Two Cents and a Thousand Words

(alternate title: “A brief history of my photographic interests”)

I’ve often heard a lot of talk about photographers seeing a shot that they’d like to take (usually said when the photographer doesn’t have a camera handy). It’s happened quite a few times to me.

Although I’ve always loved taking pictures, I really started having a serious interest in photography when I received my first digital camera in 1999. For the next few years, you’d find me out and about on weekends trying to find new places to photograph. I often ended up at Schoodic Point, Otter Point, or Portland Head Light. Once there, I’d take a couple hundred photos of the nature surrounding me and capturing my interest. Three- to four-hundred mile day trips weren’t ever out of the question.

Over the last couple of years, my focus has slowly changed. Maybe I ran out of new places to photograph. Maybe I got tired of driving. I like to believe, though, that it was an artistic decision. I was fortunate to take a photographic storytelling course with Bill Kuykendall in college. Bill, a very talented photojournalist and a frequent photographer at Penobscot Theatre, said something in regards to nature photography that I didn’t believe at the time but that I agree with wholeheartedly now: “after a while, you get tired of shooting rocks and trees.”

Starting around two or three years ago, something new started to appear in my photos: people. The most likely initial cause of this was probably photographing dance concerts at the University of Maine; from there, I found that capturing movement and emotion wins over rocks and trees any day of the week. It’s unusual to find me without a camera at a concert, a play, or a sporting event now, and I usually try to send the photos along to someone participating in the event so that they can use them for whatever they like if they choose.

Since I mentioned concert photography, I might as well touch upon the American Folk Festival. I take hundreds of pictures at the Festival each year, and it’s one of my top events every year to photograph. Last year, I wrote a bit about the missed shot that still haunts me: the entirety of the in-parade staff from the Bangor Daily News talking before the parade begun.

I’ve also found myself doing weddings for a few of my friends over the last couple of years. It’s amazing to look at the photos from weddings a couple of years ago compared to ones I took a couple of weeks ago; the entire subject matter is different. There are more stories in the photos, more expressions, more life, really. I always tell people I have a very photojournalistic approach to capturing events, but really I just enjoy emotion.

One of the aspects of photography I enjoy the most is that you learn to look at your experiences in a different way. You notice little things that would often be missed. At the same time, though, it can be a bit distracting; you can miss the actual performance or event while you’re looking at the “meta.” I’ve told Molly (one of the dancers at the University) that I’ll probably have to start going to two of the concert dates: one to photograph and one to actually watch the concert.

In April of last year I posted a quote from another BDN photojournalist, John Clarke Russ:

If you are a photographer and you take photographs for a living, you don’t do it for the money and you don’t do it for the glory. You do it because, somewhere along the line, in the course of any single day, you find yourself saying, “I need a camera to look at that.” And there’s a point in your life when you find that you’re stuck with it and you only look at life through that rectangle. Hopefully, you see life in a way that is different from how others see it.

Last night I went to the Penobscot Theatre’s performance of “Guys & Dolls.” The show was directed by Nathan Halvorson and was supported by the participants of PTC’s musical theatre camp. While my ears heard the Broadway numbers, my eyes saw the actors and singers in the wings encouraging their friends and Nathan encouraging the campers. It also turned out to be Nathan’s last night with the campers, and after the show there was an emotional farewell on stage as people exited the theatre. It made me wonder how many people in the theatre saw the stories surrounding the one being portrayed on stage. It also made me want my camera.

I have a feeling I’ll be seeing shots for the rest of my life.

Due to the fact that I’m just short of insane, I’ve decided to start another blog. This one’s pretty simple: the photo blog I’ve always wanted. If you enjoy my photography and would like to hear a little more about the stories behind the photos, check it out. It runs off of my Flickr account; if you subscribe to that feed, you won’t see any photos you haven’t already seen. You’ll just miss out on a little fun and a little storytelling.

http://photoblog.justinrussell.com

The blog is designed to work in cooperation with justinrussell.com/photography, my new(-ish) portfolio site. I hope to use the blog as an incentive for me to take more pictures; we’ll see how that works out.

