gonna take credit either. And there are so many ways now to pay, banks have made it incredibly easy to move money around online and with direct deposit. All for a fee yes but time is money too.

I’ll let you know how it works out, right now I just got it (and its free to sign up and the reader is free too) because I have had now a few occasions where I have been asked or when it might have been more expedient just to accept a credit card.

Maybe the next 5DmkIII will have it built in. Just remember you saw it here first.

This year I had to seriously confront why I run marathons.

 -a toothy grin courtesy Andrew Hetherington…

The first couple you run it’s new and it’s a challenge and you want to see if you can improve. So that’s good enough for numbers one and two. Three is where you know what you are getting in to and you realize that there is a limit to how fast you can run a marathon given the amount of time I wanted to commit to it and where I was physically at my age, the amount of capacity I had to stay healthy and train and not get injured.  And of course you do get injured every year, something starts getting creaky no matter how much you try to avoid it. Its not like I have been running for years, the body takes a long time to respond to training if you consider that against a lifetime of not training.

So going back to the basic question- why run this marathon, if I wasn’t getting any faster, and if I had nothing really to prove to myself, is it just about fun, is that enough? Aren’t there easier ways to have fun?

I knew I could do it, although the any given sunday rule applies, anything can happen while you are doing it. And I didn’t really know how my knee was going to fare. But you don’t go to the start line and think of 26.2 miles. You just think about getting warmed up, finding your comfortable pace, getting to whatever miles your friends are at, seeing whatever landmarks, halfway points, bridges, etc, you piece it out. You are just going from one place to the next.  And that’s how it gets done.

I really didn’t actually think about running a marathon and finishing until 400m from the end, when all efforts to stave off a cramp were failing, I think your body knows exactly what you are asking of it and at that point it is saying, ok, really now, this is enough. This is why in military training you’d do whatever stupid thing it was and they would let you think for a half a second, now we are done, and then they say, ok, now do it again…just so you understand that limits are all mental.

The last 6 miles I really pushed hard, doesn’t mean I was going any faster, but my splits were not tanking into the 9′s either. Mile 26 was actually my fifth fastest mile overall, (8:08!) so I was gaining ground, and I knew that slowing down would mean cramping so it was all about pushing harder not less.

And in that effort I found something strange, I kind of started to welcome the pain, it meant I was doing it right, that I was actuallygoing to finish the marathon…it was a surprise to me. As the legs got more and more leaden, I just pushed harder and harder and I think I realized that there is a whole other side beyond when you think you are done. I don’t want to get all mystical about it, as soon as I crossed the line I was incredibly happy to not be running but for those last 6 miles and especially the last 400 meters which for some crazy reason has to be uphill, the tightening of my right quadriceps into a vice-like cramp was not the real issue, even as it was happening it was not happening, it was over already, as long as I didn’t really focus on it. In reality, yes, it was real, probably another mile and it would have dropped me, but that’s not what had to happen, I just had to get to the top of the hill and that was alright by me.

So why run a marathon, the answer is so that you can experience pain in a different way. You want to lean into it. It means you are closer to succeeding than you think.

At least that is what I learned this year.

That and I’ve got a great bunch of friends and neighbours who supported me on and off the course- thank you all!

It kind of reads like that Old Spice commercial, “Can your man prepare a gourmet dinner in a kitchen he hewed out of solid oak by hand?…” Well, Taavo can. You don’t know him but if you have been to Freemans, The Rusty Knot or the new Isa in Williamsburg then you have sat on his chairs, drank at his bars and feasted under his roofs. And yes he makes the stuff. He gets it from his parents, that’s his dad Toivo enjoying his retirement. I think Taavo might have put him to work…

File under the category of “exactly as you thought” which is a compliment.

Krysten Ritter of Breaking Bad fame was nice enough to let me into her apartment. She has a new show on ABC called Apartment 23, along with Dawson’s Creek star James Van Der Beek. Gosh I remember when DC was on- that must have been the birth of Emo right there. She also gave me one of those juices you can buy at WholeFood for nine dollars, I know Bill Cunningham won’t accept a glass of water on assignment but boy those are good.

Director of the new movie “Gainsbourg,” on a press junket, hotel room, etc. I didn’t say I was from “Horse and Hound” magazine. You’re wondering how I got that photobooth into the elevator huh?…

Been a long time since I put anything up here…as usual it comes in a deluge.

First is a website update. I streamlined the logo and have separated out galleries. There will be some new galleries added in the coming week. Piece of advice; don’t bother creating your own custom website. Just get some service to do do it like aphotofolio or livebooks. It is not worth the effort. I had to migrate to a new server and have lost days to that. And I sort of know what I am doing, just enough to be dangerous. Massive PITA. If you are interested, I have used slideshowpro.com to provide the functionality, also their Director software to manage the backend. It is well integrated with Lightroom so I can export images and they appear instantly, formatted.

New also is iPhone and iPad compatibility via HTML5- ok so you don’t care- but the website works and formats for whatever iOS or Android device you are on. Check it out.

You might notice some new faces in there- tomorrow I will post about recent work.