A challenge to all Britphoto readers and subscribers

Today is challenge day... Today the gauntlet is thrown down at your feet. You are dared to pick it up and respond to the challenge. Responses may be posted either as comments to this blog entry or as messages to https://www.twitter.com/Valkyrie_2.   The challenge is to identify correctly and in the order in which they first appear, each of the individual portraits shown on the desk when the videos are filmed. For a starter, the decades in which the portraits were taken were: 1910, 1930, 1990, 2010 but not necessarily in that order. The winner will not be chosen at random. The winner will be the first person with a correct entry. The prize - aside from a well-justified pat on the back - will be your choice. It can be:

• A 500 word (or less) article written for your website. Specify the length and subject.
• A link from my blog to your website.
• An article about your photography website and a link (500 words max).
• A video blog entry containing a video and text about your photography website (500 words max).
• A video blog entry or a blog entry about you and your photography.
• Something similar along those lines that is mutually agreeable.

The entry cannot be used to demean or slight any individual, group, race, creed, color, orientation or to promote a product or service.

GPS Logging of your photos.

The following is a real GPS location track of where I was on February 20th, 2014. It looks like I was all over the place. On my GPS track, I can tell exactly where I was and at what time. This is an invaluable tool to use when taking photos as you will know exactly where you were when you took a specific photo. All you need to do is to compare the timestamp on your photo to the map for that day and you will know precisely where you took the photo. The best thing - location tracking is part of Google Maps and it's free. It's included in your Android phone. All you have to do is to activate it.

Going a little further, if you take a photo with your Android phone then the GPS coordinates are already locked into the image. Take the following image as an example - I took it somewhere when I went to Macon, Georgia. I don't know where I took it so I head over to Picasaweb to see where I took it.

Picasaweb looks at the GPS coordinates and provides me with a map, pinpointing the location.

Going a little further into the Google maps thing and selecting street view pulls up a very nice image of the location.

Your Android phone is full of useful surprises like this. Now I must admit that the photo of the tower was one I took with my phone but I could equally well have taken it with a camera and simply compared the time stamps on my GPS track with the time stamps on my photos and found the location that way.

There are, of course, alternate ways of tracking where you take your photos. The first is by writing everything down on a notepad. This is relatively inexpensive but works only when you know where you are. Trekking across wilderness might be problematic when there's no real landscape features to identify the location and no roads. Similarly in a wilderness, a mobile phone signal won't work and even a phone with GPS logging might not be able to record where you are. This is where the next method comes in - a notepad combined with a GPS locator.

This is an elderly Garmin e-Tex. It works though it takes about two minutes to lock onto a signal and the batteries last only a few hours in it. It's something to use sparingly. There are small GPS logger units available which record your location for up to 90 days on a set of batteries. These tend to be used a lot by Private Investigators who tape them to the inside of the fender of a car and retrieve them a few weeks later to provide their client with an absolute record of where that vehicle went, where it stopped and how long for for the entire period. Those things are undetectable without a thorough visual inspection. They are, however, very useful for travelling photographers and can simply be carried in a pocket.

Hang onto your wallet!

That swanky brand new camera you fancy will be your pride and joy but are you going to be fool enough to pay the new price for it? Today there was an advertisement for one of the new mirror-less interchangeable lens cameras visible on my screen. The price was an astounding $1,100. That's enough to pay for fuel to drive to work and back for a year. In six months time, that same camera will be knocking about on the shelves for probably $800 and probably 12 months later just before it's discontinued for $600. Why throw money away? Buy older and proven technology that's at the end of its production run. Last year's model works just as well purchased a year later as it did when it was first off the production line. The only reason why anybody would want to buy the flashiest, newest camera would be to show off to people in camera clubs etc. To me, going around showing off the latest technology doesn't scream affluence nor does it scream hip. It screams "I'm a moron and I've just been fleeced".

Generally, all new technology is pretty much of a scam. If you recall the very popular article here (The digital camera scam) and this article here (Camera batteries - the scam continues) it should be immediately apparent just how much criminality revolves around technology. One wonders whether shortly after the wheel was developed, criminals got in on the act producing cheap wheels that weren't quite circular. When the mugs had stopped paying a years worth of wages per wheel, eventually wheels dropped to realistic prices and were made by a multitude of competitors. Throughout the ages, early adopters have been scammed. It doesn't matter whether the technology is wheels, cameras, plowshares, steam engines or rockets.

The way prices work is the highest possible price the public is likely to pay for something is charged at first then as demand drops and market saturation is reached, the price slowly reduces until such a point as the profit from an item is less than 50%. I've worked in import-export. I've seen the costs of goods on the Bill of Lading. The cost per unit ex-works is a tiny fraction of the price in the stores. If we take a typical camera box which takes up maybe 12" x 12" x 12" or 1728 cubic inches and then see how many will pack into a 40 foot shipping container. Now the size has been exaggerated so that leaves room for palates etc. A 40 foot container will hold 2260 cubic feet of product and costs just $2,000 to ship from the factory door to the purchaser's door and that includes ocean freight, rail freight, road freight. That container will hold 2260 camera boxes. In other words it costs just $1 to ship a camera box from China to the United States. Ex works, a typical digital SLR costs about $50 to $100. They're made in China because labor is cheap and parts are cheap. As the US makes no cameras, there's not even any anti-dumping duty. Thus, after import to the company warehouse, the rest is all internal overheads and profit. At the end of a production run, when prices have dropped as low as they can, any leftover stock is usually quietly removed from the warehouse and crushed rather than set a precedent of very low priced cameras.

