Tag Archives: photography

People Just Don’t Want to Work Hard

Posted on by
Comment

I watch a documentary about the Kolb Brothers on PBS and realize something tragic.

KAET, Channel 8, is one of our local PBS television stations. Last night, it showed a 30-minute documentary about the Kolb Brothers.

Emery and Ellsworth Kolb made their name as Grand Canyon Photographers. They started their business in 1903 (or thereabouts) and it remained in business until 1978 (or thereabouts; I’m good with dates, but not perfect). The studio where they lived and worked on the Grand Canyon’s South Rim still stands. It’s a bookstore now, with a gallery downstairs where their old movie theater used to be.

Because of a shortage of water at the Rim, when the Kolbs were first starting out, they printed their photographs down at Indian Gardens, which had a year-round creek. It was a nine-mile hike down and back and the Kolbs did it almost every day.

They’d start out at the top of the Bright Angel Trail, where they’d take photos of the mule riders as they began the descent. Then they’d run back to their studio on the rim and create proofs, often using muddy water collected from puddles and ponds to wash them. Then they’d hurry down the trail, on foot, and catch up to the mule riders before Indian Gardens. At the gardens, they’d show the proofs to the riders. The riders would order prints, then continue to Plateau Point or the river by mule. The Kolbs would create finished prints at Indian Gardens, where they could wash them with clear water. Then they’d hurry back up to the rim and be there when the riders returned at the end of the day to finish the sale.

Having been into the Grand Canyon less than 2 months ago, the thought of doing that hike every day sends chills down my spine. Of course, the Kolbs were young and weren’t carrying around extra weight, like I am. I think if I started doing it (and didn’t die of heart failure soon after starting), I’d drop my extra weight, strengthen up my muscles, and feel pretty good after a few months.

The point, of course, is that these guys came up with a plan to succeed and they worked hard to make it happen. Harder than 98% of the U.S. population would be willing to work. And that’s a problem.

It seems to me that people are soft these days, more interested in how much money they can make with the minimum amount of work than how much work it would take to really succeed and get ahead.

I’m not talking about time here. People don’t seem to care about how much time they spend at work. In my old corporate America days, when I worked in Corporate Headquarters for Automatic Data Processing (ADP) as an auditor and later, financial analyst, I often saw people staying late in their cubicles, heads buried in documents that were likely just giving them something to focus on in case their bosses came by. The goal, of course, was to be seen by your boss at your desk after quitting time as often as possible. That supposedly showed how hard you worked. To me, it showed how little regard you had for your family or how little life you had outside the office. I didn’t play that game. I started at 8 and quit at 4 (to beat the traffic both ways) and got a lot of work done in between. No one ever bothered me about leaving so early — probably because I always had the coffee ready for them when they got in at 8:45 AM.

These days, promotions seemed based more on how long you’ve been on the job than how well you do that job. People are constantly looking for ways to minimize the amount of work they do. Few people ask to do more work than they’re given. Instead, they stretch that work out so it takes as long as possible. They look busy, but they’re taking their blessed time. After a while, they naturally slow down. Then they can’t keep up. And they complain.

I think being an employer here in Wickenburg woke me up a bit. As fuel manager, I had a staff of employees who spent the day sitting in the airport terminal, providing airport condition information on the radio, pumping fuel into the few airplanes that stopped by, and keeping the place neat and clean. The vast majority of the 8-hour day was spent sitting at a desk that looked out over the fuel pump area. On a windy or rainy or very hot day, no one would fly in. Otherwise, they could expect 10 to 20 planes a day, 25% of which might actually stop for a bathroom break or soda or fuel. Sometimes, people would drive in to chat or check the place out. So the employee chatted — that was part of the job, too. “Ambassador to Wickenburg,” was one of the phrases that was thrown around by the town. Whatever.

I’d created a checklist of things that had to be done every day. Things like check the fuel farm for leaks (a 5-minute walkaround), get the mail (2 minutes if you used the back door), fill the fridge with soda (5 minutes with 2 trips to the closet in the hallway), clean out the bathrooms (15 minutes; they were seldom used and seldom dirty), take morning and afternoon readings from the fuel pumps (5 minutes each trip), mop the floor (15 minutes) — you get the idea. There was about 2 hours of real work on that checklist and, on a really dead day, that would only take about an hour to do (bathrooms don’t get dirty, soda isn’t sold, etc.). Most of my employees did the job without complaining. After all, there really wasn’t much to do and they had 8 hours to get it done. But one or two of them just couldn’t do it without complaining and whining. Sometimes they’d skip things on the checklist and try to tell me that it had been too busy with aircraft fueling at quitting time to do it. Of course, they didn’t mention that they were too busy reading a book or talking on the phone the rest of the day.

