As a final post about the David Iglesias book (I promise), I caught his interview with Jon Stewart last night on the Daily Show, and I think the few seconds the book was shown may be the widest viewing audience a photo of mine has ever received.

The past few weeks have brought the first taste of the heavy, wilting heat that we're in for this summer. Charlene and I spent this weekend screening (and plexiglass-ing) our side porch with dreams of summer barbecues and mint juleps while we watch the sun set.

The past month brought some new clients and a wonderful trip out west. While in Portland, I shot a quick travel feature for the Boston Globe that ran on Saturday and can be seen here. After a few days visiting our old haunts including dinner at the best thai place ever, we headed up to Vancouver, BC to see my cousin Jon get married on a beautiful, sunny afternoon.



I came home to a new tearsheet from The Scientist Magazine


Sean Eddy for The Scientist Magazine

Yesterday, I stopped by Borders and saw that the David Iglesias book is finally out (I talked about some of the challenges of this shoot here).

The next month will bring the resumption of a personal project I've been researching in New Jersey and new portfolio meetings in DC and New York. Also keep an eye out in your mail box for a new postcard mailer to go out next week.

On Digital Journalist, I wrote about my experiences covering the McCain campaign in South Carolina.

I'm also pleased to be part of Wonderful Machine and humbled to be part of such a talented group of photographers.

(The title of this post comes from one of McCain's oft-repeated jokes on the campaign trail when he's asked about his age being a liability to his campaign. How it actually helps his case is anyone's guess.)

I've been a big fan of using online tools for much of the basic infrastructure of my business and I thought I'd compile some of what's worked for me so far.

Online tools have a number of real advantages (accessible anywhere with an internet connection, easy to collaborate with others) and also a few disadvantages (occasionally sluggish performance, security, having your data locked into a single company). Since I travel quite a bit on assignment, the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages for me and it's hard to imagine how I got by before I worked this way.

Google Calendar


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I use gCal to manage my schedule and have it configured to send reminders to me on the day of, and the day before a shoot. The other great thing you can do is link to other calendars, like the NY Times election calendar to help map out days when covering elections. For a long time, I used a simple paper calendar that I had on the wall next to my computer. The problem was that when I traveled and a client called, I had no way of checking it to see if I was available for a shoot. Now I'm able to quickly pull up my calendar on my laptop or my phone and commit to a shoot in realtime.

Google Apps for E-Mail


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Letting Google handle my email backend was one of the best decisions I've made recently. I host all my web sites through Dreamhost and their IMAP implementation was often painfully slow and occasionally rendered my email address unreachable. By switching the MX records to Google, I was able to preserve my email address while harnessing the powerful and quickly evolving web-based Gmail.

When researching a story I'll track e-mails related to that story by using the labels. By creating a label for each story and marking all of the relevant mail with that label I can quickly and easily manage my research even if emails are coming from a variety of sources.

Backpack


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I pay $5/month for Backpack, which is one of the great bargains in keeping my life organized. My main use for Backpack is in managing story ideas, though my wife and I have used it to organize the installation of our new bathroom, keep track of restaurants we want to try and to track the redesign of my web site.

It's a little difficult to express why Backpack works better than keeping track of all of this in email or on a web site, but I think its appeal is in the ease of adding information of all types, being able to share it with others and the ability to have all the information in one place.

On one page, I keep all my story ideas. Some times these are just interesting articles I run across that are worth exploring at some point, other times they're compelling stories that immediately draw me in and make me drop everything to start researching. As a story idea develops, I'll move it to its own page. For instance, when I was researching my China Adoption story, I created a separate page for it where I tracked the various adoption agencies I had found, linked to news articles about the subject and kept track of the contacts I had made. Ultimately, I added my travel details to the page after I was able to find a family willing to let me accompany them to China. When I returned from the trip and edited the photos, I used the page to keep track of which magazines I had shown the images to and their response as well as small graphics of the resulting tearsheets.

Google Spreadsheet

From dealing with this at the end of the year:

To having access to this:

I've been a little wary of using Google Docs to manage my expenses, but recently bit the bullet and began tracking all of my tax information online using the spreadsheet application. For the last few years, I've spent the better part of a full day each February entering all of my expenses into an Excel spreadsheet. While this wasn't a huge time sink, I always had the nagging feeling that I was missing some expenses.

In changing to Docs, I've decided to start tracking my expenses in real time, entering them as they come in. Not only does this ensure that I'm not leaving any expenses out, it allows me to track my income vs. expenses in real time as the year progresses and make financial decisions based on that data. At the end of the year, I can simply output the spreadsheets to an XLS and print, or print them directly from the Docs page.

That's a brief overview of the tools I use on a day to day basis in managing my business. I would be interested in hearing from other photographers if there are other online tools that help make your business run more efficiently and smoothly.

I recently sent out my first mailer of the new year, of our former Chairman of the Federal Reserve. If anyone would like Mr. Greenspan's mug to show up in your mail, drop me a note with your address and I'll get one out to you.

The next e-mail newsletter will be sent out shortly, and to receive it you can sign up here.

