Michael [mahy-kuhl] – noun
1. A male given name. 2. A witty, charming professional wedding photographer who enjoys movies, exercise, romantic walks on the beach and large pepperoni pizzas.
Maven [may-ven] – noun
1. A connoisseur or trusted expert in a particular field who seeks to pass his knowledge onto others. 2. An intense gatherer of useful information. 3. An individual who demonstrates passion for learning and teaching a specific topic, particularly through a well connected social network.
Thank you for coming to my blog! I update it regularly, so if you ever want to know what I am up to, please come by and take a peek. Feel free to leave your comments below.
I know it sounds crazy, but its true. Also, as soon as the T2i is released, we will be shooting that one as well. I wouldnt try to tackle all at once, but we have a lot of video from last years Nashville Workshop. (There are about 20 hours of lessons from these 3 workshop days). The plan is to take those lessons and divide them by topic to go into the following DVDs:
- Advanced Photography Techniques - This covers most of the major cool techniques that I know that most beginners and intermediates and even advanced users wouldn't. Packed with tons of little tips, tricks and exercises to help take your photography to the next level. Advanced lessons on Painting with Light and Painting with Dark, Fireworks, technically challenging type shots.
- Lighting Crash Course- This will probably be the most challenging DVD I have ever made. There is so much information out there, even things I haven't learned yet.... so many techniques, gear, etc. It has to be simplified and taught in such a way that anyone can tackle difficult lighting situations. Will have numerous exercises. This is essentially what I would teach if I was designing a college level course in lighting. If there is one DVD I could choose to be my very best...this will be it. I know I have really high expectations for myself, but Im determined and I want to do a good job on this one. I find myself scripting and planning this one more than the other 2.
- Wedding Photography Crash Course- Everything a Wedding Photographer would want to know....ok, just about everything. This DVD Set (it will be 8-12 hours) will try to convince an individual to go ahead or not get involved with the Wedding Photography Business (its not for everyone, and there are a lot of people out there in it which shouldn't be). This set also have sections on "Marketing and Strategy Crash Course" for Photographers, which will eventually also be a separate DVD Set.
From what I have seen, the absolute best part of the workshop, at least in my opinion, was on Marketing and Strategy, very good stuff. And about 2-3 hours of it could go on a DVD the way it was shot. No need to re-shoot or edit. Many parts will have to be reshot for technical reasons (bad audio, etc).
Once the topics are split up and divided, I will focus on one DVD at a time, in this particular order. The APT DVD is first because its the closest to being finished. I believe it will go to production sometime in March, the Lighting DVD in May and the Wedding Photography DVD in August. We will be shooting several additional lessons over the next few weeks in Alabama, Arizona and Maui.
If anyone lives in these areas is interested in helping out with production, please let me know or comment below. I can always use some extra help!
So, 2010 should be an extremely busy year for me. We are looking at 5-7 DVDs and at least a handful of more Apps (still on the fence about these guys), and my first book. Yes, you are reading this right- the funny thing is, the book has very little to do with Photography, Haiti or anything else that you might expect, but I think most people would find interesting and useful. Ive been working on it for years. Busy, busy, busy!
I do a lot of consulting for friends and associates. Its something that I enjoy and it comes naturally.
One problem I am seeing over and over and over, is the Competitive Inhibitor. Its really a Biology term for enzyme activity. Enzymes chew things up, but occasionally, a Competitive Inhibitor will bind into the activity site (the place where chewing occurs) and renders it useless. After the confidence and risk adverse, I would have to place this as the most common theme I see. I have altered the definition a little to make more sense.
"A similar but unimportant entity which binds to a power or force, rendering it useless to perform important activities."
The most common form of a competitive inhibitor is an individual's current 9-5 job. What happens is the person gets some bills and feels the pressure to pay them. (I know I have been there.) Because of the pressure, they feel they need a stable income, so they desire a job that provides predictable pay checks. Problem is, after working 8 hours a day, they are too tired to think or do anything else. So they unwind a little, crash and do the same thing the next day. Its a viscous cycle outlined in Robert Kiyosaki's Rich Dad, Poor Dad. I should also state, that not everything which takes up time is a Competitive Inhibitor in my book. It must take you away from something which is more important.
