It is summer 2009 and while some of us are packing the car for vacations to the sea shore or the mountains, many of us are choosing to “staycation”, or rather staying close to home or taking day trips to area attractions. Today’s economy is forcing us to re-evaluate, not just the family summer vacation but our business priorities as well. Seth Godin the master marketer and author of the book Tribes, recalls that often…

Here are a few books that I’ve read and re-read.  None of them specifically address the photography industry, per se. But it shouldn’t be too hard to connect the dots.  They serve as an excellent starting point for understanding the migration happening in social media, recession marketing and branding. Small is the New Big by Seth Godin Tribes by Seth Godin Reality Check by Guy Kawasaki Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day by Dave…

If you’ve been following Gail Mooney’s multimedia and video posts and are beginning to experiment with video, you’ve found that video and multimedia require different approaches than still photography. The pacing of cuts, pans or zooms through the frame, or edits in a timeline are foreign concepts to photographers. In The Lean Forward Moment, Norman Hollyn illuminates the thought processes that will drive your editorial decisions and provides a fascinating insight into the minds of…

I love reading biographies and these three very different stories are some of my favorites. Limelight is a memoir by Helen Gee and traces her history opening this country’s first photography gallery. If you love photography and photographers, you will enjoy this immensely. It is a charming tale of Greenwich Village and the coming of age of photography as an art form. Walker Evans a biography by James R. Mellow. Much has been written about…

Learn to trust yourself, trust your talent, trust what your heart tells you to make and do, have faith in the future and things that you cannot see or yet imagine. Learn to believe again in the possibilities of the unknown.

I first learned about the TED conferences several years ago from John Giammatteo, a Connecticut-based photographer who served with me on the ASMP National Board.  These annual conferences “bring together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers…to give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes.” Ever since, I’ve tried to watch as many of the TED conference programs as I can and every year I’ve been awestruck by the mix of people, topics and…