Yosemite after Rain

Yosemite after Rain

If you've ever gone on a vacation with someone who isn't a photographer - and is impatient to boot - you sort of know what it was like. I kept wanting to stop to shoot stuff and my friend who had just left a programming job was depressed and wanted to explore the edges of cliffs. It was a tense time all around. I was afraid that only one of us was going to come back from this trip.

This was shot while I was alone. Mamiya 6. I had borrowed wading boots and was in the muck waiting for the tripod to settle down.

Content Ads

Someone should write an article about how content-driven ads effect what you write about.

I'll give you an example. I was going to write an article about how I used to use a JOBO rotary tank on top of a Besseler (sp?) motor; sort of a hybrid thing to do rotary processing. Rotary processing is actually a great thing if you want to do a lot of film processing, because besides a certain amount of automation - you use very little chemicals since the tank lies on its' side and rotates the film through the chemicals. In other words the whole tank doesn't need to be filled up. I tried it on the cheap. Instead of buying the whole JOBO rig, I bought the rotary tank with their reels and put it on top of a motor made by Besseler that turned the tank.

The motor drive had a button on the front so that it would go first one way, than reverse itself. That broke the first day. But the basic concept worked pretty well, though you had to keep an eye on the tank that it didn't wobble off onto the floor. The other problem is that chemicals tended to leak out of the top, and sometimes get into the motor.

So one day, while the tank with six reels is spinning - the motor burns out. Dead. Not such a terrible thing if it was in the hypo stage - but it was still halfway through the developer stage.

What to do. Think fast.

Did the only thing I could think of: take it off the motor base and begin rolling it across the apartment floor (which at that time had a rug) trying to approximate the rotation speed of the motor. Bad for the rug. Well, that's what I was going to write my article about but then I'm thinking:

Is JOBO even in existence anymore? Does Besseler even make that motor drive? Do people still do rotary processing? This is like writing a story from the dark ages. Who's going to buy advertising for this?

So I hop on the web and try and find out what JOBO is up to. Like every other film-based firm, they are called JOBO DIGITAL now or something like that and their official distributor in the U.S. is so-and-so. I went to several official distributor sites they mentioned and either the processors were out-of-stock or a search of the site doesn't even mention the rotary systems.

So - I figure, this is stupid to waste my time writing about some system that isn't going to generate ad revenue. And this was conscious. I wonder - as I said before - what the effect of content-driven ads is on writers?

You can see it in action if you look at successful sites based on content-driven ad revenue. What do they write about? The latest and greatest digital products. They try to scoop their competition with the first review. And digital is perfect for this since new products are hatched quicker than you can write about them. New "content." New ad revenue. They feed well on each other.

I can't compete there. My pc is nearly five years old. My camera was made in 1965 or something. In a year or so they'll have a replacement for just about everything that I'm using.

But there is something pernicious about it; though no more so than the relationship that has always existed between advertising and magazine writing. Don't bite the hand that feeds you. I always felt that when I was reading reviews in Popular Photography. Very rare they'd say, now here's a product by a major manufacturer that buys tons of advertising space in our magazine and what they've just turned out is a POS.

Oh, about that article about the effect of content-driven ads on writing - maybe I just wrote it.