Cal Poly football coach Rich Ellerson is leaving to coach Army

Cal Poly football coach Rich Ellerson is leaving to coach the Army football team, which means Cal Poly could be in a bit of a hole next year.  They're already losing a ton of great talent (seniors) which is going to hurt them but now they're losing a great coach who has really helped build this team over the last 9 years. As an aside, he's also a really friendly guy.  I ran into him in the elevator at Qualcomm Stadium late after Poly's upset over SDSU this year.  I was a little frantic because I was hoping to catch his (non-existent) press conference and when I asked him if the press conference was over he said "we didn't really have one but are there any questions you have?"   When I told him I was just the photographer and I didn't have any for him we just started chatting until another reporter came along and started asking questions.

Coach Ellerson gladly answered all this guy's questions at like 9:30 or something, without rushing anything or evading anything.  He's a real class act and he'll be missed.

Working for Free - Photography is not Plumbing

There's been a huge discussion going on recently on The Interwebs about photographers working for free.  Big-time bloggers like David Hobby (of Strobist), Vincent Laforet, Chase Jarvis, and John Harrington are all talking about it right now due to a post by David Hobby last week, but the discussion has been going on for a couple years, including this big post by Matt Brown on SportsShooter.com. Matt is a photographer whose thoughts I'm especially sensitive to because we both shoot for Cal Poly Football and Basketball and I wouldn't want to be doing anything to jeopardize the work he gets from them.  (As an aside, I caught a glimpse of Matt on TV on the sidelines of the UCLA/USC game yesterday...)

The main argument comes down to whether it's "OK" to do photography for free and what the effects of that are on you, your clients, the industry, Western Society, etc.   On one hand you've got David Hobby putting forth four reasons why you should consider working for free.  On the other end of the spectrum there's John Harrington who reasons that working for free will destroy your career, put other photographers out of business, make you a horrible person, and maybe worse.

I'm not going to weigh in on the discussion other than to say that working for free has it's place (especially when trying to get your foot in the door) but isn't a long-term business model.   I shoot for some clients for free.  There are other jobs I would never take for free.  (I turned down a free job offer just last weekend, because it involved too much travel.)  But one argument that always seems to come up that you could never call a plumber and tell them that your toilet was clogged and would they please come over and clean it up for free and therefore, photographers shouldn't ever work for free either.

I love that argument, because its so ridiculous.  I've got news for you: taking pictures is a lot more fun than cleaning up poop, and that's why there's a steady stream of people willing to try it for free.  I'm a firm believer in the law of supply and demand and the recent explosion in the popularity of photography means there's a huge glut of people wanting to try it.  If you're a professional photographer lamenting all these damn newcomers to the industry, all I can say is that if you can't actually differentiate yourself from the amateurs then you probably have a problem.

There are lots of ways a pro can differentiate their work from that of the newcomer:

• the quality of the final product (this seems first and foremost)
• being able to handle large or complex projects
• professionalism when dealing with the client (invoices, quotes, business insurance, someone to answer the phone during the day, etc.)
• availability for jobs when hobbyists might be at their 9-5 day job
• the ability to be there in the future

and so on.  I don't think we're in danger of pros losing their ability to make money, due to the fact that there are always people that are going to need the level of service that a professional photographer can provide.

Final Thought: In computer science, there's a long transition of giving away perfectly good work for free.  The entire open-source software movement is proof of that.   I wonder how that affects the philosophy of computer nerds who go into photography...

Cal in the Emerald Bowl?

According to news reports from The Merc, The Emerald Bowl may have made a deal to secure Cal for the bowl game later this month.  The assumption is that this would mean an instant sell-out for the game, with as many as 35,000 of the 40,000 seats going to Cal fans. I shot the Emerald Bowl last year in the light rain (there's a gallery here of what I got) and I'm looking forward to shooting it again.  Pac Bell Park is a little bit of a weird place to have a football game since it's really a baseball stadium, but that's OK - it's still an adventure.

Having a local team and a packed house will really raise the energy level and hopefully I'll do better than I did last year.  And while the rain makes for a nice gritty "in the trenches" sort of feel, as a photographer, I could do without.