Thus rather than buying new technology, save yourself 50% and get technology that's a bit older. I don't recommend buying electronics secondhand. If they're purchased new, there's a year's guarantee and the knowledge that it hasn't been badly handled by a previous owner. Repairs can be expensive and in some cases cost more than buying a new camera.

Possibly the best recommendation one can give is never to buy too much stuff. Get the minimum and learn to use and enjoy it. If your interest is birdwatching then a wider angle lens is of no interest. If it's people then a longer lens is of no interest. If it's macro then only a macro lens is of interest. The more you buy, the more you have to cart around. Either that or you have to leave a lot of it at home every time. The new mirror-less cameras should provide adequate quality for minimum bulk and weight for the new buyers.

There will be a point at which you will want to sell your equipment. Oh say it's not so! No - sadly there is a point at which you will look at that much loved equipment and wonder what on earth possessed you to buy it. I'm at that point right now, some expert con-artist had convinced me that I should go into professional photography at exactly the point where a dying profession dropped dead. I remember now - "There's lots of money in wedding photography and you're really good. You need to do this". Thus I'm selling equipment.

The killer for selling equipment is the price you paid and the price people are willing to pay to buy your junk. This is why it's so important NOT to get fleeced at the buying stage. A 30D back when I purchased mine was $1100. Over the intervening 7 years my 30D has had maybe 1,500 exposures made on it and it is now worth possibly $150. That's a massive loss of about $900 or to put it another way, each exposure cost $0.90 which in terms of film would represent 42 rolls of 36 exposure film. Each roll would cost $6 and developing/printing would cost various amounts depending on whether you had prints made or whether you did it yourself. Just the film cost would be $252. Even if developing was double that then the total would still be less expensive than my 30D.

What about other stuff - well the flash I bought - a 580EX2 has plummeted from $550 new to $350 secondhand despite the fact it has been used maybe half a dozen times. Between the flash and the camera this is an outright loss of $1,200. You need deep pockets to buy new. Trust me - selling this stuff is painful when the price of what it cost is known.

When selling stuff, scammers abound. eBay and Amazon will charge a fee based on the amount that the goods sell for. My experience of both is that people won't pay anything like the going rate. Thus, if you get anywhere near half the going rate, you're onto a good thing. I regard the 30D as a total loss of $1100 as it'd be unlikely ever to achieve the market value of $150. I'd more likely get $75 and have to pay $10 fees to sell it then find as normal that Amazon/eBay's postage has been chronically underestimated which means most of the postage as well as the packaging has to come out of the already pitiful $65 remaining from an $1100 purchase. Thus, I'm stuck with my 30D as it's just not worth selling.

So, avoiding eBay and Amazon is generally a good thing. What about Craigslist? Well, that's a possibility. There, of course, you will get a lot more scammers. Fortunately they're easy to spot. I had one today. 

 

Clearly this is one of our friends in Nigeria just about to send a fake check. Paypal is just so dodgy that it's not worth serious consideration. It's possible to pay somebody and then claim the money back. I had a suspicious transaction and that's what the guy at Paypal told me when he reversed the transaction. Of course the problem with craigslist isn't just with clearly obvious scammers like this. There was the Craigslist killer who murdered women he met from Craigslist and then the people that rob and mug people who meet to sell stuff. Just for grins I gave this fellow my PO Box address to send the check to. If it arrives I will frame it and hang it on the wall.

Treat each purchase very carefully. You may well end up having to keep that purchase for all eternity being unable to sell it because 9 out of 10 Craigslist respondents turn out to be scammers.

Today I was looking at Craigslist and saw an awful lot of camera gear for sale. Most of it was for the going rate - some higher, some lower. Most of it was described as hardly used. 

It's possible to feel the guy's pain, trying to sell a camera just like mine - hardly ever used. I've used my Canon XT a lot more than my 30D. In fact when I bought my 30D I had been convinced I needed a second body in case one failed when I was doing one of the mythical weddings that never turned up. Heck, I couldn't even get anybody to look at my portfolio to even decide whether my photos were good or bad. I couldn't get anybody to visit my professionally put together website either. It was a total loss from start to finish. Over the 6 years I tried to run a photography business, I think I spent about $11,000 on the myth that there are people out there looking for photographers before I finally stopped throwing money away on a myth. Now I'm just trying to scrabble back as much as I can.

Oh I did all the right things - vehicle signage, Yellow Pages, websites, turned up at events, had a flea market stall, networked, joined the chamber of commerce. A few crumbs came my way but none that ever made a profit for the business. I didn't resist strongly enough pressure toward starting a photography business that I had doubts about.

