It’s been a while between Hazelwatches, so here’s a brief update. Recently it’s been terrific to see Hazel learning, responding to what we’ve been saying and starting to behave a little better. Still, she gets frustrated like all young kids do. When she did today, she did a little jumpy, twisty dance, and said:
“This is my unhappy dance.”
You probably don’t need me to tell you how to vote, and if this is the case, feel free to stop reading now. If, however, you’re still undecided, or you’ve never voted before, sure, go ahead. (For overseas readers, our “Liberal” party is the right-wing, conservative party.)
The Australian system of voting, as in Britain, does not directly elect the Prime Minister. For the House of Representatives, we elect our local candidates, and they, in turn, elect the Prime Minister. (Any party can choose whoever it wants as the leader, even after the people have voted, as the people didn’t directly choose that leader. That’s not to say that it will be popular, which is why it’s not common.) In the Senate, normally only half of them are up for election when we vote; they have a double-length term compared to the House of Reps. Also, voting for the Senate is proportional. Here, you contribute to your state’s senators rather than a more local representative.
Who to vote for? Well, since two parties are far more popular than the others, you’ll have to choose which one of these you like more than the other. You can vote for a smaller party that probably won’t get elected in its own right, and when it’s clear they don’t have the numbers to win, their votes will be reapportioned according to how you filled out your preferences. So, as most seats eventually go to Labor or Liberal, it’s really important to pick one or the other. The parties do distribute “how to vote” cards near election booths, but you don’t have to follow them.
It’s unlikely that one of the two major parties will offer policies you completely agree with, so you’ll have to pick the closest match to your own beliefs and values. Sometimes, neither offer what you’re looking for. It’s very possible that legislation that makes it through the House of Representatives will be knocked back or watered down in the Senate, if there’s no common majority across both houses. This happened in the last term of government, with Labor’s carbon emissions trading scheme voted down by the Liberals and the Greens. After trying for months to get the legislation through, they eventually gave up, leaving Labor looking like they hadn’t delivered what they’d promised.
In the future, it would be great to see many smaller parties become more powerful, leading to more negotiation between parties that have to share power. It’s unlikely to see this in the House of Reps any time soon, but it’s routine in the Senate. Ifyou want to encourage it ASAP, the Greens are probably the next-best-placed party, and could hold the balance of power in the next parliament.
Recommendations? I’m voting left, Labor in the House of Reps at least. Why?
1. Better broadband policies. There’s nothing wrong with investment, with money spent in Australia on a future-proof fibre network. Initially sold as 100Mb and now as 1Gb (10x faster), that’s possible because fibre is able to run as fast as the equipment at either end — unlike the copper network we have now. We simply can’t go fast enough with our current network, and the market won’t build fibre to the house as it’s too expensive outside the inner suburbs. Our current broadband network is slow and inequitable and will not be fixed by the market. Abbott is on record as thinking broadband is “for sending an email”, completely missing the point of what a fibre network could do for business and consumers alike.
2. Good things this government did. They said sorry. They signed Kyoto. They used stimulus spending to help Australia avoid a world-wide recession. And people want to chuck them out?
3. The Liberal coalition is exploiting racism and xenophobia by repeating “stop the boats”. Refugees arriving by boat weren’t even on the radar until the election was called and it’s suddenly a key election promise. The amount this country spends on “processing” refugees overseas before letting them into the country is almost completely wasted; the vast majority are genuine refugees. Besides, boat arrivals so far this year amount to less than three days’ worth of ordinary migration. The term “boat people” is degoratory, and popular because of a red-headed ex-politician whose name I won’t mention. There is not a vast army arriving by boat.
I could go on, but that’s plenty. Don’t vote for the Liberal party if you want fast internet or care about the environment. (Yes, the internet filter is a bad idea, but it’s very unlikely to pass the Senate, and on balance, faster internet is the more important initiative.)
There’s always something to keep me busy these days. If I’m not out teaching, I’m probably driving a child down a mountain, doing something for the house, or finishing my iPad book(s). Now, I’m also writing a series of articles for MacTalk, Australia’s best-known Mac community/site/podcast/etc.
It’s good to finally have an audience for all that information that people don’t find here on my blog, an opportunity to set the record straight on best practice, and a chance to spruik awesome software like Alfred. And of course, comments like this one make it all worthwhile.
Currently my article on Photoshop Colour Correction is live, but another coming soon on internet video, the aforementioned Alfred, and lots more besides. Requests welcome.
A plug for my latest tutorial on Creative Cow, showing some weird and unusual techniques for covering your frame with many clips at once.
I have many more tutorials up on Creative Cow, available here, and if you want me to train you somewhere in Brisbane, visit Training Brisbane.