One of these guys quit when I reminded him that he had to do everything on the checklist. He just quit with no notice. Sheesh. Did he think I was going to back down? He obviously didn’t know me very well.

It was employee problems that caused me to sell out my Airport fuel manager contract. I just couldn’t deal with the mentality of the one or two people who couldn’t be thankful for a job that paid them to sit on their butts most of the day, in a relatively comfortable place (heat and air conditioning at their command), chatting or reading or just watching the planes go by.

One of the guys tried getting his new boss to pay him more. A lot more. Like almost double what he was making, which was already too much. When the new boss refused, this guy quit. No notice. It really put the new boss in a bad spot, especially since he was already shorthanded and this guy worked 5 days a week. And the boss’s uncle had just died in Idaho and he needed to make a trip to the funeral. This employee obviously thought he’d get his way. But the new boss was a lot like me in one respect. He doesn’t back down. So the guy was unemployed for a long time and I heard he even filed bankruptcy. (He tried to tell the Airport Manager that I’d gotten him fired. Can you imagine that?)

The new boss wound up getting the guy who’d quit working for me to work for him. Recently, when he reminded that guy about his work responsibilities, he quit again. At least he gave two weeks notice this time.

It’s this kind of mentality that has me worried about the U.S. It isn’t just adults who think and act this way. It’s kids, too. In fact, I think the kids are worse. They spend more time and effort thinking about how little work they could do to get by rather than actually doing work that’ll help them get ahead.

I think of the Kolb brothers running up and down that trail. I can’t think of one person — myself included — who would do that kind of work to make a business succeed. Maybe that’s a problem.

A Good Attitude

Posted on by
2

I’m happy to be appreciated.

Yarnell Daze is coming up in May. It’s an event that’s been happening just about every spring in Yarnell for the past 30+ years. It includes a parade, art fair, car show, and all kinds of other activities for people of all ages. A lot of fun up in Yarnell, high above the low desert just as the low desert is starting to really heat up.

Years ago, I noticed someone giving helicopter rides as part of the Yarnell Daze festivities. He was flying out of a lot beside the Mountainaire convenience store (Woody’s) in Peeples Valley. I only saw him one year and that’s because I was just driving through on my way home from Prescott.

So I figured I’d call the Yarnell Chamber of Commerce and ask if I could do helicopter rides for them. There was a machine when I called. (There’s always a machine when you call. I don’t think Yarnell’s Chamber of Commerce is very busy.) So I left a message. And so began our game of telephone tag.

Someone from the Chamber called back and said they were thrilled that I’d called. Thrilled. Wow. Can’t help liking that attitude. Her message said their first Yarnell Daze planning meeting was coming up on a Monday in February and could I attend? I checked my calendar and called back. I told the machine I’d be out of town that day (I was going to be at the Grand Canyon doing a mule trip I’d planned eight months in advance). Then I didn’t hear anything for a while.

I called back early this month to see where things stood. I left another message. Someone named Linda called back and left a message for me with a different phone number. I called back and actually spoke to Linda. Their second meeting was March 28. Could I come? I put it on my calendar.

The meeting was at the Buzzard’s Roost, an interesting little cafe on the north end of town. The Buzzard’s Roost was always a funky, kind of junky-looking place that specialized in smoked food — ribs, pulled pork, etc. It was tiny inside — maybe six tables? — and had a few tables outside. Then someone came along and fixed the place up. They enclosed the outside with clean, neat-looking siding, removing the outdoor seating and making the place look….well, normal. Around that time, the bikers stopped coming in and the place looked empty all the time. It had been stripped of character. Then someone must have woken up to the fact that the place’s old funky look was part of its formula for success. They somehow managed to make it look weird and funky again, added more outdoor seating, and parked an old Harley out front. Now it’s the same old place it was but bigger and people stop in for meals again.