Hang onto your wallet. Don't buy a thing until you can answer these questions:

• Can I afford this item as a disposable luxury
• What happens when I want to get rid of it
• Will I be able to sell it or will it end up an annoying white elephant in the attic
• Do I really, truly need this
• What else, more beneficial could I do with the money
• Has this reached the end of its run yet or is the price the lowest it can be
• How much money am I going to lose when I sell this
• Will I feel like a sucker when it's time to move on from this

I would not be surprised that I won't be able to get the going rate for my flashes. I think they're probably going to hang around as a millstone around my neck while the value plummets and they're eventually going to end up in the trashcan like the studio stuff did. I advertised that for 8 or 9 months in various places and had no inquiries, no calls - nothing. Thank Heavens it wasn't more than $500 of stuff that I had to throw in the trash. It was taking up space and nobody was willing to buy it.

The Future of Photography

Does photography have a future or will be be returning to rock art? The world is descending deeper and deeper into the economic depression that the banks created - slowly and silently sinking into the mire that only a great economic upheaval will resolve. This is not a recession. This is a fully-fledged economic depression, greater than the economic depression that kicked off World War Two.

The signs of economic disaster are all present. Nobody has any money, we had a little upstart dictator in Pakistan by the name of Osama bin Laden who tried to urge the Moslems into revolt against the West in a psuedo anti-Crusade where America was viewed as the medieval Popes viewed Jerusalem - the kingdom they wanted to own.

Several years ago, a wise fellow I met in an hotel in Eindhoven (or Veldhoven) when I was in Holland was chatting with me. His view was the world was entering a very dangerous phase. Nobody had money, governments didn't have any money, people didn't have jobs. People that had jobs couldn't make ends meet.

I look around me and I see dishonesty becoming endemic. I see people cheating their taxes. I see people regarding it as normal to over-claim their business expenses. I see people working under the table without declaring their earnings. I see businesses giving people ever less hours - I have neighbors who have to live together in multi-family households just to keep food in their bellies and a roof over their heads. I see employers demanding 24 x 7 availability for their part-time workers which is essentially saying "This is a part time job and if we call you and you can't come in because you're at you're other job, you're out of this job". We traded slavery for servitude. People are getting ever unhappier with their lot. At the same time as this is all happening, people have forgotten the important things in life.

Being from Britain, I don't have the lavish views of how life should be but isn't. My lifestyle is not a champagne lifestyle and a beer budget. My parents grew up during World War Two when life was hard. My late aunt served as an anti-aircraft gunner during the war, shooting down Nazi aeroplanes. My grandparents served in the trenches of France during the Great War and some had served in the Crimean War too. I know how to budget and how to conserve finances. It constantly shocks me to see the waste around me - organizational waste, personal waste, waste of resources, waste of human resources.

I am amazed at the broken nature of business in the US, the broken nature of healthcare, the broken nature of transport, the broken nature of recruitment, the broken nature of the American Dream, the broken nature of politics, the broken nature of pretty much everything. It's all so easily fixable but nobody wants even to try, preferring to wallow in their own pits of misery, pumping themselves full of antidepressants, alcohol, illegal drugs and fake champagne lifestyles, putting their fingers in their ears and their hands over their eyes to pretend they're happy.

This is all part and parcel of the same thing and affects photography and photographers equally. Without major change, disaster is only just around the corner - as the fellow I met all those years ago in Holland predicted. Without concerted changes at all levels, the photography of the future will be rock art.

Farmville online or how do you get followers

No - not Farmville the time soaking computer game but Farmville the practice of getting "likes", "+1s" and "followers".   Every day my inbox is jammed full of invitations to get Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook, Google, Instagram and blog followers or clicks. It's very much like the click farming of the 1990s. People would advertise 1,000 clicks to bump up website hit counters when the more savvy of us could just go in and change the counter starting number from 0 to 17,338. If that was not possible with the hit counter, it was no problem just to keep hitting refresh on the browser.  There were people willing to do that for money though. That, to me was just bananas because I never pay any attention to website visitor numbers. I never did back then and I don't now.    Twitter follower adders are great if you want to add lots of bots to your Twitter following. I had 0 Twitter followers and engaged a few Twitter follower bots - I hasten to add that I never paid a dime nor would I ever have paid a dime. Within 3 months the Twitter account had amassed 2000 - 3000 followers. None of those followers ever answered direct messages nor did they respond to messages designed to provoke a response. Then the number of followers topped out and I just wasn't getting any more. Thus I set up a few other Twitter accounts and did the same thing. Across the lot there were 14,000 followers the last time I looked. Using one of the cross-referencing tools it was interesting to discover that about 75% of the followers on each account were identical. Clearly 75% of my Twitter following were bots and nothing but. Out of interest I check my webstats for this site and if I get one visit a week from a Tweet, it's a lot. Out of 14,000 "followers" I have perhaps one genuine follower on my (mostly) abandoned accounts. Each of those accounts sends 20 canned messages a day. Again, this is all done through a free service. There's so little point in paying for anything online regarding follower farming nor in online advertising to farm followers. I laugh when I see people advertising 1,000 genuine followers. What are they doing? Selling slaves? There's no way to guarantee people's interest and that interested people will continue following a blog or Twitter account.    Having now thoroughly dismissed all the Twitter follower generators we have other follower generators and click farmers. They all operate in the same way - selling fake likes, fake clicks etc. At the moment my Facebook page has 12 likes only. I set it up 3 days ago.  I learned my lesson from Twitter that Farmville is to be avoided.    Clearly with all forms of click farming being statistical only and therefore not worthy of even one cent, how do you get real people to see your website? The answer that's often given is that you have to provide engaging content. That's not the answer though. People will only see engaging content as engaging if they actually find the content in the first place. How do you stand out and be seen amidst the cacophony of people yelling "look at my site, look at my site" and people paying to scrabble to the top of the search engine rankings? This answer is elusive and nobody has ever given this answer before. The answer is very vague and has to do with generating engagement, the rules for which change more often than most people have hot dinners.   After years of ignoring Facebook and concentrating on Twitter and Foursquare, I am now trying Facebook. I've done all the usual things - promoted my sites on Craigslist and on forums but promotion there is very short-lived and pretty ineffective. Playing the search engine game by saying "get your naughty photos here" will only work for a short amount of time. Search Engine Optimization only works very briefly and then needs to be done again. For sites with no traffic or minimal traffic, that's a poor investment especially since the self proclaimed gurus don't guarantee their work will produce any results.   So, how do you get followers? It's a bit like getting friends online and friends in real life. Forums are part of that, Facebook is part. Twitter is part. The rules for getting followers are:

