Many people see investments like the new Nikon D4 as ridiculous. They cost an arm and a leg but how can anyone afford them? Well there’s something of a camera-circle-of-life out there involving your old gear that if you’re not a part of, you really should be.

When I buy a necessary items of equipment, like a camera, I like to think of it not as a piece of technology, but something that helps make my business run. I have a studio which I pay a constant rent for. I also renovated the location which cost me a decent amount, but when I think of my rent, I don’t include the cost of the renovation, just the monthly fee. Cameras should be seen in the same light. Yes I paid around $5K for my D3s two years ago. But I won’t be holding on to it if I buy a D4. Why would I? I’m going to sell it. I’ll probably receive around $4K for it and I’ll have to cover another $2K and change myself. This hike in price is also unusual as most replacement bodies come in at around the same price as their predecessor was when it was new. Normally, you’d need to cover about 20-25% of the cost of the camera if you sold your old one.

This, folks, is how we justify these purchases. It’s not that we’re simply dropping $6K happy-go-lucky styles. We’re continuing our “rent”. This difference in price is the rent we pay for our cameras. Yes we did put down a lot at some point, but forget about that. That investment is gone and you won’t be needing to recreate again. From now on, you need to put aside about $50, maybe $75 each month and you’ll be able to replace a D3s, or a D4 relatively easily. This camera rent will keep me and my company up to date with technologies for the foreseeable future. I even enjoy thinking that new technologies will be available and I’ll only have to drop 20% of the asking price in order to play with it myself.

For anyone on the fence about buying new gear, or any gear for that matter, I think it’s important to keep this notion in mind. You’ll have to make an initial investment. But when it comes time to upgrade you won’t be looking at reinvesting that same amount. The world of up-to-date gear may not be as scary as you once thought. And also keep in mind that the launch of the D4 means plenty of D3s’ and D3′s on the used market. Which likely means an increase in D700′s and D300s’, too. The circle of life goes on… enjoy my horrific drawing.

Thanks for reading,

Dave Dvir

Staying inspired is something I find works like a swing.  Sometimes it’s incredibly easy and seems like it will never end.  You finish one thing and there’s not even a moment between when you’re eager to start the next.  Other times you just have nothing going on upstairs and you really have no idea where to begin.  As a business owner it’s also tough because I’ve got some additional responsibilities like paying bills or employees or ever making sure we’re all working and attempting to make the best use of everyone’s time.

Some days I’m even so ambitious that it all acts against me in a way.  I’m so eager to work on so many different projects that I am thinking about them all at once and at the end of the day nothing gets done.  It’s kind of like when Mr. Burns had every illness known to man and they all countered each other so somehow he was invincible, only with me it’s sort of the opposite of invincible.

Anyway, the point is sometimes you have to kick yourself in the brain to get out of it.  We found this video and I really liked it.  I actually connected with almost every point and my favourite one is probably the last.  Enjoy.

29 WAYS TO STAY CREATIVE from TO-FU on Vimeo.

David Dvir

There’s a ton of material to go through if you’re new to the biz. Frankly I can’t even began to document all the great sources of information. There is one, however, that I feel is being underutilized a great deal by us all. Imagine a place where you could watch daily episodes of how-to and behind the scenes type stuff. A place where you can also go back and watch hours and hours of previous videos with important photography lessons for free! Well such a place exists. It’s the AdoramaTV youtube channel. These guys have it all. And they’re always adding new info.

I’m extremely surprised by the lack of views/attention this channel gets. Mark Wallace, the host, shares loads and loads of info with great explanations. I have to admit that while incredibly informative, it’s a bit dry. Not quite boring, but sometimes you wished it moved at a faster pace. That being said you can’t deny the knowledge. It’s fantastic. Anyone trying to continue their learning (as all of us should be anyhow) at the entry level MUST visit this channel and spend a few hours on it. I myself continue to boraden my knowledge base by watching these, even now. It’s mostly stuff I already know at this point but I still enjoy re-hashing it.

So that’s my two cents. AdoramaTV is a brilliant source for any would-be photographer and everyone should know about it.

Peace out,

Dave

After all the initial planning stages were over we had about three weeks.  Three weeks to do what took nearly half a year, and this time around it needed to have a commercial look to it.  The truth of the matter is that I did not know it could be done.  In fact, I expected compromises would have to be made in order to even come close.  The client understood and so we began work on another Rube.

Right from the start we were behind schedule (chalking it up to the postal services).  It wasn’t the greatest feeling thinking that you have to do more than amazing work in order to be less behind than you are.  Still, we persevered.  The three weeks of design/build were intense.  Probably the most intense such period I think 2D has experienced so far in it’s existence.  The trickiest part of all was that between the 14 hour days or the seven day work weeks, we still had to focus on what would be happening after the Rube was done.  Planning other jobs and coordinating the clean up/post production.  It would have been ideal to simply work on the Rube, but as most businesses go, you have to consider the jobs you’re not working on just as much as the jobs you are.  But busy is good and I’m pleased to say everyone involved did an outstanding job and I believe that somehow, I still don’t know how, we exceeded expectations.

Today: we’re taking some R&R to recover from the long work weeks but still working most of the time.  We’ve got even more new and interesting things in development and we can hardly even keep up with them all.  I’m pleased to report that business is good (at least for the time being) and everything seems to have worked out nicely.

The Rube should be released within the next few days and our mystery client will be revealed, as well.  All the while during this process we were also contacted by a couple of television programs that wanted to feature our original Photography Rube Goldberg video which is great as far as 2D is concerned.  So we are actually continuing to see some additional positive mojo coming in from the Photography Rube Goldberg video.

The way in which things have turned out all thanks to a single idea is remarkable.  I’d really like to encourage any readers that may have a “wacky” idea to believe in themselves and if they’re confident then to go for it.  Thinking big is incredibly scary but sometimes you have to just have faith in yourself.  It’s kind of like playing chess.  I realize not everyone will understand this analogy but when you play chess you have to think ahead.  Sometimes you see an opportunity that’s six moves away but you’re sure it will work.  The downside can be you might lose your Queen and some other powerful pieces.  The good side is that despite those losses you will have achieved checkmate on your opponent.  It can be the case that doubting your eventual success may cost you an otherwise brilliant opportunity.  Life is never without risk no matter who you are.  The amount of risk can sometimes be up to you.  The point is, great things can come out of ideas that may seem like long shots.  You won’t know until you take them, though.

Thanks for reading,

David Dvir

So we left off with the phone ringing ten days after launching the Rube.  It was July 20th at precisely 6:57PM EST.  Kevin had already gone home for the day and I was actually just about to myself.  The phone rang.  An area code I wasn’t familiar with and so (due to my love of telemarketing…) a quick search got me the info that it was a legit number/area code and I answered before it went to voicemail.  On the line was a ad producer, let’s call him Owen, who was putting up a pitch to a major US retailer (I’m not at liberty to say who until the official release, sorry) for a Rube Goldberg machine.  He wanted to know if we’d be interested…

To be honest I was embarrassingly excited during this entire phone call.  The whole time I was attempting to be professional and curt, take proper notes and respond with appropriate feedback but during the length of the call all I could think was “HA! A phone call!  It worked!”.  I should clarify when I thought “it worked” what I meant isn’t that I got more contracts from my own Rube, simply that we got some attention.  That’s really all I was ever after and from what I gathered from the call it was going to be a long shot that the client would approve the idea to begin with, so I never really got my hopes too high.