I stepped inside, wearing my freshly pressed Flying M Air oxford shirt and feeling a bit out of place. There were people there having breakfast, but no big groups. A woman at the counter looked at me and said, “Yes, this is the meeting.” Her name was Wendy and with her was a man who turned out to be the cook. When he went into the kitchen to get to work, I noticed that he wore a western style holster under his apron with two revolvers tucked inside it. I don’t think they were fake.

Wendy owned the Buzzard’s Roost and was evidently part of the Yarnell Chamber. She was excited that I’d come and excited that I’d be doing helicopter rides. In fact, she told everyone who walked in or called on the phone while I was there that they’d be having helicopter rides at Yarnell Daze. I know she was more excited than I was. We talked about pricing, hours of operation, etc.

Then she asked me if I could be in the parade. She wanted me to hover down the street. Wow. I’ve always wanted to do that. I know I have the skills required. But the downwash would create hurricane-like winds as I passed. It could blow up dust and tiny pebbles. It could get in people’s faces or eyes or damage property on the parade route. I had to say no. But I promised to do a low fly-by during the parade.

Wendy suggested advance ticket sales. A great idea, especially after the farce at Lake Havasu City. I’d know in advance how many people I could expect at a minimum. We’d do advance ticket sales at a slightly lower price, to encourage people to buy before the event. The tickets would have time slots on them, so not everyone would show up at once. She could sell them at the Buzzard’s Roost, which would help her draw people in. All I had to do was create the tickets and a bunch of flyers.

Linda came by and we talked about landing zones. That’s the only thing that bothered me about the gig: the proposed landing zone was all the way out in Peeples Valley, about three miles further up route 89. Not exactly the in-your-face LZ I like to have. The presale tickets would help get people out there, but didn’t they have a better location?

A man having breakfast, who’d already chatted with me about doing aerial photography from the helicopter, suggested a field near “Choo-Choo,” the train museum at the edge of Yarnell. Linda and I scoped it out when we went to check the Peeples Valley LZ. We both agreed it was better. Linda had the job of finding out who owned it and getting their permission to operate there.

That in itself was weird. Most hosts require that I find and get permission for landing zones. Yarnell was doing everything for me.

Want to know something else that was weird? Linda told me they have insurance and I didn’t have to worry about it. Wow. Normally, the big stumbling block for these events is insurance — hosts normally want to make sure I have it and add their names as additional named insureds. It’s become part of my planning ritual for events. So I told Linda that I have insurance, too. I produced the certificate and made her take a copy. I told her that I pay a ton of money for my insurance and I wanted everyone to know I had it. She took it — probably just to be polite.

Yesterday, I had all the tickets and flyers ready to bring to Yarnell. But I don’t get up there too often so I wanted to mail them up. This way, they’d get them right away. So I called Wendy at the Buzzard’s Roost to get her address. They don’t have mail to their physical address in Yarnell. It’s all Post Office boxes. She told me that she appreciated me doing this. As if I were doing her a favor. I told her that it was my pleasure, that Yarnell was a pleasure to work with, and that I hoped I met their expectations.

And I meant it.

It’s nice to see a Chamber of Commerce that actually works hard to ensure the success of its events, one that invites local businesses to participate and makes it easy for them to do their part. A Chamber of Commerce with a positive “can-do” attitude rather than the “why should we do something for you?” attitude I’ve seen all too many times around here. I think I’ll be joining the Yarnell Chamber of Commerce. It’ll be a real pleasure to support such a good organization.

Now if only all of my helicopter ride hosts were as pleasant and accommodating as Yarnell.

Photos Taken Offline

Posted on by
Comment

I take my slideshows offline. Here’s why.

I got a rude awakening the other day when someone sent me an e-mail postcard that featured one of my photographs.

Now I know this person didn’t mean anything by it. He was writing to me about something in the photo and I guess he figured that the photo would help him communicate what he was trying to say.

But it got me thinking. And it made me realize that the .Mac slideshows I’ve created to show off the places I’ve been are a perfect format for theft. They’re a high enough resolution for the Web (obviously) and for printing at smaller sizes. These are usually photos of remote places in Arizona and I’d like to think some of them are interesting and artistic. I create and sell photo greeting cards with these photos. It would really piss me off if someone else was doing the same thing with my work.

