Tag Archives: photography

Too Little to Late?

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I have just wrapped up two intense weeks covering the youth movement at the UN Climate Change Conference, in Poznan, Poland, (see youthclimate.org). These young people are the cream of the crop, beautiful, intelligent, dedicated and emotionally invested in Climate Change. They all seem to ‘get it’, understanding that we are talking about the survival of humanity and an estimated 50% of the world’s species if business as usual continues. There should be no debate, but for some reason the governments of the world are stalling, waiting for someone else to lead.

We are faced with less then a year to reach a comprehensive and hard hitting agreement in Copenhagen. Even if we get one, this might not cut back our GHG emissions sufficiently to alter us from our course. Please check out the Guardian article, titled ‘Too Late? Why Scientists say we should expect the worst of global warming’

So, it was with great amount of disappointment and a greater sense to act that I left Poznan today. Two weeks of negotiations and the so called ‘leaders’ of the world failed to take any concrete steps. If I examine the inaction of the governments of the world and the increasingly grim science, it is hard not to be a pessimist about my future. I feel that we are well on the road to disaster. However, when I examine the people that I work with, one can’t help but be optimistic that we will win. We have a year to build the largest global movement of social change and force our governments to do adopt serious targets about Climate Change.

In Australia Hundreds of people across the country have held protests against the Rudd government’s target of reducing carbon emissions by five to 15 per cent by 2020.

My question, what is it going to take in Canada for the population to wake up? We need a government that will first off acknowledge Climate Change, will work with a base line year of 1990 and throw the intensity based emission targets out the window. Three things that all environment critics of the prospective Coalition government and the leader of the Green Party have personally promised me they will do……

This is the issue of our generation, and how we act on it this year will change the course of the world.

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Photoshelter – Pro Stock

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You might notice a new little widget to the right of this page. I have recently joined the Pro Stock collection of Photoshelter. Photoshelter is a service that promotes the policy of ‘fair trade photography’. Let me explain a little, the last few years has seen a boom in the sales of Royalty Free imagery and microstock agencies. It is no secret that this policy has benefited very few professional photographers and sites like iStock Photo which sell images for pittance turn around and give photographers a pittance of that pittance. The big boys in the stock industry, (Corbis and Getty) have welcomed the huge increase of amateur photographers that are willing to sell their images for nothing, and in the process have effectively cut the bottom out of the stock market and making it much harder to make any money on stock.

It is nothing new that our industry is changing and many of us, including myself, welcome that change. We must adapt and diversify but the microstock and Royalty Free has certainly brought the quality of our work down. A photographer that I respect greatly, Vincent Laforet, has more to say on the state of our industry here.

So we get things like Photoshelter and Digital Railroad. Both which offer photographers the option to set their prices and receive respectful amount of the final sale price (70% and 80%) respectively. It is my hope that more and more art buyers that are searching for stock imagery will recognize this effort of ‘fair trade photography’ and use more of these two services.

If you wish to see what I have in the collection, click on it below or on the right. I am in the process of adding plenty more so check back.

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Portfolio 2008

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A portfolio process is a long and painful process. Your ego will be trampled to the point where it walks out the door, leaving you crying in a dark room because IT doesn’t want to be abused any more.

The process takes many hours of culling and editing and seeking opinions you respect. Then you spend hours in front of a computer screen working on images. At which point you find the best printer you can find, (Maarten Wouters at M*G!C), the best paper you can find, (Ilford Gold Fibre), and you watch the cash take the same route your ego did two weeks before. Once it is printed you spend more hours fitting it into your book and then removing every speck of dust from the prints as if they were disease.

One of the questions you must solve is, how many images should I put in. Anywhere from 10 – 50 images can be found in a book, but I believe in the saying ‘Less is More’ and my wallet wholeheartedly agrees. Between 20 – 25 images is the maximum. Any more then that and the client needs to be a family member or your best friend because no one else has that amount of patience.

After 8 years of traveling and photographing 5 different continents, what made the cut? See Here.

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