Steve Jobs, A Friend I Never Met

Little Tasha Taylor discovers the Mac

I just lost a friend I never met. Steve Jobs died on October 6, 2011 at the young age of 56. As eulogies pour in from around the world, I wonder what I possibly have to add, yet feel the need to say something.

My relationship with Steve and Apple, the company he started with a with a high school friend, began in March 1984 when I purchased my first Macintosh computer, just two months after it made its famous Super Bowl premier.

I was preparing to enter grad school and was searching for a computer. I‘d looked at the IBMs and a “portable” computer called a Kaypro II – it weighed 29 pounds and sported a 5” green screen that greeted you with a -> when it booted up. Then I heard rumors that a little company that made the Apple II was on the verge of announcing a totally different kind of computer.

The first time I saw the little Macintosh with its then revolutionary single button mouse, I knew it was the computer for me. It had 128K of RAM (consider to be huge at the time and double that of the Kaypros) but what captured my attention was what was on the black and white screen, instead of the blinking -> there were little pictures of the things you’d use on a desktop, they called them “icons” just like the images on the right side of this blog and instead of typing move c:\windows\temp\*.* c:\temp to move a file, you just clicked on the icon of a document and dragged it to the icon of a folder. As a photographer and a “visual” person, it was clear that my search for a computer was over, even though it cost $2,000 (about $5,200 in 2010 dollars).

As I sit here typing this blog on my iPhone and PowerBook Pro, it’s amazing to think back to those first days when there were only two programs, MacPaint and MacWrite. Slowly new programs trickled out and before long I bought a spell checker. All of a sudden, a whole new world opened up for me. I’d always been afraid to write because I was embarrassed about my TERRIBLE spelling but the spell checker set me free.

I bought a backpack for my Mac and carried it to work and used it to prepare our newsroom’s budget. Mine was the first computer in the station, other than a few IBMs in the accounting department. When the News Director returned from the budget talks in New York, he said the corporate big boys wanted to know why our budget looked so much better than anyone else’s. The answer was my Mac and the Apple ImageWriter printer. Hard as it may be to believe, the concepts of fonts and kerning was totally alien to computers at the time. Most computers only printed letters that had the same space for each character.

Early video games on Mac.

In the masters journalism program, I had to write a lot of papers and to my amazement, I found I had something to say and that I could communicate with words. For a photographer who communicated primarily with pictures, this was a life changing breakthrough. Before long I was writing a monthly magazine column about TV photography.

Over the years that first Mac transitioned to a Macintosh Plus, then a color Mac 7500, then a dual core Power Mac tower and finally to my current laptop Powerbook Pro. Just as the hardware evolved, so too did the software. After the spell checker, Microsoft Word was my next piece of software – a full blown word processor with the capability to easily insert footnotes which was essential for my long grad school papers.

I now have over a hundred programs on my Mac. One of the advantages to being an “early adopter” is that I could learn programs gradually as they came out, so the learning curve wasn’t overwhelming. The two most important things I discovered about new programs and the Mac were:

1. The Mac wasn’t going to break if I did something wrong. This set me free to try things just to see what would happen.
2. There is this neat menu option called Help.

For me, the most amazing program from Apple was Final Cut Pro, introduced in 1999. It was a full featured video editing program and it was the real deal. People were using it to cut network shows and the movie, Cold Mountain was cut on Final Cut. Gone were the days of shlepping into the station on the weekends to edit my home movies, I could do them at home on my PowerMac.Fast forward to 2011 and the latest incarnation of the program is Final Cut X. And, in true Steve Jobs’s style, it’s totally different than any other editing program. Rather than looking at editing the way it’s been done since the advent of non-linear editing, Apple started from scratch and designed a program they claim is faster and more powerful than anything we’ve seen before. And, like so many of Steve’s other ideas, it’s not being welcomed with open arms. The pushback has been so great that Apple was forced to put the old Final Cut Suite back on the market and they are offering a 30 day free trial period to check out the program. I’m betting on Steve and Apple and am struggling to master the program. I’ll buy it as soon as I scrape together a few hundred dollars.