My friend Laura, who is a local photographer, is stuck with a similar dilemma, and was asking me about it just the other day. She wants to show off her work on her Web site and make photos available for sale. But she’s worried that people will just download the photos off the Web and print them. People do it all the time. People mistakenly believe that if something is on the Web, it’s not protected by copyright law.

It’s happened to me with work I’ve written here. Someone liked one of my articles in these blogs so much, he printed it out, photocopied it, and distributed it all over town. He left my byline on it, but made no note of the context of where it had been found. His goal was to make me look evil — some people really do need to get a life — but he wound up providing entertainment for a lot of people who agreed with me. But that’s not the point. The point is, he broke the law in distributing my work without my permission. The next time it happens, I will prosecute. Heck, I’d love to get a copyright thief to pay for my helicopter.

So anyway, I pulled the high-res photos offline. And, from now on, photos will be limited to the small, low-resolution images you see here in these blogs.

Air-to-Air

Posted on by
Comment

An air-to-air photo shoot gives mixed results.

I needed a photo of my helicopter in flight for marketing materials. Jim needed a photo of his helicopter in flight for the cover of Trade-A-Plane. It seemed natural that we should go out together and take care of both photo shoots.

Three-Niner-LimaI’ve done this before. Years ago, when I needed photos of my R22 for marketing material, a friend took Mike and a camera up in a Piper Cub. We flew in formation around Vulture Peak. Mike snapped off 50 or so digital photos. I loaded them into my computer, discarded the really bad ones, and cropped the good ones to get what I needed.

Tristan's R44Two years ago, we did the same thing with Tristan’s R44. This time, I flew Mike in my R22. We flew in formation around Vulture Peak until Mike had about 30 pictures. For some reason, the focus wasn’t good on all of them — I think the camera’s autofocus feature was just starting to die at that point — but we had enough good photos for what we needed.

Sunday’s flight with Jim was a little different. Jim was more concerned with background than anything else. So we had to fly out to an area north of Lake Pleasant to get the interesting rock formations he wanted. He took Mike to photograph me first, then landed in a wash near what looked like a marijuana farm and let Mike out. Jim took off and I landed to pick up Mike. Then we shot Jim from my helicopter.

I didn’t enjoy the experience. Jim sits on the opposite side of the helicopter from me, so he couldn’t see me when he was next to me. He got very close twice and it really freaked me out. Mike couldn’t communicate with Jim because Jim has a push-to-talk intercom in his helicopter and Mike couldn’t push it while he was shooting pictures out of a tiny window. And the radio was a mess because every time we picked a frequency, it turned out to be a frequency already in use. We had to keep switching. Even when we got on the helicopter air-to-air frequency, some idiot kept trying to tell us to get off.

Now I know it sounds as if we dove into this without any planning. We didn’t. Jim and I discussed formation flying before we took off. We came up with a plan for getting the pictures. But somewhere along the line, the plan got thrown out the window. (It wasn’t my window; my windows don’t open.) The resulting flight was full of unpleasant surprises.

Zero Mike Lima in FlightBut Mike did get a few decent photos of my helicopter. One of them was almost perfect. A few of them were pretty funny; Mike managed to cut off various parts of the helicopter in others. Two of the photos didn’t show the helicopter at all. (That might have been when I spotted Jim over my left shoulder and veered away from him.) None of the photos, however, were as good as that first Vulture Peak shoot. In those photos, I’d been looking right at the camera. (That’s because I’d been following the lead, looking at the lead like I was supposed to. On this shoot, I’d been the lead but Jim had lost sight of me and passed me. Seeing him beside me, just after this photo was taken, scared the shit out of me.)

Jim's Hughes 500The photos of Jim’s helicopter weren’t very good at all. Jim had this idea of background firmly entrenched in his mind. So rather than form up with us and let Mike shoot photos with him relatively close, he followed the contours of a cliff face. He must have been a few hundred feet away from the cliff for the entire run. I couldn’t see him because I was ahead of him so I didn’t know how far away he was. He should have been watching me, forming up on me, adjusting his distance accordingly. I don’t know what kind of camera lens he thought we had. Mike claimed that Jim’s helicopter filled “one third to two thirds of the frame,” but Mike was seriously mistaken. In most shots, Jim’s ship is a red, white, and blue speck against the desert. I cropped the hell out of this shot here; it would not be suitable for printing.

