Just got my film back from the Gulf Coast and took a quick look. I was hoping to shoot mostly film on my trip, but had a camera malfunction as my Mamiya 6 got doused with water while I was out kayaking one day. Thankfully the camera survived, and the result was a few altered images including the first one here. 
The summer is often a slow season for photographers - editors go on vacation and those spaces between phone calls or emails can extend into long days. I've been fortunate to have less of those days and weeks as my career has progressed, but I've also come to recognize these little spaces of time as gifts that allow for a little reflection, personal growth, promotion and career development. Here are a few things I try to do this when I'm given this time.
Get better. As Steve Martin said, the key to success is being "undeniably good." There's no end to this journey of improvement and change. Being good takes time, self-honesty and focused attention. Practicing your craft shouldn't just occur on shoots you're being paid for, but on your own time as well. This might mean spending a day in your studio/garage working out some new lighting setups or pursuing a personal project that allows you to take some risks and fail spectacularly.
Share something. Whether it's a blog post, phone call or taking the time to write to an aspiring photographer who sent you an email, sharing is beneficial to both parties. The key here is to remember this is not a zero sum game. You don't lose your competitive advantage when you talk about how you run your business/light a subject/process an image. Instead, you become the person other people come to for inspiration. The "new economy" or whatever you want to call it, rewards those who share, the gift-givers.
Work on your Search Engine Optimization. Right now this means Google. PhotoShelter has been preaching this forever and has so much good information (and is a great example of a gift-giver), that it's really the only place worth going for this information (without getting into the nitty-gritty). And yes, doing this well (along with being a good photographer) translates into real, paying jobs and attracting new clients you would never reach otherwise.
Promote yo'self. Do you have a marketing plan scheduled out for the year? Do you know how much you plan to spend this year on reaching out to editors/art buyers/etc.? Do you regularly send out emailers/portfolios/scratch 'n' sniff postcards? When is your next trip to New York to meet with editors and show them a new portfolio? Promotion is a multipronged beast and doing just one thing (like having a web site), is not enough. At the same time, the old ways of promoting yourself may no longer be as effective.
Social media as a participatory medium. Checking your Facebook and Twitter feeds is a way to procrastinate and waste time, as is posting inane status updates (of which I'm as guilty of as the next person). Still, social media can be a useful tool - figure out what mixture of personal and professional you want to present to the world and begin participating.
Pitch a story. This isn't just something that photojournalists can do. Every time I meet with editors in New York I hear pleas to send them story ideas. As always, know your audience and make sure your pitch is relevant and targeted to whoever you're sending it to. I've also found pitches to be much more effective when you've already shot some photos on the subject.
Give thanks. Take the time to hand write a thank you note to an editor. These cut through the clutter and are a nice bookend to completing a job.
Think about the future. I just finished up Seth Godin's Linchpin (great interview here) which talks about how one can be successful in this changing, post-industrial world and highly recommend it to any photographer looking to make their mark. In a broader sense, I try to set specific short-term and long-term goals (more of a "to do" list actually) that can I turn to whenever I have free time rather than procrastinating.
Do something different. Plant a garden, read The Economist, ride your bike. Being well-rounded is an asset to your growth as a person and as a photographer.
Back up your photos! Nothing like holding my most obvious and pedestrian piece of advice for last. Doing this doesn't ever seem to pay off, until the moment it does. I'd also highly recommend cloning your bootable drive so that if it crashes, you can be up and running again in minutes, not hours.
See July 2010 Update at bottom of review
I don't do much in the way of equipment reviews, but I thought I'd share some thoughts on the new Einstein lights from Paul Buff. I've been using the same four AlienBee B800 lights for almost ten years. The lights have been across the country many times and survived being dropped, blown over in the wind and just plain kicked around.
My only issues with them have come from my own bad judgment. In one case, I used the lights in the rain and one of them started smoking (and smelling remarkably like Chinese food). I shipped the light back to Paul Buff and had it back in two weeks for less than $75. I've also broken the flash tubes a couple of times and now take a few extra with me whenever I go on a shoot.
In short, these lights have worked flawlessly for me, and it's only recently as I've attempted to exert a little more control over my lighting setups that I've noticed the slight variations in color temperature from picture to picture. I've also been wanting a little more power than I currently have, especially when shooting outside. Two Einstein lights arrived at my door last week, just in time for a few shoots where I got to try them out.
A few quick observations
Out of the box, the Einstein feels more solid and are clearly heavier (specs say at least 1 lb. more than AB800s, or similar weight to AB1600s). There's definitely a more professional feel to these lights overall. I'm sure I'm not the only professional who gaffer taped over the fluorescent logos on the AlienBees in an attempt to make them a bit more understated.
In my hand, the Einsteins are very front heavy. A few times I've held them in the middle of the light to mount on a light stand and felt them nearly slip out of my hands. On the plus side, the light stand mount is set farther back on the light. This allows you to tilt a beauty dish farther forward without it hitting the light stand, which had been an ongoing issue for me.