Somewhere along this journey, Steve realized that computers didn’t just have to sit on our desks, and Apple started making small, portable, special use computers. We all know their names. The first (not counting the Newton) was the iPod, then the iPhone and the iPad. Of course, along the way iTunes and the Apps Storemade it painless to purchase music and apps and keep them up to date.Think about it, when the iPod debuted, there were other MP3 players on the market but it took the combination of the iPod’s ease of use and the ninety-nine-cents-a-song simplicity of iTunes to make it a phenomenal success. There were “smart phones” before the iPhone but it became a phenomenal hit when paired with the Apps Store and all those amazing little programs that did things we didn’t know we needed a phone to do. The same for the iPad; there were other tablets on the market but the iPad tied all the loose ends together.

For example, while lying in bed with my iPad last night, reading articles in Flipboard (a news aggregator that creates an online magazine of articles based on my Facebook friends and the accounts I follow on Twitter), I came across an article about a show that airs on the National Geographic channel. In less than a minute, I’d clicked on my AT&T U-verse app, found the show and programed my DVR to record it; all this in less than two minutes, without leaving bed or switching to some other device.

As I write, we are days away from the launch of the iPhone 4S (yes I’ll get one) and a new operating system, iOS5 for the iPad and iPhone.For the first time, Steve wasn’t there to announce their debut.Many writers have noted that other entrepreneurs would be satisfied with creating any one of Steve’s amazing products. But, as Steve explained, he didn’t waste time basking in the limelight of success because he was already moving on to the next “insanely great invention.”

Steve, the world will miss you. I miss you.

(The Apple icon with the Steve Jobs “bite”

was created by 19 year old Jonathan Mak)

Working For the Man

Me, back in the early 1980s. Dressed up for the station's 30th birthday.

The Man’s Many Faces

Seems like I’ve spent most of my life working for the “Man.” The first “Man” was my dad. He paid me a couple bucks for cutting the grass. Over the years, the “Man’s” face kept changing; there was the head of the paint crew and Shorty, the electrician. For a couple summers, the “Man” was the steward on a construction project, then there were my days as a Teamster when the UPS manager taught me how to drive a Semi-truck.

The first ”Man” to give me a job after college was Lee Giles, the WISH-TV News Director who saw something in an eager rookie with no news experience. He hired me as a “trainee photographer.” That was back in 1978; he offered me $9,000 a year and I told him I was going to prove I was worth $10,000 and in six months he gave me a $1,500 raise. I be honest, I couldn’t believe someone was willing to pay me to take pictures. I like to think Lee had a pretty good eye for talent; he also gave Jane Pauley her first broadcasting job. I worked for him twice, for a total of twenty-five years.

Don’t Burn Bridges

While working for Lee, I learned the importance of not burning bridges. I left WISH-TV after three years because I wanted to work on long form pieces. I made a point of letting Lee know how much I appreciated the chance he’d taken on me and made it clear how much I enjoyed working for him, I just wanted to try my hand at a kind of storytelling that wasn’t being done at WISH.

The “Man” I went to work for was named George Hulcher. He supervised a magazine show at WHAS-TV in Louisville. He dreamed of bringing together a bunch of creative people, challenging them to put together the best possible local magazine show and then he got out of their way. Our show was called Louisville Tonight. It didn’t pay much but our name appeared at the beginning of every story on which we worked. Talk about giving you a sense of ownership! We were on salary but we often worked more than forty hours a week because it was “Our” show.

I spent a wonderful three years in Louisville before the business side of TV raised its ugly head. Even though we were the number one show in our time slot, the bean counters decided they could save money by replacing us with a syndicated show.

I had stayed in touch with Lee Giles, checking in a couple times a year. When I heard our show was slated for the axe, Lee was one of the first people I called. He’d been in TV since the early days and seemed to know everyone. (This was back in the pre-cable days when there were only three channels in every major market.)

