Official Photographer, was Re: [AGA-mcm] Potential AGAF staff

[Erik Olson <erik@thekrib.com>]

On Sun, 17 Jul 2005, Karen Randall wrote:

> In which case, why is he the "official" photographer?

Ah, I figured sooner or later this would be brought up.

We're going to have to make some kind of decision on this.

Jay came to us about this time last year, offering to help the AGA by 
photographing the convention.  In talks, this turned out to be somewhat 
more grand than that, as he also wanted a title of official convention 
photographer, and wanted to manage the online slide show of the 
convention.  There was a little ambiguity over the meaning of "Convention 
Photo Gallery" -- I interpreted it to mean the collection of photos of the 
convention on the web; Jay interpreted it to mean Interactive Photo 
Gallery Software that would later be also used to host photos of ... [we 
never got that far].

The proposal that officially was approved was: "Proposal 04-084: Grant Jay 
Luto the title Convention Photographer, with credit on the AGA website, 
and job description to include creating a gallery for the 2004 convention 
of his and others' photos."

My thought at the time was "let's try it for a year and see how things 
go"... I think I even stated that to Jay and this list.  Jay, I think, 
thought of the position as ongoing.

As many of you know, things did not go particularly well.  I think that 
both Jay and the board were none-too-pleased with the relationship.  From 
Jay's perspective, the board were a bunch of ungrateful snobs always 
asking for more, trying to keep him from setting up an interactive photo 
gallery, not acknowledging the work, and not using his work enough in the 
printed material.  And I will say from the board's perspective, Jay came 
into this with that uniquotous "The AGA is broken. I will fix it with 
Photo Gallery Software!" attitude, but the final product didn't really add 
much to what we already had in previous years.

Looking at the stats page, it shows that there was an initial surge right 
after the convention, but it dropped down to essentially NIL within a 
month or two.  (removing the page pulls from web spiders, in december, 
about 2000 hits on the convention gallery page, 1200 hits in January, 200 
in February, negligable in March).  The page for the 2003 convention got 
only a few hundred hits the month it went live, but then again, it also 
didn't have Amano, or someone pushing its existence on the forums.

> From my personal observation, the problem was that Jay wanted to do "Jay's 
thing" based on his other work.  And what he thought was the best for the 
AGA were low-resolution web photos on an interactive photo gallery (though 
I offered him the option of hosting it on any software on any of his 
favorite sites, in reality *I* set up the gallery program, and typed in 
90% of the captions on it).  What the AGA *needed* was someone to collect 
original digitals from everyone, including Jay himself, to be put on 
DVD-ROM and sent to Karen and Cheryl for TAG and later archives. With a 
minor amount of tweaking, his goals could have been compatible with the 
AGA's goals, but he couldn't (or wouldn't) do that.

And what we have as a record of the 2004 convention are a bunch of 
low-resolution photos with Jay's and others' copyright burned in.  In 
fact, your note is timely, as I Scott tipped me off yesterday that the 
gallery was busted -- probably during my software upgrade last month -- 
and if it hadn't fixed itself when I upgraded the software, I wouldn't 
really have known how to extract the comments with the photos.  It's a 
mess.  I'm now STUCK using this wretched software on the website.

Anyway, someone feel free to make a proposal. :)

  - Erik

--
Erik Olson
erik at thekrib dot com
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