In the Summertime When The Weather Is Hot...

If you’re old enough to remember, (ahem) if you’re old enough to remember, you’ll recall a Mungo Jerry song (they were one of rock ‘n’ roll’s all-time great one-hit wonders) called, “In The Summertime.” This is a song known by those who weren’t even born when it was released. Anyway, “in the summertime,” as the song goes, “when the weather is hot you can reach right up and touch the sky...”

Some summers though, when the weather is hot the sky reaches down and touches you. We’re having such weather in the New York City area now: hot & oppressively humid, sticky, uncomfortable to the max and going on four days. Luckily, I’m not shooting today and I have the refuge of a nice air-conditioned office in which to work fairly leisurely.

A couple of summers ago, in weather not unlike today’s, I was busy photographing the excavation of Feltville in the Watchung Reservation. The reservation is a lush, heavily wooded, 2000 acre nature preserve in the Watchung Mountains and because the trees are so... thick... the forest holds the humidity close to the surface. If you’re working there, you’re wet (in fact, if you’re doing anything there, you’re wet!).

My assignment was for American Archaeology magazine and I was covering the activities of a crew from Montclair State University under the direction of Matt Tomaso. They were completing an archaeological survey, testing and excavation, with geoarchaeology and laboratory components, conducted in a 19th century industrial utopian village (on the National Register of Historic Places) called “Feltville,” after its founder, Daniel Felt. Amazing stuff, really, and that’s one of the things I like best about what I do. I get to see some amazing stuff from the inside.Of course, one of the things I like least about what I do is that I may have to do it in 100% humidity. This is when photography is a job as opposed to an adventure (well, it’s still an adventure but it feels like a job).

Despite the humidity, Feltville was a very cool assignment. Some of the old buildings are still standing and some are gone. There’s the deserted cemetery of the Willocks & Badgley families with graves dating to the American Revolution. The team also excavated a wealth of artifacts from what amounted to the basements of houses which long ago disappeared into the ground.

If you live in the area, you should take your kids to see the Deserted Village of Feltville... in October... when it’s dry!

Spam. You Gotta Love It!

The way I see it, being in the Internet biz you gotta love spam. Spam. You know, junk e-mail, it fills your In box and there’s not much you can do about it.

Well... actually there is and I’ve done it. I use a remarkable software product called SpamSieve to keep my e-mail In box squeaky clean. Just the same, a couple of pieces sneak in under the radar anyway.

Tuesday, for example, I received well over 800 spam messages and all but 3 were automatically shunted to a special mailbox for spam, leaving my In box available for legitimate messages. One of those three was from a company called istockimages.com and they wanted me to upload my images, all of them, to their server so they could sell them for pennies and promising to make me a rich man.

I’d have paid them no mind except for two things: 1) the sender cc’d about three dozen of my friends (they failed to hide the addresses, not too savvy for Internet pros) as well as another eighty or so addresses I didn’t recognize and; 2) they were using the name istockimages.com which is very similar to istockphoto.com who, even though I’m no fan of micro-payment stock photography, is the leader in the field and which was recently acquired by Getty Images for some ridiculous amount of money, I think it was $50 million.

Anyway, these guys have real nerve and it made me reply to their e-mail. I wasn’t really very worried about my friends on their list submitting images, most are way too smart for that, but there were 80+ addresses I didn’t recognize and I wanted to let those 80+ know (especially if they’re inexperienced) that micro-payment stock is the most destructive business model to emerge in our business ever.

“I do not support Royalty Free licensing,” I wrote, “and I absolutely do not allow my images to be distributed so inexpensively and I especially hope that the other photographers to whom you also sent your solicitation will join me in declining your offer.”

Anyway, the istockimages.com site has a grand total of 239 images on it as of this writing, not very impressive. Needless to say, they can’t count on me to help them fatten-up their offering... unless they’re willing to take my images of Souvenirs (I don’t buy ‘em, just shoot pictures of ‘em).

Hopefully, I can count on you to stay away from them as well.

New Jersey At Last

I've been living in, and working from, New Jersey for eight years now and still my clients are from everywhere but New Jersey. I've shot for west coast and mid-west clients. English, Spanish, Canadian, Brazilian and Japanese clients. A whole lot of New York City clients, but never, never, a client based in New Jersey.

This afternoon my phone rang and it was a guy from the design department of a multinational financial company and his office is in Newark. At last, a New Jersey client! Actually, not a client yet... I only sent an estimate so far... but I have my fingers crossed.

I've done a lot of shooting in New Jersey however and the last time I shot a job in Newark I was doing an editorial piece for an airline's magazine on the revitalization of Newark's downtown (EWR is one of their hubs). Hotels, restaurants, minor league baseball and the New Jersey Performing Arts Center (NJPAC), pictured above.

Okay y'all, keep your fingers crossed, I need a reason to have my NJ Sales Tax ID Number. I've been filing returns full of zeroes for eight years and I think it's finally time to shock some clerk/typist in Trenton.

If You Live Long Enough, You See Everything Twice

The photography industry has been going through an upheaval of sorts since September 2001. Not only are photographers reeling since the terror attacks of 9/11 when telephones stopped ringing (except to find out if you’re alive), the economic climate changed as well. Literally half the magazines that existed in August, 2001 were gone by October as advertisers cut back in the wake of the terror attack and the uncertainty it fostered. One of the advertisers, America’s largest, Phillip Morris, stopped advertising completely. Have you seen the Marlboro Man lately?

The loss of the bulk of both the advertising and editorial markets for photography set everyone scrambling for work, made us more competitive and drove rates and fees into a downward spiral. Naturally, the markets compensated for the loss of business by adding new ways to find business.

Various web sites began appearing that offered to match “professionals” with clients on a per-project basis. Elance.com and guru.com eventually emerged as the market leaders in this area.
The way these work is that prospective clients (businesses in need of art) post the projects on-line and the artists (those in need of work) bid for the assignments, most often at substandard rates. One company, onrequestimages.com, took this a step further and actually assigns five photographers to shoot the assignment without any guarantee of payment... if the client likes the work they arrange to license it, if not the photographer loses his/her investment.

It’s a despicable practice we’d thought we’d done away with but, as my dad says, “If you live long enough, you see everything twice.” I guess I’ve made it, because I’m now seeing New York real estate at bargain prices.

Dennis Connors e-mailed to let me know of a project he’d seen on guru.com in which the client is, “looking for a photographer in the New York City area interested in taking New York photos for hire.” The need would be various and ongoing and, “I will require full rights to the photos, meaning that the photos will belong to me as the photographer will be working for hire..... There will be a required minimum of photos expected per day... I'm hoping to stay in the $100-$150 range per day.”

I’m somewhat of a New York City specialist, having a more than extensive file of New York City stock photos. What’s more, having been involved in stock photography for thirty years I have a pretty good idea of what a photograph is ultimately worth... and it’s a lot more than $30 per image, assuming one can even make five decent images per day. Just so you know, I can milk a day for all it’s worth... all the images accompanying this post were made on the same day.

I logged-on to guru.com and actually bid on this job. My bid is very reasonable; in-fact considering the value received by the client, my bid is outright low-balling. How much do I want? I want $125,000.00.

My message to all: JUST SAY NO TO BAD DEALS!

It's A Wonderful Life

I'm breaking two of my rules this morning: 1) never show anything but your best work; and, 2) said I wasn't going to write this weekend. The situation is complicated by the fact that today is Fathers' Day and I have two really great kids who, as many will this morning, made their dad a deluxe breakfast.

Pictured at right (though it's not my best food photo ever) is a little something whipped up by Aron (13) and Alex (8)..... The boys made me an onion, garlic & cheese omelette with a tomatilla salsa and orange lime crepes, orange juice and coffee..... all without their mother's help. In fact, Aron is already an accomplished gourmet chef and Alex is right behind him. And pardon this gratutious plug, but they're chips off the old block, I do most of the cooking in our house.

Anyway, I'm blessed with two really talented boys. Aron, left, as I mentioned, is already a very fine cook. He watches Food Network nearly non-stop (takes a break for Smallville and 24) while his friends are watching baseball, football, basketball, etc. Truth be known, I never watched sports on TV either.

Alex, right, has been playing guitar and taking lessons since he's four and a half, so it's just about half his life (he'll be nine soon). I can hear him practicing on his Stratocaster in the background, playing John Lennon's "Come Together." I have no doubts that he'll be pushing Eric Clapton out of the limelight very soon.

We're going to visit my father this afternoon, making a BBQ at his house with my brothers. Perhaps I'll bring the present my kids got for me and use it at Dad's... they bought me a hamburger press. It doesn't get any better than this!

This Day In History, 1996

I'm scouring my brain for something to write about today and I keep coming up empty-handed, so I was just wondering if there is *anything* special about it. I decided to search my stock photo database and see if I'd made any memorable pictures on this date. Nope. Tomorrow, Saturday, is no day to be blogging and therefore I won't write anything at all so I looked in the database again and found a very memorable image I created on June 17, 1996, ten years ago.

I‘d just switched from Nikon manual cameras to Canon EOS auto-focus and was all psyched-up to use them professionally after a week of testing. I think my initial investment in my Canon EOS system in the first week was substantial as I had bought two EOS-1N bodies, an EOS-1 (with a Polaroid back), a few zoom lenses, a 50 macro and a 300 telephoto. I was ready.

Just about the time I was all geared-up I had a call from John Dykstra, a special effects guy out in Hollywood. He was working on a new film for Joel Schumacher called "The Iceman," a working title which was released as "Batman & Robin," with George Clooney as Batman, Arnold Schwarzenegger as the villain and Uma Thurman, Alicia Silverstone and Chris O'Donell.

John wanted me to do some shooting in New York as they weren't planning to come here and, as Gotham City is based on New York, he needed images custom-made to use as backgrounds (yeah, every time you see an image of Gotham City you're looking at my pictures!). He originally wanted me to shoot large format and I didn't mind, but I thought that shooting 35mm film would be a better idea. We discussed it at length, I sent some samples out to Warner Brothers, we discussed it some more and came to an agreement to shoot it with 35mm.

So... when we began talking details and he learned that I'd just bought all this new stuff he asked me if I had zoom lenses or prime lenses? Well, most of what I'd bought were zooms. He said that zoom lenses wouldn't do because they all exhibit pin-cushion distortion and the effects he was going to create with my images required *no* distortion. He asked if I could shoot with prime lenses.

No problem! I took my trusty ol’ Nikon F3s out of the closet, put new batteries in them, dusted off my 11 Nikkor lenses and I was in the movie business. I made this image of the Chrysler Building at dusk on June 17, 1996 while on the Batman shoot.

Have a good weekend, see you next week.

Timing Is Everything

Driving home this evening I was listening to "Open Source" with Christopher Lydon on WNYC-AM (New York Public Radio) and learned that today is "Blogday." Imagine that, I'm blogging only six days and the seventh is a holiday already. Where have we seen this before? ;-)

War Stories: Patience Is A Virtue

My friend Arthur Cohen came by this evening to drop-off my son after his son's birthday party. Arthur’s also a photographer. Maplewood, where we live, is just lousy with photographers ...we could qualify to have our own ASMP chapter with the ridiculous amount of photographers living here.

Anyway, Arthur was here and we were talking about long days and pulling really mean hours. I was saying that as a location guy, my clients definitely get their money’s worth out of me in the summer when the days are longer.

A couple of summers ago I had a shoot in Grand Rapids for Illume Magazine (Illume is published by the Tokyo Electric Power Company... yes, it’s a Japanese magazine). They were very interested in the Steelcase Corporate Development Center so my assistant and I flew out there to shoot this story on the CDC and their unique work environment called “Functional Inconvenience.”

The writer and the art director flew in from Tokyo to meet us there, and we had five days to shoot a lot of pictures. The art director, when expressing his needs for pictures of the CDC itself told me, “Uh Joe, we need drama!!” To me this meant that I had to get up well before dawn and go to bed well after sunset... and work the whole day in between.

Anyway, one morning we arrived in the dark and sat in the car until the sun started to brighten the sky. To my dismay, as it was becoming bright enough to be able to see, what I saw was a whole lot of fog. And through the fog I saw a whole lot of nothing. Bummer!

My assistant kept asking if we could go for coffee or breakfast or something, and I wanted to stay and see how much worse my luck could get. Well, it was pretty bad.



Until the sun rose over the side of the building. It cut through the haze like a laser while the building and the sky maintained a very delicate relationship. I think this is one of the nicest of the 4o or so variations I produced on the Steelcase CDC. Having the patience to just sit there and wait was difficult, but it paid-off in spades. As my grandmother used to say, “Good comes to those who wait.”

Today Is Flag Day

Having both feet planted firmly left of center, I’ve never really been the flag-waving type. However, as a commercial artist I know a good icon when I see one. Shortly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 on New York and Washington, President Bush made a televised speech to the nation and, at the close, urged all Americans to fly the flag as a gesture of solidarity.
Within 24 hours the American Flag began appearing in places where it hadn't appeared
previously, in some of the most unlikely

places and in ways not usually seen. Recognizing the significance of the response from the American people to their President's request, I immediately began documenting these displays. People continue to hang flags almost five years later (I guess "these colors *don't* run!") and I'm still photographing flags wherever I go.



With over 1500 American Flag images (and growing) in my collection, these are some of my favorites.

It’s Farmers’ Market Season Again

So much of our lives, it seems, centers on food. Maybe that’s why I’m a touch over-weight these days. More than likely it’s because I simply don’t get as much exercise living in the burbs as I did when I lived in the city. Oh, well.

And ‘food’ has taken on another role in daily life for me... as President of my local ASMP chapter I feel it necessary to participate in all of the ASMP’s e-mail forums (thankfully, there are only four) and the newest is ASMPfood. In a post to the ASMPfood forum this morning I briefly alluded to an encounter with a 90 lb. swordfish and I’m sure that some of my correspondents will look at the swordfish image and say, “this isn’t food photography!!”

Well, I’m not a food specialist but I shoot my share of food images. In fact, I’ve recently had six assignments for a local magazine, three of the shoots qualified as food photography... I photographed a family sitting down to a traditional Christmas dinner (shoot now, publish later). I made some pictures of a chef cooking in his restaurant and some of his signature dishes (elegantly plated, of course) and I made an essay at a local Asian supermarket. I’ll show selects from those in a subsequent posting.

In the meantime, with the arrival of consistently warm weather it’s farmers’ market season again. I love buying fresh produce grown locally and I also love sightseeing at other farmers markets that I happen upon wherever I may be.

If it’s Tuesday, I must be heading for the Millburn Farmers’ Market. As you might expect, I do my sightseeing with a camera.

Swordfish - $15.95/lb. at Kings Short Hills

I was in the King’s supermarket in Short Hills Saturday afternoon doing a little grocery shopping when I saw a young girl, looked about 12 years old, taking a snapshot of the fish monger and a whole swordfish with her cell phone. I thought my son Alex would like that so I asked if I could shoot a couple of frames myself.

I shop in Kings often and I know Yves Edmond, the Seafood Department Mgr. (pictured), pretty well and we were joking around...

JP: How much for the fish?

YE: Let’s see, $15.95 times 90 pounds, about $1400, something like that.

JP: Okay, I’ll take two.

YE: Sorry, I only have one.

JP: Ahhh, forget it!

We both laughed.

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A few minutes later I was in the bakery department tasting samples of pita chips, trying to decide if I liked the sea salt or maple cinnamon variety best (sea salt wins, hands down!) when I hear a man ask, “Do you carry that camera everywhere you go?”

Looking up I see it’s Ron Brown, a photographer I recognize from our ASMP-NJ Salon program (Ron’s one of our regular attendees). “Yes, as a matter of fact I do carry it everywhere,” I replied.

It’s true. Like many photographers I carry a camera almost everywhere I go. I never know what I’m going to see and I don’t want to miss anything that might be worthy... like a whole ninety pound swordfish.

Naturally we had a discussion about photographing in supermarkets, in fact many retail stores, and how that’s generally frowned upon. The organization of a store is usually a top-secret matter. Many supermarkets make more money on placement fees for the goods than they do selling you the groceries, but I digress.



I’ve done some retail work. I recall a shoot I did for Donna Karan International. The marketing guys were trying to convince her to invest in upgrading the design of her “store-within-a-store” boutiques. I got to spend time in Macy’s, Bloomingdales, etc... all in the middle of the night. That’s a totally strange experience.






We also spent a few minutes on darkroom work. It relaxes Ron, I can’t be bothered. And then it was time to head home to catch some of the World Cup on television if I can get away with postponing mowing the lawn.

Picture for a Sunday morning

This is a Sunday morning kind of image and I need to learn how to post images anyway. Enjoy! (The image, left, and this entire blog is © Joseph Pobereskin, All Rights Reserved.)

It's seven o'clock, do you know where your pictures are?

An interesting anomaly has just put me off using the free Apple software that comes bundled with OSX in a big way (and I've been a Mac partisan for years and years) and I'm wondering if what I've just learned will affect users of Aperture?

While connecting an(other) external HD I inadvertently unplugged the power cord from my computer while it was on. With an old Macintosh running OS 9.x or earlier that would have caused an error message to appear on startup and Disk First Aid would have run a check and that would've been that. Maybe I'd have to rebuild my desktop.

When I restarted my current machine using OS X v10.4.5 I was shocked to find that my Desktop files weren't on my desktop, my music was gone from iTunes, there was nothing (no data) in my iCal files (my appointments!!!), my e-mails had all vanished, Address Book Contacts were in the ether, my Safari Bookmarks had fallen between the cracks, my widgets were MIA and my passwords in Keychain... ?????? Whoa!

I quickly found my music and reimported it to iTunes. The music files are in a folder called, appropriately, "Music." I was not so lucky with the rest. I called Apple for tech support.

I got some guy in India who knew absolutely *nothing* about OS X, nor could he understand the nature of my problem. After thirty minutes on the phone with him I insisted on being connected to someone in California. He was insulted but complied. The Californian was no help either.

My question to her was simple: where is the data being stored? If she could tell me, I could re-import it. I know the data has to be on my hard drive, all I did was cut the power. It's happened before and I never lost my data so why can't I find it now? BTW, the data IS there, we simply don't know where it is.

I finally solved most of this problem on my own. I found my iCal data and reimported it. I found most of my Mail data and reimported it (the mailboxes and the messages) but the InBox, Sent Box and Drafts Box is still MIA. I got my Address Book data from another computer where it was duplicated.

What's the problem? The data is stored somewhere and it's kept track of by a database that users have no access to. The database file was corrupted by the power outage and the applications don't know where to find the data. The problem is, neither does the tech support people at Apple Computer.

I have recovered some of the mail messages that were in my InBox and Sent Box simply by searching in Spotlight for the text. When I click on the message in the Spotlight results it displays it on my screen. I then "Redirect" the mail (yes, I have to send it to myself) to get it back into Mail.

IF THIS HAPPENS TO YOU: Open your Hard Drive and View as Columns...
Users > (Your Home Folder) > Library > then either Caches or Application support (depending) and hunt through the folders for your data. It's not fun.

One of the things I immediately didn't like about iPhoto, and why I won't use it even for my snapshots, was that I can't tell where the original files are stored. Now I know the practical manifestation of my fear. I could only imagine how I'd be freaking-out if I'd been using Aperture. It's seven o'clock, do you know where your pictures are?

Here’s Something To Think About

This was the President's Message I wrote for the Spring, 2006 issue of "Exposure," ASMP-NJ's quarterly magazine

"Here’s Something To Think About"

“If you really like it you can have the rights,
It could make a million for you overnight,
If you must return if you can send it here,
But I need a break and I want to be a paperback writer.”

So wrote John Lennon and Paul McCartney in their hit song, “Paperback Writer.” Had they known, as Merle Haggard says he learned early on in his song-writing career, that one must retain and control all rights to one’s creations in order to have a secure retirement, they’d never have uttered those words, save maybe for poetic license.

Look at what happened to The Beatles. They were the most popular and influential band of their time, perhaps of all time, and yet ten years into the project they were broke. Their work product was not under their direct control. In fact, it’s owned today by Michael Jackson (it’s okay, Paul McCartney learned how to play the game, he bought Elvis Presley’s catalog!). To make the money they required to sustain their lifestyles they needed to shut down the corporation and start fresh, every man for himself.

At the time off this writing, Sting is raking in over $2000 per day from just one song, “Every Move You Make.” Can you imagine it: $730,000.00, almost three quarters of a million dollars each year from just one song, and that’s not to mention all of the other hit songs he’s written and recorded with, or since he left, The Police. Holy cow! Two grand a day from just one song. Wow! I wish I’d practiced my guitar a bit more diligently. Probably needless to say, I also wish I’d learned to throw a fastball at 95 MPH with pinpoint accuracy, but that’s not as sustainable as writing and recording hit songs with a hot rock ‘n’ roll band.

Can photographers make this kind of money? Can our futures be as secure as Ringo’s, as Sting’s, as Linda Ronstadt’s, as Billy Joel’s, as Sheryl Crow’s, as Don Henley’s? As Weird Al Yankovic’s? The short answer is YES, ours can indeed. But how?

Well, the first part of how-to is establishing a style that’s commercially viable, and ‘commercially viable’ can be just about anything these days. The second part of how-to is being incredibly prolific, you’ve got to always be shooting. The third part is in building, or contracting for, a far-reaching distribution system... preferably automated and e-commerce enabled (ASMP has a program for that). The fourth part of this how-to is the key: retaining your rights in your work!

