New Photography
One of my life-long hobbies has been photography. I was always the yearbook photographer, spending a lot of my spare time during high school in the darkroom. I wanted to be a photojournalist, and was the photographer for the campus newspaper. Once out of school, I took a lot less pictures, but never lost the interest. I’ve taken a lot of family portraits for friends, and even shot a few weddings.
I was a dyed-in-the-wool film user for a long time. My favorite camera was the Nikon FM3A, an all-manual classic. I had the suite of Nikon glass to go with it. That all changed around 2003 with the introduction of the Canon 10D. I was floored by the quality, and being a computer geek, I was blown away by what was possible in the retouching world with Photoshop. I sold my entire Nikon kit and picked up a Canon 10D with good zoom lens and never looked back at film.
My photography, and photography in general, are going through another revolution now. But rather than film-to-digital, the new transformation is camera-to-smartphone. I picked up an iPhone 4S in October last year. While only an incremental overall jump from my 3GS, the integrated camera was an incredible leap. In a world of Facebook, Instagram and blogs, the 4S is capable of taking better pictures than a dedicated pocket digital camera from a few years ago.
This has really had a huge impact on me as a photographer. I’m taking more pictures now, because my phone is always in my pocket. And while I still use Photoshop for some things, there is now a whole suite of easy-to-use image improvement tools available that produce outstanding results. The experience is as revolutionary as my jump to digital eight years ago.
Here are a few recent pictures with my 4S. The first is a shot of my daughter at Starbucks.
This is from an event at the Park Place Jaguar dealer this month.
Here’s a low-light shot from our company “Vegas Night” party.
And finally here is one from today at the Shops at Willow Bend.
None of these were retouched in Photoshop. While a bit soft compared to “pro” standards, they are all more than acceptable for any online use. The iPhone 4S is an extremely capable camera, even in low light conditions.
So instead of lugging around a DSLR with a big honking zoom lens, my kit now consists of an iPhone 4S and a Olloclip clip-on lens. This gives me everything from the relatively normal perspective of the stock iPhone 4S all the way to a Fisheye view.
For image manipulation on the iPhone, I use Instagram, which not only allows me to apply good lookinging effects to my photos, it is also an excellent way to share my pictures with the world.
Thanks to Photostream in iOS 5, I can also easily edit pictures on my Mac and iPad. On the iPad, Snapseed is my preferred tool. And on my Mac, I use Aperture 3 and Flare. Snapseed was just released for Mac, so I’ll be checking that out too.
None of these have the sophistication of Photoshop, but they are all very easy to use and make it possible for the casual photographer to produce outstanding results.
Photography is going through another major transformation. I expect the market for point-and-shoot digital cameras to evaporate as the cameras in smartphones continue to improve. DSLRs will still have their niche, and I’ll still lust for a Nikon D800, but few people need 20MP+ images to satisfy their photography requirements. The biggest transformation for me is the fun factor. I haven’t had this much fun with my photography in years, and I’m taking more pictures than ever.
Winning versus Not Losing
This week, one of the big names in the DFW area, AMR, filed for bankruptcy. AMR is the parent company of American Airlines. The management team is trying to spin this as a business decision, but ultimately this is a major failure of leadership, and the wrong people are going to pay the price for it.
Adam Hartung has an excellent write-up over at Forbes outlining how this is a major failure on the part of the AMR management team. I can sum up the failure in even fewer words: AMR was not playing to win, they were playing not to lose.
Playing not to lose is, unfortunately, the typical death spiral today of our corporate giants. Instead of wow’ing customers and delivering outstanding products customer want to pay for, they hunker down and try to squeeze as much cost savings as they can out of their current, failed strategies. They think they can survive until better times if they just save a few more pennies. Unfortunately, this doesn’t happen. Cost cutting without innovation is a race to the bottom. You can’t out cost-cut your competitors, so you’re just racing to see who fails last. The game becomes about not losing, even though you really do lose.
Top companies play to win. I’m sure Apple controls costs, but their first priority is to delight their customers. You don’t see Apple trying to undercut Samsung and Dell to stay relavent. They build a product people want to buy, and as a consequence, can set the price point where they want, and not worry about the competitors.
Being in IT, it is incredibly easy to tell when a company isn’t playing to win. The first sign is usually having a bean counter in the IT management chain. Bean counters are usually 100% about not losing, instead of winning. Robert Crandall at AMR was a bean counter. He was proud he saved $700K for the company by not putting olives in the salad. Yet he was completely oblivious to how all those small cuts affected his company’s brand and destroyed customer loyalty, costing him 100x what he thought he saved.
The second sign you’re company is only playing not to lose is when you hear IT management start talking about “running IT like a business”. This means your senior managers failed to run the business like a business, and now they’re just looking to trim corners to stay alive. Unless you’re in the IT business, you can’t run IT like a business. IT is cost center. Can IT implement a chargeback model and increase billable hours to the business? Or increase rates? Maybe even increase production support costs and start charging per deployment to create extra revenue? Of course not! You would only be a paper profit center, robbing from Peter to pay Paul while having a zero-sum impact on the company’s bottom line.
So “running IT like a business,” when IT is a cost center, is a fancy way of saying “we’re going to cut costs in IT to try and hide our inability to run the business like a business.” It means they’re playing not to lose. But you can’t win by playing not to lose.
A National Shame
I was sick to my stomach this morning when I read the news reports from the GOP debate this weekend. The candidates were asked a very simple question: is waterboarding torture? All but John Huntsman and Ron Paul failed the test.
I spent 10 years in the United States Air Force, including 5+ years on flight status flying missions aboard various specialized reconnaissance aircraft as a Russian linguist. I enjoyed my time, but I also got to see things that no sane American would ever want to see for real.
After language and intel training, the next step to aircrew status was survival training in Spokane, Washington. I attended the basic wilderness and water survival courses, but also less pleasant courses including POW training and another classified survival course which no attendee will ever forget in their life.
There should be no aircrew member who has gone through the training at Spokane who should not say, unequivocally, that waterboarding is torture. Yet last night, nearly a stage full of men and women seeking this nation’s highest office failed this simple question.
This should absolutely outrage any American, and every veteran, as it does me. Throughout history, there has never been a doubt waterboarding was torture. We prosecuted Nazi’s during the Nuremberg Trials for waterboarding. We hung Japanese soldiers for waterboarding American POWs. We prosecuted our own soldiers for waterboarding during the Vietnam War.
Yet when given the chance to demonstrate moral clarity, all but two of the Republican candidates failed the test. Even more appalling is that these same candidates have somehow deluded themselves into believing waterboarding is acceptable even though they profess to be good Christians. You cannot be a Christian and believe waterboarding is acceptable.
If a candidate cannot pass such a simple test of morality, they unworthy of our nation’s highest office and are a stain on the honor of America’s veterans and our forefathers.
History of the World
One of my favorite movies is Mel Brook’s History of the World, Part I. There is a classic scene where Mel’s character, Comicus, is about to be thrown in with the lions and the clerk asks him his profession. Comicus says he’s a Stand-up Philosopher, to which the clerk responds “Oh, a bullshit artist”. That phrase pretty much summarizes the state of America today. We have become a nation of Bullshit Artists.
I read two very interesting articles recently which synergized nicely with one of the books of I’ve been reading. The book is Seth Godin’s Linchpin, which preaches creating a career that is a race to the top rather than a race to the bottom. The two articles are Forbe’s Why Amazon Can’t Make a Kindle in the USA and Mark Cuban’s blog post What Business is Wall Street In?
The relationship between these three became apparent when HP announced they were ditching PC’s and becoming a “services company”. That’s a nice way of saying “we failed in our race to the bottom and are going to become bullshit artists”. With the exception of a few awesome cases, most publicly traded-companies have slavishly pursued quarterly earnings at the expense of long term viability. A few rich bastards have essentially screwed over several future generations to line their own pockets today.
