As I explained in an earlier post, I returned to school a few years ago, and am working on my degree in historical studies. My next class starts in about three weeks, and I’m talking a short vacation before diving back in … so I’m stepping away from the computer and from blogging to spend a little time with my family and to try to wrap up a few projects. An article I came across some time ago — Life Trumps Blogging — is always a good reminder about keeping a balanced perspective.

The upcoming class is called Exploring Place: History, and I’m very much looking forward to it. Here’s an excerpt from the course description:

Thinking of place as a community in a geographical location or physical environment, this interdisciplinary course seeks to offer an opportunity for a place-based approach to history. Explore the local history of the place you live (or some other place of interest), whether you define that place as a neighborhood, a whole village or town or city, a geographical region, or a watershed. Research, for example, a particular topic or period of local history by engaging with historical scholarship, consulting local archives and historical societies and/or interviewing community members who have witnessed local history.

It’s one of the classes that has an independent study component, and classes like that are always my favorite. This one’s so much right up my alley that I couldn’t be more excited for it to get started. I’ll also be considering ways to incorporate elements of the experience into this blog; I’ve never actually done that before, so I guess I’ll be making that up as I go along. Should be a fun time, don’t you think?

I spent an hour or so this evening browsing around on Blogcatalog, where I recently set up an account. I’m still getting used to using sites like Blogcatalog and MyBlogLog, so I haven’t done that much with them yet. But I do like being able to look for interesting blogs by zooming through their categories, or by noting what blogs are associated with folks who have interests similar to mine. Tonight I paged through Blogcatalog’s history category, and ended out adding four history-related blogs to my Newsgator feeds and to this site’s blogroll. The blogs, and the things that got my attention from each one, are briefly described below.

From Civil War Memory, an article on the tension over memorializing individuals — in this case, a potential plan to create a monument to recently deceased black civil rights attorney Oliver Hill — when the very act of memorializing seems to conflict with dominant political or social leadership and their influence. While I’ve studied quite a bit about the Civil War, my ongoing interest in Civil War history tends to revolve more around issues of this kind, and the difficult challenge of handling historical memories … whether related to the Civil War or other key (especially controversial) historical events.

From Clio and Me, an article asking questions about a pair of dramatically different stereo images from the First World War. The meaning of imagery like this and how we relate to it in terms of historical memory and contemporary culture is, to me, something we would do well to understand more about, as more and more of our world is represented to us in pictures and video, rather than text.

From Ponder and Dream, wonderful original historical illustrations that just make you think. See for example, this one, which is prefaced by a Longfellow poem.  Or just start with sites home page and look at as many as you can.

From The Victorian Peeper, an image and article about a Victorian “dinosaur theme park,” originally intended to demonstrate themes in evolution. I’m pretty much fascinated by all things Victorian — European and American — and by the connections between Victorian England, Victorian America, and our contemporary culture. Such connections are much more compelling than our stereotypical view of the Victorian period tends to encompass, a topic that I hope to cover in future articles.

I’ve got a couple of articles at the draft stage that I thought I might finish tonight and post, but it doesn’t look like I’ll get them done. So I decided to try something a little different and see how it goes.

You may have noticed the LibraryThing widgets in the far right sidebar, one of which shows covers from random books in my library. I have nearly all the books I own entered in LT; the only exceptions are some antique or unique books that I’ll write more about later. You can click on the widget or the title to take a look at my library; or you can just use this convenient link to my catalog, or even this equally convenient link to my profile (which, incidentally, has a really hot picture of my dog when he returned fresh from getting his hair done).

At any given time when you visit this page, the top LT widget shows up to nine of my books. With this post, I’m going to begin another new feature, Random Quotes from My Library, where I pick several of the books shown by the widget, open to an arbitrary page, and post a quotation. So we’ll have three or four or five random quotes taken from three or four our five random books, out of a randomly generated selection of nine books. If that doesn’t unravel the mysteries of the universe, I don’t know what will. Oh, and yes, you’ll have to trust me on the selections I make, since whenever you read these posts, the widget will probably be displaying something else.

