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Showing posts from March, 2009

10,000 Hours

For a long time I have been interested in the idea of talent verses work. I believe that talent is over-rated and hard work is under-rated. Some research at Florida State University has born this out. FSU researches have determined that it takes about 10,000 hours to learn a difficult skill. In other words, to become a top golfer, surgeon, musician, or photographer, it takes about 10,000 hours of diligent work and practice. If you practice every night during the week and all day on Saturday’s, you would reach 10,000 hours in about 20 years. If you are in medical school, 10,000 hours is about 5 years. So this number seems about right. And practice is not just piddling around. It must be diligent and disciplined work with a purpose. A few people like Tiger Woods or Mozart were able to get in their 10,000 hours before they were 21 years-old so people called them prodigies. For others of us, it has taken many years to develop the skills that we need to be considered “talented.” The top mus

PMA Wrap-up

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Thursday, March 5 started with a breakfast featuring Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist. http://www.craigslist.org/ I was surprised that he still worked in customer service of his own company. He hired somebody else to be CEO. That shows where his heart is. He started Craigslist in 1995 just to help people. They figured out later how to pay the bills. Craig's personal blog is: http://www.cnewmark.com/ I then went to a class put on by Franziska Frey who is professor at the Rochester Institue of Technology about archiving photos and long-term storage of digital images. She said that the magic number is five years. Make new CD's every five years and replace your hard drive every five years. After that you are at a greatly increased risk of loosing information. There is a lot of information about this kind of thing that is not commonly known. I will be adding links to Library of Congress sites from http://www.mathisphoto.net/ later. I finished up the trade show in the after

PMA Part II

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Wednesday, March 4 I started off today with a couple of workshops about bookbinding and printing. The best one was by some folks from the Hardcover Binders Association, a trade group. http://www.hardcoverbinders.org/ After that, I finally made it to the main floor of the trade show. Canon has now declared itself the world leader in digital imaging, and I didn’t hear anybody disputing that. As such, they claimed the most prominent and biggest space on the floor. They have a huge array of products from cameras to printers and in all prices from inexpensive to out of sight. A number of the large manufactures such as Canon, Nikon, Sony, and Pentax were putting on demonstrations and shows featuring famous photographers and personalities. I thoroughly enjoyed myself and am looking f orward to more tomorrow. There were a few amazing products that would have been unbelievable just a few years ago. For example, Sony was showing a new camera that will produce true 220 degree panoramics in camera

PMA Report

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PMA 2009 Tuesday, March 3, 2009 The first session of the day featured Stephen Burns, http://www.chromeallusion.com/ He talked about graphics software other than Photoshop. Virtually everyone in the group were Photoshop users, so he talked about what some other things could do differently. He specifically talked about Nik Software. At 9:00 was the business meeting where five people were given special recognition for their contributions to the industry. The CEO of Nikon was elected to the PMA Hall of Fame. Geoffrey Moore then talked about disruptive innovation. I went from there to the trade show. The whole photo industry has changed dramatically since the last time I attended PMA about 15 years ago. No one was showing photofinishing equipment, no new film or film cameras were introduced, but there are all kinds of new things never dreamed of before the past few years. There are a large number of companies showing equipment for printing and binding photo books at all different prices an