pjhstudios blog

Category: Creativity

  • Risk Everything

    A user, riskeverything, on Reddit, responded to a thread, entitled “What small decision did you make that altered the entire course of your life?” with the story of his handle.  It spans three continents and involves London’s Big Ben clock tower. I go to London and on first day I went to big ben. I […]

  • Disney, masters of theme park operations

    Disney has theme park logistics down to a nimble operation that monitors all aspects of a park. They use a combination of weather reports, historical records, airline and hotel reservations to predict park capacity, but once the Magic Kindom opens, ride queues, cash registers at in park restaurants, foot traffic in particular areas are all […]

  • Joe McNally knows sugar plums

    Ballerinas are all the rage at the moment. Black Swan, New York Times critic Alastair Maccaulay stating that one dancer, Jenifer Ringer, “eaten one sugar plum too many” for a recent production of the Nutcracker. And now Joe McNally, famed photographer, comes to her defense. Joe took portraits of Jenifer with a giant, 40×80 Polaroid […]

  • Don’t Take My Picture – Craig Alesse

    Don’t Take My Picture by Craig Alesse is a good photography 101 for the family shutterbug who likes to take snapshots at all the family events, but get a little better at getting those shots. Topics covered include composition, lighting, group shots and how to put all these tools together to see a good shot. […]

  • Kevin Smith and how to work for yourself

    Kevin Smith on working for yourself: Life is mutable; the rigidity of working for someone else doesn’t allow for much flexibility. So create your own ideal universe.

  • Seth Godin – Tribes

    Seth Godin’s Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us serves up a compact guide to be a leader of ideas. How should a leader of a tribe, a movement, cause, purpose devoted to a singular mission act or think? That’s what Godin covers with a mixture of anecdotes, stories from people who have led and […]

  • A Darwinian theory of beauty

    Denis Dutton gave a TED talk about beauty from the perspective of Darwin. In it, beauty is a representation of the best possible outcome, be it animals (rabbits), art, a soccer kick and on and on. We’re hardwired to recognize beauty, despite its subjectivity.

  • Processed war photography

    Brian Barrel of Gizmodo spots Hipstamatic photos on the NY Times front page. When NYT photog Damon Winter went to northern Afghanistan to catalog the efforts of the First Battalion, 87th Infantry of the 10th Mountain Division, he took all the fancy camera equipment you would expect. He’d shoot video of firefights with a Canon […]

  • Seth Godin’s Purple Cow

    Seth Godin’s Purple Cow is a call for businesses and start ups to be remarkable. Being remarkable means being memorable, unique and doing business in such a way that it can be distinguishably different from the competition. Godin explains his purple cow: drive about the country side and watch cows–brown cows, black cows, black and […]