I’ve been taking classes at SCORE and trying to spend more time on the business side of my business. Among the many interesting things on the SCORE website, I found this list of advice for Startups in 13 Sentences.

Ha! Learned my lesson against hubris from last year and submitted works to theDragonCon Art Show on time for Jury Round 1.

I’ll be attending < href=”http://www.iconsf.org/”>I-Con in Stony Brook, New York on the weekend of March 27th. Nigel Sade, Allison Minor and I will be splitting vendor booths 174-5 in the Dealer’s Room.

Then I’ll be hitting Frolicon where you can find my work on display in the Art Show. I’ll also be teaching two classes (times to be announced) there:

Erotic Photography Made Easy
How to take sexy photographs without spending a fortune on photography equipment, and with minimal photo editing. Use your cell phone camera! Use your webcam! It’s not what you own, but how you use it, and this in-class demonstration and lecture will help you use it better.

From Photo To Fantasy
Catgirls, elven strippers, space vixens and more! Learn how to take photographs of your lover and turn them into the stuff of your own wet dreams. Have a specific fantasy image you’d like help with? Email seminar@amul.biz with topics suggestions, and we might work on realizing your fantasy/sci-fi imagery together!

AfterCapture is a magazine that is freely distributed to commercial photographers. This tends to generate an ad-centric magazine, and I frequently question the merit of their equipment/software reviews, but greatly enjoy the articles on other photographers, the educational material, and the lessons in advertising (marketing material directed at people in the advertising industry tends to be extremely well designed).

After discovering the AC Blog, it’s almost not worth my time to read the printed material anymore. For instance, check out this article on Learning Strategies for Video Tutorials.

Hey there, person who already reads my blog.

What do you do for a living? What types of clients and/or jobs should I send your way? What sort of business related internet material do you find interesting to read?

How can I help you and your company make money? How does advertising and imagery fit into the work you do, or the work your company does?

Do I have your contact info? Do you have mine?

I missed the deadline to apply for the Dragon Con Art Show, but I’ll still be teaching. Check the Art Show Programming Guide for the full class line up.

This year, I’ll be teaching a class called “The Low Cut Blouse Phenomenon.” It’s an exploration of how the internet affects the way we perceive and make art. That’s Saturday at 10am, for those who don’t want to watch the parade.

The Directors of the Art Show have also invited me to once again sit on a panel discussion on judging fantasy photography. Hopefully, the discussion will actually affect the judging criteria for future DragonCons. That’s also on Saturday, 1pm.

I’ve got a lead on a possible gig shooting for an upcoming trading card game. Has anyone worked on one of these before or knows someone who has? I’m trying to get an idea of how much they typically pay illustrators. If I can find someone who has done photography for a project like that, this would be even better.

I haven’t thought about the term Satisficing since my days as a programming major at Carnegie Mellon, but the topic came up again and I realized that I lean towards a satisficing strategy most of the time.

In a nutshell: Satisficers are content to make less than optimal decisions, on the theory that most of the time any decision will be good enough, and the cost in time to produce an optimal result is higher than the risk of making an insufficient choice. Maximizers seek as much information as possible before making a decision, with the confidence that the decision will be better than it would have been otherwise.

I realize now that much of my frustration with the people who frequently give me business advice is that they are maximizers and I am a satisficer. But this doesn’t answer the more important question: is satisficing a valid business strategy for the art sales aspect of my business? In the commercial world, photographers usually need to bid on projects, and that seems to imply that maximizers will be more successful.

This tangents into the larger question of whether my career goal is really about maximizing profit. The very term suggests a preference for a strategy which is foreign to me. I can’t imagine many investors would be willing to support a company dedicated to satisficing their profit goals. On the other hand, I’m not a corporation, so does this really apply to my business?

It’s a big question, and one deserving of far more thought than I currently have time to give it.

I’m currently working on a piece that will be called Diogenes 2: The Search for Love. I photographed the male model today, and am now reviewing the photos from the shoot.

