Bangkok Ready to Blow Like Krakatoa?

Here’s a great article about the situation in Bangkok as it is today.

Is Bangkok ready to explode like the ultra-violent Krakatoa volcano?

Who knows at this point? The whole northeast population was bought off with 500 baht notes for their votes for Thaksin years back. It was so strange to see people smiling walking around talking about how Thaksin’s party had just given them 500 baht. Buying votes works in Thailand. Thaksin owns the northeast - for 500 baht a head. Like cattle. He can do no wrong because he already bought their undying support at just 500 baht each.

Amazing Thailand indeed! Amazing Thaksin if he pulls off a comeback!

Trust No One

I read a post this morning about an incident that may have been an attempt at an abduction of a child by a Thai man.

Thai man says to girl, “get into the truck”…

Thought you should read it too in case you have kids in Thailand. In my experience I’ve not seen many Thai men act overly nice toward someone else’s kids. I don’t see them play with them, talk to them, smile at them or anything else. Thai men pretty much ignore kids - especially someone elses kids.

Could be entirely innocent - but I don’t trust anyone here. Not Thai, not farang. You can’t. There are so many predators here - of all sorts, that if you let your guard down you might be had.

Who wants to be had?

re: Last Couple Photography Posts

As of this morning I had over 30 comments about the posts on photographers that I did. The posts were meant to be a private joke - just mine. I wanted to see how far I could turn up the volume on the few idiots posting comments about a story they didn’t have all the facts about. These commenters were like emotional balloons waiting to pop. They reacted with bizarre, and usually anonymous comments that really showed their anger at what’s becoming the sad state of pro photgraphy over the last 20 years.

I’ll address a couple things that came up in comments:

I wanted the photo in the sense that - I saw it. It would work at 200 pixels wide when I shrunk it. I asked. I was rejected. I thought I’d give her another chance because I could easily choose another photo from any of 10 different sources that wouldn’t have a link to her site and a mention of her business name. She still didn’t get it. It took me about 15 seconds to read her last email and that was it. I dropped it and went on to the next option. I looked at Getty, Dreamstime, and Flickr Creative Commons licensed photos.

Some of you made it seem like I was dying for this mediocre photo and that wasn’t the case. Did you SEE the photo? I didn’t ask her for a high resolution image - it was a 72 pixel shot on the site. It wasn’t a fantastic shot to begin with. It was convenient and I could have helped the girl out by using it. When she chose to charge for use of the photo to advertise her own business I found another business and another photo.

Who shoots themselves in the foot by charging someone to do something good for their own business? Apparently I know someone that does now.

It wasn’t a huge issue to me - but to all of you that latched on to a piece of the story, whatever piece you heard - you became reactive and posted some ridiculous comments.

I understand the frustration of being a photographer and competing with stock agencies. For about a year I considered returning to pro photography. Eventually I realized, the world is fast moving away from commissioned / assignment photos. There will always be successful photographers doing it - but the percentage of photographers making a living creating images that sell for more than even $20 each has really fallen off over the last decade or two.

I chose the easy way… shoot whatever I want, whenever I want - with a slant toward producing photos that would sell well in stock agencies and forget about trying to convince people to hire me as an advertising or travel photographer. I don’t enjoy that side of photography much, the business side. Stock makes it easy to dump my good photos somewhere and make a few pennies. Photography is a hobby now. It’s very difficult to make a go of it as a profession.

There are photographers that are making a living shooting stock photography. It’s a horrible way to go about life, cranking out a couple thousand photos a year, editing, tagging them, uploading them - only to see a percentage never even get past the screeners that don’t seem to have a clue sometimes. Now the stock agencies are getting very competitive. When I joined Dreamstime they had 1.7 million photos I think. Now they have more than 4 million. I’m surprised my images are still selling, but what about when they get 10 million? 100? It will get to that, and this is just one agency - not even the biggest.