To my total amazement, he said he was looking for a Chief Photographer and wondered if I’d be interested in returning to Indianapolis. Boy was I glad I hadn’t burned that bridge. Before Lee retired with the most longevity of any news director in the country, I’d added the title of News Operations Manager to my resume.

You Never Know Who’s Going to be the Man

A few years after Lee retired, I reached my thirty year mark at WISH and decided to take advantage of a buyout offer. For the last few years I’ve earned a living as a freelancer and teacher.

For my last thirteen years at WISH-TV, I spent an evening a week teaching a class in Broadcasting News for the Journalism Department at Indiana University Purdue University at Indianapolis (IUPUI). Ironical, for all that time, I taught students to become what is now called a Backpack Journalist. (An aside: as I type this blog, I’m sitting in an airport waiting to return from a week of teaching seasoned reporters and anchors how to shoot and edit.)

While teaching for IUPUI, one of my best students was a kid named Joe Starlin. For him, I guess I became the “Man.” First he worked for me as a photography intern and then he made a liar out of me when I hired him as a full time photographer – I always told my students they would never get their first job in a top twenty-five market.

As a freelance field producer, I’ve had the chance to hire Joe a couple times but this year, he’s turned the tables on me. He’s hire

d me a couple times; once to help light a complicated shoot and another time to edit and run the second camera on a shoot. It just proves the old adage, “What goes around, comes a

round.” Or, put another way, “You never know who is going to become the “Man.” I’m sure glad I gave Joe a good grade.

Freelancer’s File – Learning the Hard Way

Freelancer’s File – Learning the Hard Way

At last I’m ready to announce my Sweitzer Productions web site.  Bear with me, I’m still tweaking it but I think all the buttons work. Please let me know if you have problems with anything. My goal is to design a site that is visually driven, showcases my work and is easy to update with new projects.

This all started because a friend noticed that I didn’t have a web site and pointed out that GoDaddy.com offered several free templates I could use. (GoDaddy.com is where I registered my domain (for the non-geeks, that’s who I paid to ensure that no one else can use the name sweitzerproductions.com). Apple also offers a program called iWeb that makes it easy to design a great looking site.

My problem is that I can’t let a learning opportunity like this slip away… after all, I can’t think of a better excuse to force myself to learn web design. So, I set out several months ago to teach how to build a site using the Adobe Suite tools – specifically Dreamweaver.

I’m old enough to remember the early days of web design and actually helped get WISH-TV’s first web site on the Internet. We couldn’t convince the General Manager that the internet was important (same guy who thought cable TV was a fad). We knew he was wrong so we went behind his back and registered a domain and actually put up a web site. Those were the days when you used a simple text editor to write the html code that drives the Internet.

I’m not sure when I first discovered that figuring out how to solve a problem is one of the best ways to learn to do something. I’m not sure this works for everyone but for me, it’s the secret to both learning something and more importantly, remembering what I learn.

I used this approach to learn non-linear editing (computer editing of video). WISH-TV had purchased a Media 100, one of the first non-linear editor, for the production department. I was producing a story for the NPPA so I decided to use the project to teach myself non-linear editing. That was before the Internet was full of great help files so I spent a lot of time punching buttons to see what would happen and reading the manual.

I know guys aren’t supposed to read manuals but I don’t believe that. I often read the manual several time. First to get an overview and then I read it again after I’ve played with things for a while. I love my Canon 40D still digital camera but I don’t shoot with it everyday so if I have an important still job, I sit down and go through the manual again. I’m such a slow learner that I dog-ear important pages and underlined text; hey, it’s my manual so why not make it work for me.

That Media 100 experience was a great way to glean an understanding of non-linear editing and it served me well when Apple finally came out with Final Cut Pro, my editor of choice. There is nothing like working for a week on a project and then having it all disappear because you hit the wrong button. After your heart starts beating again, you learn not to punch that button again, and you also eventually figure out how to recover from the disaster. This experience was often frustrating but I learned the basics and it made it a lot easier to learn other editors like the Avid Newscutter and Adobe’s Premier.