If you have dreams of doing some more than you are now...its probably one of the those three things that is stopping you:
1. A lack of Confidence
2. A Fear of taking Risks
3. A Competitive Inhibitor which takes up all your time.
If you own an iPhone or other compatible phone, enjoyed treasure hunting as a child, like Nature, Adventures, hide and seek and just being a kid again, get this App- you wont regret it. Geo Caching is a Hide and Seek / Treasure Hunt game played by people all over the world. Essentailly people hide little treasures called "caches" (they are usually not worth anything) all over the world (there are nearly 1,000,000). The idea is that you can go on a Treasure Hunt using the App and find these "caches". There are different types and rules, but the idea is if you take something, you should leave something. The App feeds you the GPS co-ordinates as you go, and there are even hints and descriptions to help.
My good friend Thad, his wife Roz and I went looking for one that just so happened to be near his home. We couldn't find it, but it was fun to try. I think the best part is, it gets you outdoors and to have a new adventure everytime. I havent had a lot of free time, so this was a new way to relax a little and have fun. Ill probably start hiding my own soon, but the will be extra cool, and or valuable. :D
Its been a while since Ive done any shooting and I also wanted to see my good friends Kristin and Chase. Many of you will recognize them from some of my DVDs. The images from that shoot were done about 2 years ago, and now they have a beautiful boy named Cade. He's very mobile! It was nice to get out and shoot again. Here are my favorites, especially the last when we went to eat.
It's hard to go wrong with Paintballer Pro! Such a huge difference, can you guess which 2 dont have it?
I think this last image is the one they should hang on their wall. I know Kristin and Chase will disagree, but to me, it's just so honest. Having a young child is chaotic, messy, uncontrollable. It was hard to get Cade to look into the camera, while Kristin and Chase were perfectly co-operative. We had been trying to get this nice, typical family shot, where everyone (including Cade) is calm, smiling and happy. While 99% of all parents prefer those types of images, to me it isn't realistic. Parents are busy, stressed out and hungry sometimes. Cade just wanted to do his thing and make a mess. This is reality.
Beautiful Eye Candy- I have a lot of respect for Tim Burton's movies just for their look, though so many of them look similar, he has a wonderful imagination. Johnny Depp is great fun as usual. I think the problem I had with it was the story itself, we know most of it already. Left me feeling kind of bored.
Its been interesting for me to see a HUGE number of emails come in asking me for advice and contact information to find a good programmer to make an iPhone App. I wanted to use this post as a way to advise a little on the topic.
Now that my App has been out for 2 weeks, I feel I have a much better understanding about the process as well as some of the things I wish I would have known before. Don't get me wrong, I'm very excited to have finished Photographers Contract Maker. I think the most enjoyable part of it is having the need, then the idea and now I have a tool that helps me solve this problem.
Developing an App is extremely time consuming and expensive. If you are absolutely committed to making your app, expect to spend between $1500-5000 depending on what it does. If its a fancy game, expect to spend more. Probably the most critical and important thing you can do is to carefully map out the App on paper. Really understand what it does, how it works, and what the screens look like. Draw them out, draw the buttons, explain what they do. It is extremely important that you find an easy way to communicate how it works to your programmer, send him your pictures, etc. This is where a lot of problems happen, especially, if your programmer is not primarily an English speaker. It is understandable that when you are looking for a programmer to feel as if they may "steal" your idea, and a confidentiality agreement wont hurt, but most programmers are not interested in stealing your idea, because they know, there is more money in App Development than the Apps themselves. (Yes you are reading this right). Making the Apps will generally earn them more money than selling them in most cases, they know this, so they aren't really interested in stealing it. IN any case, always have a contract that says the code will be your property during and after development.
You can find aprogrammer on Guru.com. You have to sign up, but this is essentially a place to find programmers who do different things. You can even search by "Iphone" and you will get a list of programmers who specialize in iPhone Apps, see the number of jobs they have completed as well as their ratings.
