FocalPower…the blog

Last week I came across this interesting photo project (thanks to Guy Kawasaki for originally tweeting this!).  The essence of the project was a photo of a various families from around the world showing the food they eat in an week along with how much this food costs (converted to USD).  Unfortuantely, there isn’t any information provided about the background of the project other than it was posted in November of 2007.

I found this project rather intersting from two aspects.  First, the photographic aspect of documenting a family with their weekly food.  It’s more than just the food that they have laid out around them.  It’s the way each family presents themselves along with their food.  And not to mention the interesting aspect of comparing the part of each family’s home that they are sharing with you in that photo.

The second aspect is the social differences in food consumption and cost.  Taking the cost off the table, what does the food that each family presents tell you about their current living situation and lifestyle?  What about the relationship of their food to themselves?

An interesting and insightful project.  What would your family photo look like?

The FocalPower website and services will have a short Maintenance Window on Thursday May 22nd from 11:00pm PST to Midnight PST.  One of our network providers will be performing maintenance on their switches and routers which will result in an outage that should last no longer than 30 minutes during this maintenance window.

The FocalPower Blog and Forum will not be affected by this maintenance window.

We hate when maintenance requires a loss of service, but it is needed at times to keep everything running smoothly into the future.  We appreciate everyone’s understanding.

The FocalPower team has started using Twitter to keep the growing FocalPower community aware of any support issues and updates in a more real time (and concise) fashion. You can follow our tweets using Twitter or look for the latest tweets in the sidebar of the blog (see “Support Update Tweets” to the right).

This will only be used for announcements of support issues with the FocalPower service or for announcements of new FocalPower releases/features. The service is still in closed testing.

This one almost slipped past me.  The Maker Faire is being held this weekend in San Mateo, CA.  How to describe the Maker Faire?   I think their description is best:

 Maker Faire is a two-day, family-friendly event that celebrates the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) mindset. It’s for creative, resourceful people of all ages and backgrounds who like to tinker and love to make things.

Check out their Program Guide for more details…a great event for kids!

There are photo opportunities around every corner at the Maker Faire.  I had something planned this weekend, but trying to see if I can wiggle out of it to head over for the day on Saturday!

For those who are local to the San Francisco Bay Area, this coming Wednesday (April 9th) a historic event will occur on the streets of San Francisco: the Olympic torch will be making it’s only North American appearance. For Bay Area photographers, this is a wonderful chance to capture both the Olypmic Spirit as well as the protesters who will be present during the torch’s passing.

If you are planning on attending, best advice would be to take public transportation: The Embarcadero BART stop is right near the finish for the route, and the starting point can be reached by taking MUNI to SBC Park. The event is expected to start at 1 p.m. and it should take the torch about an hour and a half to traverse the approximately 6-mile route. Expect large crowds and plan to scout locations for the best shots, as well as routes to get from point to point along the route, well in advance. Due to the nature of the politics and protests around the torch’s appearance, I would expect crowds to start building by 9am or earlier.

Here is a list of sites with more information about the Olympic Torch Relay:

• Official Beijing 2008 Olympics Torch Relay site
• SFGate’s Olympic Torch in San Francisco Portal
• SFGate: San Francisco’s Torchbearers (includes the essays they wrote to earn the honor of being a bearer).

If anyone attends the Torch Bearing, please send us a link to your photos or post a link in the comments. It will be great to see the images that everyone captures of the event!
(Map courtesy of San Francisco Chronicle/SFGate)

Yesterday I came across an inventive Wedding Photography service that I hadn’t heard of before: The Proposal Shoot. Fort Worth Texas based and FocalPower Quote Widget patron David Kozlowski recently discribed this concept on his blog.

As a wedding photography this is an interesting option to offer to prospective customers and help increase your revenue per client. You would need to advertise this differently than you do your other serices however. As most grooms (statistically the one who does the proposing still) probably don’t think about wedding photography until well into the wedding planning. A focused advertising model would be needed to get the word out to them somehow before they propose.

The Proposal Shoot also has some risk. One of the most interesting parts of being a wedding photographer is that your dealing with one of the most dramatic moments in people’s lives. Human drama can lead to wonderful photographic experiences. During a wedding the drama should all be in a general positive sense (most negative drama occurs during the reception). With a Proposal Shoot, there is a higher risk of negative drama…imagine if she said now or wasn’t as enthusiastic as the he envisioned her to be.

I would always require payment up front for the Proposal Shoot…just in case.