I am self-employed... read 'I must have f**k me over written all over my forehead'

Dear (project manager),

I assume that (end client) has shortened the event and would like to off-load the cost of it (i.e. the cancellation charges that (agency), I'm sure, has in its contract with them) on you. Maybe with a statement to the effect that they appreciate your understanding and flexibility, which may be read as an implied promise that they may repay the favour some other time.

So the agency then sits on its own contractual obligations with the freelancers, and it is then tempting to repeat the dance with them. The implied promise there being that one will be closer to the top of the list of people who are offered future work, which means that there is an implied threat, as well, of the opposite happening.

Here is where it gets tricky, and please let me point out that this is nothing personal. Agencies offer us work because we are the ones with the skills and knowledge to do it. It is not to do us a favour. Certainly, choosing one (contractor) over another is influenced amongst others by how well one gets on with that professional on a personal level. If the only communication between agency and (contractor) is that related to jobs, then clearly, those who allow contract changes (which are bizarrely ALWAYS to the contractors' detriment) without complaining are clearly preferable to those who won't accept this kind of dodgy tinkering. Perfectly understandable. 

However, accepting changes to one's own detriment without complaining means first and foremost one thing: a lack of business acumen. So now it is the choice of the agency: Do I prefer people who don't cause any trouble but whose lack of business savvy is probably indicative of other gaps, as well? Or do I work with people who know what they are doing and in return insist on being paid what they are worth?

It's a difficult one, I understand, especially as we so rarely get to see, even less to know each other.

One thought about the much touted 'flexibility' that deserves to be rewarded... just not right now.

I have been in the job for 20 years now. Being flexible in the sense of waiving legitimate claims I had to the benefit of the agency/end client is overall not a satisfactory business model. People still wouldn't remember me or give me more work, and the first time that someone did after years of trying (which was, by the way, me sticking to a contract that turned out to be very unattractive in reality when other colleagues with more business acumen than me got out), soon after, that particular person left the agency, and I found myself exactly back where I was before, just a big chunk more disillusioned.

If the reward for this kind of 'flexibility' was not the privilege of being offered work again at all, but maybe a real attempt to make up for a sacrifice of half of the pay agreed in the contract, by somehow allowing the contractor to recover that money on top of what they would normally earn (so that the contractor is, including the reward, at least balance-neutral, so in financial terms not rewarded at all), it would be a different issue. But that has never happened to me.

So please understand that if I see: 'Thank you for your flexibility and understanding ...', I really read these days: 'If you want to work for us again, you'd better just swallow this.' I am sorry, that does not make me feel professionally fulfilled. And after 20 years of trying to build a career in my chosen profession, I feel I haven't got anywhere and my not inconsiderable skills and experience count for nothing. I do hope you understand.

Best regards,

...

True to life but is it a good movie?

It was my turn last night to pick a movie for the evening. My choice, after some internet research, fell on ‘Take This Waltz’. I took along someone who takes a keen interest in cinema and knows much more about it than I do. The review read well enough, and it resonated with some of my own life experience.

Only after inviting my friend to come along did I read the comments to the review which ranged from 2 walking out of the movie to 2 who adored it. Needless to say, the majority of the remaining comments were on the side of those walking out.

Let me say ahead of all else that I quite like Michelle Williams. Yes, I did watch Dawson’s Creek back in the day, and I liked her there. I also like that she didn’t, as opposed to co-star Katie Holmes, marry an established Hollywood actor to get movie roles offered. Not saying Katie didn't deserve them.

Having said that, when my friend appeared to fall asleep about 20 minutes into the movie, I couldn’t blame him. I did like the photography, lots of shallow depth of field and colours reminiscent of polaroids, but to be fair it was pretty for the sake of being pretty a lot of the time rather than taking over part of telling the story.

Let me not comment on the acting, as I am not really qualified, but the movie moved along very slowly. Okay, it is about a woman who’s been married 5 years and meets someone on a trip whom she’s attracted to, who turns out to live across the road from her. So far, so contrived. But it may happen.

In some more polaroid-y shots the movie goes on to show us how she grows more ambivalent about her husband as she feels more and more drawn to the guy across the road. All those scenes drag their feet, but then again, having been through something similar, that’s how it is in real life. It’s not usually some cataclysmic event that makes you fall in love with someone else than your spouse. It often, I think, is lots of trivial moments that add up, and none of them are to the point. Nor was the movie. In that sense, it failed in my friend’s opinion and succeeded in mine.

