How often have you been pulled away from an important task to read an unimportant email that just dropped in your Inbox?  Messages that don’t contain a hot new project from a client or a valuable piece of information?

Studies show that switching between tasks requires an extra fifteen minutes  (above and beyond the time you take to read the e-mails) to restore full concentration. So, checking these messages every ten minutes means you could spend your entire day not giving the important tasks the attention they deserve.

I’ve set up a series of rules to route incoming emails. Anything with the words Facebook, Twitter or unsubscribe is automatically routed to a separate folder and marked “unread.” Once a day I read, and respond to, these messages. This keeps my inbox reserved for messages from real people like you.

As I’ve traveled the country delivering my Adaptation: Running a Successful Photo Business in Today’s Era of Smartphones, Tablets and Social Media, I’ve spoken with photographers building remarkable businesses despite being in the midst of a global recession. Closer to home I’ve started attending the Salt Lake City Entrepreneurs Meet-up group, a networking group for entrepreneurs and business owners. Here too, I’ve met people enthusiastically and successfully transforming their dreams and ideas into products, businesses and services.
The common elements among these successful businesspeople is their willingness to dive into the unknown, getting their hands dirty, making mistakes and learning. Because it’s only through experience, trial and error and a willingness to endure (and learn from) small failures that one can move forward . . . especially within this haze of economic uncertainty and breakneck pace of technological change..

Sitting on the sidelines and waiting only makes one fall farther behind while the rest of the world keeps progressing.

Jay Kinghorn and his company, Kinghorn Visual, Inc., is currently evaluating four new services for his clients focused on using photos and videos to bolster content marketing efforts.

 


Like many businesses, our company is in the midst of adapting to a changing world by finding new ways we can support our clients and new avenues for income. One of the challenges we face is pinpointing which of the many ideas we’ve explored are the best opportunities with which to move forward.

Fortunately, The Lean Startup by Eric Ries, was released this fall. The Lean Startup is a methodology for minimizing the risk involved in starting any new venture. At the core of the Lean Startup Methodology is the need to treat your business like an experiment that should be tested and refined repeatedly through customer feedback. The idea of this methodology is that the process of testing and refining eliminates the guesswork and quickly refines your product or service, your positioning and your marketing efforts leading to quicker success while minimizing the risks associated with a new venture.

You can listen to a 30-minute interview with the author on the IT Conversations podcast Website.

Jay’s heavily highlighted, dog-eared copy has rapidly become his reference for developing new services with his company, Kinghorn Visual, Inc..

The best blogs inspire, educate and inform. They make me think deeply about a subject or provide insights I hadn’t yet considered. The best blogs are a gift to their readers.

The best blogs aren’t overly promotional, self-congratulatory or read like a press release.

The world needs more “best” blogs and far fewer of the other stuff. Before you start writing your blog post, Tweet or Facebook update, consider your audience and ask yourself whether you would find this to be valuable information. You’ll be doing your readers, and yourself, a big favor.

Jay Kinghorn reads dozens of blogs to help form a clearer picture of the future of professional photography for his seminar Adaptation: Running a Successful Photo Business in Today’s Era of Smartphones, Tablets and Social Media. He also writes for his personal blog: jaykinghorn.com and his company’s blog: kinghornvisual.com/blog.

This year marks the tipping point of a major technical revolution. According to the Economist  there will be more tablets and smartphones sold worldwide than desktop and laptop computers.

How are you positioning your business to profit from this change in the way we access our news and entertainment and stay connected with friends and family?

These days Jay Kinghorn spends a lot of time juggling his iPad in one hand and his sleeping infant in the other.

Email is a valuable tool I rely on every day to conduct my business, coordinate with clients and correspond with friends and family. As a result, I’ve become very careful about what I permit to enter my inbox and what can pull my attention away from other, more pressing (and more interesting) things.

To help keep my inbox clean, I unsubscribe to every e-newsletter I haven’t personally subscribed to. This simple act helps keep me on task and my mind focused on moving my business forward.

Jay Kinghorn will be exercising his time-management skills to complete a series of marketing projects before the end of the year.

Remember to store at least one copy of all your files off-site to protect in case of fire, theft, flood or other disaster.

Jay Kinghorn will be presenting The Agile Photographer in a city near you. Check out the seminar schedule for dates and locations.

I’m constantly on the lookout for emerging trends I feel will significantly impact photography, video and visual marketing, computational photography and 3D projection mapping (a.k.a. spacial augmented reality). Here are some trends I see going places.

Computational Photography
Distilled to its essence, computational photography aims at adding intelligence to the process of taking a picture or capturing video. It helps to think of it this way. Our cameras today are “dumb” devices. They record the light reaching the sensor without any understanding of the content being recorded or the spacial relationships between objects in the scene.

By comparison, computational photography is a “smarter” process. By capturing multiple images and making comparisons between the contents of those images, your camera is better able to infer depth and spacial relationships between objects in the scene, extend the dynamic range of the capture, or allow for sophisticated post-processing like noise reduction, adjusting focus or depth of field on your computer instead of in the camera.