It’s ridiculously simple, but I love my Universal Quick Release Adapter. I can’t find anything like it here in Australia; this one was bought in a national chain in the UK called Jessops and sent by kind relatives. It’s not perfect but it does the job, making mounting and unmounting gear simple. Since one of the key differences between cheap and pro gear is the hassle of using a coin-driven tripod screw, this is an inexpensive equaliser.
Since the best gear is the stuff you actually have with you, buy more than one, to provide a base for each of your tripods and a top for each camera. Then, you can easily switch between multiple supports. On a day out, I can actually carry my basic monopod and flexible Gorillapod clone (from Aldi!) and snap either to my 550D in seconds. Hugely useful and it doesn’t tie you to a particular brand of tripods.
Note: The picture shown on the link above is incomplete, as that’s only the bottom half of the assembly. The top half stays plugged into your camera and the bottom half stays on the tripod.
So, I have a new DSLR, the Canon 550D. Nice camera, but the kit lens is just OK. It’s not terrible, but not as sharp as a 50mm prime and not nearly as nice as a Canon L lens. (The downside of knowing professional photographers is you get to try their lenses and see how bad yours really are.)
From what I’ve read, it seems that manufacturing differences between multiple copies of a camera model cause problems. Different bodies have slight differences, within tolerances. More expensive bodies actually come with microfocusing adjustment so you can compensate for slight differences, but mine does not. Maybe my body is a little front- or back- focused, but I don’t think so.
Anyway, so you might have a body 1 or 2 units forward of where it should be, and you might have a lens 1 or 2 units back of where it should be, and you’d be very happy. Sharp as can be. However, if the lens was forward 2 units instead of back, you’d have a problem. Potentially, a problem within the lens tolerances and within the body’s tolerances, but together a more significant issue.
So, how do you buy the right lens for your camera? I could order it from a store, but at least one that I’ve asked has said they wouldn’t let me test it before purchase. A Hong Kong grey-market importer doesn’t want to know and says “buy from a local store”. Another store says that if a lens doesn’t conform to the manufacturer’s spec, they’ll accept it as DOA, but I have no way to know how tight that specification is.
Do I find a local store that will let me test before purchase? Or take my chances with a (much cheaper) importer and use their return policy if needed? Tips welcome!
Not that it’s going to count for much, but a note to the spammers out there who are trying to add hundreds of links to posts on this blog:
Go away. All comments are moderated and yours are going straight to the trash.
Hazel says: I burped so much my bones disappeared.
Just a few notes detailing how to make a video (or audio) recording of a long speech into a much shorter one. This is the procedure I go through when editing about an hour of content down to 5-8 minutes, like this video of Charles Leadbetter I edited recently.
Good luck. Of course, if you don’t want to do it yourself, hire me to do it instead!
A great mistake people make is to think that other people are like them.
A great mistake that many creative people have made repeatedly is to think that everyone else enjoys being creative like they do. By and large, they don’t. Some do, but most either aren’t interested, aren’t capable, or are only interested to the point where they can produce some sort of giant flying penis, or whatever pointless meme is flying around this month.
One example: Second Life. It’s easy to admire the effort they put into making creation tools accessible to everyone, but few people take advantage of these tools. Creatives can have a good time, but the main complaint you hear — from people who don’t want to make anything — is that “there’s nothing to do”. Well, only because no other users have made something they wanted — or because they couldn’t find it.
Similarly, Macs come with a number of great tools to help you to be creative with your photos, videos, to create music and so on. I’d love to be able to say that everyone uses these to create great works of art, but most of them don’t. Those who do — and who want to share their work — are likely to come up against one of the great sad truths of the internet: promotion is hard.
A story you might have heard: my short film Airport was in the Sydney Film Festival in the Oz Digital Shorts program. It played once to an audience of around 100 in the basement of the Sydney Opera House, and that was it. I stuck it on my website, linked from my blog, and a few more people saw it. Then I showed Cory Doctorow and his partner around Brisbane, gave him my showreel, he liked it, and linked it from Boing Boing. Suddenly, thousands and thousands of people saw it, it was linked all over the net and shown in multiple other film festivals. Someone from Microsoft saw it and hired me to create an animation for them, culminating in their flying me to Boston to make a film for them and more work the next year. Clearly, you can get lucky.
Without that chunk of luck, a good movie/book/something can lurk in the shadows for ever. This is one of the great problems of distribution. A publisher of books or movies does play a role. Despite the modern idea that “middle men” aren’t necessary in this new age of self-publishing, promotion — their key strength — is critical.
Promotion and distribution bring such power that old business models, which seem doomed, keep on trucking. Free-to-air TV, for example. It’s trivially easy (though not, admittedly, free) to never watch another commercial again. Record it (somehow) then watch it back without ads. Get an EyeTV for your Mac, a PlayTV for your PS3, a TiVO or fancy pay TV box. Or just download all your TV shows from the net.