Okay, so being unfaithful isn’t nice, it isn’t comfortable, it is only done for reasons known to the person who does it, not the observer. That’s life, but does it good cinema make? Clearly not, by majority vote.

Leaving that aside, some observations of my own on the actual story.

If you don’t have much to talk about with your spouse because you are not interested in what they do for a living (coming up with recipes for chicken dishes worth turning into a cookbook) and you can get your only affirmation of your position in their lives by getting physical at the most inopportune moments, please don’t accuse them of having nothing to talk about over your anniversary dinner.

Also, if you don’t know what you want, like: ‘I am writing, but not really…’, don’t expect others to find you interesting beyond your physical attributes. No wonder that after leaving your husband for someone else, soon it’ll take threesomes both ways to keep the spark alive, and finally even that will fail.

Finally, maybe alcoholics are the best people to take life advice from, especially when they crash into some rubbish bins across the road with some chickens after having been reported missing. In vino veritas. Or in any kind of alcohol, for that matter.

However, I agree with my friend, as good as the scenes with the alcoholic are, they do not compensate for the time sitting through the rest waiting for them.

what size are you...

With a somewhat heightened awareness for things that deviate from the truth, I spotted this scene. Well, that's not quite correct as I am seeing it all the time, to the point of not really paying attention to the fact that the mannequins in this department store or any other as well as most high street fashion shops have visually very little in common with the women spending their hard-earned cash in them. I am not talking about the degree of undress seen here, I am talking about size - as you might have guessed.

Shops sell fashion from sizes 6 or 8 to 20 or 22. So why only show off the merchandise on mannequins that must surely give every woman looking at them an inferiority complex? What would be wrong with having displays of the wares addressed at the women who actually do the shopping? Surely someone size 16 would like to see the fit of a pair of jeans she likes on someone that looked a bit more like herself?

I know it's all about aspiration, shops don't sell reality, they sell dreams. And of course, even the silliest girl knows that she won't part with £120 for a pair of jeans and immediately look like the model strutting her stuff in them in the poster. But surely, women these days are smart, educated and worldly-wise enough to know that real dreams and aspirations have more to do with achievement and personality, not inches.

There is one women's magazine I know of that from the beginning of this year has only used real-life women to model in any of their features - exluding adverts, of course. Personally, I found looking at the magazine (targeted at the mid-20ies to late-30ies woman) and the version aimed at women from 40 - which I am, after all - very empowering. Of course, these women get styled and photographed as professionally as 'real' models but they come across as much more genuine and true to life. Not everyone apparently agrees but hey, I'm part of the readership, so I assume my opinion counts. I love it, and I hope Brigitte manage not only to stick with this policy but to set an example for others to follow...

Photojournalism, dead? or immortal? - The Photo Society

Photojournalism, dead? or immortal? - The Photo Society

postal voting...

... has been getting a fair bit of press for all the wrong reasons, like being linked to election fraud.

Really, though, it is meant to give people who are (most likely) not around on election day the opportunity to still cast their vote.

This very concept implies that postal votes need to be cast well in advance of the actual election. Or at least that seems obvious to me. To those who don't see it that way, let me explain:

The London election for mayor is on 3 May 2012.

I am freelance and when I work, it's mostly abroad.

The likelihood of me not being in London on any given day is fairly high, so I registered for postal voting.

The polling cards for non-postal voters arrived in the mail around late March, if I remember correctly. Let's be generous and say they arrived at the beginning of April. I received, about a week later, a letter informing me that I should get worried and call for assistance "if I have not received" my "postal voting papers by 27 April". A Friday. Seven calendar days before the election, and just before a weekend. Say I didn't get the papers. The earliest anyone could do something about it is by Monday.

Assuming also that I opted for postal voting because - remember? - I would presumably not be there on Thursday. And - in my case - not on Wednesday nor on Tuesday and Monday, either. That's my chance to vote gone to hell.

If then, as in my case, you are also away all the week that the postal voting papers are being sent out, you can see how tight time gets.