I was in New York last week and spent some time playing with the different lighting systems at B&H. The user interface on these lights is like nothing I've seen on any other system. The flash actually takes a couple of seconds to boot up when you turn it on and you're rewarded for this short wait with a rather sophisticated menu system that gives you complete control over the modeling light, recycling indicator and slave tripper (regardless of whether a sync cord is plugged in). All in all, a welcome technological advance from the tiny plastic buttons I'd become used to.
The 9-stop output range is great, giving me more (and less, if needed) power than the B800 and allowing me to light portraits while still using wider apertures (and not having to break out the ND filters).
The umbrella mounts are much improved, keeping the umbrella at a better angle for even light distribution.
The modeling light is bright (250W) and I could easily see using this for video as well as making it easy to shoot portraits with the lens wide open at any shutter speed.
I put together a quick video here showing how to use the basic features of the light.
Color Temperature Test
While this test is by no means scientific, I thought it might be interesting to compare the consistency of the output between these two lights. I set up some white seamless, put a reflector head on each light, and made sure they metered the same (AB800 was about 1/2 power) so that no detail would be blown out. Then I plugged in my intervalometer and took a photo every five seconds (with the camera white balance set to 5600K) for thirty minutes.
Here's a short time lapse, at six frames per second of the full set of images.
After running this test, I debated whether it was even worth posting the time lapse. In looking through these images, I honestly can't see much of a different between the two lights. Obviously, there's a little spill-over from the two lights that might affect the results, but aside from some very minor light output variation (of which the AlienBees exhibits a bit more), these lights seem pretty similar with the AlienBee being perhaps a touch warmer overall. The color temperature consistency is one of the big selling points and it is kind of interesting that there's little difference here, at least to my eye.
To see if what I saw was actually accurate, I randomly pulled twenty or so of the images into Photoshop, and used the Eyedropper tool to compare RGB values in a given spot for each light. Here there was some evidence of the Einstein's consistency, with the values consistently within 2-3 of each other. The AlienBees wasn't far off, but mostly showed values with 4-5 units of each other.
Locking mechanism
It was always a pain to mount a softbox on to the AlienBees. Between squeezing the two release levers together (mine have gotten progressively stickier over the years) and trying to make sure that all four "holding fingers" (their words, not mine) were inside the speed ring before releasing, this was one of my least favorite things about my lights. After a lot of headaches, I discovered the best way to mount a softbox was to put it facedown on the floor and mount the light to it, rather than putting the light on a stand first.
The Einstein has a quick-release lever that smoothly slides the holding fingers in and out. In theory this seems like a much more refined mechanism but in using it during four shoots over the past few days, I found it at least as frustrating as the old mount system.
There are now four screws holding the clips that hold the frosted glass dome onto the light. When your light modifier is exactly lined up, the speed ring fits neatly around these four screws. But when you're mounting a large softbox and don't have a great visual on where the holding fingers are, the screws often get in the way, catching on the speed ring and making a good fit difficult.
Twice on recent shoots I've had a softbox fall off as I was trying to mount it and I've learned to be much more careful about ensuring a good softbox mount before letting go of it. By moving the screws, or having them sit flush with the face of the strobe, I think this mounting solution would be much improved as the holding fingers would essentially force the speed ring into place as you moved the lever.
Wrapping up, these lights are a clear upgrade for me and have kept me away (for now at least) from investing in a Profoto setup or something similar. The lights already feel intuitive and are just plain more precise pieces of equipment, allowing me to control my lighting to a much higher degree than before.
I'm excited about possible firmware upgrades and am glad one of the best customer service experiences available anywhere is there in case something does go wrong. I'll be updating this review in six months or so once I've had a chance to use the lights on an ongoing basis for awhile.
July 2010 Update
Having now used the Einsteins for a couple of months, I have a few updates to share. First off, having full adopted the practice of attached the light to the softbox sitting on the ground, I no longer have any issue with that screw getting in the way.
The bigger issue is that I'm just not getting reliable triggering with the PocketWizards when using the lights outside. Paul Buff has addressed this issue and a fix will be out in August, but until then, I've shelved these lights for any outside work as they only seem to fire about 50% of the time working at distances much closer than the 50 feet that they're supposed to function. Personally, August can't come quick enough as I really do miss the extra power of these lights, especially outdoors.
There was a time when I entered all of the photojournalism-based contests, diligently following the esoteric filenaming and captioning instructions and crossing my fingers as I hit upload. These days I'm only entering American Photography and Communication Arts, and was very happy to get an e-mail yesterday that one of my Detroit Schools images had been "Chosen" for the web site.
This was one of the first photos I shot while working on this project and I remember struggling to make sense of what I was seeing and feeling a little creeped out by the noises I kept hearing as I walked down the dark hallways.
Bonsai from today, with old Fujiroid film
After getting tired of the dark, heavy colors of my site and blog, I decided today to do a little facelift.
A new edit is coming soon, but for today, I'm excited to shed a little visual weight, shoot some 4x5 and get outside to work in my garden as the ground begins to warm.