Those of you who aren’t interested in web design can stop reading this blog now. The rest of the post is about some of the nitty-gritty under the hood stuff I learned while designing my pages. I’d love to hear your stories about personal disasters/problems you turned into learning experiences.

For those of you interested in what’s driving my website… I discovered a great program/service called Slideshow Pro. You can buy a stand alone program that creates the necessary flash code to “publish dynamic photo and video slideshows for any web site you create.” They also sell a plugin for Adobe Lightroom, which is what I use. Presenting video and stills is exactly what I want to do so this is a perfect fit. Recently they added a feature that generates a non-flash version of your slideshow that will play on Apple iPhones and iPads (and any other platform that doesn’t play flash). I also bought a subscription to their Director, which is a “content management and publishing application that runs in your web browser.” It comes in two flavors; the one I use is their web hosting service. It allows me to upload my images and videos to their server and then link my slideshows to those images. This way, people looking at my site on a 27″ iMac see the best quality image and people looking at my site on an iPhone see a much smaller version of the image. They also offer a version that lets you host the Director on you own server if you wish.

Figuring out how to get all these different elements to play nicely with each other is not simple. And, of course, I make it even more complicated because I want my site to look a certain way. Director offers several versions of slideshow layouts and you can simply copy the html code and paste it into your web site. But, of course, I’m not satisfied with the look of any of their offerings so I have to go back to Lightroom and use their plugin to tweak the layout until I’m satisfied with the look.

Now that I have my site laid out pretty much the way I want, I have to start organizing the content. That means going though my still files and creating properly formatted images and properly sizing my videos and then uploading everything to the Director site. From now on, if everything works properly, all I have to do with new content is size it and upload it and it will magically appear in my website.

Let me know what you think of the site and please let me know if something doesn’t work for you.

Freelancer’s File Blog – Thanks, but no thanks.

Freelancer’s File Blog – Thanks, but no thanks.

Getting rejected is no fun. I know successful people who frame their rejection letters and keep them prominently displayed in their affluent offices. Kind of a “Na, na a boo boo… I’m a success and you thought I was a loser.”

It doesn’t make it any easier when they tell you, “Don’t take the rejection personally.” How else are you supposed to take it? Yet, I’ve sat in the employer’s chair and conducted job searches and I know the reasons for picking one applicant instead of another may truly have nothing to do with a person or their qualifications. Few will admit it but, in the name of creating a diverse staff, the company may be looking for a certain kind of person. Maybe you’re too old or too young, too light or too dark or too male or too female. I passed over people for an overnight position because they had little kids and I thought the job would put too much stress on the family.

In the freelance world, the game’s played a little differently but “Rejection” is still the name of the game.  I’m learning that you write a lot of proposals and many result in a job. It’s disappointing but hardly unexpected. What I wasn’t prepared for was having my ideas “stolen.” Recently a not-for-profit organization approached me and a friend and asked us to develop a proposal for a media campaign. After we spent days researching the problem, interviewing and eliminating potential partners and designing the proposal, we presented it to an enthusiastic reception. As time passed and the anticipated funding didn’t materialize, we began to notice pieces of our proposal being instituted by volunteers. Friends asked, “Why don’t you sue them?” To paraphrase, the answer’s simple, “You don’t mess where you work.” And we like to work with other groups in that environment.

What’s your experience? Ever had an idea stolen? Ever received a rejection from someone you later got to prove wrong?

West With the Night is a wonderful adventure story

West With The Night by Beryl Markham is one of the most fascinating adventure books I’ve ever read. I discovered it on National Geographic’s list of the “100 Greatest Adventure Books of All Time.” It’s fascinating but doesn’t fit into the “I couldn’t put it down” category; rather it’s the kind of book you want to savor.

You may be wondering why I’m suggesting an adventure book in a blog that claims to be about freelancing. The simple answer is that Beryl was the ultimate freelancer. Her career is filled with “firsts” and she consistently disproved people who claimed “women can’t do that.” Born in 1902 in England,  she moved with her family to “British East Africa” (Kenya) when she was three. Her father cleared land and started a farm about 70 miles from Nairobi, where she grew up learning to speak several African languages. During an extended drought, her father went broke and lost the farm. Even though she was only a teenager, she stayed in Africa when her family left to try their luck at farming in Peru.  With only her horse and the clothes in her backpack, she bucked all tradition and broke into the all-male world of horse breeding and racing. (And I thought it was tough starting my freelance business.) She established her own stable and at 24, a horse she trained won the most prestigious horse race in Kenya.

Always an adventurer, she was thrilled by her first airplane ride and immediately resolved to learn to fly. With hard work, she became the first woman in Kenya to earn a commercial pilot’s license and quickly broke into another all-male profession and started a successful business as bush pilot.

In 1936 she became the first woman to fly solo from England to North America,  “crash landing” in a Nova Scotia peat bog, after a frozen fuel line forced her down short of the planned New York City destination. Interestingly, the world probably best knows Markham for this transatlantic flight but she only dedicates a few chapters to the hair-raising feat.

Her life story is certainly fascinating but what makes this book so special is the writing. Ernest Hemingway, who knew her in Africa, writes on the back cover, “… she has written so well, and marvelously well, that I’m completely ashamed of myself as a writer… She can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves writers.” Interesting, while researching her life, I discovered that there is some question about the role her third husband played in writing the book. The controversy doesn’t detract from prose but if you’re interested, you can dig deeper at: DID MARKHAM ACTUALLY WRITE WEST WITH THE NIGHT?

Beryl’s life is an amazing journey, along the way she’s attacked by a lion, joins native hunting parties armed only with a spear and routinely flies over landscape so remote that, should she crash, rescue is impossible. What ties her story together and makes it such an enjoyable read is her thoughtful observations about a distant time and place. As I read, I could picture her flying for hours, alone over the African bush, with a notebook strapped to her leg so could record the musings of her amazing mind.

When I began West With the Wind it was quickly apparent that this wasn’t your everyday adventure story. Anyone who’s feeling challenged by the obstacles of starting a new business or who’s confronting the unknown, will find inspiration here. I can’t think of a more fitting ending for this blog than to quote Beryl Markham’s first few lines:

How is it possible to bring order out of memory? I should like to begin at the beginning, patiently, like a weaver at his loom. I should like to say, ‘This is the place to start; there can be no other.’

But there are a hundred places to start for there are a hundred names – Mwanza, Serengetti, Nungwe, Molo, Kakuru. There are easily a hundred names, and I can begin best by choosing one of them – not because it is first nor of any importance in a wildly adventurous sense, but because here it happens to be, turned uppermost in my log book. After all, I am no weaver. Weavers create. This is a remembrance…

DATE – 16/6/35
TYPE AIRCRAFT – Avro Avian
MARKINGS – VP – KAN
JOURNEY – Nairobi to Nungwe
TIME – 3 hrs. 40 mins.

Freelancer’s File Blog – Getting Connected

Social Media

Freelancer’s File Blog – Get Connected. Getting connected is one of the first things I tried to do when I started freelancing. I’ve been at it for over a year and I continue to learn new things as I go.

For starters, I use a “free” service called Plaxo to keep my contacts up to date and synced between several computers. This was a real life saver when I suddenly lost access to the work computer I’d used for over a decade. The free basic services allows you to sync addresses and calendars between computers, iPhone and other smart phones. Automatic Updates is one of its cool free features; when another Plaxo user in your address book update their contact information, it automatically updates in your address books. You can also use it to sync your addresses between online services like Google, Yahoo and Windows Mail. I use it so much I paid to upgraded to Plaxo Plus which offers additional services, like an online archive of my addresses and a “deduper” that removes or merges duplicate contacts. The service also has a Facebook like news feed that I don’t use.

I also use the free LinkedIn which is like a business versions of Facebook and Plaxo.  On your home page you see an aggregation of your Twitter and Facebook feed. It can also be used as a job search resource and job reference tool. I know that’s quite a mouthful but it’s quite a free service. It’s really geared toward people in the job market.  The site also encourages you to ask friends and business associates to write letters of recommendation that visitors to the site can see. Lots of people swear it helps them find jobs and conversely, helps employers find potential employees. I use it as another way to stay connected.

Then of course there is Facebook. Some people thinks it’s just for kids but my 87-year-old mom uses it to keep connected with her kids and a lifetime’s worth of buddies all over the world. I’m surprised to find that many of my younger friends are more likely to send Facebook messages than email. I don’t check into it daily so I turned on the feature that sends an email when someone posts a message or comments on my wall and of course I have the Facebook app on my iPhone.

I don’t think Facebook is a user-friendly service. I’m constantly switching back and forth between the Home screen and the Profile screen trying to find  things. Then there is the whole issue of “privacy settings.” The site’s default settings encourage you to share everything with everyone. I’m old school and I don’t want people to know where I am, when I’m away from home, and I don’t post pictures from my last orgy. It takes a while but I took the time to fine-tune my user setting. For tips on customizing your setting, check the old-gray-lady’s article The 3 Facebook Settings Every User Should Check Now. All Facebook offers a very detailed list of 10 setting you should adjust, complete with pictures of what to check.

I thought I knew my way around Facebook, I’ve been a member since the days when you had to have an .edu suffix to your email address to belong (only college students and professors have .edu addresses.) My students used to tease me about being the “oldest Facebook users.” My daughter posted on my Wall, “Dad, you’re so lame, you only have 10 friends.”

Since those early days, I’ve set up Group pages for my high school class Camp George Class of 67 and Friends and for NPPA Advanced StoryTelling Workshop. I’ve sent video messages to people using the camera in my MacBook Pro and can upload albums full of pictures from Adobe Lightroom. But recently I started getting emails from Facebook reporting on the activity, or more accurately the lack of activity on my Facebook Page. It’s not easy to learn about Facebook Pages if you’re looking on Facebook. I finally gave up and turned to trusty old Google and asked, “What are Facebook Pages and why do I need one?” I found lots of insightful articles but I thought the best was by Alex Wilhelm who wrote 5 Reasons You Need A Facebook Page Right Now. Alex points out that Pages have been around for a long time; they used to be called Fan Pages. He explains them this way, “Having one (Page) provides a very neat and comfortable line between your personal life and your professional work.” He suggests using your Facebook account for your “personal life” and your Page for you “professional work.” Now I have to add “Finish setting up your Facebook Page.” to my To-Do list. You can follow my progress by doing a Facebook search for Sweitzer Productions.

Text Messaging Is the current communication method of choice for young people. It’s the only way I can reach my 25-year-old son and if I want a quick response from one of my Journalism students, texting is the only sure bet. If you’re new to “texting” you can find email suffixes at WikiHow and you can use your browser to email a phone at this website – Free Text Messaging.

Twitter is an amazing tool. Who would believe you could overthrow a despot with Haiku length messages but look at what’s going on in the middle-east. I like a lot of things about Twitter but they have a lousy online interface. I use a stand-alone program called TweetDeck that allows you to organize incoming tweets in columns and lets you simultaneously send your tweets to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and several other online services. If you haven’t used Twitter, you’ve probably heard the horror stories about people who tweet about what they are eating or being stuck in a traffic jam. That’s definitely one way to use it but I don’t follow people like that. I’m more interested in reading tweets from people who write about interesting things they find on the web, or books they are reading or, like in Egypt, where people are tweeting from the front lines of history in the making.