In my case, I did find the papers on Saturday 28 April. Now it's Monday, and I've finally had time to fill in the ballot papers, spending too much time again considering who to vote for. Stupid me for taking it all so seriously, right?

Now I'm not sure if I trust the Royal Mail to get the letter to the right place on time. I may take the envelope to the polling station in person on the day. But then again, just like the Monday to Thursday job in Holland didn't happen, anybody can call me now for work on Thursday. So either I pay at least one day's fee for my right to vote, or I waive it altogether.

I used postal voting to cast my vote in German elections while I already lived in the UK, and I always had plenty of time to fill in the papers in a considered manner and send them off without worrying the time would be too short for my vote to make it into the count.

Receiving postal voting papers within 4 business days of the election is clearly not enough time.

That should worry people just as much as the alleged fraud, because it may mean that people who are perfectly entitled to it, are robbed of their vote, because either their filled-in ballot papers are still in the mail when the counting begins, or they themselves were already gone by the time their papers finally land on their door mat.

why I seem to be using hipstamatic all the time...

reward...

I have been asked by friends and have subsequently asked myself why I have put my camera away and have for most of this year taken pictures exclusively on the iPhone, and recently, even more 'limiting', with the Hipstamatic application, rather than editing the images afterwards in Snapseed (the very best iPhone photo processing app in my book).

Maybe I have to go back a little bit, and this first thought is actually confusing the picture even more but bear with me if you will.

Before I got my iPhone 4S in November last year, I had heard and read so much about the iPhone, and mainly on Twitter had witnessed a fair number of pro and semi pro photographers turn into complete iPhone nuts. Forgive the term but it seemed to me like so much hype, and who would, having much better equipment, even choose to make technically worse pictures than he or she could, right?

At around about the same time I felt I needed to reassess my own photographic path. I had learned a lot about equipment and to take better pictures in terms of composition and using manual camera settings, thanks to someone who turned out to be a true mentor in that respect, after all the jokes we had cracked about that word in the beginning. However, I increasingly felt that I was taking pictures fulfilling someone else's criteria of a good picture, needing someone else's approval (another personal weakness of mine), and in the process I grew somewhat alienated from my own work and in fact stopped taking pictures altogether for a while.

This realisation combined with that dinky new toy with its lots of brilliant (or trashy) apps allowed me to get over the confusion of not knowing what kind of photographer I was by getting me to play again. I am now taking pictures like I did with my little plastic 16 square exposures on 12 exposure film camera that I got for Christmas at age twelve or thirteen or so. Technically as good as a plastic lens, heads to trees for focus settings, and clouds to sun for exposure would allow you to be; the more important thing being what was in the frame.

Hipstamatic is even more limiting. You have a 'lens' and a 'film' combination and no control other than choosing that combination. I find right now, this very fact allows me to focus exclusively on composition and, even more so, on the mood I want to capture through it.

This is my argument for all those people who moan everywhere that cheap apps 'make any picture look nice, no matter how bad it is', thus devaluing 'good' photography, i.e. pictures taken with expensive (and hence still somewhat exclusive) gear.

I disagree on two counts.

Good camera phone and app pictures still require skill. True, if you take a bland flower picture in gritty b&w, it might add a certain interest to the picture that it wouldn't have in colour. Why? More contrast, focusing on the main thing without colourful distractions around, making it possible for the viewer to find connections: I remember those flowers in my grandma's garden. We had lovely times there. I miss her. It's getting under the skin. I don't think there is anything wrong with it. I rather think it's using what you have available to achieve a certain purpose.

Secondly, the exclusivity of the gear is mostly less dictated by the skill in making good use of such equipment than much more by the size of one's wallet or bank balance.

It's knowing why you are using it that way. We have a saying in Germany that even a blind chicken will find the odd grain. This happens to iPhone shooters, but it also happens to more high-end gear users than would care to admit to it.

Another reason why I like the limitations of what I am using now to take pictures is my attempt not to try to document facts, occasions, buildings, ... whatever, but to get back to taking pictures that evoke emotions. I don't need pixel-peeper-satisfying full-frame sensors and £6000 lenses for that.

I cannot remember her name (my biggest fallacy) but David Land, now editor of F2 magazine, talked in one of his classes at my BTEC course about a US photographer who took amazingly haunting pictures with a Brownie. Blurred, having you engage with the picture to figure out what was going on, with enough detail present to satisfy the search.

