A LETTER TO EVAN OSNOS:

In a “Letter to China” New Yorker writer Evan Osnos asks “Does Twitter matter in China?”

Having lived here for only 11 months, I have never known China to have open access to Twitter as it was blocked by the government last June right before I arrived. However, I have been an active community member of China’s Twitter community since day 1 … well, ok, maybe day 10 after having to learn the A, B, C’s of VPNS, proxies, PPTP, LT2P, and other acronyms you only know if you have to.

I have been part of other Twitter communities all around the world — and I would suggest China’s Twittersphere is among the most sophisticated and advanced in the world.

Osnos writes:

Can Twitter really tie people together in a country where it is blocked? Before writing a profile of artist Ai Weiwei—published in the magazine this week — I had only a vague sense of Twitter’s presence here. It has been blocked since last June, which means that the average Web user who tries to sign on to Twitter from a regular Internet connection will get a page that says that the “connection has been reset,” or words to that effect.

Osnos key statement here is: “the average Web user who tries to sign on to Twitter” is blocked.

So who does this leave? The super users.

This makes China’s Twittersphere extremely unique. We’ve lost a lot of the bullshit that clogs up Twitter streams in Europe and the U.S. Users here are so committed to using the service, we are willing to go through all kinds of bassackward measures to communicate and share information.

The people that will try Twitter out for a week, send three tweets out a week on their dinner plans and than never use the service again — simply don’t exist here. If you see someone on Twitter, you can pretty much guarantee they will be there day and night and every day this week.

We also all share a couple things in common beyond using Twitter. We all face the same government restrictions and all chose to find ways around them. This effort unites the Twitter community in China. We all share a common understanding of computer systems and have a broader understanding of Twitter in comparison to an average Twitter user elsewhere. Jason Ng’s small sample of Chinese Twitter users survey points out:

The majority of the [Chinese Twitter] users has bachelor degree and the second largest group is master degree holders followed by twitters with tertiary education background.

The data shows that about 30% of the respondents are students followed by computer software and hardware sector (15%) and then Internet related production sector (12.5%). If we group the two into I.T industry, then we can see that students and I.T professionals are the key player in Twitter community as they together constitute more than 50% of the respondents.

Internally we have a community of well educated, tech-savvy users sharing information and dialogue from around a fast-changing country. However, our community reaches far beyond the Great Firewall of China. Our Twitter friends outside of the middle kingdom are China experts, political analysts and the likes. In a secret society, the voices of those that speak beyond the walls might be heard more.

Although I have only circumstantial evidence, this might mean the average China user might have more followers than the average user outside of China. Are our voices louder because of China’s ban on Twitter?

Yesterday, the Dalai Lama responded to questions via Twitter and other social media networks. While Mashable used the headline “Dalai Lama Uses Twitter to Circumvent Chinese Government,” in some ways it might be more accurate to say: The Dalai Lama addressed a very powerful group of tech savy netizens in the world’s largest blogging country. Some estimates say there are over 30 million blogs in China. Those blogs reach the world’s largest online population. Some estimates say China now has over 400 million Internet users. As an outlet to reach more ears — the Dalai Lama’s tact is both powerful internally in China — and acts a symbol to the rest of the world.

AFP reports:

150,000 Chinese are estimated to have Twitter accounts, with as many as 100,000 of them physically living in the mainland.

While 150,000 is a small number compared to the rest of the world — it would be pretty fair to say — many of those people who use Twitter are also blogging to to Osnos’ “average Web user” and the other 400 million Chinese internet users. The strong Twitter community helps bring information outside the Great Firewall but also streams lot of information into Chinese based social media sites like QQ, Rehren — who users far outnumber Twitter’s in china.

Some useful links

• Evan Osnos: Letter to China — Does Twitter matter in China
• Evan Osnos Article: Must-Reads on Ai Weiwei and Chinese Art
• My Beijing Twitter list (not on here – @jonah_kessel and I’ll add you)
• Kaiser Kuo’s China Folks Twitter list
• 12vpn.com: A great VPN that works on the mobile platform and old fashioned computers
• Viscosity: A great Open VPN client
• AFP: Dalai Lama tweets to Chinese web users
• The Blog Herald: How How many blogs in China?
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UPDATE: Sunday, May 23, 2010
@photoasia sent me this link this weekend which is pretty fantastic. It is in direct response to my comment below that a lot of stock photos seem contrived or fake. The photography is impressive, as is the agencies social media tactics in making this video. This changed my view of stock a bit.

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Yesterday I saw a Tweet come across from Twitter friend @photoasia who is the Creative Director of PhotoAsia — a Malaysian based Stock Photo Library that provides excellent Asian and Malaysian Stock Photography. The Tweet read:

Looking for more Muslim lifestyle images for a client. Contact me via DM.

If you have images — find out more about how to submit them here.

Quickly, I responded with some links and comments. When I was first trying to make money with photography, I dabbled in stock a bit; however, I had not revisited the idea until recently. The Tweet got me thinking about being involved in stock photography while working as an editorial photographer. And while the idea of making money from something you did a long time ago is great — the reality is a bit complicated and requires some legal navigation as well as some difficult ethical decisions. I’m sure if you were an actual ’stock photographer’ it would be less complicated. But for those of us who are based in editorial photography, we have a much different situation.