And, of course, it’s now part of Collage.

I’d like to apologize to regular and occasional Two Cents readers for my hiatus over the last month and a half. I’ve been busy (big surprise), and my mind has been in so many places that I just haven’t grounded here in a while. For the people who read the blog instead of Collage (or for the people who read everything and are wondering what the heck all these releases are about), I’d like to give you an update on the so-called Justin Russell Network. It’s fairly lengthy, but it’s hopefully at least marginally informative.

Web development

Sephone

I head to a place called Sephone for around 40 hours each week. A majority of my time is doing custom work for area businesses that I unfortunately can rarely share, but my favorite part of the job is what I like to call our content products. These applications and services give people the ability to control their own sites without having to call us up to make changes.

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been really fortunate to have some time to devote to our best-known products, datAvenger and datAvenger lite, and we’ve released a new version of both this week. (I posted about the datAvenger release on our blog.) I’ve also been able to write a podcast management service called SephoneCast that I’m excited to see in use pretty soon.

thinglobe

A couple of weeks ago I released thinglobe.com, a geo-based service for user-generated media. Quite simply it maps where videos, photos, and thoughts were created on a map. I have a ton of stuff that I want to do with it, and as of now I’d call it my flagship project by far. I’m really, really excited to see where it leads, and it’s just a cool service that I like to use myself.

Microreviewer

A week before thinglobe came out I coded up microreviewer.com, a service for giving short (very short) reviews of local businesses via Twitter. Microreviewer was, in short, a way for me to try a few things out, and I’m quite happy just letting it sit for a while. I’d rather focus my attention on other projects (thinglobe).

Collage

And no, I haven’t forgotten about Collage and justinrussell.com. I’d love to switch Collage over to run off of a service like FriendFeed at some point, and the very preliminary stages of a justinrussell.com redesign are in the works. That’s pretty much it for now, though.

Photography

justinrussell.com/photography

I recently released version 2.0 of justinrussell.com/photography, my photography portfolio site (and the winner of the “Did You Know There Was a 1.0″ award). jr/photo has a couple of purposes. First, I have a link to send to people who ask if they can see some of my photos. Second, it boosts my confidence that I occasionally take good photos. Third, it’s a home base for my photography no matter where it ends up going in the future.

But really, if you want to see what I consider to be my best photos, head there. It’s also the home to the snazzy new justinrussell brand logo.

Pine Tree Photography

Remember Pine Tree Photography? PTP is my showcase site for nature and landscape photography. I have big plans (really big, actually) for PTP, but frankly they’re just not on the top of the list right now. At some point I want to build it up, but it’s just not there right now. Still, it’s a good place to explore some of my best photos in my most popular genre as of yet.

flickr.com/justinrussell

In order to make use of the $25/year I pay to Yahoo! for Flickr, I occasionally post photos there as well. To be honest I haven’t taken that many photos lately, but when I do the best ones will most likely end up on Flickr.

Writing

Another New World

Another New World is my passion about technology put into words; you just wouldn’t know it by the frequency of the posts. Out of all of my projects, I’d really like to devote more time to ANW, but I’m just now getting back into a writing mood. (Doing code for forty or more hours a week is sort of draining when it comes to text on a computer screen.) I really hope this picks back up.

Two Cents and a Thousand Words

I’m sort of unsure about the future of Two Cents; everything seems to be covered pretty well by other services (Twitter, individual blogs), so the posts here won’t be very frequent. If you want to stay in touch, I’d really recommend Collage instead.

The Small Steps Podcast

Small Steps is at a standstill. I love doing it, but the interest I was hoping for just wasn’t there. Also, there are a number of other podcasts doing the same kind of thing really well; I’d rather not reinvent the wheel. Search around; there are some great podcasts out there!

Thanks for sticking around. With the new stars of the top three (jr/photo, thinglobe, and Another New World), I’m really looking forward to the future. Be sure to let me know what you think about the current status, too!

With BarCampBoston3 coming up this weekend, I thought it would be a good time to do a little introductory post for anyone who doesn’t know me.