It would be way too frustrating for me to keep chasing the dream of being a shoot on assignment photographer, and I don’t think it’s a good option for myself. Some of you might be doing it now - living the dream. I know it doesn’t feel very secure where you are and you’re afraid of the dream turning horror-show. I think that must be the reason for the tone behind the comments.

It’s depressing as hell that photography has come to this for most people. If you’re sticking it out and trying desperately to eek out a living as a pro photographer I wish you luck. It’s a much harder existence than it used to be when the majority of the world’s children and adults didn’t know how to go full-manual with their film cameras. Now the camera takes care of everything with shooting modes they can choose. A flower means macro. Depth of field preview is instant. Years ago the common person didn’t know where to develop or sell their photos, now they don’t have to develop them and they know where to sell them - though for just a couple dollars for rights.

I was disappointed in a way when the whole world became able to produce good photos. I knew it was a matter of time before the value of a photo would drop like a lead Leica.

A career in photography is still possible for those that bust their ass to make it work. You’ve gotta love it more than anything else though because there are trying times ahead even for those at the top. Is it going to get easier for professional photographers to continue doing what they love as a career?

Only more difficult. Everything is changing. Some photographers will adapt and continue creating photos that are in demand and charging high prices. They will always be there. Someone must be producing new photos that the world wants. Graphic designers are cranking out the most amazing images at Dreamstime.com for instance. Some of them sell better than camera-taken photos. What’s next? Taking photos with pieces of the photo animated and the rest static? I don’t know what’s next, but for most pro photographers the road will get much more difficult. Is it time to be realistic and start looking at alternative careers or ways to adapt to the trends?

By the comments I received there are still a lot of you out there trying to make it work. Good for you, I hope you do. Really - the last two posts about photography were meant to be funny. The latest was meant to egg-on the first couple idiots that commented - anonymously of course. I knew I could really fuel the fire by posting again and not letting anyone comment.

I’ll go back through the comments and try to verify email addresses and urls - to see if there is anyone that didn’t post anonymously. If I find some, I’ll approve the comments.

To the rest of the anonymous commenters - why would you waste the time to write something as a response to a post you disagreed with and then not use your name and real email address? Everyone knows my name. I’m not anonymous.

Do you think you’re going to post anonymously on my blog so I can let you rip me a new one? Do I owe you a forum to spread your nonsense? This is my forum. I spread my nonsense here. If you disagree with something I say - use your name and email and post a comment. If you resort to calling me a name - do you think I’ll post your comment? The mentality of some people posting comments approaches that of a spider monkey. Don’t bother to comment if you can’t say anything someone wants to hear. Don’t read this blog if you don’t like it. You won’t be missed.

Why Are Professional Photographers Becoming Useless?

The more I think about it - the more I think I’m on to something with this.

Technology has killed the professional photographer’s novelty and usefulness. Virtually anyway.

There was a time when photographers were able to command disgustingly high fees for taking photos. I know, I worked in New York City for a number of professional photographers in the late 80’s and early 90’s. It was true back then that even a nimrod that could hold his pointy-finger on the shutter button in brief 8-second bursts and produce photos that were bought by nationwide catalogs.

One particularly successful photographer I worked for whose name I’ll limit to “Tony L.” was a coke head and couldn’t go more than an hour without a darkroom break with the art directors and models on the shoot. They’d come out blitzed on coke and Tony would continue the shoot laughing like a jackass, hardly able to find the camera on the tripod in front of him and continue on as if nothing happened. Nothing needed to be different. I had already set up the lighting, the cameras, everything. He held his finger on the trigger and did an Austin Powers… Yes, yes… ok, good. Yes, good. Great, that’s great. Ok. Yes… He could be annihilated on coke and still shoot photos good enough to print worldwide.

I worked with Tony for about 6 months before I got accepted to be an assistant with up and coming professional advertising photographer, Steven Wilkes who was a nephew of the ‘great’ Jay Maisel. Jay was or is worldwide famous for his photos but you know what? He had a fishbowl - very large just full of 100,000 slides that weren’t good enough to sell or do anything with. They were junk. He shot 100,000 slides of junk.

