L. M. Lloyd

When the iPhone came out, there were a great many people (like every living soul in Hollywood) hoping it would "do for smartphones what the iPod did for digital audio players." Actually, even that is putting it mildly. There were a great number of companies who devoted a great amount of resources, literally betting the iPhone would become the dominant phone in the world, and radically changing their development efforts to put the iPhone at the top of their priority list. To this day, there are many who still jump through all sorts of mental gymnastics to maintain that it is far and away the most important mobile platform ever to be seen. I hate to break it to you, but it just isn't the case, and it is time to accept that and move on.

Now, I have had my fair share of criticisms of Apple and its fans, which is why I have a whole section of my sight just for that purpose. However, as I have detailed before, my main complaint isn't really with Apple, nor their products, nor their fans, but the blatant dishonesty and illogic that is the central pillar of the Apple myth. The iPhone hype is just another example of this. In this particular instance the most offensive deceit is the redefinition of success. When the iPhone was launched, everyone from excited bloggers to serious financial analysts predicted that every phone company on Earth was now in trouble, because the iPhone was going to completely change everything, and Apple was going to dominate the phone market, like they dominate the dedicated MP3 player market. Not only has that not happened, but I would maintain that all things considered, the iPhone is a fabulous flop.

I recently got an email from a friend of mine that had some tips for ways to build your personal brand, and once I got the taste of vomit out of my mouth, I decided to write this little article. Sometimes I like to forget that this nation has become nothing but a bunch of used car salesmen, stuck on an endless loop of some psychotic extended remix of Glengarry Glen Ross, but then something like this will snap me back to reality. You see, for you to Always Be Selling, you have to be a certain kind of person. The kind of person who is always looking for the business advantage of every situation, and always keeps in mind the best way to monetize even the most private of interactions. Now, before those people were called Bloggers, they had another name, and that was whores.

Yes, I know my wacky post-punk outlook is quaint, anachronistic and oh so 20th century, but I suppose it is one of the luxuries of being one of the ten people left in America who derives their self worth from something other than how many decimal places are in their bank account. Nonetheless, I think I need to get something straight here. A brand is something a company develops for their products, to create an emotional connection with people. When a person is attempting to create an emotional connection with people, they are supposed to use this thing called a personality! Now for the Bloggers out there who are confused by what this "personality" thing I speak of might possibly be, it is kind of like a personal brand, except instead of soullessly pandering to an imagined audience, trying to give them what you think will make them like you, you instead do and say what you want, in an attempt to like yourself. Think of it as ego, except based on who you intrinsically are, rather than how popular, or wealthy you might be. It doesn't pay as well, but you get the satisfaction of actually having some intellectual and artistic ground to call your own.

Â

Not too long ago, I wrote about the importance of shooting camera RAW. That is just the first step of the process. Camera raw gives you the flexibility to process your photos far beyond what you can do with a JPEG, but there is another step needed to really get the most out of your camera, and that is creating a profile. When you convert the high bit depth data from your raw file into a colorspace your computer can display, by default the colors are very flat, and kind of drab looking. Now of course you can fix that in post, but there is a great way to get them to pop back to how you remember them in the original scene, with just one click. That is by using a ColorChecker card to create a profile.

A ColorChecker is an obscenely expensive piece of paper which has several colors very accurately printed on it in exact known values. I can completely understand why the average photographer would shy away from picking one of these up, because they charge for them as though they are printed with unicorn blood. They do let you do a pretty neat trick with your camera though. With current Adobe software, all you have to do is snap a couple of pictures of this thing in RAW, and you have everything you need to make a custom profile just for your lens/camera combination.

I have had a fair amount of watches in my life. I am not one of those watch collector guys or anything, but I do like watches. They are one of the few pieces of jewelry I wear, so I do tend to geek out about it a bit. Now of course as someone who has carried a mobile phone since '92, I haven't actually needed a watch in quite a long time, so I don't kid myself, it is just jewelry. That said, it is kind of odd that the watches that have won my heart over all others, are the rather clunky and awkward looking G-Shock watches.

They are by no means the best looking watches I have ever owned. That honor would probably go to my Tag Heuer. They also aren't the funkiest watch I have ever owned, as that would probably go to some weird Fossil I wore for a few weeks, and then got tired of. No, what the G-Shocks have going for them is their pure, and rather amazing, functionality. Most notably, the combination of being solar powered, and automatically syncing to atomic time. Now, I know I said they were just jewelry, so I can already hear you asking what functionality I could possibly need from it, if it is really just a fashion accessory?