I’m Justin. I graduated from the University of Maine in 2005 with a major in new media and minors in computer science and psychology. I’m currently employed at Sephone Internet Solutions, a Web design and development company in downtown Bangor, Maine.

One of my weaknesses is that I’ve always been interested in too many things. In addition to Web development, I spend quite a bit of time doing nature and event photography around Maine (as seen on Flickr or Pine Tree Photography, my gallery site). There’s also a lot of evidence around the Web of small projects I’ve started and all-but-abandoned due to my struggle with Application-ADD.

I love having good conversations. I love people who are passionate about what they do and people who try to make the world better. I have a wide variety of focus topics, but a few always rise to the top:

• User-generated content / Metcalfe’s law
• Location- and time-based content
• Uses of today’s emerging technologies in tomorrow’s mainstream
• Organization of complex data in understandable ways
• Development and applications of creativity

Want to get a little better feel for who I am? Check out my Twitterstream or Collage, my aggregated collection of posts from around the Web. You can also always get in touch with me by e-mailing mail (at) justinrussell [dot] com. If you see me, feel free to say hi!

A couple of weekends ago I was home watching a financial report on TV with my parents. (No, that’s not typically what I do when I’m home, but we just happened to be sitting on the living room couch as Dad was watching the show.) In any case, we somehow stumbled onto a metaphor of a bathtub from his old banking days. The main idea was that you need to keep x flowing into a system at approximately the same rate as it flows out of the system; otherwise, the bathtub overflows. After thinking about it, I realized that a bathtub is a good metaphor for two other important parts of my life: project flow and information consumption.

Project flow as a bathtub

I work for a services company. We deal with clients every day, in a lot of different ways. With that said, I have a great appreciation for the people who manage to schedule and budget the work that comes in while managing expectations and making everything just work. It’s one of those things that you never notice if it’s working correctly, but it’s really obvious if it gets out of whack (overflow).

After some discussions among the development team, I realized that the projects that stress me out the most are the ones where no visible progress is being made. These are the toughest types: the bug reports and feature requests come in at a race that (sometimes greatly) exceeds the amount of work that is being done on the project. In other words, the hardest projects are those that after six or eight hours of work, you don’t feel as though you’ve accomplished anything; you may even feel as though you’ve lost ground.

In project flow, it’s important to make sure the bathtub does not overflow with a continuous stream of new work that can’t be accomplished in a reasonable amount of time.

One possible remedy is to break down a large project into a few (or many) feature milestones. The ability to complete a feature in itself is much easier than completing a whole project. Another is to enforce a rule that a project must have clear objectives or boundaries within a certain phase; any additional features will be moved to a later release.

Information consumption as a bathtub

I follow a lot of people, read a lot of information, and listen to (and watch) a lot of podcasts. It’s simply overwhelming at times. I’ve been attempting over the last few days to reach RSS Zero, a modified version of Merlin Mann’s wonderful Inbox Zero system. (Inbox Zero will hopefully follow RSS Zero.) I’ve made some progress, but I’m still a long walk from the end of the tunnel.

Here’s the simple truth: there’s only so much time in a day. If you’re downloading more than 24 hours worth of content in a day, you won’t be able to listen to it all. Your information bathtub will overflow.

In information consumption, it’s important to make sure the bathtub does not overflow with an incoming stream of content that takes up more time than you physically have to consume it.

The solution may be the dreaded (or heralded) “Mark All as Read” button. Don’t worry. It’s OK. You can also reassess your feeds, podcasts, e-mail subscriptions, and everything else that flows into your readers each day.

Good luck! Now it’s back to tending my own tub.

Gifford’s opens back up for the season on Friday; if you’re familiar with my obsession over ice cream, you wouldn’t be surprised that I’ve already started a countdown. Thinking about this new tradition made me realize the other annual observances on my calendar. Whether it’s a signal of a new season or a tie back to my childhood, my annual traditions all have special meaning to me.

Here’s a fairly complete list of the events that pop up each year on my calendar. The year links lead to media I’ve created. I’ve been doing “lifetime” traditions for as long as I can remember.