What does that tell you?

It tells me something. It tells me that someone considered at the top of his field as an advertising photographer isn’t skillful enough to shoot just a few photos and call it a day, secure in the knowlege that he is skillful enough to have got the shots he needed.

Professional photographers in NYC typically shot 12 to 30 rolls of Hasselblad film for one shoot consisting of maybe 4 changes of clothes. I was loading film so fast for Tony that it was like a joke. Was this guy really making $2400 for each day of this circus? It was ludicrous. Maybe it still is. I’ve been out of that scene for many years now.

Now the world has changed. Anyone and a spider monkey can pick up a new Nikon D300 or better and produce some wicked cool photos. Put that person in a paradise like Hawaii or Thailand and you’d have to almost try NOT to take a good photo. I’ve seen children produce amazing photography over the last couple years. You know why?

It’s kind of like - if you had every monkey on the face of the planet tapping on a keyboard from the time they were born until they died eventually it is said that one monkey would produce the works of Shakespeare, perfectly written.

Is that a possibility? Nah, not in my lifetime.

You know what is possible though? A six year old child can point a good camera at a scene in Thailand and take as good or better a photo than any one that calls him or herself a professional photographer. It’s possible.

Good writers aren’t born of luck. You can’t possibly luck out and write 1000 words that changes the world. You could take a ‘great’ photo that does that by pointing your camera out the window at Rodney King receiving an unjustified beating in the streets of LA at the hand of the police.

Photographers are quick becoming a useless commodity. Technology has given us the capability to see in real time whether we got the shot. No more shooting polaroids and guessing whether the lighting was perfect.

Metering capabilities on today’s new digital cameras is astounding. It’s getting hard to beat them even using all manual settings and bracketing. The camera will bracket for you too.

Technology has given us complete control over the lighting so that even if we shoot a bad digital image - underexposing a bit, we can still create an amazing shot in Photoshop or other graphics program.

In the past a photographer could shoot 30 rolls of film in a day and the charge to develop all that film into slides would be hundreds of dollars. Today - memory sticks give us the freedom to shoot ten times that amount if we wanted. One needn’t be skilled much at all to produce outstanding photographs.

I hate to see it happening, but you know what? I’m not fighting it. What’s the point? Taking one look at the extent of Flickr’s library of photgraphs from everywhere on the planet is really humbling. There are many OUTSTANDING photographs there that are licensed under creative commons and available to use. Dreamstime.com has over 4,000,000 high quality images taken by almost 50,000 photographers. Fotolia, IStock, Getty, and other stock agencies are bringing professional level photos to anyone that wants them for hundreds less than what photographers used to get for them. Is this a good thing? For me it is. For the photographers that want to make a living? Yes and no.

The world is changing. It’s not changing in favor of being a pro digital photographer. Wedding photographers are invited TO the wedding to watch it - not photograph it. A friend of the bride with a couple years experience shooting for free is doing the wedding now, and is entirely capable at it. Who is going to pay a wedding photographer a couple hundred dollars to do it?

Newspapers are hiring journalists that can also take photos. It isn’t brain surgery. One manipulates a few settings, frames the shot and takes it. Then takes 1,000 more if it’s important to get a good one to publish. Why pay a photographer’s day rate to get a photo that’s only marginally better?

I don’t know if anyone’s noticed but the market is wide open for anyone with a digital camera and a few thousand bucks to spend on creating photo calendars, books, coffee cups, t-shirts, stickers, and other fluff that they’ll never make bank with. Photographers used to have skills that nobody else did. That edge is becoming soft. In 2 months someone serious about photography can learn the basics enough to shoot what a professional is shooting and almost as good. If the difference is between $3 and $300 guess what the person needing the photo is going to pay? Don’t kid yourself to believe there’s a $300 difference between the photos you take and the ones that are available on stock agencies shot by some of the greatest photographers on the planet.

