So, for today’s blog, humor me and see if you can relate to the following:

1) If you can’t pick it up by yourself then for God’s sake don’t bring it on the plane!  Yes, lady, I’m talking to you, the one on AirTran 200 yesterday who needed the two boy scouts to help you get your bag into the overhead.  One of those kids is now singing soprano while the other popped two blood vessels in his neck and is still in surgery!

2) If you’re on the plane and you’re sneaking in that last phone call use your “quiet voice”.  Nobody cares about the inner office memo John still hasn’t sent out – we don’t care how much you love your wife – and honestly, the kids will stay up until you get home whether you tell them to or not!

3) Seats ABC are on one side, seats CDE are on the other…it’s not rocket science and no I don’t want to give up my aisle seat with legroom in the exit row and take your window seat six rows back so that you can sit with your honey.   It’s a 70 minute flight – get over it! 

4) I don’t want to hear the sound track to Sponge Bob Square Pants just because you forgot the headset to the kid’s DVD player.  So, that means the kid is going to have be well behaved, otherwise I’m going to bring a boom box with me on the next flight you’re on and make you listen to the sound track of my grandmother’s old Mitch Miller sing along albums.

5)  And to the passenger up front with the American Girl box the size of my first house – sorry, it ain’t gonna fit in the overhead, or under your seat and yes, you will have to check it.  But I have to admit, watching you try and squeeze it into the overhead was better then any Seinfeld episode.

Okay, so there’s very little embellishment, but plenty of sarcasm.  While you might not feel better being reminded of every bozo who ever sat next to you on a flight, this was actually therapeutic for me and I feel great! 

Hey everybody – make it a great Wednesday!

I get some very funny emails from friends on a pretty regular basis, this one from yesterday really hit home.  The image is from 1956.   Give up on what it is?

It’s a hard disk drive with 5MB of storage and it weighed over a ton!  Now think about the 32 GB of storage in your iPhone!  Kind of leaves you wondering what we’ll be laughing about in another 20 years!

I don’t know what to call it, but we need a verb that means to check your spam filter before taking any further action.   Registration is pretty active right now for Skip’s Summer School and for some reason at least a half dozen people have contacted me to verify their registration went through.  All of them have been in the system – so where did the auto-confirmation go?  Every time it’s been in their spam filter.

A few weeks ago I responded to an email from a friend.  All I did was hit reply and my buddy’s corporate email system threw me out and even his “postmaster” had the nerve to tell me about it!  Why?  I’ve never even met the guy, something in my subject line, my name, my routing would not allow me into his exclusive email club.

Next is the cell phone.  We take it for granted when we lose a call.  We don’t even hesitate to call back.  We just accept we’ve lost the connection.  Personally I’d like to just call it “Verizoned” which would mean I lost the call and my support team of the guy with glasses and his band of 200 followers never made it to Akron.  Knowing that Verizon would be less than happy – here’s another new verb we need.  Definition?  When you get cut off and know you need to call back.

Also on the list is a word for talking to dead air when you are cut off and don’t know it.  How many times have you been cut off and continued the call?  And then, when you do realize you were talking to dead air and you call back you ask, “What was the last thing you heard me say?”  I want a word for that knot you get in your stomach when the person answers, “Hello” as the last thing they heard and you realize the last fifteen minutes have to be completely repeated!  It’s like being trapped in the movie Ground Hog Day!

I do know and respect at least one contemporary rule of engagement.  The person who made the call, when the signal is lost, is the one who calls back.  Again, don’t know what to call the originator of the call, but at least we all seem to respect and understand the rule.

And one last one we need to work on…

It’s a facebook and email challenge:   What do we call morons like me who hit reply with a sarcastic comment back to the sender, meant only for the sender, not realizing it was a group email and twenty seven people just found out how you really feel?  Or, somebody blind copies you on an email and you hit reply all, not realizing nobody was supposed to know you saw the email in the first place?