Finally, there are blogs. I resisted writing one because I wondered what I have to say that anyone would care to read. But when I looked around the web, I didn’t see much about starting out in the freelance photography/video business, so I decided to give it a try. There are tons of sites that help you start blogging but almost all the journalists I know swear by WordPress so that’s the platform I choose. It was easy to set up and I found a “Theme” that I liked.  I’m just starting to figure out how to use WordPress, as demonstrated by my mistaken publishing of this blog yesterday – I’m still trying to figure out how that happened.

In conclusion, I know there are lots of other ways to get connected; I’d love to hear your suggestions. How do you stay connected? How do you use WordPress?

Portrait A Day

Home page for John Gentry's Portrait a Day Project

Freelancer’s File  – Check out the work of John Gentry who is shooting a portrait day for a year. Portrait A Day Project

Starting with “Nan Riedeman” on June 1, 2010, John has made a new portrait each day and is posting it to his web site. He was inspired by the commitment of the Farm Security Administration photographers who put a face on the great Depression. John was struck by the parallels between the Depressions era and now – seriously divided political parties, difficult economic times and public attitudes and arguments over illegal immigration.  John says, “My project is simply to put a face on at least 365 of those in our community whom we may never otherwise meet or see.”

Recently John visited my J210  class (intro to multi-media journalism) at IUPUI (Indiana University Purdue University in Indianapolis) and made quite an impression on the students. He talked about falling in love with photography in high school and a career that began as a stinger for UPI and then as a photographer for  Indianapolis News – now both defunct. He has worked as freelance photographer since 2001. IUPUI is one of his many clients. His goal at IUPUI is to change the public’s perception of the school, from an institution that appealed mostly to middle age white people to a school that attracted a much more diverse and younger clientele. Looking around my class, I’d say he is succeeding.

As a young photographer, he was greatly impressed by the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson and his black and white images that captured the “decisive moment.” He was motivated to shoot the Portrait-A-Day-Project in black and white because, “When you should black and white, it changes your focus from color to design.”

The class is studying the work of all kinds of photographers; from Jim Nactway’s recent Afghanistan war photographs in Time magazine to Jim Brandenberg’s “Chased By The Light” (where he took a single image each day for 90 days).  I think it’s fair to say the students and I were impressed by John’s commitment to photography and this project in particular. We’ve had some pretty rough weather in Indy this year, IUPUI has even been closed for several days, yet John hasn’t missed recording a portrait.

I hope you’ll follow John’s advice and “… give them a look, because we are all interconnected, and while you may not know their faces they may have made or possibly will make a difference in your life.”

Managing Memories

Brian Sweitzer - Quetico 209

Each summer, for the last 20 years,  I spend a week canoeing and camping with the Canoe Boys – as small group of friends – in the Quetico/Boundary Waters on the Minnesota and Canadian border that is only accessible by canoe. In the early years, I carried a small video camera and entertained the group with my edited home movies. While planning this year’s adventure, we watched the DVD I made of the previous trips and to my horror, the audio was out of sync for one of the stories. This sent me on a frantic search for the original footage and thus the subject of this blog.
After looking through all my backup drives, to my relief, I found the story on something called a DVD-RAM Type -1  disk. This was an early version of a DVD that protects the DVD disk in a hard plastic cassette. The good news is that I found the files, the bad news that I no longer own anything that will play those disks. I had a false start and bought a DVD-RAM player only to discover it doesn’t play DVD-RAM Type 1,. I have since discovered that no one still sells a compatible DVD player. BUT, an old Macintosh G4 towers will play it so all I have to do is find an old Mac (nudge to my daughter to answer her e-mail about the old Mac I gave her).

This situation is particularly frustrating because I’m a fanatic about backing up my data. Over the years, I’ve heard too many drives start ticking and then been greeted by the dreaded messages: “Drive can not be read. Do you want to reformat?” or worse yet, “Drive cannot be mounted.” I may not be the sharpest tool in the shed but it didn’t take long to learn that if the data is important, it will eventually get lost if you don’t have AT LEAST ONE COPY of it somewhere. I have a stack of about 50 CDs and DVDs that I used in the old days to back up my photographs. As the price of memory continues to come down, I have embraced a system called JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Drives) that my friend Jim Brown introduced me to.