It’s already quite late here in Atlanta, so let’s go with just three books, and here they are.

From Sail Away: Stories of Escaping to Sea, the opening paragraph (on page 138) to the short story “The Gentleman from San Francisco” by Ivan Bunin:

The gentleman from San Francisco — nobody in either Naples or Capri could remember his name — was on his way to the Old World with his wife and daughter, there to spend two whole years devoted entirely to pleasure.

Consider how that straightforward sentence pulls you in, making it an excellent way start a short story. The mark of a fine first sentence in any piece of writing is that it encourages you to read the second sentence.

In Decades of Crisis: Central and Eastern Europe before World War II by Ivan T. Berend, the author discusses changes in European art in the early 1900s, focusing momentarily on Igor Stravinsky and his three famous pieces, Firebird, Petrushka, and Rite of Spring. The following is from page 98:

The elemental, raw, brutal music of these works created the greatest of scandals and lasting impressions, perhaps because its deliberately primitive subject matter was expressed through the medium of the traditional, overrefined genre of the ballet.

If you have ever heard Firebird or Rite of Spring, you know Berend’s description is right on target. If you haven’t heard either one, set aside any preconceived notion about how you might react to their “primitiveness” and dive in, keeping in mind (or considering after) how such music might have been perceived around 1910.

In Cities in Civilization, author Sir Peter Hall discusses Marshall McLuhan in a chapter called “The Invention of Mass Culture.” On page 512, he describes McLuhan’s unique contribution to cultural thought in a way I’ve come across before, that has always stuck in my mind:

Print, said McLuhan, had for five hundred years been an all-pervasive medium, whose great characteristic was that the reader remained detached and non-involved. Electric technology was different because it entered the central nervous system including the brain, making it possible for us to communicate instantly with the source; and electricity allowed people to live and work — and even think and act — independently.

These couple of sentences do hit on key elements of McLuhan’s thought, including print v. electrical technologies, technology as extension of the brain and central nervous system, the effects of instantaneous communication, the effects of speed and simultaneous interactions, and the impact of technology on how people live, work, act, and think. If you wonder if you might find McLuhan interesting, try Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. You could even extend tonight’s blogging experiment, I’m sure:  open McLuhan’s book to any three random pages, and you’ll have more material for more blog articles than you can possibly imagine.

I had read a couple of articles about Windows Live Writer during the week, so this morning I thought I would try it out. This post was written with Live Writer; and unlike other similar tools I’ve tried, I didn’t have to go back into the WordPress editor and tweak the results because they didn’t look right after the article posted. As far as I’m concerned, that alone is H-U-G-E!

I’ve just started exploring Live Writer’s functions, so may write a little more about it in future articles. One thing I noticed that I already like a lot is that you can click a check box when inserting a hyperlink and the program automatically adds ‘target=”_blank”‘ to the link so that it opens a new tab or window when clicked. I’ve been trying to follow a rule of my own when I add links, especially to blogs: I link to blog home pages so they open in a new window, and blog articles so they open in the current window. I noticed that that’s how I often read and follow articles, so I thought it would be a good practice. I usually end out going back through the draft of a post and adding ‘target=”_blank”‘ to a bunch of the links so this is a real time-saver for me.

You can download the Windows Live Writer Beta here, and there’s a blog here.  Since it’s a local install, you would of course need to install it on any computer you plan to blog from (I wonder if there is, or if they’re planning, a web version). A local install works for me, though, since I do most of my writing on a couple of computers at home, especially articles with lots of links, pictures, special formatting, or whatever.  I also can already see that I’m a whole lot less likely to get lost and confused when bouncing among multiple browser windows and working on a post, when the post is in it’s own application window rather than the browser … you know what I mean?

Of course I already have a couple enhancement ideas. I’d like to be able to preview the draft in the browsers installed in my computer, since I always check my articles in both Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox. And I’d like to see a text-to-speech option, since I almost always proof my articles using the Firefox Speak It extension.