Years ago I brought my Dad to a PPA convention and we had adjoining rooms.  As he was checking out he was laughing.  “Hey Dad, what’s the scoop?”   With tears of laughter in his eyes he responded, “You know the first night I thought it was so great that the Hyatt puts a little night light on your phone so you can see it in the dark.  The second night it really bothered me and I put a pillow over it.  This morning I put my glasses on and saw that it was a message light.  Your mother called me two days ago because she couldn’t get the garage to open.  I sure hope she got out!”

As the guy who never learned how to program a VCR and has challenges today with his DVR,  I guess it’s true what they say, “The apple doesn’t fall from the tree!”

. 

By 11:00 a.m. a group of friends came to save us from ourselves and literally carry us back to the dorm.  I’ll save you most of the details, but by noon we were both on our hands and knees in stalls next to each other praying to the porcelin goddess!

The bond of that moment created a friendship that’s lasted our entire lives and true to form, “Rich” called me on March 17th, right out of the blocks just checking up to see if I ever did learn how to drink!  He’s done it every year.    He’s outside Washington DC, I’m in Ohio and we’ve only seen each other a couple of times over all these years, but that bond of friendship has been something I cherish immensely.

Hey it’s Sunday and I always get overly reflective – but there are certain people who come in and out of our lives and their presence is always there.  It’s all about laughter, sharing, trust – all those words that describe things that are intangible.  But it’s also about “fun”…yeah, here I go again…fun is one of those words that just gets lost in business today.  Whether your business is going great or not, doesn’t matter - you ARE living the dream.  That dream is the opportunity to create anything you want, to develop any skill and to help other people enjoy the magic you can create with a well-trained eye, a camera and your creativity.

So, it’s Sunday – make it a fun one.  Laugh at least once an hour about something and if they come to take you away to the home later in the day and toss you into a padded cell, just know you won’t be alone.   I’ll be right there with you!

I can already see a couple of trolls out there rolling their eyes and getting ready to blog something like “Cohen is nuts!” He has suggested the problem with digital work flow, Uncle Harry stealing your business, photographers not knowing enough about photography, print competition not judging your prints fairly and people copying our photographs has been reduced to a theory that we need to laugh more!”

Yup, that’s what I’m saying!   For years I’ve listened to photographers analyze images.  One relatively well known lecturer used to do a whole program on what the composition in his images really meant.  A particular image represented a daughter’s climb to success.  A father’s hopes and dreams represented by an out of focus tree in the background.  My good buddy Tony Corbell, put it the best, “A hundred years from now it’s just going to be a pretty picture!”

Okay gang, let’s pick a week during the year where for seven days in a row we just laugh at everything!  We’ll laugh at images that are out of focus.  We’ll laugh at all the challenges in our business.  We’ll laugh at people who disappoint us.  We’ll laugh at growing older.   We’ll laugh at winter weather that leaves us dreaming of Hawaii. 

We’ll even laugh when life or a bird dumps all over us!  (Notice the mess on my left shoulder – and yes, we laughed until there were tears running down our faces!)

 Now, on the second week it’ll be catching and we’ll laugh with our family and friends.  We’ll laugh with our clients.  We’ll laugh with our vendors and the world just might start to loosen up.  Then, once it’s loose enough, maybe we can really accomplish something – talk more to each other, share ideas, grow our businesses and live healthier more productive lives.

I actually thought I had a unique thought with all of this - all mine, until I went looking for a quote in Google that would wrap this up this morning.   With a big smile on my face, I’m proud to announce my Saturday morning blog is hardly original and apparently been bouncing around the world for centuries, but I’m in good company!

“It makes no sense to worry about things you have no control over because there’s nothing you can do about them, and why worry about things you do control? The activity of worrying keeps you immobilized.”
Dr, Wayne Dyer

“The human race has only one effective weapon and that is laughter!”  Mark Twain

“God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh!”    Voltaire 

“Laughter is the shock absorber that eases the blows of life!” Anonymous

Happy Saturday everybody – keep laughing!

Come on, work with me on this one, because I’ve only got two points to today’s blog and they’re totally unrelated and random:

First, slow season or down time should be whenever you need to take a break.  I’ve seen photographers at the height of the “season” come close to crashing and burning.  Obviously you can’t take a break when you’re in the middle of a shoot, regardless of whether or not you need a 10 minute or 2-day “nap”.  But, you can do your best to work in a destination wedding and break after the wedding, assuming it’s in a great location.  If you’re a commercial shooter then look for those projects that might be on location where you can also enjoy the luxury of tacking on a couple days break.  The point is that it doesn’t matter where you’re shooting, you can schedule down time when you know you’re most likely to need a short break – this also gives you a bench mark to look forward to.  Most important of all – if you don’t recognize the need to recharge your battery, nobody else will!

Second, when you’re utilizing this down time to attend a convention get the most out of the experience.  For you newbies out there:  When you see one of your favorite icons, GO TALK TO THEM!  They’re icons, because they’re special.  They’re special because they’re approachable!    They believe in education and want to share the gift they have of teaching.   If they wanted anonymity they wouldn’t be at the convention, wouldn’t be lecturing and wouldn’t be caught dead walking a trade show aisle.

When you get a chance to talk to one of your heroes – just talk to them.  Let them know you appreciated their program, their images or whatever new idea they inspired you to try.  You don’t have to suck up – just be honest and remember, every icon started out just like you, not knowing what they were doing, scared to death of their first shoot and feeling awkward.   Unlike you today though, if they’re over 40, odds are they had no social media, no forums and no Internet to really draw from.  The world was a much bigger place and there was less information shared and far less tools and techniques to talk about.

But be careful.  This is just like getting close to a wild animal and whatever you do, don’t let them sense you’re afraid!  And if you believe that, you really need to stay home and consider a new career!

Think about how we communicate today?  If you Tweet you do it all in 140 characters!  U’v lurnd 2 spell evrything foneticly so that u can get in a gr8 message & do it in 140 spaces! And, when you realize you’ve been talking to dead air for the last ten minutes because the person on the other end lost the signal, you’re not upset, you just restate everything you said all over again when they call back.

Then there’s the nomad’s land of protocal on who calls who back.  If you’re disconnected on your cell phone is the person who made the call the one who has to call back or the person who was making the point at the time the call was cut off?   It’s a real challenge and takes the diplomacy of a junior Henry Kissinger to work out.

The bottom line conclusion to this increbily deep message this morning is actually there is no bottom line – we’ve become a society of abbreviations, unintentional bad grammar – we text, we tweet, we blog – all verbs that as little as a few years ago had totally different meanings.  Text was a paragraph or two, usually in a book…tweet was something a bird did, usually annoying in the morning when you’re trying to sleep and the window’s open and blog, well blog really is new – although it sort of sounds like it’s related to being bloated and should have been a good solid noun…”I’m so blogged up after eating corned beef and cabbage!”

Then there’s the new definition of “friend” and “follow“…if somebody followed you a few years ago it was rude, spooky and you probably called the police.  Nobody would ever try and “friend” you – it’s not even a word you would have used.  I have almost 4000 friends on Facebook – does that make me shallow, since 3900 of them I’ve never met?

On that note – it’s the right time to remind you that tonight we pick the first random follower for a Jill-e Designed woman’s bag and this week, if you’re following me on Twitter it’s the medium size men’s bag next weekend! 

So, enjoy your Sunday.  Tweet, follow, blog and friend anybody you want.  And when your cell phone loses the signal if the guy with the glasses is behind you with the other 300 people in your support group – be happy about it.  They used to hang out with me, but I guess with the storms in Akron they must have headed south!

Can you hear me now?

Dean Collins once had a troll yell out at a program, “Hey Dean, sure your pictures look great, you only take pictures of beautiful women!  Don’t you ever photograph any ugly people?”  The troll was no match for Dean’s wit, “Of course I do.  So why don’t you and your whole family come up on stage right now and we’ll set up the shot!”

And for this lazy Sunday morning that’s the very best I can do!  Dean was one of the finest instructors our industry has ever seen, specializing in lighting.   If you want to relive his brilliance visit Software Cinema and pick up his FineLight Series.  The material on this four DVD set is timeless!

I want a whole week where we turn back the clocks…that’s a statement in itself – I want only analog clocks that we really do have to physically turn back.  Then, I want my coffee made in a percolator and I don’t want anything coated with Teflon within a mile of my kitchen.