• Make friends with people and let them look at your site "it's not quite finished yet but it's getting there" will intrigue people enough to look.
• Produce short but engaging articles. My articles are way too long. An article should be no more than a screen full.
• Use available media such as photos or diagrams or graphs and include them in your articles.
• Provide video content. 
• Use forums/craigslist/Facebook groups to promote your site. I join in discussions and include links to relevant articles in the discussions.
• Remember - if people don't like your site, it's not personal. They're not saying no to you. They're saying no to your product. 
• Add a method of interaction such as a comment feature on your website so people can discuss things.
• Add a method of contact. Generally Twitter comes into play here because it affords countability without the risk of spam or junk phonecalls.
• Also note that some people can have a bad day and give you stick because of it.  Some people's bad days are permanent.
• Don't oversell your website. Nobody wants to hear about your website every other sentence.
• Remember your target is people. People like to be treated as individuals. Don't alienate your audience.

I currently have 6 followers on YouTube and 2 on my blog and 12 likes on Facebook. None of those are solicited. I have about 800 followers on LinkedIn but as with Twitter, engagement levels are low enough to make the LinkedIn followers I have seem a bit - well - automated and I know there are LinkedIn follower adder packages out there.   There is no magic formula. It's about personality and how you approach the solution. "Oi mate! Look at my website" is less likely to get viewers than "Yes - I've come across that problem before - I've even written an article about the solution and it's here". That's how you get viewers and responders. An alternative way to get followers is by going the negative route. Write articles that are deliberately confrontational. Write an article that argues that the US President is a member of the Ku Klux Klan or that animal rights activists are into bestiality and pedophilia. Perhaps write an article about cooking for coprophilia fetishists. Write something that people love to hate. That way word gets out about your site.   Some of the most profitable sites for photographers are the pornography sites. Every generation of young men has a sizable quota willing to view porn and crucially fool enough to believe it's worth paying to see pictures of naked women.

Photography job scams II

Everywhere you go, there are scammers hard at work, trying to part you from your money or get you to work for nothing. They're about as prevalent as the criminals that try to make off with your vehicles, money or other property. Perhaps they're worse now that they can do it all from a third country. Judging from news reports, Russia, China, Ukraine and Nigeria are hotbeds of illegal activity where those not actively involved in defrauding you are busily plotting to do so and only stop when they're dead. Even in jail they're plotting their next crime spree.

Just for grins, I'll enclose an email I received today from one of the job scammers. There are so many out there that it beggars belief. Aside from the fact I don't recall ever applying for these positions, the messenger thing is just plain weird. Certainly it would make sense for companies to interview staff online first to save both staff time and to save space in their parking lot but we're not there yet. It would be fun if everybody that read this immediately chatted to this guy on Yahoo Messenger. I'm betting that he's really in Lagos or someplace like that.

Dear Applicant,

Your resume has been reviewed by our HR Department in reference to our AD, for the following positions: "Accounting Clerk/Office Clerk,Receptionist Application,BOOKKEEPING /Customer Service/DATA ENTRY CLERK/Operations Director and Virtual Assistant position, we believe you are capable of handling this position based on your resume in Our company. We viewed your resume and we believe you have the required qualifications to proceed.Your details has been forwarded to Mr. James Kent one of the (Hiring Manager) He would be conducting an online interview with you to discuss the Job Details, Pay Scale,Benefits and company etc Following our newest online screening introduced by Better Business Bureau, you are to set up a screen name with yahoo instant messenger(IM) a(http://www.messenger.yahoo.com) if you don't have one and add up the company Hiring Manager's yahoo screen name{JAMESKENT14@YAHOO.COM} and instant message him for an online interview/briefing exercise ASAP The schedule time for the 

interview/briefing exercise is as soon as possible, You are to be available on yahoo messenger ASAP for the interview, Your swift and timely response to this position matters a lot as the job interview starts ASAP, If you have any questions or you wont be available at the interview ASAP, Please feel free to email Mr. Kent James to reschedule another interview Date..I wish you best of luck in the interview.

