Tiger Woods lay down his clubs today. From TigerWoods.com:

I would like to ask everyone, including my fans, the good people at my foundation, business partners, the PGA Tour, and my fellow competitors, for their understanding. What’s most important now is that my family has the time, privacy, and safe haven we will need for personal healing.

After much soul searching, I have decided to take an indefinite break from professional golf. I need to focus my attention on being a better husband, father, and person.

Again, I ask for privacy for my family and I am especially grateful for all those who have offered compassion and concern during this difficult period.

As much as I’d love to talk gossip, there’s just so much about Tiger I don’t care about. I don’t actually like golf. I detest the sport. It’s designed more to enrage than challenge whenever I play. But there are a few points in here worth noting for posterity.

First, the PGA is crying in their big fancy beers. Sure, it generally sucks that Tiger was playing around. But this guy has made a lot of people rich. When he shows up in his fancy black golf sneakers and vertigo-enducing striped shirt on Sunday afternoons, Nike, PGA, Accenture, and his other sponsors just see dollar signs. That he’s taking this break is likely frustrating and humiliating to those who pay the bills. Let’s be clear: this is the era of Tiger. No one watches golf without him.

Speaking of Accenture, they’ve since pulled the plug on their relationship with Woods. He’s somewhat less useful as a non-golfer.

Second, Tiger Woods and his management have proved time and again to be savvy media managers. Yes, it was likely a misstep to avoid talking about this situation in a non-trivial fashion. His silence so far has been deafening in comparison to the statements of his associated lady friends. When the women come out of the woodwork first, you’ve waited too long to speak up.

But, as if we need a reminder of dethroned pro-atheletes on the comeback trail, Michael Vick is playing football again. And he was involved with dogs.

Woods will be back, sooner rather than later. Because, if there’s a moral in this for handling scandal in the media it’s this: the public has a notoriously short memory for illicit affairs. We want our winners, and will take them battered and bloodied if we have to. Tiger Woods has been a role model and teacher for years, but the comeback from self-destruction may be his biggest triumph yet.

I’ve never really worked on the whole “time-to-market” thing with my photography. It’s always just been slogging along there, coming up the rear as I’ve taken on other creative projects for clients.

Case in point this picture from a recent family portrait session. The three shots of this sweet little girl came from the first lighting test shots of the session, but somehow unlocked her inner model. She knocked out the “Three Monkeys” poses in succession and, with photoshop magic, we suddenly have triplets.

But the inspiration for a shot like this is pretty easy to track down. Apart from being an iconic original image of the maxim “do no evil”, it’s a tepid fever on iStockPhoto.com, where a quick search for “Hear no evil” uncovers 179 images riffing on exactly the same theme.

And yet, as with all things artistic, a riff is just a riff, and what matters is your ability to capture an idea in a new way, unique to your vision and principle. For me, this picture is fun and frivolous. It’s unpretentious. Most importantly, it captures exactly the vision I had in my head as I was snapping away in our session together.

For me, this such a photography thing. There are very few pictures that truly have yet to be taken. But with each setting and subject comes an infinite number of combinations of photographers with an equally infinite number of ideas and concepts for capture. And then I think about my friends Curt and Sam and Justin and Tyler and Matt and so on and so on, all musicians working to capture the same images through music, with the same challenges, and the same rich bed of opportunity. Stephen King, Cormac Macarthy, George Lucas, J.J. Abrams, all documentarians of the unoriginal in uncannily unique voice.

The challenge I work toward beating, then, is not to struggle to find the best idea. It’s to find my uncannily unique voice, and apply it to the old, the broken, and to build new connections where none existed before.

The last year has brought a flurry of activity in the project productivity circles around the concept of Social Media. It’s buzzword-heavy discussion, rife with recommendations on using so-called Web 2.0 tools to streamline information sharing, centralize data storage, and build communities online. To be sure, the latest suite of net tools in this basket range from revolutionary, all the way to downright nifty. But the question remains: will your projects benefit by simply embracing fancy new tools?

It’s safe to say that up to about two years ago, what we call social media was exclusively the domain of artists, teens, and the technorati. The idea of Facebook as a mainstream communication platform was just gaining momentum, and services such as Twitter still required a lengthy explanation in cocktail party conversation. Things have changed in the last few years, however. Now, The New York Times is discussing these services regularly, and Nielsen Online has been tracking explosive growth in the space; from February 2008 to February 2009, Twitter grew 1,382% — from 475,000 unique visitors per month in ‘08 to over 7 million unique visitors in ‘09. Facebook had 20 million unique visitors in February 2008, today boasting more than 65 million — a 240% leap. And 65 million is a fraction of the reported 150 million registered users of Facebook.

Project management is, of course, making it’s way to the social media universe. Tim Kendall, Facebook’s director of monetization, tells me that Paramount Pictures asked all employees to communicate with one another on Facebook exclusively for one week as a way of getting teams to understand the importance of online social interaction on the tool.

In 1983, when the video game Dragon’s Lair was released, I was 11.

The video arcade was on Nevada Avenue. It was next door to Fantasy Adult Video. While the video games in the arcade were not of the adult nature, the dumpster behind the facility certainly was. In a related story, a Canadian university has been unable to track down men in their 20’s who have not been exposed to adult content. I’d like to thank the Fantasy Adult Video dumpster and my friends Dogan and John for making me ineligible for that particular study today.

On Saturday mornings they had four-buck all-play at the arcade until 1:00 in the afternoon. We’d be there at 8:00 sharp, armed with our $4.00 in quarters and pockets full of LemonHeads and Cherry Clans to see us through the morning. Even today, it’s not hard to remember the menu for those long Saturday mornings. Burgertime. Moon Patrol. Robotron 2084. Those were warm-up games. Dig Dug and Joust were appetizers. For me, a good round of Q*bert would find its way into the morning, but Tron and (amen) Pole Position were meat and potatoes.

Today, I’m using this bully pulpit to talk about a website you should not visit. It’s called Tweeteorites.com, and briefly, it is a collection of the most favorited tweets in the past 24 hours.

Now, let’s figure out all the wrong in that last sentence:

1) Favorited – this is a poor excuse for a word. No one who speaks to me in their outside voice would ever use this word for fear of me telling them how silly they sound using it. It is a bastardization of favorite which, to be honest, was just the result of the word favor trying to one-up meteor in 1969. And we all remember how that turned out, do we not.

2) Tweets – to get this one, you have to be either a) a bird, or b) a user of the service twitter.com. According to my analytics, most of you are the latter, and 90% of the former are using IE6, which I don’t acknowledge.

3) 24 hours – As if there are actually that many hours in a day. Whatever.

I triple-dog dare you to go into Barnes & Noble and not look at the Nook display. You won’t be able to do it. Though the device is all but sold out until early 2010, the monolithic in-store displays have fancy paper-cutouts in the shape of a Nook with features and specifications on them which I’m sure will be just fine wrapped and under the tree this Christmas, thank you very much.

The Nook (Technologizer’s great review here) is part of the latest gadget bubble to take hold of the elder and technorati set, the e-book reader. Like the Sony Reader and the Amazon Kindle before it, the Nook allows you to buy books from the Barnes & Nobel store, download them via 3g nearly instantly, and begin reading. The Nook brings not much to the discussion that the other two devices haven’t covered; E-Ink screen, fancy keyboard, books and newspapers. The killer features on the Nook that are supposed to wipe out the Sony and the Kindle are, well, two.

You know what’s awesome? Groupthink.

From the Oxford American Dictionary:

groupthink |ˈgroōpˌθi ng k|
noun – the practice of thinking or making decisions as a group in a way that discourages creativity or individual responsibility : there’s always a danger of groupthink when two leaders are so alike.

But dictionary people are always so … clinical. This definition doesn’t address — doesn’t even touch — the sense of warmth that comes from a good session of groupthink. You all know what I’m talking about; it’s that sense of calm that settles on a meeting once everyone has realized that the solution doesn’t offend anyone. In the room. So it must be right. Right?

So, you’re thinking about groupthink. Now, think about Tiburon, California. Tiburon sits on a peninsula on the northern end of the San Fransisco Bay. From there, looking south, you can see the city of San Francisco jutting out across the water. There are only two roads leading in or out of Tiburon. It’s idyllic. It never rains, the people are always happy, and being surrounded by water on three sides, the lapping waves drown out the sound of the poor coming from Oakland.

If you want something that is ugly and hard, which may be used in some fashion to eviscerate a ripe banana, then you’re the perfect candidate for a Motorola Droid. I think they were going for edgy on this one, but what this ad does is continue the string of puzzling positioning ads for what may have been a promising phone. Until parts started falling off of it.

I went to high school with a kid just like Comcast. He was a big kid, with big, giant, black hair. He’d spouted some story about how his long ago distant cousin was related to Russian royalty, a tzar or Rumplestiltskin or some such.

One day, this great oak of a boy shows up in a shiny new car. He says his divorcee mom has agreed to buy liquor for his high school parties because, he says, “she says that if she buys the booze and my friends come to my house, that will keep us all out of trouble.”

Of course, so will prison, largely.

After yesterday’s tome of a post, I had a few questions hit my inbox looking for details on my own shooting equipment, specifically on which lenses I use most often.

I love my D300 and was wondering what glass you shoot with most often? For people it looks like maybe an 85 1.4? Great depth of field. Do you use any tilt-shift lenses?

Thought I’d answer this one as a continuation of yesterdays discussion on picking out your first DSLR.

It wasn’t long ago that I set up my fancy Google Profile. If you haven’t set up your own, it’s a privacy advocate’s nightmare. This is a system whereby you willingly inject Google with your personal information to “improve search results” when people search for you. I didn’t give them the Full Monty, but you can find own everywhere I’ve lived, which may or may not be useful for … whatever.

The point is, last night, for the first time, I received an email through my Google profile from a friend. A friend who didn’t know my email address, and found me through Google. Profile. Man, this system is rock solid. He wanted to know if I had any thoughts on picking up his first digital-SLR camera. Well, I’ll let him tell you.

I want to get a DSLR camera for Christmas, but I do not know much about them. I was hoping that you could shed some light on what would be a good first DSLR camera for a first time user. I am interested in Nikon or Canon, but that is only because of name brand recognition. I am looking to keep the cost around $500.00 for body and lens. Any thoughts?

Do I have some thoughts? Sure I do. This one’s for you, Dave.

(more…)

The first photowalk of the holiday season. We ended up on Mississippi Avenue at The Rebuilding Center, one of the coolest, most eclectic home remodeling stores I’ve ever seen.

I’d called Chris at the Rebuilding Center the day before — I know they’re sensitive about class-type things going on in the place, and wanted to make sure there were no hard feelings about shooting on a crowded Saturday. No problem. Downright appreciative that I’d called first, in fact.

We were focusing specifically on camera function this time. With so many people carrying professionally capable DSLRs around their necks, sporting inequitable skill in using them, I thought it a good opportunity to look at the top 3-4 things to do with your camera that can improve your photos and your confidence when working quickly and taking advantage of natural light.

So many wonderful trinkets and bobbles and textures make for a great photographic playground. If you’ve never been, take the time to stop into this treasure of other peoples’ trash and soak it in. I’ve posted the full gallery here and, as always, comments are appreciated!

From diveintomark.org this morning:

And you can trace that all the way back, 17 years, through the Great Browser Wars, all the way back to February 25, 1993, when Marc Andreessen offhandedly remarked, “MIME, someday, maybe,” and then shipped his code anyway. The ones that win are the ones that ship.

It’s fascinating. Go read the whole piece if you’re into HTML nerdery: Why do we have an IMG element? [dive into mark]

Here are a few horrifying stats from bookstatistics.com:

• 58% of the US adult population never reads another book after high school.
• 42% of college graduates never read another book.
• 80% of US families did not buy or read a book last year.
• 70% of US adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years.

To be fair, I don’t go to bookstores often anymore, but I’m a Kindle guy. The rest of this stuff? So much for respondents inflating their answers to look smart…