I’ve heard a lot about work-for-hire lately. Clients are increasingly demanding all rights in the images they commission, and, really, who can blame them? They’ve been advised by their legal departments to do so, but the question remains: do your clients really need to own all possible rights in your images?

Photographers complain about this on an almost daily basis, whether they call me, write to me or write to the various online forums I subscribe to. I’m hearing about it all the time.

I’ve even lost a couple of assignments recently to other photographers who were willing to give in to their client’s request for all rights, and that’s somewhere I’m not quite prepared to go. I’ll wager that you fall into one of the two groups yourself. Group A is photographers who give it all away and Group B is photographers who wish to retain all rights (you can feel free to switch those around if you have a particular affinity for either A or B as a letter).

ASMP as an organization is very strong on advocating that you retain your rights in your work. On the other hand, you need to put a roof over your head and food on your table, and you may even need to be able to send a child (or two) to the university in the near future. When faced with the choice of working and giving it all away, or not working but retaining your rights in your work... oops, if you haven’t worked then there’s nothing for you to retain, is there?

Okay, here we have a problem: How do we reconcile our need to eat and our need to retain our rights? Is it possible to do so in a declining market? What’s the strategy for accomplishing all of our goals in this regard?

The solution lies in education. And photographer education, especially as regards work-for-hire, is going to be a major initiative of the New Jersey Chapter in the near term so please stay tuned.

Links To Photo Industry Web Sites

I read PhotoPro and PhotoDigital *every* day.....
PhotoPro Archives - http://listserv.photonews.com/archives/photopro.html
PhotoDigital Archives - http://listserv.photonews.com/archives/photodigital.html
Photo News Network homepage - http://www.photonews.com/

I'm a General Member of ASMP and President of ASMP's New Jersey Chapter.....
ASMP National - http://www.asmp.org
ASMP New Jersey - http://www.asmp-nj.org

I'm one of the principal founders of SAA.....
Stock Artists Alliance - http://www.stockartistsalliance.org

When I figure out how to publish the links themselves as a sidebar, I will. In the meantime, I have a lot of links here...
http://www.pobereskin.com/links.html

Welcome To My Blog

Welcome to my blog.

I'm not really sure why I'm here. There was a thread on PhotoPro regrding using blogs as marketing tools, seems a lot of people are, especially wedding shooters. Well, I don't shoot weddings... actually, I did, once, my very first professional job, I'll never do it again!! (I'll tell the story later, promise) Just the same, I have a lot to say and no other place to say it so... I'm in the blog biz now. How about that?

I didn't know what else to call this blog so, "Eat At Joe's" is what I'm calling it.

What's it about? I don't know. Jerry Seinfeld had a network sitcom and when they asked him what his show would be about he looked the network exec square in the eye and told the truth: "It's gonna be a television show about nothing." Well, me too. Here I'm going to have a lot to say about nothing, except the 'nothing' that I'm going to talk about is going to be photography related, and likely more the business of photography than my photography business, but you never know.

Who am I? What do I know? I have a sort of official biography and you can find it on my web site, pobereskin.com

If you don't feel like surfing over there, here it is.....

Joseph Pobereskin was born in New York City in 1953 and became interested in photography at age twelve. He was educated at the Fashion Institute of Technology (New York) and through various apprenticeships, gaining expertise in several disciplines. While his photographic interests cover a broad spectrum, he specializes in Advertising and Corporate/Industrial photography for top-level clients, and his work has been published in more than 50 countries. In addition to his work making images, Mr. Pobereskin has been active in the photographic community advocating for photographers' interests. He currently serves as President of ASMP's New Jersey Chapter and is a founder of Stock Artists Alliance, a trade association which promotes the interests of producers of Rights Managed stock photography. Mr. Pobereskin lives near New York City, in Maplewood, NJ.

There you go. Now you know what I think my qualifications are. I'll put up some links to some of the stuff I've mentioned and you can look around. While you do that, I'm going to organize my thoughts and, hopefully, have something meaningful to say in a very short while (or a little longer).


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05/11/2010 Update: A lot has changed in almost four years. I've moved from the east coast to the mid-west (Chicago), I'm now a national director of ASMP, I've had four years of blogging experience and I've come to an important decision re Eat At Joe's: Anyone may comment on my blog posts. I welcome other voices, value other points of view, I might learn something from you (and that's the point, isn't it? That we learn from each other?) But I will no longer publish comments from those using pseudonyms or handles. You must sign your real name and I must be able to verify your identity. Thank you for your co-operation.