Today, I stumbled onto the site “50 Writing Tools” by Roy Peter Clark. Roy is a senior scholor at the journalism school “Poynter Institute” in St. Petersburg, Florida. He has, over the last year, written these articles to help journalists learn and improve their writing skills. Now he is taking these articles and turning them into a book. This seems a common way now-a-days to get a book published – right as a series of articles or blog posts, get reader feedback, then present it to a publisher.

The only article I have read, so far, is the 50th. In it he completely demystifies the writing process for me. Here is a short excerpt.

”In 1983, Donald Murray wrote on a chalkboard a little diagram that changed my writing and teaching forever. It was a modest blueprint of the writing process as he understood it, five words that describe the steps toward creating a story. As I remember them now, the words were: Idea. Collect. Focus. Draft. Clarify. In other words, the writer conceives a story idea, collects things to support it, discovers what the story is really about, attempts a first draft, and revises in the quest for greater clarity.

How did this simple diagram change my life?

Until then, I thought great writing was the work of magicians. Like most readers, I encountered work perfected and published. I’d hold a book in my hand, flip through its pages, feel its weight, admire its design, and be awestruck by its seeming perfection. This was magic, the work of wizards, people different from you and me.”

It isn’t magic! I now see difference between what I do photographically and the current masters of photography do. How they get a magical image and mine look like snapshots. Most photographers don’t have a method of creativity. We just try and compose a pretty picture of interesting subjects. We might have good equipment or techniques in our toolbox, things like composition, Photoshop skills, quality optics, understanding of exposures and other stuff. But these things only take us so far in the creative process and the masters of photography know this. I don’t have the magic answer but look more critically at the steps to the photographic process can only help. People are bad at photography through ignorance of what makes photographs good.

Maybe we, as photographers, need a modest blueprint of the photographic process, like the journalists, that we can use to guide us, measure objectively our success and talk about the creative process. We can learn a lot from writers.

Brooks Jensen, editor at Lenswork talked about the movie “Tomorrow” starring Robert Duvall in a couple of his audio commontaries on photography. If you are not listening to Brooks and you are interested in photography in any way, you’re missing out on some great stuff. Here is a synopsis of what the movie shows us:

• Good copntent can survive transition from one medium to another. “Tomorrow” translates nicely from book (William Faulkner) to play (Horton Foote) to movie (directed by Joseph Anthony). So to can a good photograph be presented as a print, in a book and on the web.
• When you are interested in a particular artist you can use Amazon, Google or IMDB to find some hidden gems. Work that might not have been commercially successful but might have great personal value to the artist and therefore shed new light on your understanding of an artist.
• We must be careful in our actions as photographers so that we don’t leave a trail of bad karma and thereby alienate people to having us in there presents.
• Finally, you should look to the best bits of your photography and develop and recycle them. Who knows what direction it might take you.

Only Brooks could get all this great material that applies to photography out of movie from the early 70’s. One thing he breifly touches on, but probably has the most impact on us today as photographers is the presents of these huge databases of photographic knowledge. Here are but a few of these as of mid 2005. I expect this will be an area that get a lot of attention in the future.

• Google
• Amazon
• Flicker
• The Internet Movie Database

Work we put on the web will follow us to our graves. This is both a curse and a blessing.

Quick tips on some pretty cool CSS tricks. This article was written by Trenton Moss. Trenton's crazy about web accessibility and usability - so crazy that he went and started his own web accessibility and usability consultancy to help make the Internet a better place for everyone. He also knows an awful lot about the Disability Discrimination Act.

Lulu is the web's premier independent publishing marketplace for digital do-it-yourselfers. It's the only place on the web where you can publish, sell and buy any and all things digital — books, music, comics, photographs, movies and well, you get the idea. We simply provide the tools that leave control of content in the hands of the people who created the content...

Goal setting is the laying out on paper of the experiences you wish to have, the possessions you wish to own, the places you wish to go to and the people you wish to meet. The emphasis is on the experiences. Unless our possessions, acquaintances and destinations provide us the experiences we desire, they have no value for us...

This is part of a huge tutorial site. You can submit your tutorials and I assume they also create there own. There are over 12000 tutorials available as of this post.

Java based online color picker web application. Pretty cool.

CSS is an excellent addition to plain HTML. With plain HTML you define the colors and sizes of text and tables throughout your pages. If you want to change a certain element you will therefore have to work your way through the document and change it. With CSS you define the colors and sizes in "styles". Then as you write your documents you refer to the styles. Therefore: if you change a certain style it will change the look of your entire site...