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.

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.

When you are in it and someone says something great, you think to yourself, yes, remember that advice, then when you get home and try to remember all that sage wisdom, somehow it has faded…

The experience itself has not faded- Look3 is a tremendous festival, very well organized, just to mention a few things:

The location could not be better on a pedestrian boulevard with great food all around, tables in the center to meet and eat, even AC outlets on the lampposts! There were signs and banners everywhere, you could find your way around, and all the volunteers and staff were super motivated and excited.

Charlottesville is well integrated in the festival, all the merchants love the business, even cab drivers have opinions on film vs. digital. They must be reading photoblogs…

The curation and direction of the festival is firm: they are not about workshops altho they have them- what they are about is education, and the “image”. It is the festival of “the photograph”, and they are dedicated to enriching the experience of making and sharing work. They want to get young photographers next to the experienced veterans, and they want to put experienced artists next to each other on stage to see what happens- the pairing of Sally Mann to interview Nan Goldin was a masterstroke- it completely changed my idea of Nan’s work. As she says, she has no relation to “NanGoldin”, whoever she was.  That person is gone. And Nan even turned the tables on Mann, interviewing the interviewer, in a conversation on a couch on stage where it felt like we were listening in on a private conversation, you wanted it to continue to see just where it was going to end up.

The pairing of Massimo Vitali with NPR’s Alex Chadwick was another great idea- a professional interviewer who does his homework, and that voice- if you closed your eyes you could imagine it was Sunday afternoon and you were listening to a great radio interview, and Massimo spoke very intelligently about his work and the realities of the contemporary art world- about how Marianne Boesky challenged him early on in his development to consider presentation as central to what it was he was doing- he realized he was making objects- large scale plexi mounted images, not images- and to concentrate on showing a small body of work over an extended period of time to cement in the viewer or buyers mind who he was and exactly what he did. And it ran counter to the advice he was getting and his own ideas that he had formed over a 30 year commercial career, he was told the beach was not interesting, the pictures were not interesting, and he should drop it and move on. That has since been proven wrong, altho Massimo himself acknowledges he does not exactly understand the contemporary art world and its values, but at last he is getting to make the work he wants to make. A very illuminating interview.

Scott Thode curated what seemed like two-thirds of the work in the evening slideshows- and did a superb job. He must be nearly blind by now. There were several standouts for me- Gillian Laub’s Four Generations, Tim Davis’s Dollar General Drive By, Jeff Jacobsens completely amazing From the Catskills,  on night two, and on the final night, Donald Weber’s Interrogations, Erin Trieb’s The Homecoming, and Robert van deer Hilst’s Chinese Interiors stood out for me. Crowd favorites were Yuri Kozyrev’s The Arab Spring got a huge applause, and the festival ending video from Jacob Krupnick- Girl Walk//All Day Shot which you can see heregot everyone to their feet when the featured improv dancers from the video magically turned up live and performed. A great way to end the evening.

I could probably write more, all the interactions and conversations, how everyone is faced with similar challenges and as David Alan Harvey says, we are one big tribe and this is a gathering of the tribe. The festival is also about community, and is one of the few places I know where photographers and editors feel like they are standing on the same side of the line, all trying daily to get to the image.

If you can go next year, go. I’ll be there.

Custom laser etch on PinaZangaro covers. Typography by Angela Voulangas

New word of the day: Xoloitzcuintli (show-low-eats-queent-lee).

full story here.

Joe and Mamina.

What do you get when Chris Noth, Brian Cox, Jim Gaffigan, Jason Patric and Kiefer Sutherland get together?

Five very pressure filled minutes. But I loved them. Full story here.

I had the good pleasure of meeting, riding with and photographing Pablo Airaldi in May of 2007 for NYT…

I got a call recently from the VV to request images of Pablo, no mention of why, but they really liked what I sent and said that it was a possible cover.

It’s not the cover that is remarkable, it is Pablo’s story. We didn’t discuss much that day except the story, do some cool pics of Pablo on the streets of New York in different cycling garb, a style piece, and I suggested we just cycle and find locations that worked, which he was all for. Pablo was riding a fixie, and I loved watching him descend the Brooklyn Bridge locking up the rear wheel every once and a while. I lumbered along after him on my mountain bike. (I’m old enough to remember when it was necessary variously to have: a Banana Seat Bike, a 10 Speed, a Mountain Bike….I skipped the BMX phase…)

Anyway you should read the VV story, it is very current, it is an individual story about an immigrant, which we should recognize as very common.

I am sensitive to the whole notion of “immigration” – Neither of my parents are in the country that they were born in, and now, neither am I. By “law” I have rights to three passports but carry two- on from jus soli and the other by jus sanguinis to get fancy- born in Canada to an American mother. I have a third option available to claim British Citizenship through my father and his father, although my father was born in New York to British parents…what a bounty of passports simply being thrown at me! I have to wonder- what are we all so sensitive about when it comes to people born south of the border? East-West doesn’t seem to get everyone so worked up.

I am oversimplifying-Pablo was convicted of a felony- had I been convicted of a felony while in Canada I do not know how the immigration authorities would have handled my case-as far as they were concerned, I was an American from birth, so I suppose you cannot deny something from someone that they already possess.

Everyone accepts that this is the country you come to to get a new start-certainly things were good enough for me in Canada that I didn’t need to come here, I wanted to. I have never been to Uruguay. I am told it has a high standard of living relatively in South America, and is progressive and democratic.

What the story boils down to, as so many stories do, is that if you have money and can hire better than a public defender, your troubles will likely go away. No one will talk about rewarding bad behaviour, consequences, etc. “Used to be” that this country was a place for people with no money to come and work and create a new life. Now that we are the “haves,” we are insensitive to the have-nots. And unless we all get down to making babies real soon, we need immigration simply to prop up social security and medicare for all those boomers who used to be on the side of immigration but now seem to be against it.

Update: so I wrote all that last night and was going to post it and checked the VV story again for the link and evidently he is out!-

Alexa Chung for NYT Style here. Thanks to Brent at B2Pro, Scott and Daeja for their help. I would give you a lighting diagram but when you have one HMI in a room 15×15 you pretty much can put it anywhere and get great light!

Thanks to Catriona at ESPN, JB who assisted, Steve Wulf the writer and Chelcie for making this a great day. Ross was in Rudy, Major League, Hoosiers, and the list goes on. His big thing is that he shows up ready to work, likes to work, feels that attitude is everything. So we got down to it and had great light. What else can you ask for?

Sometimes you get there, you get setup, and, well, read the rest here.