Two Helicopters in WickenburgI was a nervous wreck when we finished up and very glad to be done. (My hands were shaking for some time afterward.) We landed and parked side by side on the ramp. Then we wandered over to the terminal to the shade to look at the photos in the camera’s tiny screen. We were both disappointed. I knew I had a few usable shots, but Jim’s were just too small to be of any use.

I do want to say that I appreciate Jim taking the time to do the shoot with us. I know his ship is expensive to fly and that he’s very busy working on a new product to show at Heli Expo early next month. I wish we’d gotten some better shots of his ship. Maybe we’ll try again sometime soon, when Jim isn’t so pressed for time.

I Bought an iPod Photo

Posted on by
Comment

I didn’t want to do it, but I had to.

The biggest problem I have as the author of computer books and articles is that in order to write about hardware and software, I have to own it. Or at least have it in my possession for enough time to learn and write about it.

That’s why I bought an iPod years ago. I had to write about using iTunes with an iPod for my Mac OS X book. I couldn’t get a loaner from Apple and I didn’t know anyone who had one. So I had to buy one. I still have it and still use it. It’s the original iPod, which held 1,000 songs on its whopping 5 GB hard drive. At the time, it was an incredible breakthrough in MP3 technology. But today, it’s a dinosaur, almost embarrassing to admit owning. (I own a Newton, too. But let’s not go there today, huh?) But it works, so I don’t care.

Want to know where I spent the most time listening to my ancient iPod? In my old helicopter, Three-Niner-Lima. I had Paul, my old mechanic, install an audio patch into the intercom system and put an RCA jack on the side of the instrument panel. I bought a nice leather case for the iPod with a mounting do-dad so I could hang it beside that jack. Then I used a standard Radio Shack cable (not bought locally; those guys don’t have anything you need when you need it) to patch the iPod into the helicopter’s intercom system. I could listen to tunes while I flew. Best of all, when there was a radio transmission, the music would automatically cut out so I could hear the radio. Ditto when I talked on the radio. A great arrangement. It made some of those long cross-country flights over Arizona and California and Nevada deserts a bit more pleasant.

The iPod Photo came out about a month or so ago. Probably less. I can’t remember. Anyway, Apple took the next logical step and made it possible to put photos on an iPod. So they’re worth looking at, they changed the screen to color. And since 10 or 20 GB isn’t enough to hold all your music and photos, they come with either 40 GB or 60 GB worth of storage.

I tried to get one from Apple as a loaner. They have an editorial loan program that is extremely difficult to get hardware from. I succeeded twice times in the past — I got an iBook loaner once and an iMac (ET style) loaner another time. But this time I wasn’t as lucky. I was told the waiting list was “a mile long.” Wow. So I bought one.

It came yesterday. I had company so I couldn’t tear open the box and immediately play with it. So I took it to work this morning. I’d just finished work on [yet] another Word book and was waiting for the index to come from the indexer so I could lay it out. I’d promised articles to two publishers. But I could spare a few hours to configure and learn about my new toy — I mean, vital piece of hardware.

It’s cool. No doubt about it. The dock it comes with sure beats that FireWire cable I left on my desk for syncing and recharging the old iPod. And the color screen is beautiful.

I stuck it in the dock and immediately started putting songs on it. I was able to fit my entire iTunes music library, which really isn’t much — only about 1,600 songs. (No reason for me to copy all my CDs to my computer’s hard drive when they weren’t going to fit on my iPod anyway.) Then I copied my iPhoto photo library to the iPod. All 2,600 photos. When I was done, I’d used less than half of the iPod’s 40 GB. Sheesh.

I got an e-mail from one of the editors waiting for articles and wrote back to her, mentioning that I’d just gotten an iPod Photo. How about an article that explains how to create a custom slide show with music on the iPod? She wrote back saying that they’d been talking about iPod photo in a meeting that morning. Write the article! So I did. And I submitted it this afternoon.

So I guess it must be an important piece of hardware, necessary for my work. After all, I’d owned it for less than 24 hours when I wrote an article about it that earned me $300. Another article and it’ll be paid for.

And yes, the new helicopter will be iPod-compatible. It has a built-in audio jack. But I think I’ll stick the old iPod in there, just for old time’s sake. After all, 1,000 songs really is enough.