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Our niece, Heather, has decided to start her own business. Following her bliss, she decided parlay her love of dogs and cats into something that (we all hope) will make a bit of money: Tails of Boston.
So, if you live in Boston and are are looking for someone to walk your dog, check on your cat, or thing like that — head on over to tailsofboston.com and see what she has to offer.
Good Luck Heather!
Ziggy says good luck too…
I just finished an awesome book – and I mean “awesome” in the traditional sense. The book is Brain Rules by John Medina.
I found the book through the now familiar web of links on the Internet. Garr Reynold’s (from the inspiring Presentation Zen) mentioned it in his blog and pointed to an Authors@Google video on YouTube. I watched the video about four times and purchased the book on Amazon.
I can’t recommend this book highly enough. I’m going to give a copy to my daughter and son-in-law who are expecting their first child in a few months.
For people, like myself, who think of themselves as fact-driven and relatively objective, John’s Brain Rules lay out the known workings of the brain based on peer-reviewed, reproduced science. As John himself says, he’s a great guy but a cranky scientist: evidence is all important, and there’s an entire website devoted to the detailed research references for everything in the book (along with excerpts of the DVD that comes with the book).
From a business perspective I was interested in the book because giving effective presentations is something key to my future income stream and knowing how the brain acquires information and maintains attention is critical information for presenters. For this alone it was worth the price of the book. But, if you do nothing else and take an hour to watch the Google video, you’ll see that there is much, much more to Brain Rules.
(While reading the chapter on attention I suddenly realized that a seemingly nonsequitur joke in his presentation was rather odd — and then I went back to the video looked at the timing and it all made perfect sense!)
Read the book or at least watch the Google Video. Visit his web site. Go, now! Shoo!
Well, another year another successful telethon. The students raised over $30,000 for needy families in the area (all proceeds go to the Beacon Santa fund). We’ve been doing this for 15 years now and it is always a privilege to watch these young adults do something so spectacular for the community.
The telethon is billed as a “40 hour, non-stop” event – but for the students and a number of clinically insane volunteers such as myself we know that the 40 hours is just the on-air time: it takes literally weeks of preparation and probably another 20 hours for the event itself. We’re all pretty beat by the end of it.
For a number of years I led the adult teams in support of the auction but that has now passed on to very capable hands and my time is free to photograph the event. It’s hard to express how much fun I have doing this and it always offers an opportunity to fine-tune a production workflow because we try to post the photos on the web site as the telethon progresses.
It seems like I use a different tool each year, and this year was no exception. Last year I used Aperture to process the photos and generate the web galleries. This year I used Lightroom and it performed wonderfully. I used a variant of the flash gallery I use on dmg-photography.com and I received great feedback from lots of folks all throughout the telethon. Including some behind the scenes shots from earlier in the week close to 1000 selects were published and turned into 11GB of traffic over the weekend. Fun stuff.
I also used the telethon as an opportunity to try my hand at time-lapse photography. Using an intervalometer and the older Canon 10D I created a few time-lapse movies of one of the studios. Unless you have fairly predictable conditions time-lapse movies are a big gamble and these turned out fair – a couple of nice spots but only the “grand finale” one worked out the way I had envisioned.
If you want to see the photos or the time-lapse movies, head on over to the WAVM web site and take a peek: http://wavm.org/telethon07/gallery.html. While you are there check out the great opening video that was put together by J.P. Mosca (a senior at WAVM).
Today starts my first full week as a professional photographer. There are, of course, a few definitions for the word “professional”: 1) connected to a profession; 2) skillful, worthy of a professional; 3) engaged in a specific activity as one’s main paid occupation. I’m not sure I’m worthy yet, but worthy or not we’re embarking on taking a run at number three…
I’m still putting together the pieces: business plan, marketing strategy, etc. I’ve got a number of “pro bono” / family projects I’m using to help refine my workflow and learn how to do this full time instead of stitching together bits of time here and there. And there is just so much to do.
It can all get a bit overwhelming. But every once in a while something happens that reminds me why I’m taking this leap… Foxes don’t wander past my old office window, enticing me to head outside even for a few minutes and shoot. With friends like the fellow in the photograph above apparently waiting for me, I’m looking forward to heading out into the field one of these mornings and seeing a bit of the world through their eyes.
We’ll all find out on December 6th. Yes, the Chronicle people called today and said that the Rivers show will be aired next Wednesday. I’d like to get excited, but I’ll be working on the telethon that evening. Myles spoke with Betsy and said that he was pretty happy with how the show came out – so I guess I didn’t drag it down too far.
Apparently Winter starts in earnest next week. Today it was 60 degrees at 10pm at night and they are forecasting 60’s tomorrow, then wind and thunderstorms, and then snow by Monday. Nothing boring about this season.