Predicting the past is easy. The future, less so.

I had an interesting lunch with a friend today at Maudie's Mexican Food Restaurant on Lake Shore Blvd. today.  It was an interesting lunch because my  friend, whom I'll call Bob, works at a mid sized public relations agency.  He actually owns his own creative company providing art direction, creative direction and ad design to the surrounding firm.  I love having lunch with Bob because he works with top clients from as far away as Japan and, while he's closer to my age, he is surrounded by 20, 30 and 40 year olds every single day.  We talked about family and hobbies and funny stuff that happens and then we got down to the meat of the meeting:  What's going to happen next year?  Where is the ad business going?  What will the trends be?

Here's something interesting.  Bob was a very early iPad adapter.  His justification for purchasing it was as a presentation device.  Now he admits that the screen is too small and, given a choice, all (regardless of age) of his clients prefer to see presentations and portfolios as PRINTS.  So last century.....but that's the way things go.  Big prints.  It's the wave of the future.   Also, little prints.

We've both been watching magazines come back strong.  We agreed that perhaps all the marketers overshot the whole "everything will end up on the web" pitch.  Seems that clients really do want audited results, tangible proof of circulation,  direct feedback and so much more.  While magazines folding up their tents make the most splash in the gossip forums the reality is that there are more titles than ever before and the ad revenues to the standing players are recovering quickly.  Amazing.  Two years ago we were ready to leave them for dead.  Prediction?  A lot more paid placement in print and direct mail, supported by the web.  That means designers need to dust off their "print chops" and remember how to manage color for paper and all that other stuff.  But now clients want to measure all this stuff.  And remember, you'll need better technique for print.  The file are much bigger and the details and faults are ten times as obvious.

And, who ever guessed that this would happen? Holiday parties are back with a vengence.  Wheeeeeeeee.  And they're actually buying nice wine and good food.

So, what the heck does that have to do with the photo above?  And why is all out of focus?  And why is everything blurry?

I was walking around the train station in Rome with my Mamiya 6 camera.  I'd been taking photos all over the place all day long and I was getting ready to meander back to my hotel.  I noticed how Italian business guys fell into two strata when crossing the station.  If they were in groups of two or more they'd walk slowly and chat and gesture.  When they were alone they would do this brisk walk.  I like the brisk walk so I waited around until a likely candidate emerged from the crowds and headed by me.  I wasn't paying attention to exposure like I usually do.  I'd set the camera to auto exposure.  I lifted it up to my eye and waited for the right moment and then shot.  I could tell as I heard the slightly extended action of the shutter that I was down in the 1/8th to 1/15th second exposure zone.  Yep.  I screwed up.  I think.

But much later I printed this negative and I started to like the feeling of motion.  I started to like the way all of the background mushed together.  I liked the way Tri-X handled the grey tones and the highlights. But I like most of all the energy of the man heading home.  It's okay to do things wrong.  It's okay if you're the only one who likes them.  But it all goes into the learning mix.

Getting back to basics.

Our fragmented culture has inculcated us with the fallacious idea that we should all be Renaissance Men and Renaissance Women.  We should be, all at once, a writer, engineer, artist, photographer, triathlete, movie critic, economist, political expert and social critic.  Burrowing down, the faux Renaissance culture makes photographers feel like they should be masters of taking any kind of photograph, experts in all facets and styles of postproduction and retouching, they should be masters of sales and they should cast their brand far and wide thru dominance in "social networks".

So now we have lots and lots and lots of people tossing around lots of half baked ideas and meaningless, endlessly repeated prattle while snapping mostly vacuous and banal photographs and posting a huge melange of crap in every conceivable media.  As long as it's free.

But far from being a distant and dispassionate observers I have to readily agree that I'm as culpable as the next guy.  I've gone from being a regional corporate photographer who was generally thought to be a good portrait photographer to being quoted as an expert about lenses on DPreview.  I've pontificated so often about lighting on Flickr that I'm considered by some to be an expert there.  But it's all a big joke.  And I'm bursting my own balloon before someone else does it for me.

Mea Culpa.  I got swept up the in the supposed paradigm shift.  But in the end the web and all this noise is just the "pet rock" on the TV of a new generation. Bell bottom trousers.  Social networking is a desperate attempt at personal marketing in a time when jobs are shifting from employee to contractor and people are scared to death they'll be left behind.

I started posting on Facebook because one of my clients acted shocked that I wasn't on Facebook.  What if I miss an invitation to an event?  Fat chance.  I'm sure the invitation will be in the massive amounts of e-mail we look thru every day.  And if I did miss an invitation would the world end?  I'm hosting a party for my swimmer buddies on December the 11th.  To date I've gotten 32 invitations to other events being held on the same evening.  The problem isn't missing an invitation but weighing which ones to accept.

I started this blog to help sell my four books (please buy all four for everyone on your list) but no one really likes talking about books so I started writing about other stuff.   And now I write about other stuff all the time.

I started posting to Twitter to bring more readers to my blog.  But Twitter is so weird and disjointed that in the months and months I've tried to decipher it I still can't see how anyone gets any value from it.

I know how to do two things well.  I can take portraits.  I can write words that flow (most times) and make sense.  That's it.  I don't know more than the rest of us about philosophy.  I don't know much more about lenses than anyone else and what little I know either comes from actually shooting them or from taking the time to read more anecdotal stuff on the web and re-interpret (regurgitate) it.  What I know about camera sensors is meaningless and irrelevant.  If I had more understanding about economics than the rest of you out there I sure wouldn't be trying to make a living as a writer and photographer.

I taught workshops last year.  But it's hard to take workshops seriously when I think that everyone should just take their money and go someplace exciting and shoot on their own.    If you've got a couple weeks and $6000 burning a hole in your pocket just get on a damn plane and go to Istanbul or St. Petersburg and shoot from sun up till your last daily minutes of consciousness.  Then you'll have something to show off.  Something you might actually want to print.  All you need to know about handling your camera is in the owner's manual.  The rest, to reiterated my own tired quote, is just "time in the water."

So, what do I do now with the realization that I'm not smarter than most other people.  Not a wildly stellar, superstar photographer, not a brilliant philosopher or  economist.  What do I do with the realization that blogs don't sell books.  That Twitter doesn't sell blogs.  That I don't want to spend precious hours every day doing "rah!-rah!"  for myself about myself?

How about I turn off Flickr and Twitter and Facebook and do what's always worked well for me?  That would be taking photographs of people in my own style.  Writing stuff I know about.  And swimming enough laps everyday so that I can eat pizza once a week and a glass of wine or two and not gain weight.  That sounds pretty good to me.  And marketing?  Two postcards and $500 in postage brought in more money for me in a handful of jobs this year than all the web marketing I've done in five years.

Will I keep blogging?  Yeah, but I'm only interested in talking about street photography and portraits.  I'll leave it to someone else to sell cameras and books and lights and stuff.  I just want to know how to use them to make art.  And then I'll be happy to talk about art.

Two things I do well:  Portraits.  Words.  One thing I'm okay at and enjoy: Swimming.

I'd love to be a real Renaissance Man but it makes me tired just thinking of all the stuff I would need to be able to do.  No one has that kind of time.  Might as well be doing what you really love.

the holidays are upon us.  I humbly submit that a good book about photography will be most welcome by the photographers on your list.  Here are a few suggestions: