9 thoughts on “Interview with Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio”

  1. I haven’t read photo.net since it spun out to a separate company, but maybe I should start now. It would be interesting to have an RSS feed of just the interviews because the perspective they give is very interesting.

  2. I like their dry sense of humor. But 14TB on Firewire drives? They should get with the program and buy a couple XServe RAIDs like Vince Laforet, or better yet StoreVault S500s.

  3. Fantastic. I read it all the way to the end and I’m not even a photographer. So many memorable bits — Geo, National Geographic, financing travel, freelance pay, fixer/translator, dealing with publisher (a well known theme at greenspun.com), magazine pay, husband-wife team (a friend of mine just quit her job to work with her husband’s home audio business), and even the computer workflow stuff.

    You picked the right subjects and apparently asked the right questions.

    Where do I send my check or money order for “PG: The Philip Greenspun Magazine”?

  4. Fazal: They are camera nerds, not computer nerds!

    Ryan: Thanks for the kind words. Please send a check for $2 million payable to “Philip and Alex’s turbine-powered helicopter fund” 🙂

  5. “They are camera nerds, not computer nerds!”

    A quickly converging group I imagine.

    The interview was terrific and would be an excellent direction for new material on photo.net. Although photo.net is a fine resource, I find it difficult to maintain a long-term interest in it because the forums can tend to be repetitive in spite of good moderating, and so much of the new static content is equipment related. Although photography magazines seem to survive in spite of similar content issues, I always hope that photo.net can be more that an online magazine–something that can continue to be interesting after you’ve advanced past the point where primers and tutorials are useful. There are enough interesting photographers doing interesting work that I can see these sort of articles as a great long-term feature that doesn’t get stale as the readers get more advanced in their craft.

    Thanks for pointing it out and good luck with the turbine-helicopter fund. I always seem to crash the helicopters in the x-plane simulator, so I’ve found a new respect for anyone coordinated enough to get one off the ground (and back down).

  6. Love it. All I need is an RSS feed of at least links to the interview pages.

    Although I’ve been a member for almost 10 years, I’ve never really gotten into Photo.net that much because I’ve never really focused on the technical aspects of a photo. I read the equipment reviews like everyone else, but the story of a shot is what pulls me in. The interview format does it for me. I’d never heard of Menzel before today, but I just ordered the Material book based solely off of that piece.

    I do like the technical pieces of the article. It seems that since my move to digital years ago, I’m more concerned with file management, preservation and workflow issues than I am about anything else.

  7. I like interviews like this because they pry insightful working knowlege loose from people who are otherwise far too busy to write it down themselves. CACM had a series years ago where they interviewed the people who created things like the space shuttle avionics or the bank ATM networks. It was great.

    [Helicopter fund? I thought you were still shopping for bizjets…]

  8. The finest set of interview questions for photographers that I’ve ever seen. Please recycle some of these so we can get a sense of the larger solution set:

    How did you get the job at National Geographic (big famous X)?

    How does National Geographic (big famous X) plan a story? How many months in advance of putting a photographer on the ground do they start work?

    How does National Geographic (big famous X) support a photographer on assignment?

    How important is it to have the right fixer in a foreign country?

    Tell us about your business today. Where does the money come from? What percentage is stock, corporate assignment, editorial assignment, books?

    How do you market your stock photography?

    Is it better to work for U.S., European, or Asian magazines right now?

    How much time and money did it take to produce Material World?

    Tell us about your next trip.

    What other projects are you working on this year?

    How much disk space do all of those scanned film files and new digital files take up? What kind of disk array do you have at home to store it all?

    What is your typical assignment kit? Bodies? Lenses? Flash? Tripod?

    Do you capture RAW or JPEG? Why?

    How do you determine exposure? Do you use the meter more or the histogram from a test picture?

    What do you do on the computer for editing and conversion?

    I could see recruiting photo.net enthusiasts for a subgenre of interviews where local neophytes (like me) might go interview local legends for local tips. Build an archive of long-view observations, opinions, and advice for New Orleans, New York, New Delhi, New Brunswick, New Guinea.

  9. I agree with Ryan. I wouldn’t know which end of a camera to use but it’s fun to read about people who are trying to do something really well while also trying to make a living at it.

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