PJH Studios

Category: Creativity

How things are created, mainly dealing with the process and means of creation

  • Five months

    Dan Provost and Tom Gerhardt went from a simple idea–a tripod mount for an iPhone 4–to an actual, physical product, called the Gliph, in five months.

    This turnaround, from idea to market in five months by two guys with no retail or manufacturing experience, signifies a shift in the way products are made and sold — a shift only made possible in the last couple years.

    Provost details the whole process. What they did when, why, how, who they had to contact. It helped that they understood design, so they could relate to the people who would make their product real. Amazing stuff.

  • The Art of Non-Conformity

    The Art of Non-Conformity: Set Your Own Rules, Live the Life You Want, and Change the World by Chris Guillebeau tells of how you can live the creative, purposeful life you want. His advice is pretty simple: get over your fear of failure, your fear of others’ expectations, and if you want it enough, you can find a way to make it work. Perhaps Nike said it best: Just do it.

    Guillebeau has some cool stories to provide insight, both personal and of those he’s met. The most important thing he believes is doing things and learning by experiences. Education and reading can provide ideas and insight, but they’re informational tools. You won’t know what works unless you do it.

  • Making ideas happen

    Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality, written by Scott Belsky, keeps the principle that an idea and the belief in that a central, well conceived idea is the core of making things happen. The book is broken down into three sections with practical tips and anecdotes to organizing and executing, connecting with others (he calls it building a community) and leadership. The tone is confident and some times cerebral, but grounded with enough stories to visualize what he’s talking about. Those stories can apply to individuals, teams in a corporate environment or non-corporate environment.

    Organization and Execution
    In the first section, Belsky suggests that when you have an idea, keep focused on it and create actionable steps to build momentum and confidence. Prioritization and identifying what’s essential is key in the beginning. It’s easy to keep adding to the idea, but you’ve got to be critical and keep to what matters.

    Community
    Don’t be afraid to partner with others. Know yourself, particularly if you’re a Dreamer (someone who can think up ideas), a Doer (someone who can execute) or an Incrementalist (someone who can do both–these are rare, he says, and he compares them to polymaths). Share ideas with others to get feedback and refine the idea. Let people in to build something bigger than just an executed plan.

    Leadership
    Know what really motivates people when it comes to doing things–play and recognition. If someone is doing something that doesn’t feel like work, that the task or project engages someone enough, they’ll do amazing work. Recognition for hard work also motivates people. Be sure to know what skills compliment each other, and know when to have a devil’s advocate to restrain a project from overreaching.

  • Rock Gods – Forty Years of Rock Photography

    Rock Gods: Forty Years of Rock Photography by Robert M. Knight is a diverse collection of photos that span his entire career. He’s taken pictures of Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Rolling Stones, Jeff Beck and many more.

    He focuses on lead guitarists, and his body of work shows that, especially with his live concert shots. Knight excels at the live concert photography. He says his approach is like a journalist or someone doing a documentary, where looking at the photos afterward they come to life in a more visceral way.

    In Rock Gods, he tells stories about some of his memorable shoots. Greeting Led Zeppelin in Hawaii as they walk off they plane carrying the master reels to Led Zeppelin II. Meeting Jeff Beck for the first time, after years of trying. And as he’s known for, being the last photographer to shoot Stevie Ray Vaughn.

    After paging through the book, I wanted more. More of his old concert shots, more of his more recent work. For photographers, viewing Knight’s work can tell a lot about composition and lighting–what worked, what moment created that visceral feeling you get from a concert photo.

  • Digital Masters by Nancy Brown

    Digital Masters: People Photography: Capturing Lifestyle for Art & Stock (A Lark Photography Book) by Nancy Brown is perfect for the Mom With A Camera crowd, who own a digital SLR and want to get into the portrait business. The tone of the book isn’t overly technical, and what technical aspects are mentioned are basic so that one can have a working understanding of equipment. Her tip of having a reflector for outdoor, sunny portraits will help a lot of people. For the most part, she focuses on the process and how to approach the shoots. The sample shots look like stock photos (which is one area she specializes in) of children or people in their 50s, 60s or 70s.

  • A Day in the Future

    As I rise and stretch, I notice I’m sore. Not from tending the fields though. I have no fields. Some unseen person does all the field-tending for me. Sometimes I forget that there’s any field-tending going on at all.

    Lyrically written.

  • 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 want to get the standard tourist shot – me and BB (cheezy but I am an australian and it is the other side of the world!). Was about to ask this guy to take my photo and he lay down on the grass and shut his eyes.

    I turned to the nearest person. It was a girl reading a paper and asked her to take my photo.

    That was the easy part.

  • 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 monitored from a command center. From central command, more boats can be deployed if the queue reaches a certain thresh hold. Or:

    Another option involves dispatching Captain Jack Sparrow or Goofy or one of their pals to the queue to entertain people as they wait. “It’s about being nimble and quickly noticing that, ‘Hey, let’s make sure there is some relief out there for those people,’ ” said Phil Holmes, vice president of the Magic Kingdom, the flagship Disney World park.

    And sometimes, they even throw parades.

    What if Fantasyland is swamped with people but adjacent Tomorrowland has plenty of elbow room? The operations center can route a miniparade called “Move it! Shake it! Celebrate It!” into the less-populated pocket to siphon guests in that direction.

    It seems like a fun way to earn more dollars.

  • 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 camera on his own dime. He knew she possessed the poise and grace to keep her composure for the length of time needed to get a decent shot.

    You also could not focus the camera. You had to focus your subject. Small shuffles back and forth would place them in that tiny zone of critical sharpness. Then they had to hold that position for about 30 seconds while the interior workings of the camera got spooled up, the lights got shut, and the flash fired. Not easy to do. Especially on point.

    But Joe recognizes an artist whose body is their art.

    It’s been equally wonderful to watch from afar as she has fought through personal struggles, dropped out of dance for a while, and then returned to the stage as a principal dancer. She has always talked straight up about the life of a ballerina, and her struggles with her weight. Her talent and candor, I feel, make her a beacon in the dance world, which prefers to keep the pain, the anorexia, the sweat and the tears behind the curtain. Ballerinas look amazing on stage. Offstage, their bodies can be just as beat up as an NFL offensive lineman.

  • 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. The writing is simple, casual and direct with very little photo jargon. The focus is understanding situations and when to click the shutter button.