Today’s inspirational quote of the day comes from Bobby’s blog Annabelle, Believe!,
Contrary to popular belief, when people are taken away from you, the perspective they gave you still exists for you somewhere. It was never on loan — you’ll have it for an entire lifetime. It doesn’t go away. It’s not some funnel cloud or wormhole that was spinning once only to later evaporate into nothing because they left. It’ll be with you forever. And if you wind up seeing things in a negative light, or if your vision winds up cloudy, it’s really just the overlapping perspectives of loss and grief playing games with it. Things get hazy, but what’s behind all the haze still exists for you if you’re willing to peer through it and continue to stare straight back.
So I want you to know that the world and the universe will always be unlocked for you thanks to that person, they just made it effortless for you once when they were around. And yeah, it sucks that now you have to put work in in order to see everything that way again.. but nothing outside yourself has really changed. Everything happening out there is still as wonderful as it always was.
Any high school era adventure always starts at 5:15 AM, and this one is no different. While in my early morning Seminary class, I decided to ditch school and go to the beach.
These are a few of my notes from my trip in late May through early June 2008 to Greece, England, Scotland, and the US state of Georgia. I’ve been rewriting the notes and adding different thoughts and turning scribbled freehand code-like notes into legible, and hopefully comprehendible articles. I’ve also had quite a bit of time to think about everything, time to process all the different cognitive input that I rapidly consumed. Letting the entire experience soak in allows this, and each time I retell what I did with my summer, I learn more and more from these notes and memories.
One of the first things I did when I found out I was going to Greece was plot out shots in my head. I had visualized what the photos of Greece looked like before I got to Greece. This was my first mistake. It was my first time out of the country in years and I had forgotten what it was like to be in a completely new place, with a completely different language that uses different characters. While the culture shock nearly threw off my groove, it did throw all my visualization out the window. Everything was better than I could have ever imagined, and the decision of what to keep and what to crop out of the picture became one of the most difficult parts of the trip. I wanted to capture the entire visual experience on camera but the scene you see through the viewfinder is different than the one you see with your eyes. This difficulty aside, I tried to stick to one of my few rules: keep the photos interesting.
Keep the photos interesting means don’t shoot the same photo everyone else. Don’t shoot that typical vacation photo that everyone else has seen. They’ve seen it before, they don’t need to see it again. Do look around for photos. Look for shots that are just calling for someone to capture a photo worth a thousand words. Not all photos are created equal. Some photos are ten word shots, other photos are worth thousands of words, and some their beauty could fill entire libraries of words.
I remember a question someone asked to me when I had just got back from the trip and people were reviewing the photos: why were you taking pictures of the ears of a horse? Isn’t that a little strange? That question seemed a little bit strange to me and caught me off guard. I wasn’t thinking, is taking pictures of the horse’s ears strange? I was thinking, what is the shot no one else will take? What will set my vacation photos apart from all the rest of the billions that are taken every summer? How can I get an interesting shot? Take this common subject and turn the objective of the shoot around. Instead of shooting photos of a horse, I was taking candid portraits of a superstar whose face is known around the world, and no one has the up close and personal shots. Instead of shooting with a huge telephoto lens like a paparazzi, I’d grab my 24 and 50. Instead of a full body shot, I’d get up in this horses face and find something interesting to take a photo of.
Once you get into the mindset of looking for photos, it becomes a new game and obsession. Everything you see becomes an photo opportunity, not to take photos of subjects, but to take interesting photos that tell their own history. My family had been to Greece twice before and returned with barely any photos. I was devastated each time they returned with a few pictures of everyone and the typical vacation shots. I promised myself before I left that I would take photos of every little thing and capture the spirit of the adventure. I went to Greece looking to take photos, create memories, and meet my Greek relatives. I came back with more than I expected: I returned with stories.
These are a few of my notes from my trip in late May through early June 2008 to Greece, England, Scotland, and the US state of Georgia. I’ve been rewriting the notes and adding different thoughts and turning scribbled freehand code-like notes into legible, and hopefully comprehendible articles. I’ve also had quite a bit of time to think about everything, time to process all the different cognitive input that I rapidly consumed. Letting the entire experience soak in allows this, and each time I retell what I did with my summer, I learn more and more from these notes and memories.
The first flight was a three and a half hour flight from San Diego to Atlanta. I think it was a 747 with touch screens on the backs of the seats. The prices for the on-demand content were a little ridiculous. A limited selection of music, movies, and television shows each cost $6, with a droning in-flight movie for people who weren’t wise enough to bring something to do. I brought two CDs and my classic Sony Walkman MP3-CD player. I had an enjoyable time in the window seat, staring out at the sky and the wing that occupied most of my view.