• Downtown Countdown (January 1, started in 2006: 2006 2007 2008)
  I (literally) start off the new year in downtown Bangor as a beach ball is thrown off the side of a building. Yes, that’s how we do holidays in Maine.
• Gifford’s opening (mid-March, started in 2007: 2007)
  One of the first sure signs of an oncoming spring is the opening of the Gifford’s Ice Cream stands around Maine. Nothing beats one or two hundred people waiting in line to get (free) ice cream in a nine-degree wind chill as it starts to snow.
• Winter/spring sunrise trip (winter/spring, started in 2004: 2004 2005 2007)
  Each year I take one weekend and head down to southern Maine. I spend Saturday night in a hotel and wake up early enough to catch the sunrise at either Portland Head Light or Old Orchard Beach. Sure it’s cold. Sure the lighthouse is covered with snow and the beach with ice. Does that stop me? Of course not. To be honest, it’s really refreshing to have a place all to yourself with crisp winter air as the sun rises over the Atlantic.
• Mount Battie hike (mid-April, lifetime: 2002 2004 2006)
  My mother has been making the trek up the side of Mount Battie in Camden since she was a child. The tradition was passed down to me early on, and we spend a weekend day each April hiking the side of Battie. I even have a custom-made walking stick for the occasion.
• Dance concerts (late April and mid-December, started in 2004: 2006 2007)
  It should not be a surprise to anyone that I’m a huge fan of dance performances, both for their creativity and the photo opportunities. It’s a great way to welcome in the holiday season or welcome in the summer.
• Independence Day fireworks (July 4, lifetime: 2006 2007)
  My parents and I would always scope out a spot on the hill on the corner of Exchange and Hancock Streets in downtown Bangor when Dad worked at United Bank. Our old spot may now be a construction site, but we still find a place to watch the fireworks over the Penobscot River each year.
• Whale watching (mid-August, lifetime: 2002 2006)
  Mom and I (along with an occasional special guest) head down to Bar Harbor each summer to head out on a Bar Harbor Whale Watch boat into Frenchman’s Bay and the Gulf of Maine. Over the years we’ve seen sunfish, dolphins, right whales, minkes, and humpbacks. Cruising out into the open sea at 35 MPH is worth the chill you cover up with warm layers of clothing. (Why do so many traditions have to do with being cold?)
• American Folk Festival (late August, started in 2003: 2006 2007)
  The AFF is Bangor’s best event, and I’ve attended in 2003, 2005, 2006, and 2007. There’s a good chance you’ll find me running from stage to stage at the yearly three-day music festival. Starting last year, you might also see me volunteering. (You may also spot me eating blooming onions, hot wings from Governor’s, lemonade, donuts, peanut butter cake from River Driver’s, and more.) I’ve discovered some great bands at the Festivals, and it’s been the home to some of my best-ever photos.
• Apple picking (mid-September, lifetime: 2003 2005 2006)
  Right around the start of school each year, my parents and I would head to Winterport to pick our own apples. Lately we’ve continued the tradition in Dixmont, filling up a bucket full of Macintoshes.
• Thanksgiving cornbread (late November, started in 2005)
  When I found my own apartment, I wanted to bring something to the table (literally) for our Thanksgiving trips to each of my grandparents’ houses. I settled on the Homesteader Cornbread at Allrecipes.com. It’s gotten rave reviews each year.
• 30holidays (November 26 through December 25, started in 2006: 2006 2007)
  For two years now, I’ve spent late November through Christmas taking one holiday or winter-related photo each day. I’ve yet to make a complete set, but it’s still a great way to get in the holiday spirit.
• Christmas tree (early December, lifetime: 2002 2005 2006 2007)
  Christmas is in the air as my parents and I head out to Piper Mountain Christmas Tree Farm in Newburgh to choose and cut our Christmas tree. Out of all of the yearly traditions, this may be the most important one; I’ve trudged through snow with strep to have a say in tree selection in the past. When the tree has been chosen, the real fun begins: hot apple cider and donuts in the Piper Mountain gift shop.
• Holiday baking (mid-December, lifetime)
  Although it’s been tougher to schedule since I left the nest, Mom and I always make time to do some holiday cooking each year. The menu doesn’t change that much from year to year: cinnamon rolls, mint-filled sandwich cookies, brownies with mint and hard chocolate toppings, mulled cider, and chocolate bread pudding.
• South Paris and the elk farm (December 24, started in 2005: 2006 2007)
  Who says the Web can’t lead to new friendships? I met Melody online in 2003, I think. After learning that her parents lived in Maine, we started a Christmas Eve tradition in the form of a visit to a local western Maine elk farm. I explained the rest of the story - including the Route 2 Christmas carol sing-along - in a blog post last year.