Sometimes finding a good programmer, be it for an App or anything else, a lot of these programmers are truly awful and most will not start a project without some type of significant investment (say $500 or more, so it can be a little risky). There is also a very good chance that they will not live up to their rating and take months instead of weeks to get a job done. To illustrate this, I just fired one of my App programmers because he wanted to control the "code", meaning he wanted to decide when and how the code would be delivered for testing, when in fact, I was paying him as "work for hire" . In the end, I lost $470 in start up fees because now he doesn't want to refund it. Can I fight it? Yes. Will I get it back. Nope. If taking on these kinds of risks is not your thing, App development is not for you.
Additionally, once you do find a good programmer, it will be several months before all the bugs are worked out, no matter what they say. They will tell you it will take a few weeks...it wont. Photographers Contract Maker (or PCM) took a good 4-5 months and 34 versions to get right. Not only was it expensive (several thousand dollars), communicating with the programmer, and then checking and testing the application took a tremendous amount of time, Id guess about 200 hours of my time alone.
One really great side of iPhone Apps is that you do not see the piracy problem that we see with the DVDs. For every 1 DVD I sell to an honest customer, 200 are illegally downloaded. Apps are much harder to "pirate" and at the cost of $2.99, who would want to go through the trouble anyway? Additionally, Apple is going to take 30% of all sales.
While I had a few good days when the App was first released, now that things have settled down, I am selling about 12-15 a day and this equates to about $25-30. What this means is it will be several months before I break even for the development of PCM, if at all. I also feel that I have a pretty useful app, and it's been getting good reviews, imagine if it wasn't a good App, or didn't have a strong market for it?
I guess what I am trying to say, if you think that making a great App is a good way to make a lot of money quickly, its not. Only a handful of Apps will make the big money.
My recommendation: If you really REALLY want to make an App, make one that you will give away for free and be ready to spend more than the programmer is quoting you at (because you will). You will know after your first one if you want to make more, but right now, I am getting more and more reluctant to make one for revenue generating purposes. We have a few in the pipeline, but we will be watching them very carefully.
Its one thing to have a great idea, its another to have a profitable idea. If you aren't making money on an investment, why do it?
Id like to "announce" that Canon has made an "announcement" for an upcoming "announcement". Yes...they really said that.
It looks to be a very awesome and much needed update:
- Your 5Dii will soon shoot in 24p (this is very exciting, cant wait to see what it looks like on the 5Dii's ginormous sensor)
- It will also shoot at 29.97 instead of 30
- Sounds like they have some of the audio level controls worked out too (this is HUGE). Ive tried for a while to record the audio tracks straight into camera from my wireless mics, the problem is there is a pre-amp in the camera that boosts the signal randomly. There has to be a way to lock it down and it looks like Canon has addressed it. Thank you!
I must hand it to Canon, they typically do a pretty good job with their firmware updates, however, the timing of this update is very curious. I know they have been working on it for several months (since before the release of the 7D). I don't think the firmware updates take that long to do, so I think its safe to say that this has been intentionally delay....question now is....why? Can we expect another announcement from Canon soon? Yes...
A BGAN, is a Broadband Global Area Network. It is a device that is about the size of a laptop computer and will allow you to access the internet anywhere in the world. BGAN units typically run a few thousand for the unit (Ive seen used versions for about $1500) and then you pay for usage by the MB. In a disaster situation, like the one in Haiti, where internet connections are down, simply having a BGAN makes you an asset to any aid organization, simply because you have the ability to communicate. Rick had one and offered it to me when he left, and I almost bought it from him, the reason I didn't was because I didnt have a computer to plug into it (I left it at home). I decided to go with my iPhone instead, which worked only because there was limited cell service. (ATT covered all the expenses of my calling and data usage which would have been in the tune of several thousands of dollars if they hadn't).
I am still thinking about getting one, just to have it ready. Not really something you want to try to scramble and find after the fact. Anyone doing any type of disaster aid should have one. They also have different variations for Airplanes as well as boats.
