Two Cents and a Thousand Words

After going to sleep after the very looooong day I had yesterday, I realized that anyone who still reads this blog may not recognize the importance photojournalism holds in my view.

My only real training in photojournalism came via a class taught by Bill Kuykendall, a wonderful photojournalist who also happens to be a great guy in general. In the class Bill always told us never be shy, always speak up, ask people if they’d be willing to have a photograph taken. I could never get myself to do it, and I’ve been scared to designate myself as a photojournalist because of that.

Last night at the Festival made me realize a couple of things. I have great respect for anyone who can do photojournalism for a living. I’m not typically the fanboy type, but I really do respect the work of Gabor, Kevin, Bridget, and John Clarke Russ (another BDN photojournalist swerving through the crowds of people last night). They have a tough job… a fun job, but a tough one. Last night I put my camera down for a few minutes here and there to just watch how they worked. It’s really interesting to watch how another person serious about photography does what they do.

At the same time, though, there’s a new breed of photographers out there. I’ve grown up with the explosion of sites like Flickr and Facebook; the independent photographer is now alive and well. They’re taken seriously. They do great work. At the end of the day, I think it results in a richer account of history from a visual standpoint. There’s been a lot of discussion on whether bloggers are journalists, and I think the same discussion should be carried out with photojournalists. Journalism in any form takes training, ethics, and guidelines. While I think I’ll leave the true photojournalism to the pros I saw last night, I’ll do my part to document this wonderful event from my perspective.

The photo to the right is an environmental portrait of me that is, for once, not taken at arm’s length. I swiped it from Jeff Kirlin, another Person with Big Expensive Camera I met last night documenting the AFF for his site. It’s great to know there are more like me.

The American Folk Festival runs through Sunday. You should go if you’re within an hour (or more!) of Bangor.

I had a chance to photograph Kevin Bennett, Gabor Degre, and Bridget Brown, my three favorite, extremely talented Bangor Daily News photojournalists, joking around before the parade at the American Folk Festival tonight. Did I do it? No, of course not. I’m too frickin’ shy to ask. That has to stop… now.

I did, however, manage to get quite a few photos of the festivities tonight; more will come tomorrow and Sunday. View tonight’s photos in the new 2007 American Folk Festival set of my Flickr account.

The 2007 Summer of Music started on a high note (har har) with a performance by Carbon Leaf this evening in Portland, complete with great music, lots of people, and even a marriage proposal. Stay up-to-date with my Flickr photostream for photos – coming very soon.

I really do adore concert photography.

If you’ve been following Collage, you probably noticed that I’ve recently been posting about my summer music plans. This one’s gonna be big.

I use the summer of 2004 as a benchmark by which to judge a summer’s quality. During that year I was hanging out with a few key people who were (are) really, really into music. After Bumstock finished in April, we set out to hit a bunch of concerts (most notably, Dave Matthews Band, Guster/Ben Folds, and Linkin Park/Korn/The Used). I miss that summer. Fortunately, an announcement, a festival, and a bunch of good music this spring allowed me to create a better lineup over the next couple of months. I will be busy.

Here’s a short summary of where I’ll be heading to hear people play instruments. I’ve never heard any of them in concert before.

July 12: Carbon Leaf (Portland)
I believe I first found out about Carbon Leaf way back in the days of the good MP3.com. After downloading a few of their tracks from the site, I found that they also allowed concerts to be recorded and archived in the Live Music Archive. They’ll be playing in Monument Square as part of the Alive at Five series. Besides loving their folk-ish rock sound, they also encourage photography at concerts; you know I’ll be there.

July 22: The White Stripes (Portland)
In 2004 it was Dave Matthews (and Linkin Park) that held the distinction of being the most popular artist I saw. This year I might be rocking out to “The Hardest Button to Button”, “Icky Thump”, “My Doorbell”, “Seven Nation Army”, and more. To be honest I like smaller bands the vast majority of the time; they just seem less mainstream. The White Stripes are coming to Portland, though, and I want to go see what Jack and Meg are up to.

July 27: Rustic Overtones (Portland)
My history with Rustic can be summed up as “too late”. I first heard them through a trial with eMusic.com and proceeded to buy just about every album they had ever made. I also downloaded a bunch of their shows from the LMA. I never had a chance to see them in concert, though; I learned about them after they disbanded in May 2002. From the minute I heard the announcement that the Overtones were reuniting for two shows in Portland, I wanted tickets. Unfortunately, I found out too late; they were sold out. Fortunately, the eclectic rockers will be doing a free WCYY Patio Show on the 27th. Yup, I’ll be swinging back down to Portland for that one… and I don’t plan on being late.

August 2: Enter the Haggis (Rockland)
My friend Chad sent me a link to Enter the Haggis‘s Web site and told me to check out the tunes. I did, and now I’ll be going to their concert. They have a wonderful Celtic rock (or, should I say Celtic ROCK) sound that should be really interesting to watch in concert. They’re playing the Maine Lobster Festival for a set right before the…

August 2: Rustic Overtones (Rockland)
Hey, if I’m there already, why not?

August 4: Arlo Guthrie (Freeport)
I love all kinds of music. Good American folk music is one of my favorite genres. I grew up listening to “Alice’s Restaurant” and “City of New Orleans”. I even know how to play a few of Arlo Guthrie‘s songs on the keyboard. He’ll be at the L.L. Bean flagship store for a free outdoor concert on August 4th as part of Bean’s Summer Concert Series. I’m really excited that I get to see him.