So, bang goes the business model for free TV, right? No.
Most people don’t think like that. While I’m sure at least some people reading this already download most of their TV, most people will just sit down and watch whatever’s on, or plan their evenings around whatever’s on that night. Sure, they could just tape it all and watch it when it suits them, but for many people that’s just too hard. They just want to be entertained with minimal effort.
If you’ve realised that you don’t have to watch ads, you probably don’t feel remotely guilty about downloading TV instead of watching it locally. On one hand, you could wait weeks or months to watch a show, then strip out the ads and watch it at the same time as your friends. On the other, you could download it now, ad free and watch it ahead of them.
Some specific cases: Lost is buried on a secondary channel here in Australia, and picture quality is awful. Downloads are in 720p HD, out the night it goes to air in the US. Another, to see the final episode of House to check out how good a Canon 5D looks — potentially important as I teach video editing and work with a DSLR myself — I can’t watch it locally as the local station devotes their HD channel entirely to sport. Other shows which aren’t even on here and will never be shown? Who does it harm?
Eventually, it will become so trivially easy to download that it will seriously threaten the local TV audiences, but there will remain a vast majority of people who just want to watch TV. Though anyone with a basic camera can make a simple show and give it away for free on the net, it’s very unlikely that a show made like that will make it onto a mass distribution channel like broadcast TV.
Making quality programming is hard. It takes money, a lot of people, and a number of failures. Yet even failure is relative. We all have niche interests that aren’t necessarily profitable to cater to. Your critical and financial failure is my favourite film and that director’s starting point. Mega hits fund failures, and failures breed successes.
Book publishing is more individually driven, with less incentive to support failure. You hear about huge advances — but they’re the lottery winners. An unsigned, unheralded author is incredibly unlikely to see their book published. Even if you get published, if your book isn’t a success in the first printing, there likely won’t be a second and you won’t be on shelves in a year. Retail space in real shops goes to blockbusters and new releases that might be.
Online distribution doesn’t have the problem of physical space, but there are limits all the same. Effectively, you won’t be much better off than the unsigned author doing what they can with word of mouth and a blogger’s write up or two. A very few will get lucky — usually through hard work, tireless self-promotion, determination, etc.
They will usually have made something worth buying — harder than it seems. Now that the old-world filters of editors, professional designers, cinematographers etc. are officially “obsolete” it’s easy to display what should have been kept hidden. There’s never been more crap out there. Good editors do a worthwhile job in keeping it out of mainstream distribution, but Google can find it all.
So, if you are creative and you’ve realised you can’t do it alone (make a movie, sell a book, etc.), who do you call? I wish I could tell you.
I alluded to this earlier, but let’s make it plain: it’s very hard to make money from being creative for yourself. If you can get a publishing deal, you’re likely to make maybe 10% of the cover price. That’s great if you sell a million books at $30 each. Less exciting if you sell 5000 at $15.
If you want to make a movie, that’s great, but you’ll need serious money to fund it. Producers, who raise money for films, can end up more like salespeople than filmmakers. If you just want to direct, you’ll need to become very passionate very quickly, or lower your sights.
Music is already sinking as online distribution is so easy. If you hope to make money from music sales, hope really hard. Tour for cash. If you can’t tour or your music doesn’t play well live, I have no answers for you. The “unbundling” which iTunes has enabled means that your entire album now needs to be good, or users will just cherry-pick the best of it.
Ways you can make money? Freelancing or working for someone else who sells for you. Teaching your skills. Consulting.
Big companies will, I hope, continue to exist and occasionally produce something really worthwhile amidst the crap. Without the big mainstream blockbusters (in every medium) there would be no money for truly great creative products — blockbuster or not.
The individual creating something at home has never been more fortunate. Each year, tools get cheaper. Computers become more accessible, cameras get better, and distribution becomes easier. But the same is true for everyone. If everyone who wants to pick up a movie camera now can, there’s that much more competition.
Skills are still hard to learn, experience is still hard to come by, talent is still not something you can buy. Attention spans are shrinking as all this new media invades our space. It’s unlikely that your work will ever be seen by many people that you don’t already know or are related to.
But… do it anyway. At some point, nearly everyone else will give up. The people who “succeed”* are the ones who didn’t give up. If you realise you’re not very good at something, take lessons or try something else. Ask for help, and not just on the net. Ask friends. And if you make something really really great, and tell enough people, then someone with a lot of friends just might see it and tell their friends too.
*I don’t know what “succeed” means in this context. I’ve had work on TV, I’ve been interviewed on TV, I’ve won competitions for money, I’ve been flown around the world to make things for very large companies and I’ve got regular freelance work in several different fields. I don’t know that I’m “successful” by most people’s standards, though. Perhaps I need to appear in more celebrity magazines?