Month: June 2008

http://www.vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=1109822&server=www.vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1
Shooting with Thomas Hawk from Frederick Johnson on Vimeo.

Fred Johnson, Senior Marketing Manager for Professional Photography at Adobe who I blogged about on Monday, blogged a short video conversation that we had Friday after lunch while out and about shooting a bit. The video was shot on the Canon G9 point and shoot camera which seems to be on of the most highly regarded point and shoots out there right now.

Fred and I talked a little bit about my own photography routine, my back up strategy (drobos), and some of the ways you might want to think about using Flickr to maximize your exposure on the site.

In the video I told Fred that I shoot between 100 and 500 photographs on an average day. I’m a big believer in shooting every day. One of my goals is to shoot every single day for the rest of my life. On days where I don’t feel like shooting I will still force myself to shoot, even if it’s only for five minutes on that particular day. I think the discipline is good.

A lot of people ask how I find the time to shoot every day. For me, photography is more of a lifestyle than anything. My Canon 5D and bag of lenses goes with me everywhere I go. Because my camera is always with me I’m able to steal little pockets of time every day to shoot. I shoot when I go out for lunch. On my way to the gym in the afternoon. On my way to BART at night. For 5 minutes around the house in the evening or morning. Whenever.

Of course I also schedule specific time for shooting as well, even entire weekends. This next weekend, for instance, I’m going to Las Vegas where I’ll be shooting pretty much non-stop for about 48 hours (with as little sleep as possible). I’ll probably come back with at least 4,000 or so unfinished shots from this coming weekend. That will probably result in 400-600 or so potential shots to finish and process.

Fred also is one of the co-hosts on the popular “This Week in Photography” or TWIP podcast. I’m going to be the guest on this next week’s TWIP podcast and will talk a lot more about my own photography as well as stuff that I’m working on with Zooomr, the new video show, PhotoCycle, that I’m working on with Robert Scoble and Marc Silber and lots of other ideas and projects around digital photography.

Thought I’d check out Plurk since it seems to be the hot new site that all the cool kids have been playing with for the past 23 minutes. Davis Freeberg invited me to sign up for it and I was a little surprised to see that my first introduction to the site was a post from him telling me that he was “thinking about doing Geoge.”

I quickly learned that you have to hover over the message on Plurk in order to see a message in it’s entirety.

You can find me on Plurk here. I’m going to check it out for the next few days or so. I’ve only been on it a few minutes, but already I don’t like that they limit my profile to 250 characters or that I can’t include html links in my profile. I like to be so wordy and all when talking about myself. I tried to do some special profile stuff as well but it told me that I needed karma of 10 for that and I’ve only got karma of 0 🙁

I spent a good chunk of Friday lunch and afternoon hanging out with Fred Johnson from Adobe. For those of you who don’t know Fred, he is the Senior Marketing Manager for Professional Photography at Adobe and a hell of a nice guy. In addition to being responsible for Professional Photography at Adobe, Fred also handles outside marketing for Adobe’s Lightroom product. I bet a few of you use that software huh? He’s also a photographer and blogger himself.

Fred had recently been down with Robert Scoble and Marc Silber to do one of our segment interviews with Michael Adams (Ansel Adam’s son) for our new photo video show PhotoCycle. Fred is also involved with what is probably the best photography podcast out on the internet right now, “This Week in Photography,” or TWIP as it is probably better known. TWIP interviewed Heather Champ from Flickr on their show last week. Congrats by the way guys on landing your first sponsor for your blog Lensbabies.

Fred and I talked a lot about where photography and professional photograpy are headed at Adobe. I can’t give any of the details (yet, but stay tuned), but we had a great conversation about Adobe’s Lightroom product, that Fred helps manage, and where things are headed with the new upcoming release. We also talked a lot about Flickr and Zooomr and blogging and social media and podcasting and all the great ways that Fred is out there looking to engage the photographic community.

I think it’s really cool that Fred is out meeting with bloggers and social media types in addition to the mainstream press. Not only that though, Fred is also out there hanging out and learning the ways that some of the very top talent are using Adobe products. Here’s a write up on Fred’s blog where he recently spent some time hanging out with my Pal Merkley. Although I process every single image that I shoot, I am nowhere near being able to do the kind of post processing magic that guys like Merkley or Kelly Castro (who also works at Adobe) are doing.

One of the coolest parts of Fred’s job is that he gets to see a lot of the super interesting behind the curtain research stuff that Adobe is working. We talked about the new 3D camera that was in the news earlier this year where by using multiple sensors and capturing multiple focal points new prototype cameras can allow photographers to adjust the focus field of a photograph after it’s already been taken and is out of the camera. Marc Levoy showed Robert Scoble and I some similar research that Stanford is doing on this type of photography last year.

In addition to getting to know a lot of the people in the photography community Fred’s also very involved online himself. In addition to Fred’s blog, you can find him on Flickr here, on Twitter here, and believe it or not he’s even already on FriendFeed.

Nice hanging out with you Fred and looking forward to the upcoming release of Lightroom 2.0 and all the other great things coming from Adobe. Thanks for taking some time on Friday to hang out and brief me on Adobe and Lightroom!