Everyone’s a critic and I’m no exception.

Recently a close friend of mine posted some pictures she took at a local event in downtown Albuquerque onto her facebook and for the most part they were fairly decent photos. However as a photography enthusiast (Not a professional) there were a couple of nit picky critiques I had with many of them. For the most part the photos were all very low in contrast and some of them weren’t the best of compositions. To add to that I mentally went over what I would have done to make the photos better.  However I refrained from commenting with my criticism mostly because this was her personal facebook and I didn’t want to come off as a cynical asshole that I know that I can be in certain situations with all our friends witnessing.

However I got really twitchy when she post “I should really start my own photography business.” So many things raced through my head of why that wouldn’t work out, (at least right now) with the main thing being the startup capital. She’s going into her Junior year of college and I know for a fact that she doesn’t have the money to afford the higher end equipment to run a successful photography business. (I’m aware it’s not the equipment that makes a good photographer, but to run a photography business successfully you need to have the means to handle and situation when they are thrown at you.)

Now there are a lot of things I could have said in this situation. I could have made my earlier criticism public in order to crush her dreams, but that would make me a terrible friend. I could have pointed out the difficulty of starting a photography business with the over saturation of photographers out there now. Instead I commented with “Yeah maybe in 5 years.” Now as backhanded as this may sound I was only trying to be rational.

The 5 years  came from the idea of a 5 year plan where she could 1) learn the craft and get better at the finer details while at the same time build a portfolio of her best work. 2) Save up and invest in better equipment to be more versatile with what she can do with her photography and 3) Build a reputation with models and potential clients that will be vital in promoting her work.

Now her response to my comment about the 5 year plan resulted with her elaborating on and idea that it can be a student based thing where interested parties can donate and allow the students to make money on their photos. My problem with this is, who would donate into this? I honestly can’t for the life of me think of an individual or organization that would invest in a sort of business model that is so incredibly reliant on unproven talent alone. Not to mention this seems like something that photography classes are for. At the university that we both attended there are multiple classes that teach photography in certain fields. I myself am registered for a photojournalism class as in the fall. I’m hoping to take this class, learn more and find a way to use these skills and apply them to the work that I want to do.

I’m not saying that she shouldn’t go for it. She has the talent and I believe that she could develop into a top notch photographer. But that’s the thing, she needs to develop (I’m aware of how punny that statement is.) And I’m the same way. Whether it’s my writing, my photography or my video making I need to learn more about those fields and apply the skills I acquire over time before I get too starry eyed.

Maybe I’m being too much of a pessimist here and I should let her continue to dream big, but I’d like to think I’m being a realist here in saying “it’s great that you want to do this but work for it first then grab it when you’re ready. “

Adblock forcing sites to try the subscription model?

So today we live in a world of online media where the businesses running online companies have few options when it comes to monetizing their online content. Two of these options include ad based revenue where they can make money off of advertisements or a subscription model where someone pays a monthly fee to have access to the content. Needless to say neither option seems to be that popular.
Both are so unpopular that people will willing go to lengths to avoid dealing with ads or paying monthly fees.

In the case of avoiding ads we have the app that can be added to select web browsers known as adblock.Now what adblock does is fairly straightforward. It blocks ads. Many enjoy this option simply because you can now listen to pandora or watch videos on Hulu without dealing with pesky ads ruining your experience.

However this little short cut raises a slight problem, How do they make ad revenue if the users aren’t seeing the ads? Well the truth of the matter is a lot of ad money comes from the websites selling their user information and analytics to ad companies and not so much selling of ad space. However the money being lost from ad revenue has not gone unnoticed. It’s a big reason why services like Pandora and Hulu+ have been moving to the subscription model.

It’s harder for services that have gone through ad revenue to adapt to a subscription model because their user base is not used to having to pay for their services and they will often lose viewership because most people won’t be willing to pay. But remember as previously mentioned there is more money coming in from the selling of user information than there is the selling of adspace.

Where Adblock really becomes a problem is on services like YouTube where content is being not only being created by everyday people but it’s also letting the content creators benefit off of ad revenue. The amount of money youtubers get from ads varies depending on the views they get and whether or not they are using copyrighted material, but it’s still important to leave that in mind that it’s not just google benefiting from the ads on youtube.

Like many other services before it YouTube is trying out the paid subscription market by releasing channels you pay a monthly fee to watch. Personally I don’t see this model succeeding on youtube simply because YouTube is a place where users are not going to willing pay to view content.

I’m not going to tell you not to download adblock because I know that on many sites ads have a tendency of ruining the experience but I would at least say air on the side of caution when using adblock simply because if content creators can’t make money off of ads they will be forced to find other ways of monetizing. One thing I would recommend if you do use adblock is to disable it on the websites that you wish to support. For example I disable adblock on YouTube simply because I want the YouTubers I watch to benefit from me watching them. But just realize that by using adblock you might be bringing about some long term consequences.

Well here goes nothing

I’m trying out new kinds of blog spaces and I’m figured WordPress would be an interesting place to try out. There are so many free services out in the magical land of the internet but many of them become very specific to the “audience” that is already there. Tumblr for example is now so over saturated with random Gifs and fan fiction that it’s hard to consider it a legitimate blog space.

A lot of people like to have everything all in one place I’m not so keen on that mentality. I have my POS phone (Or dumb phone) for calls or text, my nexus tablet is used procrastination purposes and my laptop is for official work like writing, editing accessing emails, and I really feel the same way about my websites. Youtube is where my videos go, Facebook is where I keep in contact with real life people I don’t particularly like, Twitter is where I stalk famous people and the random things they have to say, Tumblr is where my nostalgia lives and now I’m just looking for a place to do my writing.

Something that should be kept in mind is that I have a problem with spelling and grammar. It’s not so much that I’m an idiot and have no appreciation for the English language but I just have such a terrible time proof reading my work until after I’ve already hit publish. Only then do I just notice my stupid little mistakes.(This is what has kept me a B student in college as opposed to an over achieving A student) So if you’re a grammar nazi I’m just going to go ahead and apologize in advance.

The things you can expect me to write about are rants and reviews on current events whether they’re big stories in the media, new movie or music releases or just random things I happen to care about. I may even post some of my photography and videos that I do from time to time. (please note I consider myself an amature photographer using and crop sensor DSLR and a basic kit lens don’t expect some award winning photos out of me). I’m not out to offend anyone or cause any big controversies but I’m not going to cater my post to a single group of people. My opinions are my own and I don’t expect them to match up with everyone else’s and if you do disagree with me that is fine and I welcome conversation but I will not cater to people who use hateful language with saying things like “Go kill yourself” or “You’re a Fag”. I’m just going to ignore it and not respond it. I value inteligent conversation, not the responses of adolescents who are behind in development of empathy.