Now that you know, maybe my pictures don't look that nice anymore, but hey, I'm trying, and I'll never stop learning.

My final reason to explain why the iPhone is my first choice in most cases: it's just ready to shoot so much faster than my camera...

the love of (self-) important men...

I once knew a painter. I liked his art.

He made me a present. It was a painting called 'The Kiss', and he said it was inspired by us. He gave it to me for my birthday.

Except he asked me to let him show it in an upcoming exhibition. It would be marked as 'sold', and I would get it afterwards.

Then he gifted it to me again for another occasion. Maybe Christmas. I should check my journal but I can't be bothered.

Then he gifted it to me again, I think. I hope you guess what follows. We broke up without me ever actually getting my present.

One day long after our break-up he rang me one Saturday to meet in one of our regular late breakfast places in Hampstead. One of the nice things about being with him were extensive informal weekend morning walks.

He was very friendly and only got around to business shortly before we were ready to leave. He then offered me to hand over the painting or to repay me the £1000 I had lent to him over the time we were together. It was clearly very obvious what I would go for as he had someone at his bank on the phone to make the transfer right there and then.

Before we left, he confided in me that anyway, he had sold the painting to a bank for over £3000.

He must have loved me very much indeed.

He did give me a very dull (compared to the original colours) and tiny print of it. No. 2 or 3 of a run of 100, it's a bit smudged. The print has the same place of pride in my flat as Picasso's paintings had at Dora Maar's place when she died. I seem to remember they were found under her wardrobe.

make a smile go around the world...

happy face
Originally uploaded by antje b.

... it really is so easy.

Yesterday I went to collect a parcel that couldn't be delivered to me the day before, from the local sorting office. "Local" on a London scale as is still a 25 minutes walk or several bus stops away.

Normally, the sorting office opens really early but closes at 1pm. For Christmas the normal red card left to inform of a failed delivery had been replaced with a blue one with snowflakes on, but the most important change was made to the opening times which had been extended to a generous 5.30pm.

As I collected my parcel after returning early-ish from work, I told the young man behind the counter that although it clearly was extra work for them, I really appreciated the new opening times and thought they were a great idea.

He beamed at me, said something along the lines of it making their work easier, as well, and that he would pass the comment on.

I left the sorting office also with a smile on my face, and it stayed with me as I pondered how easy it really was to be nice to people, and yet also how rewarding.

It is so easy not to comment on things well done. It's just become an expectation, and usually, things only get said if something doesn't work.

A case in point was the conference I was interpreting at just that very day of yesterday. After the meeting the interpreters weren't given a glass of champagne, as happened recently at a similar event, but someone from the organisers came to the back and told us that there had been very positive feedback about the interpretation, commenting about what a change that made from the normal 'no-news-is-good-news' attitude.

That made me smile and feel appreciated, and I managed to pass this feeling on to the young man at the sorting office. And hopefully, he, too, would get an opportunity do that to someone else at some point.

I used to be one person who would respond more strongly to things that went slightly wrong than to things that went smoothly. Thanks to my currently slightly readjusted brain activity, I find myself being more relaxed in dealing with mishaps and much more willing to express my appreciation for the opposite.

In that sense let me send a smile to the one(s) who made me seek help about negativity.

Pass it on. Generously. :-)

'The Debt' - screening at the Frontline Club...

The screening of ‘The Debt’ by director John Madden at the Frontline Club was announced as a bit of a rarity, moving away from the purely journalistic treatment to the fictionalisation of political issues.

The film, starring Academy-Award winner Helen Mirren, Academy-Award nominee Tom Wilkinson, and Ciaran Hinds, as well as Jessica Chastain and Sam Worthington, picks up in the lives of three Mossad operatives who worked together in the 60ies on a mission in East Berlin to extract Dieter Vogel, known as the ‘Surgeon of Birkenau’, a medical doctor who conducted cruel experiments on concentration camp inmates in Nazi Germany.

The occasion is the launch in 1997 of a book about the operation written by the daughter of the woman in the trio. Not wanting to give a way the plot as the film is going to be on general release in UK cinemas from 30 September, I’ll just talk about one aspect of it that struck a chord with me. To do this, I may have to digress a little.