Email address: jameskent14@yahoo.com

Best regard,

Director of Human Resources.

Robosoft Technologies Pvt. Ltd!

There is, of course, a very good reason why I'm not worried about scammers and criminals getting hold of my resume - it has only a PO Box and a Google Voice phone number listed as contact details for me.  If you're going to take security seriously when applying on all these strange websites, that's the only way to be safe. There's not much they can do to trace you with either in order to steal your identity. They'll move onto easier pickings.

The making of the videos

Over time, this website has evolved and evolved greatly. Indeed, the original concept probably dated back to 2006 where it was to be a vehicle to display my love of creativity and photography. With the advent of social media, the people element is back. Being a people person, it's much more fun when there's some form of interaction.

Having run the two blogs and some previous blogs over the years, recently the video element was added. Some people shoot only video and just don't bother with written blogs. This seems such a shame as both are equally pleasurable to complete. For the moment the aim is to have both video and written entries.

Over the course of the video making, various things have been pointed out such as the lack of lighting in the foreground. Currently the light source is a compact fluorescent desk lamp beside the camera. This was a later addition to the videos. These are, it should be emphasized, the first videos that have ever been produced as selfies. A professional video technician would most likely be able to point out all the flaws and leave me wondering if there's anything that's right.

The aim of the videos is not to achieve ultimate perfection; rather to achieve a modest degree of success and to support the general aim of the blog which is to inform, to educate, to entertain. It also showcases some of the things that I do however this is not a deadly serious affair. I do not strive in this blog for perfection. The videos are unscripted, unedited and filmed off the cuff. The blog entries are not themed - they are written off the cuff. Sometimes when time allows, several videos or blog entries will be composed at the same time then scheduled to appear after various time intervals.

Video presentation has clearly improved since the first video as have the blog entries. Nothing is ever proof read. There may well be the odd error that has slipped through. It is anticipated that improvements will continue over time.

The video equipment is a very old Canon S1 IS and an equally elderly Hakuba tripod. The limitations imposed by the equipment are few - the camera will record 11 minutes of AVI video file that have then to be converted to the MOV format before being uploaded to YouTube in order to reduce the size from 1,000mb down to 200MB. The DSL connection currently used still takes 30 minutes to upload even a 200MB file.

It would be very nice to upgrade from the S1 IS to a read video camera for the videos but short of a fairy depositing one in my lap, that's unlikely to happen while the S1 IS remains a viable option. Similarly, the lighting is unlikely to improve beyond a desklamp with a CFL bulb without investment. As this is purely a personal blog that investment is unlikely to happen. 

I'm currently looking into ways of reducing the echo in the videos from the walls. I'm not really sure quite what can be done though as the room is quite small. Again, this is an investment question. The original plan for the blogs specified no investment whatsoever. It's just too easy to rush off and buy a trinket to use for a photographic subject. That represents capital outlay and capital outlay is taken off income. 

One of the best bits of advice given to me by my father is: Never pay out money on the hope of it making a return. As I've said so many times, money paid out on arts never earns more than is spent. This reminds me of one of the great works of literature found scrawled on the doors of the latrines in my old university:

A chemistry graduate asks "What is it made of?"
A physics graduate asks "How is it made?"
A engineering graduate asks "How can it be made better?"
An accountancy graduate asks "How much does it cost?"
An arts graduate asks "Do you want sauce and fries with that?"

As can be seen - the video setup is not expensive at all. If that camera could still be purchased secondhand I'm sure it wouldn't be more than $15 and the desklamp was about $10 from Walmart. Even the CFL was only 68c from Walmart. I think I paid about $10 for the tripod about 10 years ago. I encourage anybody that wants to start doing videos just to get out there and do it. It's not expensive and it is a creative outlet.

High-Speed photography debunked

High-speed imaging is one of the most technically complex and fun things that it's possible to do with photography. This is the subject of my two books on high-speed photography, available here.  In order to take high speed images like the image below, it's necessary to use skill, perseverance, dedication and a modicum of equipment. To take the image below I used an electronic flash, a standard digital SLR, a cable, a radio trigger and an audio trigger-delay unit.
The myth that high-speed photography is only available to those with extreme specialist knowledge or extreme equipment is blown wide open in my books. That myth of cost and exclusivity is debunked.

This video goes into more depth as to how to go about taking high-speed photographs. I have done high-speed photography for fun. I haven't done any for several years now due to lack of a suitable shed or garage to do it in. It gets messy when liquids and fragments are involved. Bathrooms are OK for drips but not for fragmentation. I get some ludicrous criticism of my high-speed images in my books for not being artistic etc whereas in fact they were intended solely to be illustrative of the techniques. I have a faint suspicion that my critics need to get lives of their own.

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Batteries

Today I was filming a video on tablets when I discovered a Duracell battery that was in my illuminated revolving stand had leaked on me. I didn't know that Duracell occasionally had problems with battery reliability. Given that it's only 20 days outside the use-by date, I don't think much of their 10 year guarantee.

