rant

Things you need to know about lists of things you need to know

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On the Web, in magazines and in newspapers, there are an infinite number of articles with titles like, “10 things you need to know about . . .”, “12 tops tips for . . .”, “24 best ideas for . . .”, ad nauseam.

In keeping with this silly trend, here are the top seven things you need to know about meaningless lists of things you need to know:

 

1. Magazine readership studies, going back to at least the 1990s, have shown that using numbers on cover blurbs increases readership. Using a non-round number such as “Top 12” rather than “Top 10” will increase readership even more. An odd non-round number is even more effective: “Top 11” will attract more attention than “Top 12.”

The next time you’re in a supermarket checkout line, look at all the magazine covers and note the numbers in their cover blurbs: “47 Ultimate Summer Fashion Tips”, “63 ways to boost your love life”, “21 foods you must avoid”, etc.
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Avoid this Toronto photo contest

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The city of Toronto, the same city that bans parents from taking pictures of their kids taking part in any activity at a recreational centre or arena, has launched another of its photo rights grabs. By simply entering this contest, you’re giving the city all rights to your pictures for all eternity.

Rule 14 includes:

Entering the contest constitutes an agreement by the contestant to give a royalty-free, world-wide, perpetual, non-exclusive license to the City, and anyone it authorizes, to display, distribute, modify, crop reproduce, and create derivative works of the entries, in whole or in part, in any media now existing or subsequently developed including the Internet, for any City purpose including, but not limited to, advertising and promotion.

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Recycling the trash

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Here in Ontario, we’re in the early days of a provincial election and the three parties are on the campaign trail.

This post could’ve been about the fact that the Conservatives don’t even have a business portrait of its leader and that several of its candidates also don’t have headshots. No portrait = invisible.

Or this post could’ve been about the NDP which had to cut-and-paste its candidate headshots onto a matching background since the party couldn’t figure out how to organize consistent portraits in the first place. [Edit May 13: It appears that the NDP’s first attempt at cut-and-paste using the high-school blue background was so bad that they did all of them over again.]

Or the post could’ve been about the media handout pictures from the three parties. These photos have no captions, no IDs, no information whatsoever. They are useless as media handouts.
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More is not always better

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Some photographers offer their customers a disc with all the pictures they shot on that particular job. Similarly, some customers want a disc containing all the photos taken. Why?

To me, this suggests that the photographer can’t edit, the customer can’t make a decision, or the customer doesn’t trust the photographer to do the job properly.

Certainly there may be times when having all the photos might be a good thing, for example, when the pictures are used as evidence in a trial. But quantity is not quality.
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Photographers are not Press

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This is a ridiculously long rant about this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. If you don’t cover the film festival or are not involved with it, then save yourself some time and skip this post.

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The 38th annual Toronto Film Festival recently ended. It’s the one event that all Toronto news photographers look forward to covering. Yes that was sarcasm.

Being the 38th edition, one might guess that the organizers might be, uh, organized and know what they’re doing. Sadly that guess would be wrong.

What do photographers need to do their job? They need to know who, what, where and when. Guess what information wasn’t given out?

Upon check-in, each photographer was given a bag of stuff, all of which was rather useless except for a pizza coupon :-). The bag contained no information that a news photographer needed.

Sigh.
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Take the long way

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About two years ago, a US survey asked kids what they wanted to be when they grew up. One of the most common answers was “a celebrity”. When asked what they wanted to be famous for, the kids said they did’t know or it didn’t matter – they just wanted to be famous. (Here’s a British news article about a similar but unrelated UK study.)

In the old days, someone had to work to accomplish something and then, maybe, they might earn a degree of fame for their achievements.

Today, it seems many people want to take a shortcut. They want the fame but without achieving anything first. Popular shortcut attempts are: appearing on a reality TV show, releasing a scandalous video or tweeting provocative pictures of themselves.

Photographers are not exempt from taking shortcuts.
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Why photography?

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There are many photography web sites that offer advice on “how to”.

How to photograph portraits, how to photograph children, how to take pictures of pets, how to shoot sports, how to take pictures at night, how to use a wide angle lens, how to take pictures with a flash, how to take pictures without a flash, how to . . . ad nauseam.

But there are few sites that talk about “why”.

Why photograph portraits, why photograph children, why shoot sports, why use a wide angle, why use a flash, . . . ?
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