Guide for creating 360 panoramas from the DJI Mini 2

About a year ago I got into drone photography with my first drone, a tiny DJI Mini 2. While not the fanciest of drones it does a pretty good job for the price point. Easy to control and decent 4k video.1 

One of the downsides is that the onboard software will stitch a 360 degree panorama for you, but only at a lower resolution. The Mini 2 does have a nifty feature to take all 26 photos needed for a complete 360 view, in the DNG format, but it can’t stitch it together for you. So what is a person to do? Enter open-source tools!

I’ve done this a few times and each time I have to remember all the steps. Time to write it all down for myself and if I’m lucky to help others too. 2

Take your photos

First you need to take the photos! 

Position your drone somewhere near the object or location you want to take a panorama of. Do not place your drone directly above the point of interest! You want to position the drone away from direct center. It helps make sure your POI gets the best coverage of direct photos. Make sure the drone is between the sun and the point of interest. Don’t have both your POI and the sun in the same direction. You’ll end up with blown out sun flares. I did not do this perfectly with my image above of the Fort, but you can see that the sun is off to the left from where my drone was. You have to learn the rules before you can break them. 

Once positioned, switch the mode to Pano and select Sphere.

Then make sure your format is set to jpeg + RAW3

Once ready, hit the red record button and let the drone take the photos. It will hover in place and rotate both the gimbal and drone to get as much coverage as possible.

Now you have your drone up in the sky, positioned nicely and you’ve taken some photos. Time to return to the computer. You have a folder of DNGs that are waiting to be stitched together. Enter Hugin.

Hugin

Hugin is an open-source panorama photo stitcher.4 It’s a powerful tool with many knobs and dials. I’m going to focus on the settings that I think are important, but please do read up on all the software can do. I’m doing this all on a Mac, but the interface and steps are generally the same. 

Speaking of Macs, the most recent version of Hugin for Mac was last updated in February of 2019. If you’re using a Mac with a Retina (HiDPI screen) display you’ll want to grab a beta release that fixes an issue with Macs with this screen. It’s unfortunately still out-of-date compared to the Linux and Windows releases.

As noted on Hugin’s download section, “On Mac OS 10.15 Catalina and later you will need to manually grant Hugin “Full Disk Access” in the Privacy tab of the OS X System Preferences, Security & Privacy.” Since we’re using an out-of-date and not well supported version of Hugin on the Mac, you’ll want to right-click on the Hugin.app and select Open or else you’ll get a scary warning about it not being trusted (you can trust it). Do the same for PTBatcherGUI.app. You’ll also want to make sure Hugin has Full Disk Access as noted above. Check these settings in System Preferences>Security & Privacy. 

Ok, you’ve download Hugin and installed it. The second step done.

DNGs to PNGs

If you’re using the settings above on your Mini 2, you’ll end up with image files in the DNG and JPG formats. We want to use the DNGs as they have more data and less compression. You’ll need to convert them to another format to use with Hugin. You can do this a myriad of ways. If you’re using a modern Mac, a Shortcut workflow to select files and convert to PNG works just fine.

Loading images into Hugin

Open Hugin and select Load images… from the main window. You’ll want to Shift+click to select all the PNGs we created earlier. 

Depending on how you converted the DNGs to PNGS you may be missing the metadata for your lens type. You’ll then see a window asking about the Camera and Lens data. Here’s the settings to use.5

Lens type: Normal (rectilinear)
Focal length: 4.49 mm
Focal length multiplier 5.345 x

Select Ok. You should see your images in a jumbled mess in the Overview window in Hugin. That’s not right! Click 2. Align… in the main Hugin window.

A new window will pop up and the magic starts. Hugin will analyze all the images and look for points where the images overlap. This might take a few minutes depending on how speedy your computer is. Let it do its thing. 

Fine tuning

Once complete, you’ll see something that looks a little more put together. Maybe like a giant ant hill, but at least the sky and ground is consistently attached. 

Head over to the Move/Drag option in the main Hugin window. Click Straighten. Hey look, a panorama with a straight horizon and all! Is it upside down? No problem. Roll the image by 180 and click Apply. Click Straighten again for good measure. 

Export

Time to tell Hugin to make you a single image. Save your project. Go to File>Save in the menu bar or use the handy command+S to save your project. Head back to the Main Assistant window and select Interface>Expert from the menu bar. “What?”, you might be saying. “I’m not an expert!” Don’t worry. We’re going to use this interface to make a few small tweaks. 

