Book Review - Photos That Sell by Lee Frost

 The BEST book on Stock Photography
I've read a lot of books on the stock photography industry and this book is by far the best. When I first got it a year ago I paid too much attention to the extraordinary photography and not enough to Lee's text. Recently, I went back and very carefully, slowly (one or two pages a day) studied Lee's advice. I've sold images myself to clients around the world and can tell you this book is what you need if you're interested in selling images. It's accurate, complete, and packed with tips that few others would be willing to share. I have and will continue to look back to this book for ideas in producing my own work. The author provides great advice across the range of stock subject matter as well as the various markets.

The are two things that really make this book shine though. The first is the numerous photographs accompanied by sales info: number of sales, where it sold, and the total sales to date in U.S. dollars. Not all the images in the book have this information (most have the standard equipment and exposure stats), but some do. Next, there are several two-page interviews with other stock photographers. They share their backgrounds, markets, and tips.

Buy this book. It's worth it!

Also check out:
Stock photography articles by Lee Frost
Lee Frost Photography

Buy it on Amazon

Star Wars Trivia

At the bottom of this page, http://www.generalgrievous.net, are links to the plot scripts for Episodes 7-9 of Star Wars authored by George Lucas.

I guess the post-Return on the Jedi books that came out were based on these. I read the 4th and 5th trilogies (long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away) but not the 3rd trilogy which was based on the scripts above. (Anyone to whom that sentence made sense is DEFINITELY a Star Wars NERD :)

If Lucas does a pre-history to the pre-history will it be called the -1 Trilogy? -1 B.A. (Before Anakin?)

The first sentence of the "synopsis story" for Episode 7 (see this site, http://www.starwarssequels.com/) says, "Thirty years have passed since the Battle of Endor..." Uhmmmm.... That would put Harrison Ford and company at EXACTLY the age they are now! Uhmmmm.....

Also, the first link above has a very interesting "History of the Jedi and Sith"
article written by someone else but based on input from Lucas.

On a differnt vein there seems to be a lot of market opportunities in the Star Wars universe. As I see it, here are some much needed products:

• Jedi parachuettes. They're always falling from high places and/or into endless pits.

• Sith Lord anit-aging/anti-wrinkle cream. (You need to see Episode 3 for this to make sense.)

• Anti-lightsaber forearm armor. Jedi are always losing arms and hands. Leg armor would be good too.

• Anti-Sith Lord ligthning rods. Always ground yourself before battling a Sith Lord. A custom lightning rod add-on for your R2 Unit would be a good product too.

• Hooded capes in different colors. Start a fashion trend and convince all Jedi they need to buy a new hooded cape every year to stay in fashion.

• High Definition Color Holograms. What's with the fuzzy blue-only holograms? Where's HD-HG?

• A space ship car wash. There are a LOT of freakin' space ships in the Star Wars universe. I've never seen a car wash (or "ship wash"). Or a gas station for that matter.

• "Hand tar" to help prevent you from dropping your lightsaber (which seems to happen ALL the time). (This idea curtosy of Matt Orman.)

• A "clapper" for when you've lost your lightsaber and can't find it. Clap on... Clap off... (Of course, if you drop your lightsaber and an innocent bystandard picks it up then "clap on" could cut their head off. Your Jedi forces should alert you to this beforehand though.)

Barns of Arkansas Part II

Naran Patel, author of Barns of Arkansas, called me this morning angry over my review of his book. What can I say? First, I was quite insulted by his accusation my review was based on his ethnicity or because he was not a native Arkansan which is unequivocally not the case. I don't see how anyone could read the review and come away with that feeling, but apparently he did. The review had everything to do with his work simply "needing further refinement". As I stated in the review I think it is great that he visited different, and often remote, parts of the state during his stay here. It's also great that he took some snapshots of his travels.

Clearly, when one publishes a work it is open to comparison with all previously published works. As such, I described Mr. Patel's book as the worst picture book ever, and I still stand by that. However, that doesn't mean Mr. Patel is not capable of doing much better work. I'm sure he is. On the phone, as I struggled to get a few words in, I tried to encourage him to continue taking pictures and convey how that over time he will notice his eye for composition dramatically improving. The same holds for anyone who puts in the effort. I'm sure that one day he will look back on his barn landscapes with power lines intruding through the top of the frame, white skies, and especially the one where a foreground clump of grass is in focus instead of the barn itself, and realize how far his skills have advanced. He's not there yet though.

Instead, he continually insisted the pictures were the way he wanted them to be. I don't think so. I think Mr. Patel looks at each picture and sees what his memory recalls versus what he actually captured within the frame. He can't be blamed for that as this is the starting point for all photographers. The next step is to supplement that desire with technical ability followed by composition skill where it doesn't come naturally, the well-worn path for any photographer. The ultimate destination for consistent, truly excellent work is what the late Galen Rowell called previsualization, the act of foreseeing the result before ever leaving one's lazy chair and being able to go out in the field or into the studio and create the image EXACTLY as one had imagined.

One thing I would like to clarify from the book review is my comment on the book being self-published. I didn't intend for the self-published nature of the book to be taken in a negative way; however, it's clear that the book would have never been published by a publishing house. I stand quite firm in that belief. However, I have self-published a non-photography eBook myself and have nothing against self-publishing which has significant advantages. I have sold copies to readers all over the United States and in countries all over the world. On each sale I have made more profit than would have ever been possible with a traditional publisher.

I don't really know what Mr. Patel expected from our discussion, but I doubt that he went away feeling satisfied. After listening to him for several minutes I told him about three times that I was running late and honestly had to go (the complete truth) until finally I was forced to hang up on him. So I'm sure he will know tell anyone who asked that I was just a jerk and hung up on him when he called. Ah well...

Yesterday, for totally different reasons I wrote an equally scathing review of Donald Trump's last book. I wonder if The Donald will be calling me soon?

Book Review - Trump: Think Like a Billionaire by Donald Trump and Meredith Mciver

Content-Free Rubbish
This is one of the worst uses of dead trees I've ever seen. It's complete dribble. Trump's first two books, The Art of the Deal and Survivng at the Top, were biographical pieces and were at least slightly interesting from that perspective. If a good editor were to tackle Think Like a Billionaire not a single word would remain afterward. It is complete and total crap. The majority of this book is devoted to a underwhelming discussion of the Mar-a-Lago diet, the Miss Universe and other pageants, and the first two seasons of The Apprentice. COUNTLESS times Trump congratulates himself on being the personal savior to NBC. At the beginning of the book he tells everyone not to take vacations and what lazy bums they are if they do. Later in the book he tells you how to pick a luxury hotel or resort. What? Oh, and when you leave the airport you should have your assistant call ahead to the hotel to let the manager know you're about to arrive. Yeah, I'll do that.

Book Review - Dark Star Safari by Paul Theroux

Most educational travel book I've seen to date

Dark Star Safari is a journey through the REAL Africa. From Cairo to Cape Town Paul travels along the worst roads and through the toughest villages that you won't see on a tourist safari, talking with and learning from everyone he meets along the way. From that perspective this was the most educational travel book to date that I've seen.

One of the consistent observations throughout the book is that wherever Paul traveled the detriment brought to Africa by aid workers is quite clear. Aid is not helping, and it never did. It only contributes to the under-development in Africa and only serves to keep the local despots and corrupt, stagnated governments in power. In Malawi, as in the much of the rest of Africa, the NGOs (Non-governmental Organizations) and virtue activists hire away the local teachers (who only make $27 to $67 dollars a month) offering them better pay and conditions to become food distributors. Few of the villages even have teachers any more.

The author speaks with a knowledge and history of Africa that few others possess since he had lived and worked as a teacher in Africa during the 1960s. As Paul states, foreign aid workers "…didn't realize that for forty years people had been saying the same things, and the result, after four decades, was a lower standard of living, a higher rate of illiteracy, over population, and much more disease. Foreigners working for development agencies didn't stand long. So they never discovered the full extent of their failure. Africans saw them come and go."

Labor-intensive projects are extremely rare in Africa because of self-serving foreign "aid" that require "purchases of machinery have to be made in the donor country, or that bids be restricted to firms in the donor country, or that a time limit be placed on the scheme which encourages the tendency towards large contracts and heavy spending on equipment." Paul also verifies what I had first read about in Jim Roger's Adventure Capitalist. All of the used clothing donated to churches to be distributed to "poor Africa" becomes merchandise the second the cargo ship leaves the port. When it reaches its destination it's purchased in large blocks by merchants who resell them. The author picks up some "new" clothes himself in order to avoid looking like a tourist. His T-shirt read "Top-Notch Plumbing". Of course, all this "good-well aid" does nothing but to hurt Africa's economy. There was a time, not too long ago, when some of the best tailors in the world were in Africa. But how can you be a tailor when the West sends clothes over for practically free? Why be a farmer when the West wants to feed you for free? What's the best industry in Kenya? Coffins. Coffin-making is a booming industry. In one area of Malawi the people are growing their own Maize crops but are using hybrid seeds resulting in big plants but sterile seeds. The farmers can't set aside plants as seed corn because they are all sterile! As Theroux says, "Without free seeds each year these people would starve."