What are your yearly traditions?

I’m not surprised if you’re looking at the length of this post and thinking something like, “Oh, great.” to yourself. Here’s the general idea: I’m launching a new blog called Another New World today. If you’d like more of the backstory, please read on. Otherwise, feel free to just check out the new site.

I realize that I’ve been in another one of my blog posting slumps lately. It’s not intentional; I’ve just been trying to figure out which direction I want to pursue now. Over the last few months it’s become clear to me that my next project shouldn’t be a new service, community site, or anything like that; it has to be a place where I can express everything that’s taking up space in my brain.

The problem(s) with Web development

I was doing Web development before I was even connected to the Internet in 1996. I’ve been doing it as my primary occupation for just about five years. The problem with Web development is that it takes quite a bit of time to finish the process that starts with an idea and ends with a new site. There’s brainstorming, design, development, testing, and marketing. To be completely honest, I just don’t have the time.

Even if you discount the time factor, there’s something even more dangerous: Application-ADD. I’m as guilty of this condition as any developer. The forgotten part of the development cycle is the maintenance it takes to sustain and grow a site. By the time you’ve gotten to that point, you often have a new “next big thing” idea. In fact, I’ve had somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 “next big thing” ideas since I started doing Web development. I’ve completed about five of them, but I haven’t followed through. I’m just starting to understand the merits of realizing that they just won’t all be done. (It reduces my stress level quite a bit.)

But wait! I do Web development as a full-time job. When doing Web development in a client-based setting, your time is spent fulfilling the wishes of other people; often those wishes don’t align well with what you think would be best or most effective for them. Application-based development is a bit different. As one of three developers responsible for Hula, our e-commerce product, I had a fairly large amount of input into the features and overall decision-making process for the product.

And finally, there’s burnout. After forty (or more) hours of doing development a week, I often don’t feel up to the task of sitting down and wrangling PHP for 10, 20, or 40 more. I think Google’s 20-percent time rule is one of the biggest business innovations in decades, and it obviously has very rewarding benefits (see Gmail, Google News, Orkut, and others for example). Unfortunately, not all businesses have the ability to incorporate a similar program.

Passion

I read a lot about passion. It seems to be a underlying theme of the current tech boom (and our generation as a whole).

Web development isn’t my passion. I don’t wake up with a “Eureka!” moment in the middle of the night wondering if a certain CSS or PHP trick would solve a nagging problem. My passion is helping people understand what technology enables us to do, and it’s inspiring people to move forward into a new and better world. We have the ability to do so much. The difficult part is moving there.

A lot of people tell me that I’m a quiet person. That’s true, to a point: I enjoy listening to others and thinking a lot more than I enjoy talking. If we’re talking about something I’m passionate about, though, you’ll have a very difficult time getting me to shut up. When I’m passionate about something, I’m anything but quiet.

Something new for me

It would seem, then, that I should talk about topics that interest me more often. How do I combine these all into a single focus?

I found the answer in other blogs. I’ve read Boing Boing for as long as any other blog. Recently I’ve been a somewhat religious reader of John Gruber’s Daring Fireball. The answer was another blog. Writing reduces the time from idea to product, and it’s also a purer way of expressing my thoughts. I really just love writing in general (as evidenced by this post).

Tonight I’m launching Another New World, a blog about how we’ve reached today and what we need to think about before we can reach tomorrow. It will be a combination of essays and links to related information, and it will be the closest representation to date of what takes up space in the ever-changing landscape of my mind.