Once the Advanced menu option is selected you’ll see a new window. Select the Stitcher tab. 

Form here, make sure the projection is set to Equirectangular. Field of View should be 360 x 180. For Canvas Size click “Calculate optimal size”. The Width, and the Height should be at a ratio of 2:1. So 18648 x 9324, 9482 x 4715, 4096 x 2048, etc. Hugin likes to be helpful and crop out the top of the image where there is no sky (Dones can’t look up!). If you see the Top setting under Crop set to anything other than zero, change it to zero.

I find it helpful to export two versions.  One exposure corrected with low dynamic range and the other fused from any arrangement. So I suggest checking the “Exposure fused from any arrangement” option as well. 

Hit Stitch! And you’ll be asked to specify the prefix for your images. You can leave this as the default or change it to your liking. Then away it goes! This will take some time. 

Once complete you’ll have two big TIFF files. By default this will be in the same folder where you saved your project file. One will just have the prefix, the other _blended_fused.

Most times the blended version is the best. These are big files, about 700 MB. If you don’t need/want such a large file, you can always adjust the canvas size in the Stitcher. Just keep the ratio at 2:1. 

Take a look at your images. Pick which one you prefer. 

Pretty good, eh? All except for the giant void where the sky should be. Time to fix that.

Skyfill 

More open-source software! This time we’re going to use a utility called Skyfill to fill in the sky. We can close Hugin for now. Go download Skyfill. There are Linux, Windows, and MacOS (Darwin) versions. Open the zip and inside you’ll see a file called skyfill.

This is a command-line utility, so no point-and-click for this bit. Right-click/control-click on the skyfill file to open it. A Terminal window will open and a bunch of text will appear. You just ran skyfill but with no settings so it will say [Process completed] without actually doing anything. You can close that window. Why did we do all of that? In doing that we did give the program permission to run from the Terminal.

Time to use the Terminal! Open the Terminal app on your Mac by going to Applications>Utilities>Terminal.app. Drag and drop the skyfill file into the Terminal window that appears. You should see something like this. 

If you hit return, skyfill will run, but again not do anything. It doesn’t know where the image from Hugin is or what settings you want to use. With the command to run Skyfill still in the Terminal, drag your image to the Terminal window. You should see something like this. 

Hit return and skyfill should do its work to fill the sky. The result is a giant TIFF file in the same folder as your source image with the sky filled in. It will have “-filled” appended to the file name.6

So here’s an 360 image where I break the rules when we first began. I have my subject (a house) right below the drone and the sun blaring at the camera. A terrible photo but illustrative of why you shouldn’t frame your photo this way! 🙂 

Cleanup

From here you might need to touch things up. Maybe remove an errant bird or adjust the colors. Load the TIFF image into your favorite image editor of choice and go to town. I’m skipping details here because personal preferences differ when it comes to editing software and depending on where and when your image was taken you may have more or less editing to do. Personally I used Pixelmator Pro and do a light pass in editing. 

Share

Once you have your image all cleaned up you’ll want to share it with folks. I have a few suggestions and there are other ways to do this. 

Flickr

You an upload your image to Flickr as a PNG and the site can display your image in a 360 view. You’ll need to add the equirectangular tag to your image and refresh the page. Here’s an example. You can upload images at large resolutions, but the built-in viewer will downsample them. There is no ability to zoom in on an image.

kuula.co

Kuuala has a nice interface where you can customize the focal point and default view. It accepts photos up to 16384 x 8192 in PNG and allows for viewers to zoom the image.

Google Streetview

If you can get your final image on to a mobile device, you can download the Google Streetview app and upload your photo to Google Maps. Here’s an example of one I created and uploaded.

There are some downsides. Google now “owns” your image and you have very little chance to interact with anyone viewing your images. However, given the reach of Google, many more people can see and enjoy your photos. 

Conclusion

This isn’t the perfect tutorial and there may be other tools to help with some of the steps. In my desire to use open-source when possible, this is what worked best for me. If you have a tip or question, please leave a comment. Now go have fun with your sky camera!

Reflections on the 2020 iPad Pro and Logitech Folio Touch

Way back in 2011 I was lucky enough to win an iPad 2 at a conference I attended in Boston.1 I used the heck out of that thing. We had already bought my mother-in-law a first-generation iPad at this point so I was familiar with the device, but having one of my own was great.2 I could use it to share photos with family on its large screen instead of my tiny iPhone 4s. I could read comics, surf the web, all the stuff iPads are known for. Then in 2013 I upgraded to an iPad Air. So thin. So fast! In 2016 Jackie and I traded in our Airs and we both got the then new iPad Pro 9.7. A pressure-sensitive stylus? Four speakers! Be still my beating heart. 

As phones got bigger, laptops lighter, the iPad became something of a strange in-between device for my uses. I ended up not using it much for a span of time. In 2016 I sold my iPad Pro for the same price I bought it for! That’s how amazing the resale value is on Apple products.

Enter 2020. We’re stuck at home more than ever and nothing (temporarily) soothes the soul like buying a new gadget. I’ve been eyeing the new round-rec iPad Pros since 2018. Something about them is very Padd-like – even more so than past generations. It embodies the idea of a simple blank slate that can do whatever is needed at the time.  The “naked robotic core” as John Siracusa puts it. I like that in the last year Apple added cursor support to the OS. I’ve also taken an interest in trying to flex my creative side more often by drawing.

But new gadgets are expensive. What is a man to do? Well, in my case it was turning to a life of crime to sustain my gadget habit. Ok, not really. I turned to something far worse. Collectible card games. 

You see, dear reader, at the turn of the century I was enrolled in the local community college as a theatre major. As a theatre major you are invariably in the company of fellow nerds.3 At the time, Pokémon was very nerdy, and very popular. I mean, it was popular for kids, but nerdy for college-aged kids to be into. You might known Pokémon from the video game series or the popular kids TV show. What you might not know about is the Pokémon TCG (Trading Card Game). The TCG is a game you play with cards of various Pokémon in a 1:1 battle. The more cards you collect – read: buy – the better you can build a deck of cards. It’s fun, addictive, and apparently, lucrative. 

Over the summer of 2020 I was moving stuff around in preparation for moving into my Tiny Studio. In a cabinet I found my old Pokémon card collection.4 Out of curiosity I looked up how much some of the more rare cards were going for online. Long story longer, I sold about two dozen 1999-2000 era cards on eBay for close to $2,000 total. Ha, who says nerdy hobbies don’t pay! I later found out that 2020 was a gold rush of collectors coming into adulthood and prospecting cards from their youth. I got lucky. 

So here I am, owner of a new iPad Pro 11” with Apple Pencil 2, and Logitech Folio Touch. This is my review on what I think of it a few months on. I mentioned it earlier, but one of the reasons I wanted to get an iPad now was that the OS for iPad now supports keyboard and cursor input. This means I can use it like a traditional computer with a physical keyboard and trackpad via the Folio Touch. 

Up until now I didn’t actually own my own computer. I mean, I have computers in the house. My wife has a nice 2017 iMac and my work has provided me a 13” MacBook Pro. Neither though are my computer.5 This iPad is. For what I need, it works pretty well. 

The iPad Pro

This thing is fast. Faster than my new 2019 Macbook Pro 13” in many instances. It’s beautiful to look at with it’s 120Hz screen and it’s beautiful to touch – with a solid, light case and thin bezels. 

Everything – mostly text and buttons – look super big and beautiful on this screen. As a man approaching 40, I like big buttons and text. 

There’s a trend in modern video games where they often have smaller and near illegible text for important menus and subtitles. I want more folks to take a page from past devices where they had lower resolution screens and had to use larger text to make it legable within that lower resolution. Keep that going even if we have super-high resolution 65”+ screens. Because not all of us do and not all of us can see so well.

Thankfully the iPad embraces big text and even allows you to customize these options to a great degree.

I’ve been using the Pro to edit photos. I can plugin my USB-C SD card reader and suck in the 40MB RAW files from my DSLR super fast. Again, faster than importing to my Mac. And bam, they’re ready to edit. I use Pixemator Photo, which is grossly underpriced at under $10. The features and performance are top-shelf. I was editing a group of these RAW images, making a few slight color corrections and crops. When I went to export, in bulk, it was so fast I thought the operation failed half-way through. Nope, they were all exported, just faster than I anticipated.  

Face ID feels futuristic. When does this come to the Mac‽ 

Logitech Folio Touch

When I ordered the iPad I also ordered one of Apple’s Smart Folios. I thought that I might just buy a bluetooth keyboard and lug that round if I needed a physical keyboard. After a few weeks I felt like the Folio wasn’t offering much protection and the idea of carrying around a separate keyboard soured. I looked into what was available and learned about Logitech’s Folio Touch. A rugged case with a connected full-size keyboard and trackpad. No batteries to charge and backlit? Sold.

I’m really digging the keyboard and trackpad support in iPadOS paired with a keyboard case. It feels like a Mac Jr. The keyboard uses a nice traditional scissor mechanism with a surprising amount of travel. Most keys are full-size and the transition between my desktop keyboard and this one feels pretty natural. There are many common keyboard shortcuts between he Mac and iPad, so the learning curve has been minimal. The trackpad and it’s multi-touch gestures works just like the one on my Mac, albeit smaller. 

I will say that initially I felt the trackpad support was a little iffy. Sometimes it was difficult to get the Dock to appear when you mouse to the bottom edge of the screen. Scrolling was a bit jumpy. Since getting the Folio Logitech has released a firmware update and Apple pushed a Smart Connector firmware update too, both of which have lead to a more predictable experience.

I do worry how well the case will wear over time. Particularly the edge of the kickstand as it will see the most friction from opening and adjusting on a surface, and the hinge mechanism itself. When I fold the keyboard back to hold the iPad like a book the keyboard automatically deactivates which is good. It’s really easy to fidget with the keys as you hold the device in your hands. 

One thing I had to deal with when I first got the case was a stuck “I” key. The key would stick in the down position randomly. I chalked it up to a manufacturing defect and started the process to return it with Logitech. However, I like to try and figure things out on my own. A gentle pry on one corner of the key and some compressed air fixed it. I surmise that a small bit of plastic from a mold was stuck on a part of the key mechanism. The warranty is for one year so, that’s nice if I do need it. So far, so good.

The case is on the heavy side. Combined with the weight of the iPat it’s not as heavy as a laptop, even a laptop on the smaller, lighter end of things. With the case and iPad it weighs in at 2.06 pounds. The iPad itself is 1.04 pounds. For keyboard use, this is fine. For portably this is fine. For holding in your lap watching a movie or reading, it’s a bit of strain on your wrist. A brand-new M1 MacBook Air is 2.8 pounds in comparison, but I can’t draw on its display (or fold it flat to read with). 

Concerns

Remember, I’ve used the iPad as a tablet for years at this point. This is my first time trying to use it as a laptop-like device. A keyboard-attached device? We need a better name than tablet-with-a-keyboard-and-trackpad attached.6

My concerns and frustrations are notably in this weird between-space where the the iPad currently lives. Let me illustrate a few examples. 

The browser agent for the iPad tells websites to load the desktop version of their site. This is fine in most cases. But on Wikipedia I get the desktop version, but Page Previews (the little pop-up that appears when you hover over the title to a liked wiki page) isn’t activated. The newest iPadOS (as of 13.4 specifically) does support cursor-based input and can support hover states. It will take some time for developers to fix this, if at all.7

It’s an example of the difficulties of the iPad being both a very popular device and the people using it with a cursor/keyboard input device are rather small in comparison to say, well anything else – much less smartphones and traditional desktop computers. 

Another niggle. Not having a physical, or even software, Escape key is bugging me. For instance, many dialogs on web pages and in software can be dismissed by pressing the Escape key. There isn’t an Escape key on any made-for iPad keyboards or cases.8 

Through modern computing history the Escape key is always up in the top left corner of the keyboard, so there’s an inherent ease and muscle memory to just *boop* the Escape key to dismiss dialogs. No Escape key in the iPad world. Just a little 🔲 square icon to return to the home screen. Ask me how many times I’ve *booped* that key in error.9

I use Wikipedia a lot. No surprise, but it’s true! When viewing media at full screen on the ‘ol pedia, the MultimediaViewer allows you to Escape back to the article you were browsing. On the iPad I’m stuck with a little “X” button I have to mouse over and click or, sigh – I know writing this out sounds super lazy – reach up with my hand and touch. Now, I’m able-bodied, but I do think this is an accessibility issue for folks so my complaint isn’t totally selfish and lazy!10

If it isn’t clear I’m a keyboard shortcut junky. I love not having to move my hands from the keys. A lack of Escape key is frustrating. I am happy however that iPadOS has a system-wide search bar. I used Quicksilver for years before switching to Alfred. Using a Mac without search utility is maddening. Thankfully iPadOS uses the same Command+Spacebar to invoke its Spotlight search, making the transition to using this much easier. And Spotlight has come a long way. It’s actually pretty useful. All my files, Notes, contacts, and bookmarks are indexed and a web search is a quick query away. 

Desires

I’d love if I could connect the iPad to an external screen and use that screen as a secondary, extended, surface. Heck, I’d love it if when connected to a 16:9 ratio screen that the content would use the whole screen – even if just mirrored. Games, apps, and the OS should adapt to the connected screen. Right now they appear as a mirror of the iPad screen locked at a 4:3 ratio.11 I know videos will play at the correct ratio and I’m sure there’s more than enough horsepower in this device to power a 4k display. It’s funny that you can use the iPad as an extended screen for your Mac and can plug your iPad in to an external monitor over HDMI, but can’t extend your desktop, err tablettop.

I still, after nearly a decade of use, want to see some of the boring features of the iPhone come to iPad. A calculator. A weather app.12 Widgets wherever I want them on the home screen. Battery health.

And most importantly, Low power mode. This feature is a life-saver on the iPhone and while the iPad isn’t as critical or portable, it’s much desired to eek out just a little more when you’re away from an electrical plug.13.

Conclusion

Having this iPad since October I think it’s pretty close to a perfect device. It’s great as a stand-alone computer for my light needs.14 It’s flexible for the various uses – web browsing, photo editing, typing (This whole thing was written on my iPad!), playing games, drawing, etc. It’s fast and snappy. Some compromises, sure, but the size, speed, and flexibility are unmatched. I’m eager to see more refinements with the iPad software to make it even easier to use as a primary device. 

Update: I just read Becky Hansmeyer’s thoughts on the potential for iPads in the post-M1 Mac world. I agree with many of her points and am encourage by what she wrote.

Community is as Important as Code

I’m a fan of the ATP 1. On a recent episode they talked about the amount of time one of the hosts, Marco Arment, spends on responding to email regarding his podcasting app Overcast. The gist 2 is that Marco doesn’t respond to much, if any, email regarding his app. I don’t think that’s the best thing for the community that’s developed around his code. I encourage developers creators of anything to rethink how they handle communication from their customers.

Marco is a successful one man shop. He’s the engineer behind the successful tumblr and Instapaper among other accomplishments. I like him and I think he’s one of the good ones 3. He obviously knows what he’s doing.

I understand where he’s coming from when it comes to feedback and engaging with folks, especially over things like bugs and feature requests. It takes time that  isn’t coding and that can sometimes feel like ‘not work’.

But nurturing the community around your product/service 4 is work and it’s incredibly important. Just as important as every line of code you type.

Ignorance is Bliss

People don’t know you’re a one-person shop. They don’t think about the expectation of support from one $5 app from a larger company 5 compared to that of a smaller company. They don’t know that the app was made by a team of 10 in an organization of 10,000.

They might do a little research, ask a friend what they recommend, and then hit the App Store to download something to solve their need or want.

Frankly they shouldn’t care. Some level of support is expected. I don’t view it as an entitlement, but perhaps more of an expectation of doing business. If you contact a business, of any size, I don’t think it’s crazy to expect a response.

Look at the use and success of tools like Yelp. Why does Yelp exist? What’s the most unusual and valuable part of that service? The reviews! Businesses (smart ones at least) care about what people are saying on Yelp. They respond with sincerity and engage with their customers.

Ignorance also goes the other way. How you respond is how you will be perceived. Not caring what customers think of your company and product is inviting ignorance into your work.

It’s also a humbling thing to receive feedback and questions. You do not know it all. No one does. Ignoring or mocking the idea of responding to email from people shows arrogance. I can’t believe I’m referencing a Reddit comment as part of my argument, but, in this thread asking “What is the most unflattering thing a person can do to themselves?” someone said:

“It’s nice to be important, but it’s more important to be nice”

While you could argue that responding to emails might not help your code – responding to people is being nice. That’s more important than one more bug fix or one little tweak to the UI. Letting people in, shedding some of their ignorance and empowering them with knowledge is helpful to you and the community at large.

Community Props You Up

People will help support you. There is an admonishingly large amount of prior work in this area. Look at the Apple community boards. A giant company creates a place for others to help each other. Panic, a much smaller company, has a nice Q&A site setup for their community. These are for-profit companies. Looking at the open-source communities you’ll see even more – like local Meetups around Ruby, Drupal, PHP, WordPress, Small-Business owners, photographers, marketers, etc. Wikipedia in its entirety is all about people helping each other to make something.

