How Much Do YOU Need to Earn to Do Photography Full Time?

Here's an article of mine published by PetaPixel, a profile of one of the tourist photogs at the Gateway of India. 

http://petapixel.com/2015/08/22/how-much-do-you-need-to-earn-to-do-photography-full-time/

Notable: Rob Walters' Omaha

The comments to Walters' photos are revealing. One notes that the photos are self-selecting, that is, the photographer deliberately ignored scenes that did not fit his ideas about a people-less city.  An Omahaan chimes in to say, yes, visit this part of town and you'll find lots of people.  Another commenter believes the photographer should be more in touch with his subjects, approaching people on the street to find out why they are on the street.  Someone finds the images bleak.  One man wonders why readers would be interested in "amateur random pictures" of "mundane scenes."

What we prefer is to feel safe, with other people around; to feel charmed by stories that reaffirm our own stories about ourselves; and reassured that our existence isn't really this bleak. What most people seem to prefer when looking at images can be found in popular styles of photography relying on creating super-saturated hyper-realities.  

Rob Walters website.  

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Review: Atta Kim ON AIR

Atta Kim - ON AIR

The Buddhist understanding of the world is that it is not a place full of things, a place of people and animals, cars and buildings, continents and oceans.  It is rather a world of processes, of coming into and out of being, arising and passing, waves and vibration.  It is a world of cause and effect, each effect becoming a cause, each cause an effect, the whole of the world interconnected and interpenetrated.

We have a similar understanding of the world from modern science, but the Buddha first taught these ideas 2500 years ago.  His insights came from meditation.  What he understood is that we are fooled into believing things are real because we process sensory data at a far slower rate than it occurs.  So it appears to us that something remains stable and fixed when it is actually in rapid flux.  A classic example within the tradition is the candle flame.  In the morning it appears the same as the one that was first lit the previous evening.  In reality, that flame is not the same as it was an hour ago, a minute ago, even one second ago.  The flame arises and passes away far faster than the eye can see.

And so it is the same for what we call human beings.  We image ourselves as somehow solid and fixed, but we are changing not just day to day, but not just hour to hour or minute to minute, but micro-moment to micro-moment.    

Review: Ragnar Axelsson and Last Days of the Arctic

British Airways boasts over 100 hours of on-demand television programs and movies.  Even so, on this week’s Dubai-London-Atlanta flights there wasn’t much on offer.  In fact the only thing worth watching was a one hour documentary on the people of the Arctic as seen through the work of news photographer Ragnar Axelsson.