Jess (& co.) have now knocked out the indoor [Dobbin](http://www.dobbinclothing.com) shoot, and just in time; if the production schedule holds, their Spring ’13 line should launch next week. Just-in-time fashion: excellent for incorporating trend and customer feedback; terrible for a startup company’s mental health.
[Ed. note: yes, friends and family who wrote in to correct, I know that the phrase is ‘compliments to the chef’ with an ‘i’. This was an attempt at cleverness – entrepreneurship being a complement to cheffing – that apparently wasn’t so clever after all. Tough crowd.]
Recently, I’ve started to notice how many entrepreneurs are interested in both cooking and photography. Which makes a lot of sense.
Entrepreneurship is basically the art of slogging daily through nebulous victories and vague defeats, for years and years at a time. Successful startups are those where the victories at least slightly outpace the defeats, consistently enough for the edge to compound gradually. Even in today’s world of lean startups, of building minimal viable products and iterating fast and always shipping, the process of slogging and compounding moves excruciatingly slowly. It takes a long time to see anything happen, and an even longer time to see anything incontrovertibly significant – anything big enough to impress your mom or your non-entrepreneur friends.
Like entrepreneurship, cooking and photography are about making something from scratch, and about sharing it with others. Unlike entrepreneurship, they also let you do so exceedingly quickly. Over the course of an afternoon, you can create something that never existed before, yet that’s still good enough to be appreciated by family, friends or the broader world. And it’s not just the immediate validation – that appreciation (or lack thereof) also provides fast and clear feedback to quickly guide iterative improvement.
After a long day of slow slog, it’s hard to explain how very gratifying that can be.
We picked up our wedding photos yesterday, and while we’ve just started sorting through them, we’re already exceedingly impressed with Annabel’s work:
On Yoav’s roof deck.
[This and all future moblogs brought to you courtesy of the Treo 600. [Maya, your life will be better if you let Mike buy one.]]
Underwater:
Above Water:
The full collection of my shots from the 9/11 fundraiser is now up. Take a look.
After much delay, finally located a relatively inexpensive scanner with an attachment capable of handling medium format negatives (an Epson 1650). I’ll be adding images to the gallery over the next month, although at some point I’ll need to put together a much better layout to organize them. Actually, at that point I’ll probably need to redesign the entire site.
Still, my log files tell me people are coming to the site even in its current iteration, and at the moment I barely have to post (thank goodness I gave up sleeping and going to the bathroom!), much less to rack my brain for feebly ‘creative’ design ideas. So you’re stuck with the site as it stands. Shut up and enjoy the pictures.
A friend is curating an upcoming NYU exhibit of young New York photographers reflecting on the city in the wake of September 11th, and asked that I put together two or three prints for the show. Flattered, I accepted before realizing I had no idea what I might photograph. After spending about a week racking my brain, I finally reached a mental image of what I wanted: crowd scenes, the city’s hustle and bustle, but viewed through a dreamlike haze in darkly exposed black and white. I blew through several rolls and hours and hours of darkroom time experimenting with different techniques that might yield what I wanted, but none of the prints looked right to me. On a lark, I decided to buy a very cheap filter, cover it with a thin layer of Vaseline, and shoot a few rolls through it. It came out perfectly.
I’m still trying to decide which shots to use for the show, but as soon as I do, I’ll scan and post them. As several visitors have pointed out, the newest picture in my gallery is about six years old, and at that point I was mainly shooting color wildlife and nature photography (to sell through a stock photo agency) rather than the black and white portraiture and street photography I mainly do now. I’ve been meaning to add more recent images to the site for a while, but good medium format scans are expensive and difficult to come by. Time to bite the bullet and get some scans done.