I spent several hours on Wednesday evening doing a complete rewrite of my low light dance photography article. His comments and questions had pointed out some basic problems, mostly that I had assumed familiarity with the dance culture, and why you don't use flash at these events. The rewrite actually took a lot more time than writing it the first time.
This morning I got an email from him: "Unfortunately, I believe it's time to let you go. This hasn't been working at all and it's taken you way too long to get anything ready for us. It's also taken a ridiculous amount of effort on both our parts. I've never had this many problems getting a piece into shape. I want to thank you for your efforts but unfortunately I don't believe this is a relationship that will work." All in all, I have to agree with him. It certainly wasn't working. A lot of it was working from different sets of unspoken assumptions. The attempt, however, was very enlightening. The business model for his blog seems to be "Look at the shiny! You want the shiny, it'll make you a better photographer. Click here and buy the shiny". I'm as big of a gear slut as any photographer that has walked the planet. I love gear that lets me get pictures that I couldn't get before, or gear that makes it easier, or makes it possible to get better quality photos. I also love solving technical problems and making the gear to do so out of a couple dollars worth of kit from the hardware store. But, I never realized until now, how much more important I feel it is to get the most from your gear than it is to have better gear. Mind you, there are a lot of photos that I can get with my K-5 that were flat out impossible with the K-100, but that just means that I need to use the "push the envelope" techniques in worse and worse light. Unfortunately, writing about how to get more out of the gear you have doesn't sell gear, and selling gear is what makes money. Although, I suspect for the most part, people are going to spend what they spend on toys, and it's just a question of which toys and for what reasons. Even on this list there seems to be no correlation between people saying "Gear is only important in that it doesn't get in the way" and not buying toys. The past few weeks did give me an idea of some fun things to write about, and I need to decide if, and how, I'm going to do so. The only real financial incentive I can see for writing about photography online, is to help sell my services as a photographer. In the meantime, I've got metric buttload of life happening to me right now, and I should get back to work on that. As to the piece I wrote on low light photography, all of the editing was done in wordpress, and I didn't cut and paste what I wrote, and when I asked him if he could send me what I wrote he replied: "Because I worked on it quite a bit, I will not. It's only fair in terms of ethics." He had also asked for a comparison between the DA40 and the DA*16-50. It probably didn't help that my treatment of the comparison was that this is like asking which is faster a Dodge Van or an Austin Healey Sprite, if you're worrying which of these two lenses is faster you need to stop pixel peeping, turn off your computer, go outside and take some photos". -- Larry Colen [email protected] sent from i4est -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