The idea is to use a bunch of cheap internal drives in an easily accessible box with slide out drive drawers. Pictured is a Wiebetech SilverSATA drive http://www.wiebetech.com/products/silversata.php. With this box, I can buy cheap SATA internal drives and stick them in one of the two drawers. The other day I bought a two terabyte Seagate drive for $139 at Fry’s. I use drawer 1 for my working media and drawer 2 for backup. When the backup drive gets full, I simply remove it, store it in its original cardboard box and file it away. I then replace it in drawer 2 with a new, cheaper SATA drive. My goal is to always have AT LEAST TWO COPIES of all my data. I even take it further; periodical, I create a drive full of all my “really important data” – like bank and tax records, still and video libraries, and personal letters – and give the drive to a friend to store  “off site” at their house, just in case my home blows away or burns down.

I said I was a “fanatic”…  until recently, I even experimented with keeping a copy of my data on the “cloud” as well. I subscribed to a service called Mozy that, for a reasonable price, allowed you to keep an unlimited amount of data on their remote servers. This allowed me to keep close to a terabyte of videos, stills and music on their servers, somewhere on the web. But all good things come to an end and the other day, I received a letter from Mozy informing me that, to their amazement, people took them seriously when they  offered unlimited space. They went on to implying that a small group of subscribers were abusing the system by actually using the “unlimited storage” and ruining it or everyone else. They now want to charge about $60 a year for a mere 50 gig of storage. What a joke!

I do use a WONDERFUL cloud based storage system called Dropbox https://www.dropbox.com/ that lets me story 10 gig of data for free, but it’s so much more that just a storage system, I’ll devote an entire blog to it later.

Sooner or later ALL hard drives will fail. In my experience, the more important the data you store on the drive, the more likely it is to fail. Also, whatever the storage media, it will eventually go the way of the 45 and 33 rpm records and become obsolete, like my DVD-RAM Type 1 disks. Today, storage is so cheap THERE IS NO EXCUSE NOT TO BACKUP YOUR DATA. You can buy a terabyte hard drive that will fit in your pocket for under $150 and that’s big enough to backup EVERYTHING you have unless you’re a real pack rat like me. Macintosh users have even less of an excuse because the current operating system includes Time Machine that seamlessly backs up your data.

Do yourself a favor and back up your data NOW and, as technology gradually changes, move your data from your old storage media to the latest and greatest new storage media.

Getting Started

Evening glow at Gatineau - (This image is one of my favorites. I took it years ago with a point-and-shoot camera resting on a car roof for stability. The balloon with tulips is piloted by a high school friend. This was in Gatineau, Quebec.

Why can’t I ever do things the easy way? There are lots of programs for easily designing a web site but I have to start with Adobe Dreamweaver CS5. I’ve worked with web design since you typed  HTML in to text editor but I have to master CSS and Spry before I can even get started.

The back story is that after thirty years of working in TV news (mostly at WISH-TV, the CBS affiliate in Indianapolis) I took a buyout in January 2010 and have been freelancing and teaching at IUPUI (Indiana University Purdue University)  ever since.

When I set out on my own, my friend Deborah Potter at the News Lab suggested that I blog about the experience. It’s taken over a year to follow her advice and the pieces still aren’t all together but they are falling into place. I hope this blog will add proof to that statement. I even have dreams of making the blog part of my Sweitzer Productions web site but I’ve come to the realization that if I wait until everything is ready to go, it may take another year.

The other day someone told me that stating your goals publicly was a good way to force yourself to follow through with them so here’s my commitment: I plan to regularly write about my experiences as a freelancer. This will include topics as diverse as sending out IRS 1099 forms, deciding what equipment to buy,  interesting people I meet and my successes and failures along the way.

My goal is to make this interesting and entertaining enough that someone will actually want to read it.