Edit:  Yes, Cal was there, and I shot the game.  It was great!

My Blurb book has arrived

I just got my Yellowstone book from Blurb today and overall I'm impressed.  In this post I'll take a look at what worked and what didn't - partially for anyone thinking of making a photo book like this and partially for my own note-taking purposes. First of all, I love coffee table photography books!  I've got a small collection of them and I'm always looking for new ones.  I'm no "expert" or "connoisseur", but I know what I like.   I look at things like the colors, the finish, the construction, etc.   After the Vietnam trip I put together a book with Apple's Aperture software and printing service and was pretty happy with it.   The things I didn't like were the small size, the thinner paper, and the lack of "pop" in the images.

Blurb recently came out with a new premium paper which is supposed to be thicker, and also with a new 13" x 11" size.  I think prints and books should be big, so to me 13 x 11 is about right.   I could go bigger...

First Glitch:

I did my layout, imported everything into BookSmart, uploaded my book, and then I hit a hiccup at a most unexpected place: entering the shipping address.  No matter how I laid it out, their system would not accept the address of my daytime job as a valid shipping address.  This is a large publicly traded company with hundreds of employees and a real shipping department and everything, so it seems weird that their system wouldn't accept it.  After consulting with Blurb customer service they basically told me they couldn't fix it and to try a different address.  A better response would have been "Sorry for the technical trouble - We've manually entered the address into our system so you're good to go."

After picking a different shipping address, the book ships via FedEx and seems well protected and in good shape upon arrival:

Inside the box, the book itself is shrink-wrapped:

Let's look at the binding.  This was a 40 page book which is about the smallest coffee table book I've ever seen and the Blurb binding process barely accommidates it.  The binding would look a lot more normal if there were at least 80 pages in the book:

A big discussion item on the forums is how to lay out double truck images and how much of the image gets lost in the gutter.  The "lay" of the book is important too since the binding, paper weight, and page count all affect how the gutter behaves.

Printing Quality

The quality of the color and black and white images is good.  The dust jacket is ultra-glossy but the pages are pretty much matte.  The colors are just as I expected and the shadows didn't print too low at all.  I don't have anything to complain about with the printing of the photos.

The text, on the other hand, is another story.

There are two ways to layout pages for a Blurb book - by using one of the fixed templates in their proprietary BookSmart software or by using an external program like Adobe InDesign to layout the pages and then export the whole page as a full-bleed jpg image.  The page layouts in BookSmart are a bit limited so I chose to use InDesign to lay out the pages.

There's a lot of discussion on the Blurb forums about printing quality, especially with text.   As it turns out, there's a serious downside to laying out your book in an outside program: the text turns out pretty blurry.  As explained in a post about text quality on the Blurb forum from Mark Lentczner, here's what's happening:  When you put text in one of the text containers in a pre-made BookSmart template, the text gets rendered at around 800 dpi and looks very crisp.  When you have text rendered by InDesign at 300 dpi and then re-folded, spindled, and mutilated by the BookSmart software and then again by the printer.  The result is acceptable for large print (like 50pt.) but horrible for smaller stuff like 24, 12, etc., as seen here:

Conclusion:

Overall, I'm pretty happy.  I like the photo printing and I like the size, especially for the price.  I can see ordering a few of these for friends and family but there's no way it would be suitable for commercial sale, due to the text printing issues.  So what would I like to see Blurb do?  Here's a list:

• Find a way to fix this text printing issue Right now in order to print any small text at "bookstore quality", you HAVE to enter your text in a pre-made template in the BookSmart software.  Uploading files at 800 dpi would result in page images that are 7 times larger (and upload times 7 times larger), but if that's what it takes then that's what it takes.   Perhaps it might help if we could upload PDF files instead of rasterizing everything?

• More sizes I like the larger 13 x 11" size, but why stop there? How about a 11 x 13" choice?  How about even larger?  I guess supply and demand...

• Cover options We can choose a glossy dust jacket or a "cover wrap" option.  Why not both?  Why not a matte dust jacket?

• Printed or colored end papers Right now the end papers are plain white paper.  Nothing wrong with that but it would be really nice to be able to print on those pages, like lots of my other coffee table books.

• Better customer service Two things here - first of all, they could have handled the shipping address better.  Second, they could be much more informative in the forums.  There are lots of forum discussions where technical questions could easily be answered with an authoritative answer from a staff member but instead forum members waste lots of post speculating and arguing.

So again, I'm pretty happy overall.  Give Blurb a try and see how it works for you!

Why I shoot football

Every Fall I shoot a few college football games and I never get much out of it, monetarily.  So why do it? First off - let's talk about why NOT to shoot it.  Shooting football is difficult and expensive.  Sports shooting demands some of the most expensive equipment around, and football especially so.  The game action moves very fast and there are lots of people running around in front of you blocking the action so having the fastest glass and the fastest auto-focus helps out.  Even with field-side access you have to stay pretty far away, and when the action gets close, you generally want to move farther away lest you get overrun by a receiver flying out of bounds as fast as he can!  (with helmet, pads, and spikes - you don't stand much of a chance.)

A standard setup to go shoot a football game is two high-speed bodies (like the Canon 1-D) and four fast lenses (400/2.8, 70-200/2.8, 24-70/2.8, 16-35/2.8)  So around $15,000 - $20,000 of gear, depending on what else you add.  I've never shown up with that much gear but I've often rented parts of that kit to get as close as I can.  The game takes about 3 hours but you want to be there a little early and stay a little later, so really it eats half a day.

Then, let's talk about the editing time!   Editing 600 - 1,200 images takes a fair amount of time.

Did I mention that it doesn't pay well?  So why do it?  There are a couple reasons:

First of all, it keeps me fresh and on my toes.  Shooting football is good preparation for shooting a party or a wedding or anything else that moves fast and has no second chances. There's no second chance in shooting sports and that's a good mindset to be in for a lot of photography.

Second of all, it's fun!  I'm a college football fan and it's nice to get a third perspective on the game.  (First perspective: watching on TV.  Second perspective:  Watching format he stands)  Being on the field is different from being in in the stands.  You're really in touch with the flow and the electricity of the game.  The view is often better from the stands, but the energy of being on the sidelines is better.   By the way, I'll never understand those "special" people who are wandering around the sidelines because they won a contest or know somebody or whatever and are standing around, not paying attention, or texting.  How can you not be riveted to the game?  That's why you came, right?

Third, I'm a huge Cal Poly fan and letting the Athletic Department use my images is a small way to give back.  Cal Poly contributed greatly to my current situation in life and the least I can do is give a little back.  Sure - I never got much from the Athletic Department while I was in school, but this is a way to give back indirectly.

Book is done, and NPS map resources

My book of Yellowstone photos is done and printing! It's amazing to me how much work these things take.  After quickly throwing some images together I started a longer process of polishing it up, while teaching myself Adobe InDesign at the same time.   The official 0.9 version of the book has been uploaded to Blurb and ordered, and should arrive in time for Thanksgiving.  This is the first time I've used Blurb and I have no idea how it's going to turn out.  I've mentally prepared myself for it not turning out well so I'm fully expecting to have to adjust the colors and reprint it.

I like printing large so I went with their new premium paper and large format landscape size, which is 13 inches wide by 11 inches tall.  That means a double-truck spread is 26 inches wide!  (I included at least one full spread and a couple of 1.5 page spreads.)

While I was on Blurb's website I took a look at the books that other people have published and shared.  There are over 2,100 Fine Art books and 3,900 Travel books, so I'm not the first person ever to do this.  Oddly, I don't see any way to sort the books which means most of them will never be seen.

While researching some data for the book I went looking for a good map of the Yellowstone.  It turns out that there's a National Park Service office called Harper's Ferry Center, which is the map making division of the National Park Service.  They make a lot of their maps available for download in the original Adobe Illustrator format! These aren't just small, low-resolution maps - these are the actual files they print the park maps and brochures from!  Like all data created by the Federal Government, they are in the public domain.

Here are the eight different maps for Yellowstone that you can download.

Here are some notes about the maps which are also interesting.

I downloaded the full map for Yellowstone and then started hiding layers that just added clutter and ended up with a nice, clean graphic to use for the endpapers of the book.  I'll let you know how it turns out.