After the fall of the Wall and German reunification, documentaries and feature films dealing with the ‘trauma’ that was the GDR history were everywhere. Some of them were the usual propaganda with a rather obvious agenda (or straight-forward counter-propaganda, if you want), some was very delicate and thoughtful work, revealing with a great deal of understanding deeper layers underneath the bare facts and leaving viewers to judge.


‘The Debt’, based on an Israeli film from 2007, explores several issues in a similar fashion. Apart from the obvious, Isreal’s policy of actively persuing outside their own jurisdiction those guilty of holocaust crimes, there is the motivation of the three young people to do what they have come together to do; there are the personal relationships within the group, couped up with only each other for company on a dangerous mission abroad; and there is an interesting exploration of the relationship between captive and captors, with the captive cleverly manipulating his captors who will carry a number of the personal issues arising during this mission with them for life.

However, even more interesting was the conflict between honesty and covering up the actual results of a mission, supposedly for the ‘greater good of society’. This in my opinion was as relevant an observation in East Germany as it is in Western democracies today as it is pretty much everywhere in the world. Inevitably at some point personal interests will clash with more powerful people’s personal interests, and under the mantle of ‘the public good’, lies are told.

A very interesting film, well worth watching.

Brian Storm at the Frontline Club...

Could Multimedia Story-telling be the new journalism? Who are its clients and how to survive commercially with it? All highly relevant questions that have been asked a lot recently.

Brian Storm, founder and executive producer of MediaStorm, came up with some assured answers during his fascinating presentation at the Frontline Club.

Being passionate about stills photography, he was shocked to learn that newspaper readers spend no more than 0,6 seconds on average looking at an image. He believes that good photography has so much information contained in it that it deserves to be taken in thoroughly. One way of gently forcing viewers to engage with a photograph beyond a cursory glance is to embed it in a multimedia story, where the makers of the piece decide how long the image remains in front of the viewers’ eyes.

Here is one example of multimedia photography projects that he showed to illustrate the kind of work MediaStorm does.

In Rwanda, in 1994, Hutu militia committed a bloody genocide, murdering one million Tutsis. Many of the Tutsi women were spared, only to be held captive and repeatedly raped. Many became pregnant. Intended Consequences tells their stories. See the project at http://mediastorm.com/publication/intended-consequences

He touched upon some ways to structure a multimedia story to make it compelling viewing: establish empathy with the character(s), using body language, which makes up 80 percent of communication. He spoke about ‘back-timing’, having an element in the imagery that challenges a statement that has just been made. Visual sequences should be little essays, moving without extreme cuts from wide to extreme close-up. Make sure that in cuts the viewer’s eyes can stay in the same place and remain on the point of interest. Take stills in the same format as the video, 16:9, to avoid letter-boxing or crops in the edited piece, and finally, be as ruthless in editing by subtraction as you would be when selecting your portfolio.

Just as interesting is the business model of MediaStorm with four lines for diversity: publication, project specific agency work, production work for others, and teaching online and in workshops. Interestingly, MediaStorm content is available without charge to embed in online publications for the desired reach. In order to show a whole project (story, supplementary stories, photographer’s epilogue) with or without subtitles in several languages, with easy access to options like forward, comment, access to transcripts in several languages, buy related photography books or get involved, MediaStorm has developed its own media player. This code is available to embed free of charge, as long as it’s not tampered with, which means that MediaStorm monetises every view of the story anywhere online, as it and the advertising is running off MediaStorm’s website. To prevent abuse, the back-end control is pure genius: anyone who embeds the player gets a unique ID within the code, and if any tampering with the code is detected, MediaStorm can switch that particular embed off from their end.

Editorial work for partners proved to be particularly interesting as NGOs and non-profit organisation begin to seek partnerships with journalists rather than straight marketing to get their message out. They want awareness raised by people who know how to get a story in depth, i.e. journalists, and even tend to pay more for such projects than regular editorial clients. Also, this can develop into long-term partnerships with updates and new stories in the future.

Due to the huge amount of really interesting information there was little time for questions. One that was particuarly relevant to photographers ‘crossing over’ raised the issue of video work compromising the stills photography. Storm replied that one needed to allow enough time for ‘hunting’ (getting the right stills) and ‘fishing’ (filming).

It was certainly one of the most informative and positive presentations about journalism and its future forms that this blogger has seen.