Here are the two articles I read that prompted me to try Live Writer:

Windows Live Writer for Blogging - Great or Garbage? by Michael Martine, where Michael describes his experiences with the tool and lists his likes and dislikes. He’s also surprised to be satisfied with a Microsoft tool;  I have to say that, despite being steeped in most-things-Microsoft, I’m having the same reaction.

Windows Live Writer by Mark Avey. Mark covers quite a few of the functions he’s used, and likes the tool as much as I think I’m going to.  Mark also contrasts Live Writer with Scribefire, a tool I’ve used occasionally that I like but find I need to clean up after before my article is ready to post.

Thanks to Michael and Mark for previewing this software and writing about it; I probably wouldn’t have even tried it otherwise.

I’ve recently noticed that over at Georgia on My Mind, Elementary Historyteacher regularly hosts Georgia Blog Carnivals, featuring posts from Georgia bloggers. I think it would be a good idea, following Joe’s suggestion, to spend some part of this weekend taking a look at the sites EHT lists on her blogroll. Yes, I know they meant last weekend, but I just discovered the carnival a couple of days ago and I was painting my front porch last weekend anyway. With Atlanta temperatures forecast to push 100 degrees for a couple more days at least, I know I won’t be out there painting on Saturday or Sunday, so it will be a good weekend to immerse myself in some new reading.

A few site updates and some housekeeping notes….

I’ve added the social bookmarking button available from the Add This! site to each post.

I’ve also added a Mybloglog “Recent Readers” widget to the sidebar. I’m not entirely sure what to do with Mybloglog yet, but I’ll catch on soon enough. My posts are now appearing there, and I’ve also set up a profile.

In addition, I think I’ve come up with a way to replace my sidebar Blogroll with my Newsgator feeds. Actually Newsgator already lets users generate a script containing their feeds, but it doesn’t take the folder/feed structure into account; it simply creates a list of links. From what I see in Newsgator’s support forums, there have been requests for this feature, but it doesn’t exist yet. I should be able to pull it off anyway with some creative cobbling, and may try it over the weekend. If you happen to stop by, the site should be fine, but the Blogroll may be unstable at times.

Finally, following David Airey and his list of Top 5 Essential WordPress Plugins, I attempted to install a feature I’ve seen on several sites and liked a lot. It’s the Subscribe to Comments plugin, by which anyone leaving a comment can elect to be notified by e-mail when additional comments are posted to the same topic. Unfortunately, activating the plugin causes this WordPress database error for me:

WordPress database error: [Access denied for user to database ‘blog’]
ALTER TABLE wp_comments ADD COLUMN comment_subscribe enum(’Y',’N')

I take this to mean (and a few searches around the Internet seems to confirm) that the way I’m set up with my web host doesn’t allow me to alter the structure of the WordPress database via this plugin. So, while I like the function a lot and I think it’s a fine plugin, I’m not so sure I should even inquire about changing whatever needs to be changed to make this update possible.

I have to admit this sort of thing frustrates me a bit, and reminds me of a recent article from Lorelle on Wordpress, Bloggers Are Not Webmasters and Webmasters Are Not Bloggers. While I have enough passable HTML knowledge that I’ve been able to modify this site’s various templates and can even poke at the PHP code a bit to make it do my bidding, I’m way over my head when issues surface that have to do with MySQL or the WordPress database. I’m pretty fearless and fairly patient about trying different things and learning from what works and doesn’t work, but I have no context within which to translate a database error and correct it. Lorelle’s article is a good reminder that even though I might find a solution to the problem with additional research and some phone calls to my web host, that’s not how I should be spending my time. So … I’ll give some thought to what I wanted to accomplish by installing the plugin, and take a look at alternatives, whether they’re plugins or something else.

So… I’ve been thinking over the past few weeks that I might try my hand at selling photos online, on one of the stock photo agencies. Since I’ve long believed that the best way to learn something was through total immolation … oh, I mean, immersion… I went ahead and filled out an application at iStockphoto and sent in my three (carefully (?)) selected photos.