Word of mouth is still the #1 best way to grow a product or service. It’s incredibly powerful – more so than almost any other form of marketing. It’s genuine, it happens naturally, and it’s often more deserving than spending millions on a campaign. The people helping other people are doing it out of love for the things that you create.

Outside feedback is invaluable. Working in a small team or inside of a large organization it sometimes becomes difficult to get a genuine outsider view of your work. Developing a community around your products or services helps to break out of that echo chamber and get a fresh set of eyes on what’s going on. Invaluable help from interested folks. Ya can’t beat that.

Ignoring the 700th email of a particular issue, say a bug, is wrong.

These +1 numbers on an already existing issue are indicators. They should sway you. Influence your to-do list. Your response. A handful of responses in one direction could mean a lot. A “canary in the coal mine” on what your community wants, or more importantly, needs.

Trust is Scary

Putting faith into a community of people you don’t know is scary. Terrifying even. I help to host events for the local WordPress community here in St. Louis. Every month, at the end of one of our meetups, we ask what topics folks would like to hear about next month. We take an informal poll and pick a topic. Then we ask who would like to present. Numerous times it’s someone I’ve never met who has never spoken up.

I have yet to be disappointed with a presentation. I put faith that if someone is willing to step up and speak in front of a group of strangers, they’re doing it out of good will and are motivated by something other than financial or professional gain.

You Work For Each Other

They took their time. That’s what is valuable. Your customer’s time. Not the novelty. Not the accuracy. Their time. It doesn’t even register to them that their bug report or suggestion is the 500th in a long line of similar suggestions. Their time is equally important as your time. Thinking and acting otherwise shows hubris and arrogance. They are working for you by using their time to give feedback, ask a question, or file a complaint.

By not responding, by not putting it out there, you have nothing to point to say, “Yes, I hear you.” It enters a void of your inbox and only encourages more silent tosses into the abyss. Creating a community helps alleviate these emails. People who enjoy your creations will help you and other people who are looking for information.

It Pays Off

Terry Gross had this great interview with David Remnick the editor from The New Yorker.

At the end of the interview Gross asks if Remnick asks him about his time and how he manages responding to every inquiry regarding The New Yorker.

From the transcript:

REMNICK: Bring it on. The odds are tough. I remember when I was in my 20s, I sent William Shawn a query letter, and I got an answer. And I never forgot getting an answer.

GROSS: What was the answer?

REMNICK: The answer was no (laughter). But I never forgot the time that was taken to write a cogent, short note about why not. And I also remember when I submitted my first piece to The New Yorker, which was happily accepted by Gottlieb – by Bob Gottlieb – he answered that day – that night. And I’ll never forget that. And I know in my heart that I’m falling short all the time in a million different ways, but I try to answer emails, letters, phone calls because I know not only is it the right human thing to do, I think, but also, once in a blue moon, it’s going to pay off. Once in a blue moon, you are going to get a short story, a suggestion, an idea that’s going to find its way into The New Yorker and be something or someone brilliant. And that’s part of the job. And it’s a delightful one.

Who knows what responding to a simple request for feedback will turn into? What might seem like a boring response to a question asked for the 300th time might turn into something much more.

Writing is Thinking

Listening and responding helps you to think about your creation. The entire product or service is evaluated in a new light.

Automattic requires all new hires to work the help desk. Why is that? Shouldn’t those developers be writing code? Shouldn’t project managers be catching up on the team’s progress? No. Learning how the product works and understanding how customers approach the product works to improve the product.

Writing up a FAQ with that experience from the customer’s view helps you think about how your creation works. Where can it be improved? What keeps coming up as a difficulty? What’s not clear? What can I go back and make better?

That comes from wiring and thinking about things in public. Pushing the ‘Submit’ button and letting others see it. Responding to what they put out there.

In Summary

I encourage all creators of things, whether it’s an iPhone app, a web site, a community, a non-profit – whatever – to deeply consider the work and art of community feedback and dialog. Consider it to be just as crucial to the growth and stability of your work. Just as writing code, organizing topics, or wrangling volunteers is. They go hand-in-hand with happiness and success and are not nearly as scary or time-consuming as one may think.