August 11: Great Big Sea (Freeport)
Great Big Sea is also a part of the L.L. Bean Summer Concert Series. To be honest I can’t remember where I first heard them, but my friend Kelly really loves them and pretty much convinced me that I should go. It’s free, too.

August 24 – 26: American Folk Festival (Bangor)
In my mind, the American Folk Festival is hands-down Maine’s best event. This free three-day party on the Bangor Waterfront costs $1 million to produce each year and brings in tens of thousands of people from everywhere. I took some of my very favorite photos during the AFF in 2006, and while I’m not volunteering there I’ll be listening to every band and taking photos of them all. Last year’s highlights for me were No Speed Limit and Beòlach.

It’s going to be a full summer. If you have Facebook, check out my profile; you can hear song samples from a lot of these artists using the wonderful iLike application.

One other thing… you can now subscribe to the Work section of Collage with any newsreader:

Collage RSS feed

I’m using today as a bit of a cleanup day. I really want to move forward (Pine Tree Photography, a couple of small projects, etc.), but I have a lot of things holding me back. I thought I’d detail a few not-so-nice parts of my daily/weekly routine just in case you’re at all interested.

I get a lot of spam. I don’t like spam. In the last two weeks, I’ve received about 3,200 spam e-mails (that’s about 200 a day). A lot of this comes from posting my e-mail address openly around the Web, and it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make to give people an easy way to communicate with me if they wish. Many of these go to accounts that I haven’t used for years, particularly ones at mainesites.net. Today I deleted all of my e-mail accounts at mainesites.net. Hopefully that’ll cut down on the spam quite a bit. If you get a bounced e-mail when sending to me, please understand and resend it to justin -[at]- justinrussell.com.

Unfortunately, the same spam problem goes for my blog. I’m currently looking at just under 100,000 spam comments; most of these are moderated so they don’t appear on the actual blog, but I still have to find some way to go through them. I’m planning on upping the anti-spam stuff here sometime, but for now, please send me an e-mail if you post a comment on the blog. It’s one of the reasons I haven’t been as active on here as I’d like.

And to be honest, I’ve found other avenues. Today I incorporated my Twitter posts into Collage. That’s really where you can keep track of what I’m thinking, what I’m doing, and what I’m creating. I’d suggest the blog as a secondary check, especially since everything on the blog is posted in Collage, too. (As a side note, I’ve been playing around with Jaiku a bit. It’s a Collage-like thing that is the closest to my original vision for Ufeed that I’ve seen so far on the Web.)

I also got rid of an early justinrussell.com clone that was still hanging around on Tripod (?!?). Yup – it’s last update was over five years ago. That makes me feel old, for some reason.

If you’ll allow me to digress a bit… Gruber posted something about the iPhone as a device that is so ahead of its time that it belongs in 2010. I’ve been watching some old Screen Savers eps, looking through some of my old projects, and just generally thinking about the last decade or so of my life. Apple’s not the only company releasing products that are ahead of their time. We’re in that group, too. Maybe that’s what I like so much about this culture.

I just visited Wikipedia’s page on Portland Head Light to confirm that it is in fact America’s oldest operating lighthouse (it is). When I reached the page, I noticed that the photo for the article looked strangely familiar. Yes, someone swiped one of the photos I took in 2005 from Flickr and used it for the article about what is most likely America’s most photographed lighthouse. It’s cool, though, thanks to Creative Commons. Really cool, in fact.

Just over nine years ago, I launched a small photo gallery site as one of my first projects on the Web. It was on one of those free Web hosts – probably either Xoom or Tripod – and it was home to some of my favorite photos. Of course all of the photos on the site had been meticulously scanned into my family’s Gateway; I didn’t own a digital camera yet.

Since I first launched Pine Tree Photos, I’ve become much more interested in photography in general. I’ve also gone through two rewrites of the site since that first launch. It’s now time to launch a third.

Quite simply, the new pinetreephotography.com site is the best I’ve ever created for a personal project. I like how it’s presented, and the code underneath is much cleaner than anything I’ve ever done. I have to partially thank my development friends at Sephone; our work on a PHP framework there, including Matt James‘s DataObjects data organization suite, has made development monumentally easier.

It’s still a bit rough, but this latest version of PTP is the base of an upcoming progression of updates and extensions. It’s quite a move for me; it’s the first site that I’ve ever roadmapped. My plan for the site takes me into this fall. After considering the abundance of ideas that stream through my head every day, the six-month plan I have for PTP is a huge and remarkable investment for me. I hope it will work out as planned.

For now, browse the collection. I’ll be adding more photos soon, and you can download and send e-cards for the vast majority of photos on the site. I’ll be keeping you up to date as the site expands, too. I’m really excited about this.

Please tell me what you think. Head over to my contact page and tell me what you think!

Would you consider me obsessed if I, say, hypothetically, wrote a script that parses the FedEx tracking page for my iMac and sent a text message to my phone every 15 minutes to see if it had gone out for delivery so I could know when to drive to work to pick it up?

No? OK, good.

(For those keeping score, it’s in Bangor but probably won’t be delivered until Monday or Tuesday.)