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Chase Jarvis-Success Hit List

The following is from a post by Chase Jarvis of critical keys to success. This was the first, and for me, the most damning.

1. Get shit done.
Over-thinking, pontificating, and wondering are tools for the slacker. People don’t care what almost happened, or what your problems are or why something wasn’t. They care about what is, and what will be. That requires actually making stuff happen. Pros do, make, ship, send, publish, post and deliver; amateurs sit around and wonder, or worse, scratch their arse.

Here’s the full post.

PHLEARN_AddEyeMakeup

When I set this site up a few years ago, I was going to amaze people at the awesome training materials I would provide. I dropped in the first couple of pieces I produced from a class I held.  The class and the materials didn’t go over as well as I had hoped, so I pulled back. In the meantime I’ve continued my own learning process which consists of a daily review of multiple web sites/blogs, training sites, magazines and books. It doesn’t take long to realize that there is a HUGE body of training materials out there. So rather than spend my time producing more training material to add to the current glut, I decided to use my training section as a library of the materials I discover that I think are helpful.

So I removed the few things that were there and started adding links to material that I think is worth checking out. I may at some point produce my own, but for right now, I want to concentrate on producing work.  Please check out my training section and feel free to let me know what you think of the material that is there.

Saturn, with Earth, Venus and Mars

Here’s the link to the NASA site with more details and full res versions.

Fast Cars

I’ve been tinkering with the site the past couple of months. What I had before was a bit messy and not structured the way I wanted, going forward. So some modifications were needed.

I can’t create in a vacuum, I need somewhere to show off what I’ve done. This is it, for now. I’ll get more ambitious later.

Previously I had two sites – my blog and a gallery on SmugMug.  My domain went to the gallery and linked to the blog. Now there is only one site and the domain points here.

The site is now made up of 3 areas:

• Work Log (Blog) – This is my working journal. Here I record my thoughts, notes, research, anything that I think is interesting or anything I just want to verbalize
• Gallery - I will publish the results of my projects, jobs, etc here. This is the finished product area
• Training – I want to do more classes, reach out and help others learn. Each class I teach will include a syllabus – a summary of the key points with example images.

It ain’t pretty. There are some formatting issues, it could be cleaned up here or there. But it’s fully functional and it’s time I start being a photographer again, an artist, not a bad computer programmer.  Content is king here.

Meet Beaux

Next up – probably a store. It would be cool to actually generate some kind of income.  But there are some ego issues involved there. What if I put it up and nobody comes… :0)

But before the store or anything else – a whole lot of images, good, bad, some great. Tune in and see how it goes.

Oh, and the pictures above – no relation at all to this post other than they look nice and add some color to a fairly boring post.

Happy shooting all…

The ideals which have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth.

The trite subjects of human efforts, possessions, outward success, luxury have always seemed to me contemptible.

Albert Einstein

This allows me to have more (full) control of my site and I can use Windows Live Writer to post. That alone cuts my posting time by at least half and looks better when I’m done.

This is a good thing.

I think I’ve got it all working – now I just need to figure out how to redirect my domain name. Until that happens I cleared the posts from the old site and added a link to the new site.

Welcome and enjoy.

Art is poetry when “poetry” is an emotionally rewarded aesthetic banter with our senses. Reduce craft to a one button push, the poetry now includes a lackluster effort to engage – similar to a street passing of two indifferent relations. There is no strength in laziness.

Genius lies in understanding that art involves the consumer’s world view, the context in which it is consumed, the collaborative nature of the work and the commitment of the artist. With his erased de Kooning, Rauschenberg proves that great art works don’t necessarily involve the tools of great skill. Our democratized digital renaissance proves similar; great tools don’t necessarily produce works of great art.

Here’s a set I did where it made a difference. The scene was a high contrast shot, late morning so the sun was a bit high. But still had some good shape and flow. The HDR added the extra bit of detail and contrast that pushed a slightly washed out image into a interesting image.

I’m still playing with the Detail Enhancer vs. the Tone Compressor. I like the Tone Compressor in my mountain shots – it plumps up the pine trees – a richer green with nicer luminance. Here’s a comparison.

This first shot is the middle image of my 3 shot, 1ev set. I applied base Exposure and Black Lightroom adjustments. I applied a Gradated filter to the sky.

The second shot is the HDR Detail Enhancer version:

The third shot is the HDR Tone Compressor version: