Aaron Paul Vogel

This is a promotional video that Steve Lamme, Leanne Snyder and I shot. Steve and I did the editing. It took far longer than I planned, due partly to the poor communication between us and the organizers which resulted in some last minute planning changes. All in all I'm pretty happy with was a difficult situation and a first of its kind event for me. Let me know what you think!

Last night I had a lengthy conversation from a good friend and fellow intern. She was bemoaning the number of things her editors were piling on her plate on top of already frenetic photo assignment schedule. Once they found out that she - one of two at the paper - knew how to do audio slideshows, they assigned her to compile audio slideshows for a number of other photographers currently working with her at the New York fashion week events.

This particular friend of mine is a quality over quantity kind of person, like myself, so I could completely understand why she spent an inordinate amount of time tweaking and refining two slideshows. What was astounding was that her editors, when told that the third would have to wait until tomorrow, couldn't understand why things that look good take time. My friend was unsure what to do as she'd already been working incredibly long hours and was paying with her health for doing so. You see, she has Lupus, and despite fending off the germs and struggling her way through arthritic joints thus far, The Wolf has finally caught up with her in the form of a cold. "I've touched subway railings and moments later eaten out of those same hands and been fine so far! Why now?"

This little anecdote brings up two points that I think are important for interns to think about. First, a complicating factor in her problems is her Lupus, though more so that she didn't remind her editors of her limitation after accepting the internship offer (she did state it on her resume), nor did she bring it up when it began to become apparent that her photography assignment schedule was exacerbating the problem. Had she been up front and built a rapport with her editor where she could let him know when the assignments were causing a problem and he could be ready for such a situation, the problem of her burnout may have been avoided. As it is she's worked herself sick.

The second half of the problem is unreal expectations by her editors. This is not, sadly, an solitary incident of an editor that's out of the loop. Instead it is a single example of an problem that is endemic in the industry: asking too much of too few people. There is, of course, something to be said for interns busting their butts to prove themselves and produce increasingly better results within their capabilities. It is an entirely different story when unreasonable expectations are placed on any staff member. As 30 year Daily News veteran Frank Van Riper writes in the August 2007 issue of Digital Journalist:

"The danger, though, is what happens when – in an increasingly bottom-line-hungry climate in which deadlines are constant – news organizations (or, more correctly, the suits upstairs who call the tune) feel they can pile various jobs onto a staffer who is in no position to complain, and still expect to get professional quality results in both words and images."

In the end I advised my friend to do what I think she knew she had to: stand up for herself and her body, and tell her editor what he can expect from her. With only 3 weeks left in the internship they're not going to let her go because of it and she won't come home three-quarters dead. She may not get a glowing review if another paper should call, but from what it sounds like, her editors didn't really pay much attention to her before this, so what kind of review would she get otherwise. Besides, if she (read WE) don't stand up for ourselves and our time now we (she) can't expect our editors to suddenly expect a reasonable amount of work. Once a precedence is set, particularly in new media, that's where the bar will always be. So in the end busting your ass and setting unreal expectations is not in your best interest

UPDATE: I got a little iChat update from my friend last night:

"[I'm doing] much better. Long story short I had a good talk with the editor. Said my quality work takes time, either give me that or I make so so slideshows faster. He appreciated my honesty and gave me 2 days off to recoup. He said I'm too valuable to him this week."

If you haven't heard of Discovery Channel's hit show Deadliest Catch you're clearly not paying attention to some of the only good television on these days. I'll spare the details for those of you in the know, and give everyone else a link to check it out for themselves: Deadliest Catch on Discovery. take a look and come back.

Well, it turns out that the brave souls who started and continue to film (they have extra camera now, but continue to work themselves) the show are Sacramento locals. Well, relatively local. One lives in Auburn and the other in Lotus. Sac Bee did a story on Doug and Todd Stanley a couple weeks ago. I'm praying I can talk to the guys about what they do, and maybe, just maybe, get them to come out and talk to Brooks NPPA about their gig. That would be amazing.

Below you'll find what I believe will ultimately be the final way that I host and post my videos to the web. The solution is, unfortunately, still a version of hand-coding in that I encode the FLV files using a program on my computer, then upload that file to my hosting server and use a pre-created SWF file and some special embed code to actually play the FLV file. Sadly I've yet to find a sharing/hosting service that can cleanly and reliably share my files. While I lose out on potential views from traffic coming from the sharing site, I have very good control over the way my video plays on my website. Ultimately I'm happiest this way, but I'm amazed that with all the options available out there for video sharing, this is still no high quality, flexible and simple site: no one site has managed to do it all.

What you see below is my Profiles in Composition video encoded using the On2 Flix Standard program. It is a $39 standalone program that does nothing else than encode video to FLV files using the On2 VP6 codec, which, at the moment, is the highest quality FLV codec available. In the future this same program, or the next version of it, will be support the H.264 codec, which is even better for getting quality at low file sizes. Once the FLV file is created I upload it and use the JW FLV Player rather than going through Flash to create a player. This is a nice, FREE, way to embed FLV video without having Flash. There's even a wizard on the website that will create the embed code for you and a javascript that will cleanly deal with users who don't have the most recent Flash Plugin installed. It's far more advanced than anything I could come up with on my own.