Thursday, May 19th

AZASMP Presents “Shoot the Breeze”
A casual social event for local photographers. Everybody’s welcome—members and nonmembers, seasoned professionals and students and emerging photographers. Drop in, meet your local photo community, and say howdy. Bring images. Free for ASMP members and students, $5 for nonmembers. RSVPing to Steve Dreiseszun is appreciated.

Friday, May 20th

Photoshelter presents “How to Start your Photo Business”
Continuing their series of free webinars, this collaboration with MAC Group (suppliers of fine photographic products including Profoto, PocketWizard, and Tenba) is aimed at helping students move from school to business. Speakers include several industry heavyweights—John Harrington, Greg Smith, Matt Whatley, and “Photo Closer” Frank Meo—and a half-dozen recent graduates who have made the transition. Free registration is required; space is limited.

Avid Media Composer 5.5 Tour
Avid Media Composer 5.5 was released not all that long ago, and Avid (along with local partner EAR) wants you to see what they’ve cooked up. If you’re working with DSLR or RED video, this will probably be well worth checking out, if only to see what the Joneses have. Free preregistration is required; space is limited.

Friday, June 10th

Clarion Call II: Call Harder
They say lightning never strikes twice… They were wrong. Selina’s back with a vengeance. Insert additional Die Hard references here. Hot on the heels of the original Clarion Call, Selina Maitreya’s at it again. The teleconference—nay, telesummit—guest list this time around includes Nike’s Aric Rist, buyer Beverly Adler, ASMP’s Susan Carr, consultant Maria Piscopo, Frank “Photo Closer” Meo (yes, he does get around), and ASMP’s Gail Mooney. Spaces are limited; admission at one level has already sold out. $25–$50 to listen live, special packages available starting at $97.

Through June 25th

William Wegman: A Thing or Two
Dogs! Gallerists! Gigantic-format Polaroids! Wegman located a collection of 20×24 Polaroids depicting his well-known Weimaraners while organizing his studio. They hadn’t been seen in years, but they’re on the walls of the Lisa Sette Gallery from now to June 25th.

Through August 14th

Pure Photography, Post Production, and Mixed Media
The latest in the Center for Creative Photography’s “CCP at the Phoenix Art Museum” initiative, this exhibit (hanging now) examines the gamut from straight photography to extremely… uh, un-straight photography. $10 adults, $8 students and seniors, free on Wednesdays after 3pm.

Check out the excellent and simply-named Give Me Something To Read. It’s a great Tumblr stuffed to the gills with interesting, thought-provoking, and fresh content from across the web.

Give Me Something To Read is best paired with (and is sponsored by) one of the coolest services to be developed recently—Instapaper. Instapaper lets you amass content you want to read later with a handy “Read Later” bookmarklet in your browser. Come across an interesting page anywhere on the web, click “Read Later,” and it’s ferreted away to your Instapaper account to read later. It doesn’t clutter up your browser’s bookmarks, and best of all, it makes it incredibly easy to read those articles at any time from any computer and nearly any device.

I’m in love with Instapaper for iOS, which lets you access your Instapaper clippings from your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad. It’s incredibly simple to use, it will download articles so you can read them where there’s no 3G coverage, and it’s even smart enough to automatically switch to a night mode for easier reading in the dark.

Even if you don’t have an iOS device, there’s a thriving ecosystem being built around Instapaper. Many popular third-party desktop and mobile applications can save links to your Instapaper account, and there are Instapaper clients for easy reading on everything from Android to the Kindle.

Any time I’m stuck in a waiting area, my iPhone comes out with a ready-built newspaper full of only the articles I’m interested in. It definitely beats the stack of months-old magazines and trashy, overpriced airport novels.

Getting my schedule at SB3, I was disappointed to find I’d ended up in “The Artist Lost and Found, Part I” due to scheduling issues. Having survived a BFA program, it hadn’t sounded even remotely useful when I’d been choosing my workshops. But I was in L.A., I didn’t have to alter my schedule at all to stay in Part I, and it still sounded like a nice break from the nitty-gritty of many of the other  workshops. I gave myself over to happenstance.

What actually happened in that hour with Sean Kernan was not anything at all I was expecting. I’m not even sure how the description could have been worded to more clearly describe what did happen. And I’m loath to go into too much detail lest I ruin the experience.

What I will say is that if you go into it with an open mind, you’ll get something out of it.

