VerveCast

One of the key components of my success thus far as a young creative has been involvement. Getting out there. Meeting new people. Learning about new ideas. Getting to know the movers and shakers in the Milwaukee community. Plus, being involved in the creative community is a great way to reinvigorate your own creativity. Re-motivate and re-inspire yourself, so to speak. And it never hurts to be in the know.

That’s why I’m a big supporter of networking and community gatherings that support Milwaukee’s creative culture. The following three upcoming events are personal recommendations from yours truly. I suggest you check them out:

TONIGHT: Spreenkler Meetup
Group of energetic creatives who gather to discuss social, tech, startups and more. The meetup consists of a little presentation or two, Q&A and then open forum. Beer and snacks are usually provided. I’ve attended this meetup for close to a year now, if not more, and in my opinion, it’s a can’t-miss event.

SATURDAY: WriteCamp
“WriteCamp is a free, unconference designed for you to discover new ideas and connect with people who are part of the writing world in the Midwest. It’s free and open to the public — come and enjoy keynote speakers, ad-hoc presentations, networking and food.” This will be my first Write Camp visit… can’t wait!

SATURDAY: PhotoCamp
“PhotoCampMilwaukee is a BarCamp-like event fully focused on photography. It’s an ad-hoc un-conference for people who love photography to get together and teach what they know, and learn what they don’t.” Even though I’m no pro photographer, I do have a passion for it. Sadly, it falls on the same day as WriteCamp so I won’t be able to attend this year, but you’ll see our very own Pete if you attend!

Okay, now it’s your turn. What events here in the Milwaukee area do you love to attend? Why do you think it’s so important to stay involved with and connected to our creative community?

One of the great things about working at Z2 is getting to play with the equipment after-hours…

Last week I stuck around one night and projected some of my Processing animations on the cyc wall in the photo studio, and did long exposure self-portraits.

I’m never sure how we may use this sort of thing in the future. Is there a client that will want something like this? Is there an internal project that could benefit by this sort of experimentation? I never know… but working in the creative arts, I believe you have to keep trying things, and hope that they can be sparks that someday start a fire.

Here at Z2 we’ve made some mistakes. Like you, we’re only humans, and we do our best to get it right the first time, but that doesn’t always happen. One thing we actively do to prevent mistakes is check one another’s work. (In fact, I just asked Olivia if it should be anothers or another’s or anothers’ in that last sentence.)

I grew up in the world of print, where mistakes were a lot more costly, but even in the digital world, we do our best to get it right the first time. If you just spent 20 minutes rendering a video file, and then another 20 minutes exporting and compressing it, the last thing you want to see is a typo.

I’m going to assume that other agencies do the same thing, and as for freelancers, well, I hope they have a good solution to proof something before sending it off to a client. (It’s often hard to see your own mistakes, especially when you’ve been working on a project for so long you can’t look at it objectively anymore.)

That said, it looks like the folks at the post office could use a bit of help in the proofing department.

It seems when the USPS issued a Statue of Liberty stamp, they used the wrong photo.

The Statue of Liberty depicted on a USPS stamp is actually the one at Las Vegas’s New York-New York Casino, and not the original in New York Harbor.

Oops.

Remember kids, ask a friend to proof your work!

Back in 2009 I was working in my office at home when my wife’s cat Cleo started head-butting my leg. This is her way of saying “Hey!” so I picked her up and put her on my desk. My wife then came into the office, saw my headphones on the desk, put them on her cat, and suggested I take a photo, so I did.

Since I like sharing the photos I take I uploaded it to Flickr and titled it Headphones Cat.

So last week Mashable did a story on 5 New Sites for Deep Discounts on Music and there was my photo!

So how did this happen?

When I published my photo on Flickr, I choose a Creative Commons license that allows others to use my work. The specific license I chose was “Attribution, Noncommercial, Share Alike” which means that if someone uses the photo, they have to give me credit, they can’t use it for commercial purposes, and if they make changes, the new image they create has to have the same license.

Flickr has a nice feature that allows you to search for Creative Commons licensed work. I’ve used it plenty of times. Typically, if I need photos for a presentation, I’ll use photos from Flickr with a Creative Commons license. (And I always provide credit and a link.)

If we get deep into the licensing issues of Creative Commons, there’s great debate over what constitutes “commercial” use. For instance, Mashable is free to access, you are not paying to read their site, but there are advertisements, and they make money from those advertisements. The story could exist fully without my specific photo. It was not a story about the photo itself, though the photo does help support it in a minimal way. These are the sort of issues that are tough to sort out, but for most cases, they don’t come into play.

We told Cleo she was on Mashable, but she wasn’t really impressed and appeared to instead wonder when she’d get her next treat.

There are no photos involved like last time, but I still consider this a certain sort of a challenge.

In my years at Z2 Photo I’ve learned that being a photographer means being resourceful, and sometimes that means solving problems quickly–really quickly–like, before anyone else even realizes there is a problem.

So with that in mind, I tweeted the following question:

I had already thought of a few items I would use as a light diffuser, but was really interested to see what others might come up with.

I’m not convinced that every item listed would function as a “diffuser” but it was great to see the ingenuity of people. :)

Thanks to everyone who answered my question!