 As can be seen - the end of the battery has burst with chemicals oozing out. This has obviously been leaking for quite some time since the liquid content has dried up. Clearly this started to ooze before the beginning of April and possibly even earlier than that. It's clearly not even made in China - you can see the manufacturer's address as being Toronto, Ontario.

Even after cleaning the battery compartment, there's still gunge left on the contacts. I'm just hoping that it hasn't killed my little revolving pedestal.

I don't use this revolving pedestal much - I used it for one photo project involving a revolving clock and never really looked at it afterwards.

If there's any moral to this story, it's that battery technology hasn't advanced much further than the early days and it's still worthwhile to take batteries out of things that aren't in use and to put the batteries into a leak-proof container such as a glass jar.

Now on Facebook

It has taken hours to set it all up and to redirect my Twitter account but it is all set up now. I now have a Facebook page to which both of my sites, my Foursquare and my Twitter account will auto-publish. I am not now nor will I ever be an expert on Twitter nor on Facebook. The whole process was very frustrating as I had sort out all the problems with no help whatsoever other than reading some incredibly geeky help pages.
Having been through all this, I can make some recommendations to others. First - give yourself plenty of time. It took me probably about six hours off and on to decipher the unintelligible gibberish that Facebook etc call "help pages" and to try various different things to get Twitter to post not to a profile but to the page I wanted.
It seems that I have to set up a "profile" on Facebook during which they demand my "real name". Well, they're not having my real name. I refuse to be told to self-identify online. It's a privacy and safety thing. It's one thing to have a video online and no name and no address to go with it. It's quite another to have a real name available publically.
Ages ago, on a closed system, I used my real name. I suddenly had a phonecall during which I asked how they got my details. The fellow was quite helpful and it appeared he found me though standard documentation once he knew my real name. Given that villains do exist out there, I quite appreciate the German response to Facebook http://www.slashgear.com/facebook-under-real-name-fire-as-germany-insists-on-pseudonyms-18261400/ In this article, the Germans insist that psuedonyms be used for Facebook. Given that I was located solely on the basis of my real name, I have no intention whatsoever of using my real name ever, online or in print. This is purely a matter of safety - that fellow that called me could quite well have been Ted Bundy or Dennis Nilson. Fortunately he was not. After that I never used my real name online nor have any intention of so doing.
How did I get this whole thing to work? Well, my new Facebook page needs no human intervention at all. Rather, all my posts come directly via Twitter. My blog posts are picked up by "Twitterfeed.com" and are then posted directly to my Twitter account. My Foursquare account posts directly to my Twitter account. My Twitter account feeds straight into my Facebook account. No human involvement required - it's all automatic. This and the complicated instructions is why it takes so long to set up. It's enough to drive a fellow to drink!

Update: 06/17/14 - Facebook Account closed due to uselessness.

Tablets II

Ages ago I did an article on tablet computers. Today it's time to revisit that article and to rework it in the light of later developments. These are my thoughts on the latest working of tablets.

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Photography and Safety

Look after yourself out there. It's a rough, tough world for the unprepared. Don't be like many photographers, ever the dreamer, not knowing where your feet will land. Look, use your eyes, your ears, your senses, your intuition and your common sense.

 

Audience Research

I'm running a couple of photo blogs. Thus far, they are being seen but not by sufficient numbers of people to make them really worthwhile. They are www.britinthe.us and www.britphoto.us
I've had a little venture into doing vLogs with the blogs, doing video on photography allied topics. The topics of my blogs are travel photography from my travels with www.britinthe.us and basically anything to do with photography on www.britphoto.us
I've been analysing the content with the highest clicks for www.britphoto.us and reckon that the pages with the highest hits to date, using the Popular Posts tool would seem to indicate that the most popular postings are either controversial or sexual.

Popular Posts

• The great digital scam

• A day in the life of a transsexual.

• 10 reasons why a male photographer should have at least one pair of pantyhose.

• The filter that sees through clothes

• Making the photo blog more fun

• Photography and politics

• Photography job scams

• An open letter to Canon

• Kill Facebook Now!

• Spy cameras - very James Bond

I must admit that I'm disappointed that spy cameras (which I find interesting) don't seem to have fired people's imaginations much. I do notice that those with a sexual base seem to get more readers, even though there is no real sex on display.

Another interesting thing is that the videos seem generally to have fizzled. My audience doesn't seem interested in videos. As an example, I have 487 views for "the filter that sees through clothes" but only 372 actual views of the video. For the photography on politics, I have 176 page views and only 55 video views.

It seems that videos don't reach a great quantity of readers. Having said that, I wonder whether that has anything to do with 85% of viewers just clicking straight off someplace else. I tried to reduce that by putting a photo in every article so they had something visual to attract their attention.

I know the content is interesting. I know the photos are good. I'm not quite sure what the problem is. There was one posting that went viral and had 1,500 hits in a few days due to it being posted as a link on a Romanian website. That tailed off rapidly though. That was the top posting - the great digital scam. 

I think the problem is that I'm just not reaching the right audience. Not quite sure how to reach the right audience. 