I left that (all too brief) hour with Sean Kernan feeling like I haven’t  felt since I was spending every waking hour in one of the art buildings at ASU. It was reinvigorating, refreshing, and left me with the desire to go make something, dammit!

Hearing time and again that more clients are looking for photographers to create—or at least manage—combined still/motion shoots, I wanted to get a more solid handle on the best ways to handle production. Basic doesn’t cut it forever. SB3 delivered with “Essential Pre-Production for Video” led by Richard Harrington. Both a prolific author and trainer and owner of a successful video firm in D.C., RHED Pixel, there was no going wrong.

Richard crams an incredible amount of information about video production into an hour. Whatever you want to know, it’s almost certainly covered in his session. I feel considerably more comfortable estimating motion shoots now without the nagging feeling that I might be leaving something out. Sitting down with my video jock friends afterward, we’ve run through hypothetical estimates and ended up at the same conclusions (and in some cases I’ve even covered things they haven’t thought of).

Gail Mooney’s been lecturing that video is a team sport for a couple years now—Richard’s session will leave you equipped to build the right team for any project.

I recently attended SB3 in Los Angeles, and as an emerging photographer it was easily the single most valuable event I have attended since I graduated. Both ASMP national and my local chapter have produced a number of valuable events in the time I’ve been a member, but you will never find anything as value-dense as Strictly Business. $250—or even less if you’re a student or ASMP leader—gets you a hardcore weekend of education, networking, and strategizing.

When your only complaint coming away from an event is that it wasn’t long enough, you know it was a good one. And that’s just the case with SB3. I’ll be blogging more about SB3 over the next couple weeks, but I would strongly encourage any emerging or established professional photographer to attend.

Here, let’s deal with some excuses:

I’m a poor student. I can’t possibly afford this!
Lies! Lies and mendacity! Students get a special discount rate of $200, ASMP member or not. (And you should totally be an ASMP member, by the way. It’s a valuable membership at normal dues, but there is no better steal than the $50 student membership.) SB3 will give you the industry knowledge and connections that will help you start out your business on the right foot. And food’s expensive, right? Good news: ASMP will feed you at least four meals. There’s also alcohol. And if there’s anything both students and photographers love, it’s alcohol.

I’m an emerging photographer! I can’t afford this!
Hi. I’m Colin Mattson. I’m an emerging photographer. I paid my $250 ASMP member rate and ASMP fed me four meals, kept my gullet stuffed between and after meals, and offered me alcohol. They also fed my brain, giving me the tools to get in and stay in business. I met photographers of all levels and ages and built a useful support network. And you know what happens next April? That $250, plus my travel costs, all comes off my taxes. What’s better than a free conference? (I suppose the non-rhetorical answer is “A conference you’re paid to attend,” but those don’t come around terribly often.)

I’m an established photographer and can’t possibly learn anything new.
If you’re completely incapable of learning due to a traumatic brain injury, I’ll buy this one. But for everyone else, just look at the workshop list. More and more clients want multimedia and video; how ready are you to serve those markets? Even if you’re comfortable shooting video, how comfortable are you with the way rights work for video? (Hint: It doesn’t work like stills.) How’s your personal work going? Sean Kernan’s sessions can help you break out of commercial robot mode. Need some professional insights into your business? SB3 has the industry’s top consultants at bargain basement prices. The industry’s changing; SB3 is an excellent look at how it’s changing and how to deal with it. Four people even get up on stage and bare all about how they’re adapting. (And if you want to be one of them, you might be able to attend the Chicago session for free.)

This is a big loss to the photo community. Heather’s hosted some great discussions over at HMAb, and she’s often brought an interesting perspective to things as both a Canadian and a freelance buyer. I’ll definitely miss her updates—and the “A Year in the Life” series by emerging photographers Jaime Hogge and Grant Harder—but what’s already there is massively useful itself.

If you’ve never checked out HMAb, I definitely recommend dropping by and digging through the archives.

I’ve got my fingers crossed that Heather returns to blogging  in the future!

If you haven’t tried it out yet, you owe it to yourself—Adobe’s made a ton of improvements to Lightroom, and it’s most notably in the brand spanking new raw processor (which is also part of Photoshop CS5). With this release, Adobe has closed in on what were traditionally the front-runners in image quality.

Lightroom 3 gives Capture One a serious run for its money, and in my opinion the new noise reduction algorithms may even surpass C1′s in quality. It’s good stuff so check it out!