Samantha Michele Voss

Posting's been a little sparse as I've been traveling a lot of these past few weeks, including assignments in North Carolina for New Scientist and Minneapolis, MN for the Guardian. This weekend, Charlene and I went up to NJ just in time for the birth of my brother and his wife's first child. We spent a wonderful couple of days visiting at the hospital getting to know our new niece and I worked on my baby photography skills (mouth open and screaming: bad, eyes open and reaching for teddy bear: good).

..and other wonderful lessons for the creative person here.

day 3 in South Carolina

My time in South Carolina was spent in fog and overcast skies, driving down highways lined with pine trees growing in the sandy soil. 1100 miles covered over two and half days and the constant struggle to distill political theater into substance.

sunrise on Siem Reap, Cambodia

What does it mean? We don't get to know. Even if it means nothing, we don't get to know for sure that it means nothing. - Miranda July

A magazine called today asking about photographs from Cambodia, a country I visited in March of 2004. Looking at my photographs brought me back to a time before I really began earning a living as a photographer.

I remember sitting at my computer waiting for the phone to ring and feeling more than a little indignant that I wasn't getting hired to bring my unique talent and creative eye to assignments. In retrospect, it's a damn good thing I wasn't hired more. While I was learning my craft freelancing for the local weekly, I was consistently making some very bad photographs full of visual clichés and lacking in the lifeblood of great photos - moment, content and feeling.

But the other thing that hit me in looking at these photographs is that I still take the same kinds of photographs I took then, just better versions of them.

The more I've been asked to shoot portraits, the more I've realized the need for an assistant to come along. There's nothing worse than struggling to carry your gear on a hot summer day in DC and arriving to meet your subject in an air-conditioned government office out of breath and covered in sweat. But in looking over some jobs I shot in the past year, I'm reminded of the times when there wasn't any room in the budget for an assistant and hauling the equipment was left to me.

With that, here is a small selection of self portraits from a year in portrait photography.

Kodachrome against a 255,255,255 sky

The rich but natural colors of Kodachrome 25 brought grayscale memories into a color age. The memories of the past captured on this emulsion were shaped by the film's tonality. The images are infused with a certain nostalgia for a time and place that feel far away.

In my first few working years as a photographer, I burned through hundreds of rolls of Fuji Press 800. Looking at the cool, deep colors of that film, with its minimal grain and great shadow detail remind me of those beginning years in Portland as I tried to figure out the complicated visual language of photography and where I wanted to go with it.

I'm mostly disappointed by the technology we now accept to record our present day. Everywhere I look, I see the ugly texture of digital noise from small camera chips, the clipped highlights that whiten so many skies and the slightly blurred, murky video grabs that pervade many news sites and newspapers.

The character of these images suggests a certain time period that for me at least started on 9/11 when my wife and I huddled around a computer screen, watching a tiny live video feed on WashingtonPost.com of the towers after the first plane hit. We didn't own a television at the time and watching the second plane hit was confusing, since the online video at that time consisted of a 200px wide image that denied the viewer anything in the way of detail. Yet for better or worse, it's that image, with the small, gray plane that took up just a few pixels as it moved jerkily across the frame and into the second tower that stays with me most when I think about that day.

lightning storm at midnight, runaway bay, jamaica

Cold scapes, by Barry Lopez, 12/07 National Geographic: "The world is beautiful, in many unfathomable ways. In our hurrying, though, we frequently miss what is beautiful around us, in the same way that we forget from time to time what we want our lives to mean. Just to stay afloat in the modern world, many of us reluctantly choose detachment from the constant stimulus. We even turn away from beauty, as if it were another thing we had had to much of."

Char at the lake

Today, Charlene and I celebrated two years together of marriage. I remember getting up early on our wedding day to walk around the Arboretum under a deep blue sky as the leaves were beginning to change.

Somehow about two years of marriage and ten years of knowing each other, it feels like everything is just beginning.

General Petraeus

The ever-present challenge of covering politics in DC is breaking through the wall of "the message." Events are staged to best convey that message: words are suitably conciliatory or vitriolic and backdrops are color-coded and placed to maximize their airtime on television. I think it's part of being a good photojournalist to make a photo that reflects the person, the political climate and captures something timeless about this moment in history, rather than playing into the controlled message being presented.

One of the few times these machinations are stripped away is in the hearing room. While it's an opportune place for politicians to grandstand and to recite long-winded questions that are more rhetoric than question, it is still just a man or woman sitting at a desk answering questions. And this presents one of the most challenging opportunities to make a lasting image, but it also presents one of the few times when covering politics is a contemplative, unhurried practice.

If you've spent any time covering politics in DC, you've become comfortable sitting in the well - that carpeted space between the politicians and the substantial wooden table where the witness sits. This time is spent waiting for gesture, for expressions and ultimately for meaning in the witness's visual actions. It is also time spent cursing the ill-placed water bottles that break up clean lines and the stacks of papers that blow out under the harsh television lights.

For a newsworthy hearing, photographers will have spots marked with tape and the first few hours are punctuated by the clatter of motor drives as the wire photographers compete to get something usable that they can transmit. As the hearing reaches the late afternoon, the space empties out and it becomes easier to pursue different positions and here the real work begins. It's so difficult to find something meaningful here - it's too simple, too cluttered, too obvious. But ultimately it's about seeing the space and the person in a new way and trying to make an image both relevant and timeless.