It’s time for digital photographers to go out and get themselves some real skills. Digital video is one such area that they should be pursuing. It takes a lot of skill to shoot digital videos well. The market for digital videos that are of high quality will be around a lot longer than the market for outrageously priced photos. The photographer’s market is going away. The world is welcoming $2-4 dollar stock photos and free creative commons licensed photos.

Professional photographers, if they haven’t already shouldn’t be afraid to go out and get themselves some real skills that will set them apart from the monkeys hitting the shutter. The days are over when I could shoot a photo of Woody Allen in the window of his apartment watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and get $1000 for a 1/4 page in People Magazine. The days are gone when a 2 photo set of John F Kennedy, Jr. losing his bike lock key at lunch brought me $3750. Now - everyone has a camera and the variety of photos is getting much better.

My next post will compare the vast difference in skill levels necessary between being a good writer and a good photographer. Let’s put a camera in everyone’s hands, but not a keyboard… Am I making any sense to you people?

Cheers.

Buddhism Section Updated on ThaiPulse

I spent a couple hours today transferring over some of the Buddhist temple and meditation retreat information from the old TP site to the new one (www.ThaiPulse.com). There are many photos - probably 50 or more of Wat Suan Mokkh, Wat Pah Nanachat, Wat Tum Sua, Wat Tum Sang Phet and then if you really want to knock your self out you can see either the photo section of the old ThaiPulse site or see some of my photos up at Flickr.

My Thailand Photos at Flickr.

I think I have 600 photos of Thailand there at the present and in the process of uploading another 7,000 approximately. No I’m not uploading all my junk shots - these are my better than average shots.  The first photos you’ll see there are my beer bottle temple photos of a cool Buddhist temple in Sisaket’s countryside.

Here’s a better link that goes straight to my Thai photo sets so you can choose for yourself what you want to look at: Thailand photo sets

Black Magic Curse? Head Monk Gives Gasoline Mixture to Young Man… and Kills Him.

The Abbot of a Buddhist temple in Surin, a northeastern Thailand province gave this to a young 23 year old Thai man. Think the monk will go to jail for telling the kid to drink the holy water which was really a mixture of gasoline and something else?

This story from Thai Rath and posted at PhuketGazette on 10/24.

Cruel cure for unlucky lad

SURIN: Sometimes, a cure can be worse than the illness. This was certainly the case for one young man who went to the local temple to perform a ceremony to ward off bad luck, but ended up dying after drinking “blessed water” prepared by the temple abbot.

Twenty-three year old Bunyang Khreuaniam of Khwao Sinarin District on September 30 told his mother that had been warned by someone trained in the arts of black magic that he was in for some bad luck.

Concerned that some wayward spirits might target her son, she took him to Wat Beung Wang Nam Yen to see the abbot about performing a ceremony to ward off any potential misfortune.

The abbot, 56-year-old Luang Ta Yuan, told Mr Bunyang to go home and fast for two days without food or water, then come back for a ritual ceremony.

It gets worse… read the rest of the story here.

Buddhist Temple in Sisaket Built with Beer Bottles (and others)

I never posted my photos of this temple because I didn’t any great shots - the lighting was all wrong but I still took about 50 photos. I’ll add them to this post as I find them. There are many more buildings than this article shows - but the idea is well captured.

If you live in Sisaket or Surin -somewhere around there you might as well go - can’t go to the Cambodian border and see the temple anymore, can ya?

Buddhist Bottle Temple in Thailand…

How Important is Face in Thai Society?

I saw an article in The Nation today about a Thai man that set himself on fire in a street. Why did he do it? From the looks of the article I’m going to guess it had a lot to do with face he was going to lose when he couldn’t give his family money so they could hire rice pickers for the harvest. The family was counting on him for money apparently and he wasn’t able to give it because his employer cheated him out of the money (which may or may not really be the case - but no matter).