As a result, I spent my afternoon saying things like, “Look over there! Is that love? Yeah, look at it closely. It could be Love, but it looks kind of grimy. Sorta wilted. Forlorn. Look, it may be Love, but I wouldn’t want to stick it in my pocket, you know what I’m saying?”

Now I’m spending the evening talking to myself. “Whoa. What’s he looking at now? That doesn’t look like any Love I’ve seen. I think he’s found an Infatuation. Yeah, infatuations look like that sometimes. Hey, now! What’s that? Oh, that’s not Love. That’s….that’s….I dunno what that is….but it ain’t Love, that’s for sure!”

I’ve noticed recently that the internet sometimes seems so big to me that it becomes almost self-defeating. When seeking pro-photo communities, for example, the number of options are overwhelming and strangely deceptive.

To start with, there are so many communities where people share images and talk photography that I could easily spend all my time reading them. Ideally, I’d like to limit myself to communities that are strictly professional for my shop talk, but contain potential art buyers for the display of my work. Or perhaps I should find a community that is multimedia, but shares my interest in subject matter. Then, too, I need somewhere that keeps me abreast of the technology and equipment news, without getting sucked into the mindset that my equipment determines what sort of photographer I am.

Even among my social and hobby-based online communities, there is a tendency to get stuck in the trivial details. One hobby-based site I am generates at least 200 messages a week arguing over terminology.

I recently attend WPPI, a pro-photography convention focusing on Wedding and Portrait photography (two areas that I spend a lot more time thinking about than involving myself in). I picked up a number of memberships in the heat of the moment, and now must evaluate exactly how much time I have to spend reading all these conversations. Several of the books that I picked up also have online communities built around them. Should I even check them out? What value could they provide to me?

I have been traditionally hesitant to join art-based communities like Deviant Art and Etsy, or participate heavily in networking sites like Model Mayhem. My dubious reasoning for this is that I would prefer people to come to MY site. Yet, all of these places provide a built-in audience much larger than I could ever hope to generate on my own.

My purpose for joining these websites, taking part in these communities, is to build what I refer to as My Army Of Dreamers. I’m seeking friendships that will encourage my own creativity, push my efforts, and support me in those moments of self-doubt which plague all creative professionals. Yet, I am often reminded of a parable from Art and Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland:

A pottery class is divided into two groups. The first group is told that their grades will be determined entirely by the quality of the single best pot they make. The second group is told that their grades will be based entirely on the quantity of pots produced, regardless of quality. The first group spent the entire semester debating the nature of The Perfect Pot, and while they had many nice theories, the work they produced failed to live up to their own beliefs about such perfection. Meanwhile, in addition to producing a large number of pots, the second group made better pots, faster and more consistently. The moral to the story is obvious: talk is cheap; doing it is what makes you good at it.

(Tangent: Whenever I quote that book, I have to include my other favorite anecdote. A frustrated young piano student complains to his mentor, “It just never sounds as good as it does in my head!” The mentor sagely replies, “What makes you think that is ever going to change?”)

This, then, is the dilemma: I want a community to support my endeavors, but I worry that I’d be better off spending all that time just taking some darn photos.

New times for the events that I’ll be running or involved in during Dragon Con (when not running my art booth):

Photographic Truth, Myth Of – Not “How To Photoshop,” but Why to do so. This workshop begins with a method to critique images, then uses this to explore common photographic cliches. Using principles of color theory and composition, we will seek alternatives to these overused methods. Amul Kumar – Friday 7:00 PM – Hanover G

ART005: Photography in Fantasy Art – Join the Art Institute of Atlanta and several fantasy photographers in a discussion about fantastical photography and it’s place in fandom and art shows. Help us create guidelines for entering photography into the Dragon*Con Art Show.. Art Institute of Atlanta, Amul Kumar, Dave King, Tracy Cornett, John Parise, Fox Gradin – Saturday 10:00 AM – Hanover F