It was fun, good to sit in on some seminars on the subject of design. It's what I do for a living, and I'm a perpetual student of it. Had an advanced photography seminar, too, taught by Ed Biamonte. He's an excellent and exceptionally well-rounded photographer (working for a regional publication, 417, he gets to wear a lot of hats, shoot fashion, food, editorial, advertising, etc., and he's good at all of it). He makes the job look so fun I couldn't help thinking I want your job.
As you know, if you've been to Lobster Land a time or two, I'm a chronic, compulsive shutterbug, though I have a strictly amateur rig. My 'rig' is actually just a single Canon PowerShot A570IS. I like it for having a lot of manual controls, basically the same controls as the Rebel and other Canon SLRs, but it fits in my pocket and while I maybe couldn't quite afford it in the Dave Ramsey sense when I got it, it was low on the Richter Scale of Stupidity.
And since I've taken 47,015 (no joke, no exaggeration) with this camera and it's predecessor, an earlier PowerShot, I guess I'm getting some use out of it.
But where I have some confidence riddled with insecurity as a designer, making the design classes seem quite comfortable, I have insecurity riddled with insecurity as a photographer. I've learned a lot, enough to know the limits of my knowledge. Which is to say I'm a true dilettante.
It's funny, but photographers I know seem to be hardcore about Nikon or Canon. Tastes great, less filling, that kind of thing. I've heard great photographers, true pros who will tell you only an idiot would waste his money on Nikon, and I've heard others swear that Canon has a defacto monopoly on full frame dSLRs and high-end glass.
I can relate. I love Gibson guitars, can't stand Fenders. Their necks feel all wrong. But put either one in the hands of, say, John Scofield, and I guarantee you it will still sound like Sco. And I think Sco's preference, actually, is Ibanez.
Speaking of Sco, the jazz trio at the reception was playing Softly As In a Morning Sunrise and that guitarist was definitely poaching Sco from the live album with Richie Beirach in 1977.
A fellow dilettante (with deeper pockets than mine) was taking the class, and he came out ready to ditch his Canon 1D Mark III and collection of L-series lenses because Biamonte is a Nikon head. I'm like, Dude, Biamonte knows what the hell he's doing behind a camera. He could take great shots with my camera for crying out loud.
In fact, as I took shots of sculpture in the Holiday Inn, and then of the jazz trio playing the evening reception prior to the awards dinner, I felt incredibly self conscious. I clicked far fewer pics with my little PowerShot because I was aware of Ed's presence and knew how ridiculous it is that I still try to get 'the shot' when I know for a provable fact that there is inadequate light, I'm too far away and the shit is too fast for my little camera to get it.
Then I caught Biamonte taking pics of his fellow 417 staffers (when they had won some awards) with his phone. My camera may be a toy next to a DX1 or a 1D Mark III, but I'll put it up against any phone you got.
Speaking of the awards banquet... Central Missouri is actually a bit of a hotbed of publishing in part because the J-School at Columbia is a big deal. It's the prototype, actually, that all other J-Schools aspire to. But when it comes to the competition entries, it's a relatively small field. There were categories with only one 'finalist,' and I think that indicates a category where nobody else bothered to enter.
Farm Journal and it's subsidiaries cleaned up, for instance, and I do not mean this as an insult, because I saw their publications and they are doing good work in their niche, but I thought of Les Nessman. Winner of five Buckeye Newshawk Awards and the coveted Silver Sow.
The closing keynote speech, after the lunch on Friday, was Tom Junod, an extraordinary writer for Esquire. He had, really, a rather dark message for all the J-Schoolers who showed up just for him after lunch, but he's so funny he makes even 'the end is near' entertaining.
Junod writes long form magazine features, personality profiles and whatnot. And he talked about how he got to screen part of the upcoming Terminator IV movie, and how at one point the director asked him, point blank, 'You're not going to fuck me, are you?'
What the director meant was leaking dialogue from the movie a la the Christian Bale's diatribe that was heard around the world. A diatribe, actually, from the set of that very movie.
And for perspective, Junod pointed out that while he'd never do such a thing, he could make a much bigger splash leaking those clips from his digital recorders to the internet than he could with anything he could write in Esquire. Which does tend to spell out the 'death of print' if anything does.
Oh, and on a completely different subject, I was struck by the TV in my hotel room. The Holiday Inn where this shindig was hosted had, in its rooms, big-ass plasma TVs. I don't know how many inches, but you could about lay them down and play football on them instead of watching football on them. I'm not a big TV guy, so I might not have turned it on if it weren't such a monster. I'd brought a couple of guitars that needed restringing and practicing on, and a couple of books, so no need for an idiot box. But when I turned it one, I was not overwhelmed by the picture quality.
What I was overwhelmed by was, Boy Katie Couric sure looks fat when you stretch regular TV out to wide screen.
I looked in vain for any way to crop the screen to the regular TV aspect ratio, even inquired at the front desk. I gather that it is possible with such TVs but that the remotes they trust you with in a Holiday Inn don't have the juice to make it happen. Thing is, I picture a deal with LG or whoever is selling LG and Holiday Inn where the hotel gets a sweetheart price based on the notion that people will be hooked by their exposure to a real HD plasma TV and want one at home. Watching a TV that ads 80 lbs to everyone is not going to have that effect.
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