What angers me the most though is what I have seen verified in other reports, namely aid workers "were no more than a maintenance crew on a power trip". Other than a Nun or two who had moved to Africa on their own accord, none of the aid workers, in other words the NGO aid workers, were happy to be there or in the slightest bit helpful to the author. They're all too busy driving around in their air-conditioned Land Rovers to get out and actually help people.

The happiest and most self-sufficient villages that Theroux encountered were, in a very consistent pattern, all out-of-the-way such that the government and aid workers ignored then and didn't mess with them.

There is much more to the book though than state of Africa's corruption. The author's adventures are incredible. It's incredible that he actually lived to tell the tale actually. If you want a romantic story of big-game hunters in Africa, ready Hemingway. If you want reality, read Theroux.

Buy it on Amazon

Book Review: Barns of Arkansas by Naran Patel

Worst Picture Book Ever

I don't enjoy doing bad reviews, really, but this is the WORST picture book I have ever seen!

Many of the pictures are blurred, some HORRIBLY so! I would list page numbers but there are none. Mr. Patel has no understanding of depth-of-field. In one shot the foreground grass is in focus but the barn, i.e. SUBJECT of the picture, is completely out of focus! Quite a few barn pictures have power lines running through the image that could have been composed out of the frame by an observant photographer or, at the very least, edited out in post. The vast majority of images are set against the ugliest white skies I've ever seen published in such a book. I won't even mention the typography!

It is the perfect example of how bad an ego trip can get. This is a self-published book. The author is an engineer who photographed barns during weekends of his three-year stay in Arkansas while working on a chemical weapons arsenal that is being destroyed. I'm glad he got around and saw more of the state than our chemical weapons stockpile, but as a life-long resident of the state, I find this book insulting. The only positive thing I can mention is that I'm glad I only borrowed the book from the library and didn't pay money for it.

Buy it on Amazon (for someone you hate)

China Economic Report

If you have any interest in the growth of China's economy you might want to check out a recent trip report by Nouriel Roubini of the Stern School of Business, NYU and Brad Setser of Oxford. The original website is http://rgemonitor.com and a direct link to the PDF is http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~nroubini/ChinaTripReport-Roubini-Setser.pdf.

Here are some of the highlights:

• "China's economic expansion is increasingly unbalanced, with too much investment in already prosperous coastal regions and too little in the interior."

• Foreign direct investment firms pay a 15% enterprise income tax compared to the 33% rate for domestic firms in order to encourage foreign investment.

• Exports grew 35% year over year in January, February, and March.

• "A vast rise in steel capacity coincided with a modest slowdown in the real estate construction... creating, at least for now, more steel capacity than is needed to satisfy even a rapidly growing Chinese market." Bad news for steel stockholders.

• A 15% revaluation against the dollar would "do little more than bring China's real exchange rate back to its 2002 level."

• "The government has kept the retail price of gasoline down, helping to control inflation. The state owned oil companies are (effectively) required to use the large profits on their domestic production (which still covers roughly 2/3s of total demand) to offset the rising cost of imports. For now, this works: the state-owned oil companies profits are still up, though they are not up by as much as they would be if prices increased to world market levels. Moreover, with the enormous expansion of China's automobile industry--both domestic and foreign--there is pressure to keep gasoline prices low to encourage automobile purchases. And, as in the US, there is also pressure to build more roads to ease traffic congestion."

• "Land is also too cheap, if you pay off the right people. The peasants who work agricultural land still cannot formally own land--land remains the property of the 'people.' ...the Communist party retained de facto control over all land, and, over time, it has transformed itself into a capitalist real-estate venture. As cities expand, developers who can convince the local party committee to turn agricultural land over for development (or to allow old urban neighborhoods to be razed fro new redevelopment) can make a fortune. Rather than buying the peasants (or old urban tenants) out, they often buy the local party committee out, so the windfalls profits from land that is used for real estate development often accrue (privately) to the members of the local party committee, no to the peasants who have been working the land or urban dwellers that have lived in these urban areas for decades. This is clearly a key source of social tension; compensation for such eviction from rural or urban lands is systematically lower than the values of such real estate."

• "China already restricts foreign ownership of domestic Chinese companies: it has no desire to let foreigners take advantage of the cheap renminbi to buy a range of Chinese manufacturing and industrial assets (remember, $150 billion would buy all of China's listed equities).

• "China's excessive reserve growth increasingly is prompting some Chinese intellectuals and policy makers to envision a different growth model--one where China's stock of excess savings is used to build up the overseas presence of Chinese firms, not just to support the US Treasury market."
  

Terry Smith Images offers Fine-Art Prints

In association with Art-Exchange.com, a leading world-wide art distributor, Terry Smith Images is now offering fine-art prints. You can view the prints available here:

http://www.terrysmithimages.com/services/fineartprints.html