Any ideas? Please put them on the comment form below.

Photography and politics

Your pictures are the worst I have ever seen. You should be ashamed of producing such utter garbage. You need to throw that camera away and buy one like mine and let me show you how to take photos properly.

How many times have you heard garbage like that? I hear that quite often. Yet are my photos bad? No - they're not. Both I and anybody I ask love my photos. Do I care any more about statements like that? Heck, no. I think the people that utter such statements are uncouth, uneducated louts that have probably got an inferiority complex because they are using a borrowed camera that they're going to have to give back.

I enjoy taking photos and hope that you do to. I don't have the right to criticize your work and nor does anybody else have the right to criticize yours nor mine.

View the video then get out there and get using your camera. Don't let the dust pile up!

Photography job scams

Just about every advertisement you see on photography jobs boards sounds wonderful. The sad fact is that there are no realistic positions out there for photographers. A while ago, I remember looking to see what jobs were advertised for photographers and I found hundreds if not thousands. All of the jobs I found were for newborn photographers for hospitals. The premise was that you joined the organisation then went and hung around hospitals trying to take photos of mothers and their newborn babies then sold them to the parents and families. The problem with that is that most families do their own newborn photos with their phone cameras and shoot them off within seconds to all their relatives and anybody else via Facebook and blogs etc. What it was, was a cynical exploitation of people desperate to make money with their cameras.  How it worked - the company would handle all the financial transactions in exchange for a massive cut which would leave the photographer that sought the work, did the work and worked for the company getting maybe $10 a day if they were lucky.

In the days of Facebook and instant upload from a phone to Facebook, Flickr or any other of the social media or file sharing websites there is no need to get a photographer to take a photo and rush away to make prints. Certainly some people will later get high-quality images using one of the few remaining part-time professionals. The whole point of family photos is to show the latest news and to record it for posterity. Thus, it's not necessary - particularly during the current economic depression to spend the money on one of the dying breed of professional photographers.

Today I had a look to see if there were any photography jobs listed on careerbuilder and found none. This is not at all surprising. The profession is about as dead as a profession can get. I liken professional photography to that of scribes and notaries. How many scribes do you see offering to write people's letters for them? None - everybody can read and write these days. Notaries are 10 cents a dozen. Just about everybody is a notary these days.

There are still people out there operating photography scams. There's a group going around photographing schools and churches for next to nothing. The photographers don't make much money at all. It's constant upsell all the time. They don't upsell consistently they don't keep their jobs. The camera, lights and background positions are all marked on a plan and the exposures are pre-calculated. There's no actual photography bar pressing the shutter button. It's not a photography job - it's a sales job and a poor sales job at that.

There's a romantic notion among most amateurs that photography is about art and taking nice photos. This is so untrue that it's laughable. The worst, blurriest photo is great if it can be given enough pitch to sell. Professional photography is not about nice photos nor art. It's about taking something good, bad or indifferent and selling the heck out of it. It's a sales job with photography.

Going further, photography is a free gimmick with a lot of other things. That cruise you went on where they took your photo and sold you a copy of the print. That wasn't photography. That was the cruise line selling a line in nostalgia so that they could milk you of yet more money. The "photographer" was just Joe Blow with a camera. The rest of the voyage he's probably shoveling coal in the boiler room.

Every time I see photography "jobs" advertised, they oversell the artsy and photography angles in order to try to finagle some wannabe into applying. Then they have to make the sucker that takes the position into a salesman. There, it's a sink or swim philosophy. If they take photos and can sell, they keep the job. If they can't take photos but can sell them, they keep their job. If they can take photos but are lousy at sales - they're history and there are hundreds of others willing to take their place.

Get that idea right out of your head that photography is anything other than sales. I had a nice conversation a few years ago with an aerial photographer. He just hired a plane and used an elderly film camera to take photos above towns. He then had the photos printed to large sizes and went door-knocking trying to sell them. Even he admitted the photos were poor - it was just they were unique that sold them. Of course now, with Google Earth and satellite imaging everybody knows what their roof looks like. I should imagine his gravy train has ended. Below there should be a Google Maps satellite image of the Whitehouse by way of example. If not, try this link: white house

Out-takes

The April first video was great fun to put together. I had intended to put in another text article between then and now but have been so busy with ordinary life. I do have an ordinary life, oddly enough, that I've just not had the time.

Thus, today I thought I'd treat you to a selection of my out-takes. These are three videos that didn't quite go as planned.

The first video is one of the camera filter that removes clothes - or rather if you look closely you can see that I'm still wearing my wristwatch and my trousers/pants.

The second video I realise I'm still wearing my wristwatch and notice it after the camera has started rolling.

The third video I'm beginning to talk, stumbling a bit as it's even more unscripted than normal and then the phone rings and I have to dash off to answer it.

I've put all three outtakes in one video. I hope you enjoy watching it as much as I do.

They swarm like flies around a corpse

One of the problems with running a photography website is that there are a lot of scammers swarming like flies around a corpse. They rely upon the feeling that everybody has that their website should be making money. Thus we all duly scrabble around looking for ways to make money and it never ever works. Perhaps I should correct that - I do get some money from Adsense but it's more like a check for $100 every couple of years. Last month for example, the advertising on my blogs pulled in the princely sum of $1.79 which though nice isn't going to get me $100 anytime soon. At $1.79 a month, it's going to take about 5 years to reach that $100.