As I listened to the Cowboy Bebop soundtrack ‘Blue’ on repeat, I realized that the airline charges for every little thing. The meals are $6-10; drinks are $5; headphones are $2, luggage costs extra, more than one carry-on costs extra, fuel ’surcharges’. Almost as disgusting as the cellphone service corporations inventing new fees to add an extra $20 a month to the bill.
The only cool thing about the flight was that the touch screens had an option to look at the flight information. It displayed the altitude, time, distance to destination, a map with the intended and actual flight path, and other information. I’m not sure if this information was real-time from the airplane instruments or if they were delayed and altered so the passengers don’t get freaked out of suddenly their flight takes a turn for the worst. Best of all, the system is running on Linux, as the touch screen system on my chair crashed and rebooted in front of me. (The picture below is from a flight later on in the trip, but I’d be willing to bet they all use the same software base.)
I’m not a fan of Atlanta, nor am I a fan of the Atlanta airport, but that part of these notes, is at the end of the trip, not the beginning.
Gene and I hit it off immediately. We’re both a little sarcastic, both think fairly highly of ourselves, and both work as hard as we can to be valuable to those that hire us to do a job. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Oh our meeting wasn’t by coincidence. The company I was working for at the time hired the rock band KISS to come to a Sports Collectors convention that we were having in Atlantic City, New Jersey in the summer of 2003. At the time the company only had four full-time employees (of which I was in the top 3), two or three part-timers, and had hired at least 20 people to help out with this event. So I got an inside view at the hiring, negotiating, and managing of KISS – and I learned a lot from that process. But I really learned how to make the best effort I could in a situation by working with Gene Simmons for the day.
Not that Paul, Peter, and Tommy weren’t amazing guys themselves, but Gene clearly steers the ship. And rightly so.
Hiring KISS wasn’t an easy task. The negotiation, if I remember correctly, went on for weeks. It wasn’t only about the dollar amount either. Things like amenities, time spent, marketing, transportation, personalities involved (we also hired the KISS Demon wrestler and, believe it or not, there is a conflict in there somewhere), etc. However, the moment we got the entire deal solidified with KISS’ agent at the time, the legendary Doc McGee, Gene immediately jumped into our corner.
It was pretty amazing. Gene would do anything and everything he could to see that we were compensated properly for hiring the band. He wouldn’t make any more or less money based on his efforts or even if we were profitable in hiring KISS – but I could tell immediately that he didn’t care about that. The moment he was happy with what he was getting out of the event, he worked really hard to make sure we got what we paid for. I remember when he showed up to the venue, five days in advance of the event, to do a press junket. He arrived with his arms wrapped around 3 women. Not one, or two… but three. We did not ask him to do this. He rolled up in a limo, got out (sans make-up) clad in a white suit, and immediately the air around the entire event changed. It went from the average sporting event that happened every single year, to one that we knew would change the face of the industry. He walked up to the podium and gave a few statements (completely unrehearsed with us) and knocked it out of the park.
On the day of the event, the day I was formerly introduced to Gene face to make-up-covered face, he continued to put our interests above his own. He made sure we got the shots we wanted, the video clips we needed, and got the crowd more involved than we had ever asked. In fact, most of us were relatively inexperienced with working a crowd from a “rock ‘n roll” perspective. We had done large sporting events in the past, and they have their own feel, but this was something different. Gene walked out of the back room to see a crowd of a few thousand people in a building and managed to completely shift the focus of everyone in the over 1,000,000 sq. ft. building to him. The crowd went pretty crazy. At which point Gene turned to me and said; “Wow, you’re a popular guy huh?”. You had to be there.
During the entire event Gene and his band KISS were more than courteous with us and with everyone that paid good money to see them, get their photos taken with the band, and have their various items signed. We had people that flew in from all over the United States, some toting their entire instrument-collection to have signed, and I don’t think anyone was disappointed that they came. KISS stood for photographs and signed for hours in full make-up, 2-foot high boots and all.
At one point, about an hour into the signing session, Gene wanted to get rid of his gum. He, as any of us would, went seeking out a piece of paper to spit the gum into. When he did that, he signed it, handed it to me and said: “I bet that gets like $30 on eBay, email me if it doesn’t.” He was right. $32 after 12 bids. That may not seem like much money, but as I said, hiring KISS cost our company a pretty penny and the entire band did everything they could to make it worth our while.
I have always had the same philosophies, for better or for worse, as Gene. If someone hires you to do something, first be sure you’re happy with what you’re doing and happy with what you’re getting for doing it, and then try your best to make hiring you for the job the best choice that company could have made.