I invite you to check it out and, as always, tell me what you think.

Y’know, I was 3/4 done a post about politics and then I decided to scrap it. It just didn’t sound right. This is my second try.

I don’t enjoy talking about politics in the course of normal discussion. The simple reason is because people are often so closed-minded when it comes to debatable issues that they very seldom open their minds enough to risk a change of opinion.

As I see it, there are just too many facets of government to be able to know everything about everything. I’ve developed a set of beliefs based on my past experience, but I like to think that I’m open enough to able to change my opinion if a better set of beliefs is presented to me.

Abortion is the perfect example for me. I’m pro-choice. Laura, one of my best friends, is most definitely not. For the past couple of years, we’ve had an ongoing e-mail conversation covering just about every detail of the topic: what we believe, why we believe it, what we believe should be done. After really diving into the discussion, I realized that although our views of the subject appear to differ quite a bit at the surface, there are really only one or two differences in our beliefs… the most notable of which being the point at which life actually begins.

In the end I believe real progress on political issues will only be achieved with a through, heartfelt conversation over the differences people have on any given topic. There are a lot of smart people in the world, and not all of them share the same views. In other words, there’s a very good chance that there are some very good reasons why people disagree with you on any given topic. Shouldn’t we all invest a little time to hear why others feel the way they do?

In 2004 I thought of an idea for a site that would act as sort of a political MySpace… a place where candidates for any race could sign up for a page, list their thoughts on issues, and allow people to find the best candidate. Facebook has done something like it, but I had wanted to open it up to anyone from presidential candidates to local sheriffs or school board members. I was quite honestly tired of not knowing what any of the local candidates on the ballot really believed. In rethinking my idea, I think I’d also want to open up a sort of issues garden: a place where people could go to thoughtfully supply the reasoning for their personal beliefs without attacks on the other side of the issue.

Obama said something that resonated with me during his little overflow rally this afternoon. It’s actually the first line in this video:

For those of you on dialup:

I will listen to you even when we disagree. We’re not going to agree all the time.

There needs to be less talking and more listening in politics. Maybe that’s what would get me interested in it again.

I don’t want to be just another person spouting off my political thoughts until November. Instead, I want to start a little mini-project to cause you to rethink some of the beliefs you may have. I’ll occasionally write a blog or a Twitter post marked “Politics Unusual” (and they’ll be in Collage, of course); these will be things that I believe will either strengthen your beliefs or cause you to reconsider them. If you have any thoughts for me, let me know.

I’ll admit it: I was planning to let my subscription of Wired run out.

This month’s Wired cover story features Sarah Silverman helping readers understand why so many parts of the world suck. I’m always impressed by their stories; they’re topical, fun, and really comprehensive. This month’s issue also includes the paper version of the iPhone story, so I thought I’d flip through and see which pictures they decided to use and how they decided to lay the story out. (I’m a bit of a page layout geek, too.)

Not surprisingly, I was interrupted on my way to the story by a stupid pack of magazine subscription cards stuffed annoyingly into the middle of a story. On the facing page I noticed Sarah out of the corner of my eye. I looked down, and she was surrounded on a couch by a plethora of the very same Wired subscription cards I now held in my hands. I cracked a smile, and I couldn’t help but shake my head and whisper to myself, “There’s no way.” I read the segment of the “Why things suck” story on the page underneath the cards:

“You know all the subscription cards cluttering up this issue of Wired? Well, um… sorry … The worst part about ‘em? They cover up some really good stories.”

I think my jaw dropped at that point. I’m not an expert on magazine design, but they either had to choose that page for the placement of the cards or lay out the issue so that the story would appear at that spot. They addressed an annoyance about the medium and had some fun with it.

I wanted to cancel Wired because each issue takes me about two hours to read and I have a pile of about twenty unread magazines collecting in my bedroom. I literally enjoy the magazine too much. Needless to say, the pile will continue to grow thanks in large part to that little stunt they pulled this month.

How’s that for marketing?