The days forward were partially filled with more back-and-forth with Owen.  Their Rube had some interested qualities to it and we needed to let them know our thoughts, what we were capable of, timelines etc…  Fairly standard stuff, really.  As days past we continued working like normal while being told from Owen that we’d hear a decision very shortly.  Well a week went by and now we hadn’t heard from him at all.  We’ve all been there, things go south and people quickly lose track of who they were talking to and you essentially never hear from them again.  It’s never anything personal, it’s somewhat less professional, but it happens fairly often and we all take it for what it is.  Still, from my brief phone chats and correspondence with him, it didn’t seem Owen’s style.

C’est la vie, it was nice that we got the attention regardless.  But then, out of real surprise, an email.  A golden nugget of unexpected chaos came into my inbox from Owen.  ”dude, the client said YES”.  This is directly taken from an email I received three weeks after the initial phone call.  My jaw would have dropped if I was able to move.  The reason I was so excited about this project in particular is because of it’s lineage.  This all spawned from a crazy idea I had seven months prior.  Something completely… well…  out-there and wacky.  I was just thrilled to know that you can be truly crazy for the most part yet still achieve a measurable sum of success.

Back to reality.  The lines immediately following 2D being awarded the contract were as terrifying as “dude, the client said YES” was delightful.  The deadline was a matter of weeks, the client wanted drawing the next morning, and there were roughly 1,250 emails to be exchanged before we could even get our hands on the materials (this is a themed Rube, by the way) from the client to start building or thinking of elements for the machine.  Sheer joy lasted about eight nano-seconds.  There would be time for joy later.  Now it was business time.

—- To be continued…

David Dvir

It’s been a busy time for me lately.  Many things happening and I’ve just been trying to keep up.  Things have calmed down a bit now though and  I feel that I should share the events of the last while to give those interested my point of view of recent times.

I’ll start three months ago: late June.  I’ve been working on a crazy idea in my spare time for the last five and half months and now it’s creeping into my actual working time.  I have a photography business that’s in its second year of operation and have had it running out of a new studio for about ten months.  The idea, a Rube Goldberg machine, was a long shot in the minds of most people.  I had enough faith to start the project and had to do my best to keep that faith as there was no turning back at this point (it wasn’t always easy).  The goal was getting the business’ name out there as quickly as possible.  Things were going well (business wise), but they could have been going better and I’m an impatient person.  At this point in time we were gearing up to shoot the Rube fairly soon.  Thoughts that were running through my head constantly resembled “will this get any hits?”, “how are we even going to shoot this?”, “I’m tired”, “what happens after it goes out?”.

It was a stressful period leading up to shooting and the 99 takes it took to complete the job didn’t help at all.  Perhaps one of the most difficult periods was immediately after shooting.  The time between editing and releasing the footage.  We wanted to get it trending if at all possible which meant releasing it on a weekend, preferably a Sunday.  Due to some holidays sending people out of town and thusly away from computers, we opted to wait two weeks to make it live.  A nervous time to say the least.  Finally we launched and seemed to get circulation going.  I was quite pleased despite the hit count at the time (which was about 1% of the actual number of hits thanks to a youtube glitch that was later revealed to have started the same time we made our video public).

So at this point – mid July – I’m happy the video is out, but also focused on getting back to work.  Our video was born into the world and really couldn’t be mothered in any way so it made no sense sitting around waiting for something to come of it.  The best thing to do was to pretend it didn’t exist and carry on as such.  I came into the situation a 27-year-old with a business that I was already feeling fortunate to have and that’s how I wanted to come out of it.   The emotions immediately following the Rube’s release, despite trying to have a nonchalante attitude, were anything but.  I knew it had some potential to change business, however little.  Logic says there’s nothing to be nervous about and to simply carry on but I’ll be damned if I was able to do that (Kevin can attest to that, I’m sure).  Nervous I was…

So to recap I had spent the last six month’s working and scheming to attract future business and everything at this point out of my hands.  I was at the mercy of the interwebs.  Then, thanks to people’s reception of our video, we did indeed receive a good number of hits.  Ten days after launch… the phone rang.

— I don’t want to bore you with any longer a post so this will close Part 1.  I’ll follow up with another post shortly.

Dave Dvir