I want “raw” to mean vegetables that aren’t cooked…I don’t want to hear the word “jpeg” and “peg” only used in reference to Blackbeard’s leg in an old pirate movie.  I want people to call me when they need something not text me.  I want phones that really ring instead of playing a Mariah Carey tune that none of us ever liked anyway.   I want to listen to music on BIG speakers – speakers that weigh at least 80 lbs and are made of solid wood not plastic.

I want to be excited because I got 38 images out of a 36 exposure roll of film…in fact I want everybody to know what a roll of film is…I want to be yelled at because I forgot to fill the ice cube trays and I don’t want to hear the clunk of ice being made automatically as the ice maker interrupts the solitude of a morning cup of coffee.

And I don’t want to be in Lightroom…I want to be in the darkroom.  I want to hear the noise of a fan drying prints and smell acetic acid in the air when I’m ready to print an image.  I want everybody to know what it means to dodge and burn, instead of thinking it’s something to do with Dodgeball and a suntan!   I want shortcut to mean a back street to beat traffic, not an icon on my desktop.  I want to communicate with people in person, on the phone or in notes written long hand!   Which goes with wanting mail in the mailbox that’s at my front door, not on my computer or cell phone!

I want to hear the phone or doorbell ring to interrupt my day, not have an IM pop up on my screen…in fact, I don’t want anything with a screen except the front door or the TV and I want all the shows for this special week to only be shows we watched when we were kids.

Last but not least, I’m tired of acronyms…PPA, IPC, ICP, PEC, SPE, PMA, WPPI, PMDA, DWF, ISO, EST, PST, DST, BFF, IMs and they all think they’re BFDs!

Sorry, gotta run – just saw a really disturbing facebook post and somebody from Nigeria just sent me an email telling me I have a million dollars in US currency coming if I just email him my bank information…what a great day!

I walked through the airport in Akron with that special arrogance only tech weenies understand.  I actually walked with a little bit of a swagger – I was cool!  I was a cross between the Office Max “Yeah We Got That” Guy and Verizon, with my network of 300 people backing me up.  I was no longer the guy who burnt his hand trying to get a jammed piece of toast out of the back of the toaster oven an hour earlier, but the King of technology, capable of landing a man on the moon by myself, if necessary.

Half way through my movie, with my top of the line Shure headphones splitting the sound track into perfect stereo and my earbuds buried halfway into my skull,  I realized where technology has gone wrong.  Whether it was good solid reasoning or standing on the edge of a splitting headache from watching a movie on a monitor slightly bigger than a teabag makes no difference. 

As we get older our eyes get worse.  In my case I’m never without my reading glasses.  Well, if our eyes get worse and we’re losing brain cells then why are the screens getting smaller?  What in the world made me get excited about the technology of having the “Big Screen” in my shirt pocket?  Cecil B DeMille gave his life to make movies bigger and in ten minutes I did my own version of Disney’s “Honey I  Shrunk My Life” to literally fit in the palm of my hand.   Then I checked my email on my Crackberry and did a text to answer an urgent request.  It took me ten minutes to type the following on a full key pad the size of a book of matches with keys half the size of capers, “I don’t know. I’ll call you!”

I know technology has helped us become part of the greatest communication network in the history of the planet, but I find myself longing for the days when I was a kid.  Days when everything closed at 5:00 pm on Saturday and didn’t open again until Monday morning.  When you could only see a feature film with a greasy box of popcorn in your lap.  When Norton was a guy on the Jackie Gleason show!   When I  took the Sunday paper into the bathroom, instead of my cell phone to check email, and nobody called after 5:00 pm because it was considered rude to interrupt when you were having dinner with your family!

My 87 year old Dad calls me every time he sends me an email, just to make sure I got it!  That’s what I’m talking about – the personal touch – that ability we have to communicate directly, not through a monitor and a key board. 

Well, I’d love to write more, but I need to update my software, reconfigure my network settings and recharge my laptop before I lose all my data…there’s simply no escape!   Andy Rooney, where are you when I need you?