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

["Karen Randall" <krandall@rdrcpa.biz>]

Erik wrote:

> Ah, I figured sooner or later this would be brought up.
>
> We're going to have to make some kind of decision on this.
<snip>
> 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."

So basically, he ISN'T "official photographer", he was just "official 2004 
CONVENTION photographer"?  If that's the case, then we really don't need to 
make any decision at all.  The 2004 convention is old business at this 
point.

> 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.

Not for lack of trying.  Even among the high rez images he sent me, few were 
publication quality.  I even sent the files to several of you for "second 
opinions" when trying to use one of his shots for a TAG cover. (I was TRYING 
to give him a TAG cover just to make him happy)  Then, of course, he shot 
himself in the foot by getting rid of all of his high rez originals, so we 
couldn't use any of his photos any more.

> > 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).

I don't think the rest of us were ever aware of that.

> 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.

It gets back to Jay thinking he knew more about what he was doing than he 
really did. (or pretending... I'm frankly not sure which)  It turned out 
that he couldn't do that collection piece because he didn't even have a CD 
burner, let alone a DVD burner.  My guess is that he didn't/doesn't have the 
computer power to store all the images he was taking, which is why he 
decided to down-size them all.  He definitely thinks like a web/computer 
screen viewer rather than a publication-quality photographer in terms of 
photo use/resolution/quality.

> 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.

Sorry you're stuck trying to salvage his current format and photos, though 
because they were only low rez and had his copyright burned in, it's not 
much of a loss anyway.  Fortunately, we do have a better permanent record 
than that, even if it's not currently on the web site.  Because I felt 
uneasy about the situation, I took a lot of pictures, which are saved both 
on my hard drive and my external hard drive.  I have some of Scott's (from 
the pre-convention days) and all of Steve Fuller's.

I am SURE Scott saved his, and I'd be extremely surprised if Luis and Ricky 
don't have a bunch as well.  I'm thinking we should contact these folks and 
pull those photos in before too much time passes?

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

I'm not sure a proposal is needed, given the way it was originally voted, 
but I propose that we drop his name off the web site, and stop calling him 
"official photographer" among ourselves.  It doesn't sound like he'll even 
notice, but if he does, and doesn't like it, we can point out that his 
official job was for the 2004 convention which is long past, and since we 
don't even have another convention scheduled at this point, we were just 
"cleaning house" on the web site.

Karen 


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