I have to admit that when I found out that all three of the images were rejected, I had the same reaction of aggravated disappointment that I know I’m not the first person to feel. But it passed pretty quickly as I started thinking about what the reviewers had to say, and even more quickly after I buzzed around some blogs and realized that not only were rejections common, but rejections are meted out by iStockphoto (and other sites, I’m sure) with the same exact boilerplate text for everybody. So my pics were just among the thousands and thousands reviewed, where I imagine the reviewers click a checkbox on a screen to generate repeating rejection notices. No problem; if that’s the business model, it’s the business model — though frankly I think it might benefit the stock sites and the art of photography as a whole if they treated it as an opportunity to share real knowledge as opposed to knocking photos out of an assembly line.

On the other hand, I will say this: as I read what other photographers wrote about their rejections (no links here, sorry; I don’t want to start something), I came to believe that a lot of people are burning up a whole lot of their creative energy getting all spiky over their rejections. It’s really of no consequence that any one agency rejects any one photograph (or ten photographs or a hundred photographs): it seems to me that rejections are something that someone can either learn from or simply disregard and move on, and neither choice is more valid than the other. But whatever choice is made, should be made quickly.

Anyway, I tried to decide what these rejected photos taught me, based on the iStockphoto form-letter. Here are some of my thoughts; the pictures follow and you can click on any image to view the full-sized original (I just learned how to do that! wheeeee!).

The white orchid was rejected because it’s a flower. I knew they didn’t want any more flowers (see their needed photos list here). I had previously read the list, but it just didn’t occur to me that I shouldn’t submit such a photo with my application. Well, now I know; that was an easy one.

This next one was rejected for two reasons: the focus needed to be improved, and the photo “lacked impact” so was not suitable as stock. In other words, they considered it blurry and boring. I guess I could say it’s intended to be a depth-of-field shot, so where the focus should dissolve is largely a subjective opinion … and yet I can see that even as a depth-of-field shot, it would have been better if the architectural piece I’m focusing on was sharp from top to bottom. I know one of my consistent technical challenges is taking straight pictures, both on horizontal and vertical planes; I’m constantly straightening and cropping my pics when I get back from a shoot. Maybe my posture’s bad; if so, I have to learn to compensate (or, hell, just stand up straight!).

As to lacking impact and not stock, presumably they know their market so I accept that. But permit me this one snark: if they think this photo isn’t suitable as stock, they haven’t spent enough time searching their own website. And I still like the out-of-focus eagle in the background.

This last photo was rejected on the grounds that the lighting could be improved. Unfortunately, the response only suggests different ways of dealing with lighting in general, and offers no specifics as to what the reviewer considered wrong with this lighting. Since they are no blown highlights, and the lighting isn’t harsh or out of balance, I’m guessing they considered it too dark overall. Okay, that’s fine … although, realistically, Santa does deliver most of his goodies at night, doesn’t he? In any case, I’ll take this as advice to pay more conscious attention to my lighting when shooting or during post-shoot processing.

Having said all that, what shall I do now? The only rational and creative thing: yesterday I opened an account on Fotolia and have submitted 34 photos (Fotolia doesn’t have a gated application process), all of which are waiting for approval (well, okay, approval or rejection). And tonight I resubmitted three new samples to Istockphoto. Yay, for getting back up on that horse and doing it all over again!

In closing, I wanted to mention two articles I came across while doing some research on the stock agencies. The first is Photography’s Vanishing Middle Class, from the very fine Strobist blog. The second is from Thomas Hawk’s Digital Connection, and is called Why Corbis’ New SnapVillage Stock Photography Agency is a Bad Deal for Photographers. These two articles — along with their very well-written comments — touch on so many cultural, social, and market issues that have been made more volatile by the rapid transfusion of digital photography into society, that I can hardly wait to write a detailed analysis of the two.

Stay tuned….

Update:

There have been some nice developments since I wrote this entry. Fotolia accepted 31 of the 34 photos I submitted, so that means I’m officially in the business!

You can see my photos here.

As another important lesson learned, Fotolia accepted two of the photos (Santa and the architectural shot) above that iStockphoto rejected — a probability I had read about in my research that has proven to be true. Like iStockphoto, they declined the white orchid because they don’t need any more flowers; see their list of needs here.