Paired with a smartphone-like Internet connection, possibilities are magnified to integrate location, position and image recognition to your photography.

Right now, much of this research is being conducted in the labs of universities and manufacturing facilities (e.g. Stanford, MIT Media Lab, Adobe, NVIDIA, etc.). We’ll most likely begin seeing the results of this testing in smartphones phones first, then dSLRs. I eagerly await the results.

Computational Photography: Resources and samples

•  Camera 2.0, the FCam from Stanford: http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/camera-2.0/

• - American Scientist magazine: http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/computational-photography/1

• - FxGuide Podcast: Adobe CS 5.5 & Tool Tech (Technology Behind After Effects Warp Stabilize Feature): http://www.fxguide.com/fxguidetv/fxguidetv-108-adobe-cs5-5-image-tech/

• - Computational Photography on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_photography

3D Projection Mapping
3D Projection mapping, more accurately called spacial augmented reality, projects images onto the physical environment. What makes 3D projection mapping different than, say, projecting an image onto a screen, is that the three-dimensional geometry of the surface receiving the projection (e.g. a building or studio set) is used to pre-distort the projected image. This means the image takes on the shape and physical characteristics of the surface upon which it is projected.

It’s much easier to show you projection mapping than describe it, so here are three examples of 3D projection mapping in action. Right now, there are a handful of companies producing high-end projection mapping events for large companies, and a number of video DJ’s who pair geometric designs, bold patterns and brash colors to music, but there aren’t many uses in-between. My hunch is this middle ground is an area ripe for exploration by intrepid photographers.

From an artistic perspective, the concept of being able to create environments from digital photos, videos and graphics is quite tantalizing.

3d Projection Mapping Samples

• - Music Band, Animated: http://createdigitalmotion.com/2011/09/band-of-instruments-animated-wondrous-projection-mapping/

• - Adidas France Event: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tp2Z_RBcLPs

• - Architectural Projection Mapping: The Future of Motion Graphics? http://www.fuelyourcreativity.com/architectural-projection-mapping-the-future-of-motion-graphics/

• - Living Room by Mr. Beam: http://vimeo.com/18460233

Jay Kinghorn will be presenting The Agile Photographer in a city near you. Check out the seminar schedule for dates and locations.

Do you make room in your to-do lists for skills training, experimentation or creative exploration? If your to-do’s focus only on getting through your immediate business and personal tasks, but fail to move you forward, you’ll have a hard time pushing yourself into new creative endeavors, opening new business opportunities or quite simply, getting unstuck.

Make sure you have a place in your to-do list for reading, contemplative walks, experiments and unstructured thinking.  Getting through today’s tasks keeps your clients satisfied, but working on tomorrow helps ensure you’ll be able to adapt to tomorrow.

Jay Kinghorn often has his best ideas while suffering up a steep hill on a trail run, speeding through an aspen grove on a mountain bike or watching the clouds move through a sunny sky.

Inspired by two short What I Read interviews with Clay Shirky and Chris Anderson, I’ve been focusing my attention on those writers and publications that provide deeper, thought-provoking content, rather than the daily media buzz. Here are a few of the blogs and podcasts I follow to gain insight into the trends shaping our future.

- Anil Dash: http://dashes.com/anil/
I first heard about Anil’s blog from my good friend and colleague Judy Herrmann and was hooked once I read his Redefiners presentation. His posts are crisp, insightful and usually flecked with humor.

- Robert Cringely: http://www.cringely.com/
A bit curmudgeonly, but in a good way. The I Cringely blog usually takes a contrarian viewpoint to the industry consensus and he’s often right. He accurately described what the new version of Final Cut Pro (now Final Cut X) would look like more than a year before the software was released.

- IT Conversations Podcast: http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/
My connection to a world far geekier than I’ll ever be able to inhabit. The IT Conversations aggregates presentations from O’Reilly technology conferences (Web  2.0, Where 2.0 and Gov 2.0) along with interviews from top authors and thought leaders. A great source for keeping on top of technology trends.

- O’Reilly Radar: http://radar.oreilly.com/
Tim O’Reilly, the sage of Silicon Valley,  has built a publishing enterprise based on having the best insights and the best information. The O’Reilly radar is another great source for figuring out how technological changes will impact the publishing and media industries.

- Clay Shirky: http://www.shirky.com/weblog/
He doesn’t post as often as most of the others on this list, but when he does, his insights on how social media, user generated content and internet connectivity are affecting media are pure gold.

- TED talks: www.ted.com
If you haven’t already experienced the TED talks, stop reading and dedicate a half-day to unearthing the treasures on this site.

- FxGuide TV Podcast: http://www.fxguide.com/podcasts/
The tools and techniques used by Hollywood Visual FX artists are the leading indicator of what we photographers and multimedia creators will be doing/using several years from now. Watching the software demos in these podcasts is a bit like peering into the future. Insightful and entertaining.

Jay Kinghorn strives to find a balance between being informed and falling prey to the time-suck that the Internet can be.