The key is to make things, which is what we are rapidly losing the ability to do. I was shocked to learn from the Forbes article that we can’t make numerous electronic devices or even rechargeable batteries without China. Given the next world war will be the USA + World vs China (or China + World vs USA), it is ludicrous from a national security standpoint to have eliminated such basic competence from our repertoire.
Germany is the anchor of Europe, and it is because they kept the ability to create things. There are still excellent manufacturers in this county making things, but they tend to be niche and expensive products. Some of my favorites include Goruck, Wilson Combat, Harley-Davidson, Lum-Tec, Bark River Knives, Randolph Engineering and Timbuk2. The Goruck blog is a pretty entertaining read on the pursuit of made-in-America excellence. But none of these together can come close to counterbalancing America’s lost ability to produce stuff. Your typical American CEO would happily whore out their own wives and daughters to improve quarterly earnings, and care even less about the long-term viability of our country.
We need to get back to making things. And the way to make it happen is to vote with your wallet. Look at that label the next time you make a non-trivial purchase. Why aren’t you buying that watch, or sun glasses, or anything, that wasn’t made in the USA? We didn’t win two world wars being a service economy, and your spending will decide whether we become a nation that creates things, or a nation of Bullshit Artists.
We Are Rich
One of my objectives this year has been to read up more leadership and career oriented books. I’ve owned way too many technical books that didn’t end up doing much for me other than take up shelf space, so I shifted styles to reading up on improving myself.
I read The 4-Hour Work Week last year, and in spite of the slacker title, it was pretty good on ideas to improve your work/life balance. It also kicked off my interest in reading this genre of book.
I started the year with Tribal Leadership. One of my ExtJS Twitter friends spoke pretty highly of it, so I gave it a read. I followed it up with Tony Hsieh’s book, Delivering Happiness, about the Zappos culture. I found the sequencing of my reading ironic in that Tribal Leadership talks about the stages of an organization and Delivering Happiness covers what an organization working at the top of its game looks like.
The third book was one I just stumbled upon. I’ve started going to the Social Media Club of Dallas meetings to expand my horizons. I’ve always been interested in social media, and this club allows me to meet the people who make a living at it. Last month’s presentation was by Tim Sanders, who wrote a book called Today We Are Rich.
I really didn’t know what to expect from the presentation, but Tim turned out to be an incredibly talented speaker. The book is mostly about his grandmother, who raised him, intertwined with some rules on living better. His presentation was a mix of excerpts from the book with additional commentary. I liked the presentation enough that I bought the book for my Kindle that night.
The book was fast read, but a powerful read. Tim lays out seven essential principles for a better life:
- Feed Your Mind Good Stuff: learn how to identify and filter out the negativity that surrounds us
- Move The Conversation Forward: learn to break free from the negative thought cycle and communicate positivity and confidence
- Exercise Your Gratitude Muscle: learn to practice thankfulness to build a positive outlook
- Give To Be Rich: learn how generosity of self can combat feelings of inadequacy
- Prepare Your Self: learn how to fully commit yourself to your goals and be ready for anything
- Balance Your Confidence: learn to temper your self-confidence by trusting in others and believing in something greater than yourself
- Promise Made, Promise Kept: learn the value of integrity by being accountable for your promises
Each chapter digs in to these in greater depth. Whereas Tribal Leadership and Delivering Happiness started to get a bit too repetitive halfway through, this book stayed fresh to the end. The book’s only fault is that Tim would occasionally drift in too spiritual a direction for my taste.
I’ve started trying to apply a few of these and I can honestly say I’ve felt an improvement in my attitude and perspective. I would have never intentionally read this book if I hadn’t seen Tim speak, yet it has turned out to be one of the best books I’ve read this year. I can wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone.
Tim’s first principle is to feed you mind good stuff. I’ve embraced this and am using it as encouragement to get through a lot more books. My current reading list is:
- Linchpin (Seth Godin)
- Anything You Want (Derek Sivers)
- Enchantment (Guy Kawasaki)
- The Thank You Economy (Gary Vaynerchuk)
All are loaded up on my trusty Kindle and I want to finish at least one a month.
So checkout Today We Are Rich, and if you have any other suggestions on books I might like, please leave a comment.