In the end you grow as a person and professional, your product or service grows in its capability and focus, and the community as a whole benefits from learning and sharing from one another.

A Great Interview with Mike Monteiro – “Design Is Not An Investment”

“Yes, investments are great. They’re also not necessary. When I think of investments I think of stocks, artwork, original Star Wars figures mint in box. Stuff that’s nice to have, and that you hope increases in value someday. Design is core. It’s not a nice-to-have. It’s plumbing. It’s foundation. You don’t invest in design. You can’t exist without it. A website without design isn’t a house without art, it’s a house without a bathroom.”

Like any professional I have numerous books on topics core to my work. Technical manuals for systems, guides for programming languages, historical text from founders in the discipline, and numerous outdated (FrontPage 97!) reference materials from years gone by.

Yet, there is only one book that I would give to anyone entering the field. Mike Monteiro’s Design is a Job. I’ve been a ‘professional’ for over a decade. I just read his book a few years ago and it has changed how I approach everything – for the better.

And now Mike has a second book out, from the other side of the table as it were, called “You’re My Favorite Client“. This interview with him is a great introduction to the relationships between designer and client.

Both of Mike’s books are essential for anyone working to create something for someone else. Web design, photography, app developers – all will gain more from these books than any technical guide or “Photoshop for Dummies” could ever muster.

All your Facebook Friends are Photographers and That’s OK

I saw this question/rant on Reddit the other day that perturbed me enough to write a long-ish response.

The gist is that people who buy a DSLR and start taking on paying gigs aren’t photographers. Or at least they rubbed against the grain of the OP (Original Poster).

I disagree, and in fact this kind of rhetoric appears far too frequently in the few photography communities I participate in.

My reply:

The levels of skill in photography are many. I imagine it’s daunting to someone who’s never used a camera (much less a DSLR, in manual mode, editing raw, with multiple lenses, flash/strobe, etc etc.) to understand what goes into taking a good photograph. There’s the obvious technical know how, but also the aesthetic eye for good composition.

Now, that said, to be someone who takes photographs better than 99% of the population takes a small elevation in skill. A very small but noticeable blip. You take a class or two, pick up a few books, buy some nice kit, practice, practice practice. Bam, you’re now able to have a few photos that look better than most people could ever imagine taking. Now you’re better than most people you’ll ever know.

To go from the folks you’re describing to say Ansel Adams or Annie Liebovitz level of quality is many, many blips of improvement.

For most of us here, we’ve got a few blips – gained a few levels. Some more than others. But to most people we’re all lumped in a category of “Are you a wizard ?” when it comes to this stuff. And frankly, it’s hard for a non-photographer to see who’s a newbie starting out and who’s been doing this for 20 years.

You use the word worse, which has negative connotation. In the words of a man with a few more blips than I, True professionals don’t fear amateurs.

Being a professional is more about showing up and doing a job than having the best skills or resources. You can accomplish more with a great work ethic, networking and producingsomething. If these people are getting work, great. If they’re learning, even better! Are they making things ‘worse’? Cheapening the ‘art of photography’? Pfffttttt. They show up, they take photos better than most people could and they get paid.

Everyone has to start somewhere. It’s those that stick with something that improve – themselves, their work, their community, the art form, et al. – that are the folks to admire and encourage. Being frustrated, worrying about the negative potential is useless. It’s a windmill to ignore.

Instead I say help them, encourage them. Be a good mentor (as you mentioned doing) and help elevate anyone willing to show up and put in the work. Not enough people do that, and instead post silly stuff like this, that I feel worsens our collective attitude to those that share a similar interest.

tl:dr; It’s late and I should go to bed.

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Since writing that, I have thought more about this.  Anyone can be a professional photographer. As with every skill and industry, there’s always going to be a great gradation in the quality, skill and, proliferation of work. Some people you might find on Facebook or Craigslist – or even people recommended to you! – might totally suck. But not starting, not putting yourself out there? That’s what worries me.

More people should pick up a camera and see what they can do with it1. If they get a paying gig, great! If they do a bad job? Well that would suck. But like I state in my reply, even a low quality photographer is better than most people. And people are willing to pay and admire those with skills they lack.

So what happens to ‘bad’ photographers? I would like to believe that they will get better. We need more bold people to try than people who never try at all.

I encourage you to take a look at the full conversation over on Reddit. There’s some interesting dialog and viewpoints. If you have your own thoughts, please share them.