I’ve written about the Thai concept of ‘face’ a few times here at this blog and also at some of my other sites. Without going deeply into it - face is the backbone of Thai social interaction. Face is akin to respect or value… worth in Thai society. A Thai person gains face by doing the right thing in the eyes of others. He gains face when he overlooks mistakes or errors by another person and instead encourages the person to try to do better the next time. He gains face when he has friends in high paying or highly respectable positions in Thai culture and is seen with those friends. He gains face when he has accumulated wealth himself or in some position of power.

Losing face occurs when someone tells a truth that hurts to your face or behind you back. If someone is gossiping about you behind your back you are losing face with those people because you’re being spoken about negatively. The things said might be right on and truthful, or they might be lies but either way - face is lost when you find out.

Losing face occurs when a man’s girlfriend goes with another guy instead of him. Thai men will often kill the other man or kill the girlfriend. Thai women usually kill themselves it seems.

Losing face might occur if you have a temper that easily flares up and causes you to become loud in public or to hit someone or worse. Losing temper or getting emotional (negative) causes loss of face. Being stupid and being found out causes loss of face. Gambling and losing a lot will have people talking and you’ll lose face. Being wrong and having someone point it out causes a loss of face.

Losing face is something every Thai strives to avoid - even more so than building face because I think naturally all Thais have an idea in their mind that everyone else has face until they lose it. It’s a given that people have a decent level of face until they show that they don’t deserve it.

For some reason the man that killed himself by fire was going to lose face whether because he wasn’t bright or quick enough to see that his employer was going to screw him out of his pay or whether he was just powerless to do anything about it when he found out he was going to be screwed out of his money. It doesn’t matter whether he lost it gambling it away or for whatever other reason - the whole point is that he couldn’t pay his family money they were counting on to be able to harvest their rice. He was going to face a severe loss of face within his family and that was unacceptable to him.

It brings to mind some discussions I’ve had with my girlfriend about her needing to give money to her parents because they can’t take care of themselves anymore. I understand it in her case. I’ve met her entire family and my girlfriend was basically brought up by her aunts and uncles because her parents couldn’t do it. Literally, couldn’t. I won’t go any deeper than that about it.

When your Thai girlfriend or Thai husband or whomever tells you that they need to send back a couple thousand baht to their family so they can help support them it’s really in your best interest to do so. A couple thousand baht - even 5,000 baht - I don’t see a problem with. If you’re sending 10,000 or more baht each month I guess if there were extenuating circumstances then it might still make sense. Anything over that and I’d have to wonder - why must it be so much?

I’ve met guys here in Thailand that send 0 baht per month and I’ve met guys that send 25,000 per month to their Thai tee-rak’s family. 25,000 baht is a lot of money for family support each month and in my mind wouldn’t be justified for any but the most urgent need - perhaps your tee-rak has 17 kids that her parents are taking care of or maybe her mother needs some 24-hour nurse care and dialysis that costs a lot of money, or something like that.

Sending something is probably necessary - especially if the family knows the daughter or son has a farang partner. All their needs must be taken care of, so now the son or daughter should take care of the parents needs too. It’s Thai societal expectation - this is the way life goes. A son or daughter loses a lot of face if they can’t contribute to ma and paw’s monthly income. After all - the son or daughter went to college and can get a decent job making more than enough to take care of their own monthly expenses AND send some home. That’s the whole goal. That’s the reason most young educated Thais head for Bangkok to work outrageous hours (10-14 per day a lot of them with the commute). They need to make enough for themselves AND their parents. Girls have it extra hard it seems like because frequently the sons are screw-offs and don’t send money home to help. The family forgives this - but the girl’s are then held to a higher standard. The girls are put under more pressure to come through then.

So, this guy set himself on fire in the middle of a street which showed me how much face means inside a Thai person’s head. It’s everything to them. It’s their whole world. If you cause a Thai to lose a lot of face - they might as well burn themselves in the street - the pain is less than they feel inside over losing a considerable amount of face.

Thai man immolates self … (The Nation 10/30/2008)

Your Digital Photos Aren’t Worth ANYTHING

I had a weird experience the last couple days and it got weirder today.

I wrote a small company on a very small island and told them I liked one of their photos they use on their site. I also told them I was writing an article about the island and would mention their small business favorably and put a link in the article linking to their site AND another link on the photo with credit to them and a link back to their site if they would allow me to feature the photo in the article.

This was not for ThaiPulse incidentally, but no matter - could have been for any site.

The girl co-owner, a Brit, writes back that she couldn’t let the photo be used without charging for it.

I thought she didn’t understand so I wrote again to clarify everything. It’s in the best interests of her business to be mentioned - didn’t she “get it”?

She got it, at least she thought she did - but, in the next email back she wrote again - that the article is worth more with a photo and she’d need to charge for it.

Let me explain further. The shot has nice color. That’s about it. It is only about 400pixels by 250 and not high resolution by any means. Anyone or a monkey could have taken the photo - it’s just that the perspective seen is from high above the ground.

I have access to Getty images for free. I have credits at Dreamstime.com enough for hundreds of photos - basically free. Or, if you equate credit to dollars - I have the $3 it would take to get a photo of the island from the same or much better perspective.

I like to help small Thai businesses that I like, that I believe in. For free. I don’t make any extra money writing this article, I’m paid a salary at the place I was writing for. It’s not freelance… anyway…

Your digital photos (and mine) are not worth squat in today’s market. Everyone and their kids has a digital camera and are capable of turning out remarkable photos. Gone are the days when I worked in New York City as a photographer and spent hours prepping a scene or a model to take photos that were worth something more than $3 at Dreamstime. Those days are WAY gone.

Apparently someone is still telling the world they can make money with their digital photos. It’s a novice way to enter into online sales of some sort. Something everyone can do to have a business online. Everyone wants the easy money online.

There isn’t any easy money in digital photos. Not even if you put together 100 photos that make people fall down semi-comatose and suck wind for 10 minutes because they can’t wrap their minds around what they just saw.

I have 700+ photos online at stock photo agencies. I know how to shoot a photo. I have some good photos. I was a professional at one time. I make about a dollar a sale on my photos - high resolution shot with amazing care and precision.

A dollar.

The best photographers in the entire world are putting billions of photos online at stock agencies because that’s where the buyers are. Not NYC, not Chicago and L.A. They are online and they want a photo for about 3 dollars.

The best chance anyone has for making money on digital photography these days is to make all of your photos “Creative Commons” licensed (see flickr’s CC info) and put your credit in the form of a URL directly on your photos so that some people will come back to your site.

That’s about it. There’s too many calendars. There’s too many coffee mugs with photos. You’re aren’t anything special unless they’re naked people doing weird stuff. Even then, there is such a glut of por—-n online that those photos too are dropping down to the couple dollars a shot rate.

Digital video is another story. Creating something unique digitally is another story. Writing stories - is another story.

Digital image money making is dead.

If someone writes you to say they are writing an article about your town and they are mentioning your business in the article - favorably, and with a link back to your site from the article, and the writer would like to use one of YOUR photos in the article WITH a link back to your site. Count them - that’s 2 links.

You should: (multiple choice)

A.) Tell the writer your photos are not free and you will charge him for them.

B.) Understand that you are getting free advertising and offer the writer 25 more photos you have that you haven’t posted online yet.

C.) Tell the writer you have enough people coming to your small business, but thanks for the thought.

D.) Write back as fast as you can, “YES, USE MY PHOTOS, THANK YOU FOR THE LINK AND MENTION!” and quickly invite the writer to use your service gratis for a 2-day stay if he’ll write 2 more articles about your business over the next couple weeks.

E.) Go back to watching Thai soap operas and thinking about how to make your skin whiter.

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