Income from adsense has not always been that low. For a long time I had a stalker who was persistently viewing my sites. I was getting an utterly ridiculous 200+ hits a month from a Roadrunner residential IP address located in Irmo, South Carolina. I have a feeling that individual was also clicking on a lot of adverts on my sites. That was dropped away mysteriously starting somewhere around mid February.  I'm wondering whether my stalker has just given up totally. The downside is that because they're not clicking, revenue has fallen.

The single flag at the top of the map used to be 195+ hits a few weeks ago, Now it has dropped to a single hit. I suspect that will vanish in the next few days as there seems to be a 6 week storage of hits with the counter in use. I am very glad that my statistics are no longer biassed by whoever that was that had been stalking all of my blogs over the years from that location.

I've tried various ways of getting income from the internet and it has always appeared to be lack of website traffic that has been the problem. I've written a few sensational articles but while that does get my site a lot of hits, the adverts don't seem to get too many clicks. Yesterday for example, the April 1st gag posted about the filter that could see through clothes. That was fairly well received and generated a vast number of website hits.

Out of interest I placed links on Craigslist and got lots of people clicking on the articles and clicking on adverts. That made money until Craigslist decided to block html links. They'd probably want to charge to allow me to use links and the income from the advert clicks is just insufficient to pay for anything like that. In fact, it'd probably cost more to promote the blog that way.

Another route I tried - urged on by a friend who has success with his blog was using Amazon associates. That was interesting as it allowed me to select specific ranges of items to advertise with Amazon handling the transactions and delivery and paying me a small amount for each transaction. Clearly, that never worked. I'm pretty sure it worked well for Amazon but it didn't seem to work too well for me. It is a pretty scammy way of doing things. Amazon promises to throw a few crumbs at me for doing the hard work of advertising their junk and pushing it to my buddies. It's an example of MLM  multi-level marketing aka pyramid schemes. Ages ago I was offered an insurance salesman job. I read about it a bit more and asked a few people who'd tried that before. The commonality was that people would sell insurance to friends and family then run totally out of clients. It was great for the company as they invested minimal time training staff who then got them a few thousand dollars income and who then left to be replaced by more staff that would repeat the process.

So, is there any way at all to make money out of the internet and out of photography blogs etc? In my experience, yes, but only if you're going to be satisfied with laughably little money. Yesterday for example I had my April 1st video out. The site normally gets 50+ visits a day. Yesterday it received 435 visits by 7pm. That should have meant a lot of adsense income. It made just 40 cents by 7pm.

As I said at the beginning, there are myriads of scammers all flocking around trying to tell you how to make money from your website or blog. Certainly I bought into Google Adsense. It was free and the adverts are not too conspicuous. On the other hand, when I checked the adsense from a friend's computer, it seemed not to be working though it usually seems to. Yes, I'll call adsense a scam - what that's all about is advertising an advert. Google wants people to click on adverts so it can charge advertisers. Thus it wants people to write blogs and provide content for no cost that will attract people to websites carrying adsense and they attempt to provide adverts appropriate for the website topic. It's all a huge milking operation and by paying a fraction of the income Google gets from the adverts, Google gets mugs like you and I to provide content. It's pretty much the same for the Amazon shop - we advertise somebody else's products in order that somebody else can make huge amounts of money and then after all the feasting is done, they flick a few crumbs off the table to the slave quarters where we live. It's all multi-level marketing, similar to the insurance companies.

The amount of money gained from advertising is dropping year on year as more people take advertising and advertising gains ever less revenue. In order to gain the same amount of revenue, companies are forced to expand their revenue base by persuading people to use their skills and talents to gain the company money in exchange for crumbs of no significant value.

A while ago, I used to run an LED sign on the back of my vehicle. I used to sell advertising space on it for $5 a week and on a good week I could have 3 advertisers. Many weeks I had none. While the income was welcome, I was paid only $4 of every $5 as the website took a massive 20% cut. After trying it for 2 years and getting very little money out of it, I killed the project. It just didn't pay well enough to keep bothering with it. Sure - it was income that I would not otherwise have had but like blog income, it's not worthwhile to do it for income.

I am debating whether it's worth bothering with continuing to carry advertising since it pays so very poorly. Wherever you go, there are people wanting maximum work for minimum income. Most of the time these things are just best ignored. 

As an aside, some people live fairly close to me. They live in a two bedroom house and there are 3 adult women, one man and two children. All of the adults earn minimum wage and none can survive on the minimum wage. 

The filter that sees through clothes

I have been working for a very long time on a filter that can see through clothing and have succeeded. It's cost me about $10,000 and taken probably the best part of ten years to develop this filter. It's not yet available for general purchase as I am a little uncomfortable with the idea of people using it to view others naked.

I hope you enjoy seeing this video and that you will search your conscience deeply before deciding whether to use filters such as this in the future. Please don't try to develop this in your own home. It should only be attempted by qualified professionals such as myself.