Legal Complications: The Fine Print

A big question for me is on ownership of the intellectual property for editorial photographs. And to clarify — ownership before something went stock. Let’s take this hypothetical situation that might have happened in the past …

1. You worked as a staff photographer for a newspaper.
2. The newspaper was disorganized and never had you fill out a contract on terms of ownership of intellectual property.
3. You used your own cameras, lenses and gear.

So — who owns the rights to the images? The photographer? The newspaper? Is there a dual license? Could these images be used for stock purposes?

Does signing a contract with an employer which details salary and benefits, but does not mention anything about intellectual property, negate the photographer’s rights to the property (given the above criteria)? I’m sure most newspapers have very clear policies on this. However, if a paper didn’t — does the assumption of ownership hold up in court? While this is clearly something an employee should work out with their employer to avoid any bad interactions down the road, a photographer with an enormous archival stock of editorial photos doesn’t necessarily have ownership of their images to submit to a stock agency. In addition, the stock world has its own set of legal obstacles.

To test the waters, I made a contact sheet with some images of Muslim people and places (I avoided submitting anything that was shot for publication to avoid the “hypothetical” situation above). Most of these images came from street photography in Malaysia and Algeria. Although I’m an avid street photographer, and shoot with purpose even in my spare time — I am not in the habit of walking around with model release forms due to the nature of where I normally publish images. Images that appear in magazines, newspapers, photography exhibitions or for educational purposes don’t normally require release forms. When I’ve done commercial shoots, I will always bring model release forms since I know the images will be used in advertisements, posters or promotional materials where they are required (here’s the last model release forms I was using — very simple but necessary). However, this makes any street photography one does where there are identifiable people in the images financially useless for commercial or stock purposes. This doesn’t mean they couldn’t be used in editorial publications later. However, unless you are in the habit of trying to make any stranger you see on the street that you photograph sign a contract before they move on, your out-of-luck in the stock world. In a multicultural sense, given language barriers I wonder how easy this would be without a translator. Furthermore, the Arabic world isn’t the most camera friendly environment.

If we take the images in this post — the top one could be used, with no people being identified, as well as the second photo only showing the back of someone’s head. The third photo however, has no commercial or stock value since this woman was photographed at a market in Cameroon Heights, Malaysia. At the bottom are some of the other images I shared with the stock agency. About half of them can not be used.

This gives me a little more respect for stock photographers who actually setup life style shoots with all sorts of situations and peoples, although I feel like most of them are sitting at their house taking pictures of inanimate objects. However, are they actually visually representing life accurately with their models?

Or better yet — are they even trying to? Do stock agencies want a “real image” or the “idea of a real image?”

The great thing about street photography is how real it is. Even with assignments for newspapers and magazines, subjects are usually aware of the photographers. With street photography its easy to create images with relatively little “camera presence.” There’s no doubt a good stock photographer will certainly be able to create natural looking scenes. However, if you look around at the images that surround us in advertising, billboards, brochures or products — the images are overwhelmingly fake and contrived.

For those photographer’s that did grab that model release or have a nice picture of a clock, sock or dock — than there is the details of the actual contracts between photographers and stock agencies. I can stomach the difference between “royalty free” images and “rights-managed” images; however, some editorial photo agencies can’t use your images if they have been used for commercial stock before. This is certainly another important consideration for photographer’s wanting to be represented by editorial agencies.

Ethical Decisions

Perhaps the most important question is: Do you want your images to be used for stock purposes?

I have mixed feelings about this, but it really comes down to — how much money is it worth to be able to control your images? With some images I might not care at all — however, other images would certainly lose their intrinsic value by turning them into advertisements.

I took part in Photo District News Photographer’s Income survey last year. The results are very interesting, especially when you look at the variation in income between an editorial photographer and a stock photographer. The survey concluded:

The largest category of respondents by far was self-employed photographers. In all, 1,040 of them completed our survey. They included 244 advertising photographers, 229 photojournalists and editorial photographers, 200 wedding and portrait photographers, 101 corporate photographers, plus dozens of others specializing in architecture and interiors, stock, music and entertainment, and other niches.

The rankings of freelance photographer specialties by income was mostly–but not entirely–predictable. Male photographers still vastly outnumber female photographers; more surprising, however, was the great disparity in their earnings. (By comparison, the mean salaries for male and female reps are almost identical.) Advertising, corporate, and stock photographers earn twice as much (or more) than photojournalists and editorial shooters. Music and entertainment photographers do signicantly better than photojournalists/editorial shooters, though not as well as the advertising and corporate types. And pity the ne-art photographers, who obviously get up in the morning for reasons other than money. The surprise was the lower-than-expected median income for the 27 fashion photographers who responded; they had a few high earners who brought the group average up, but the low earners among them are on par with photojournalists.

So how do different photographer’s incomes measure up? Here’s some big points from the survey:

1. Self-employed photographers reported 2005 earnings of $95,000 on average, while the median income of respondents was $57,500. Stock photographers, meanwhile, reported earnings of $125,400 on average, with a median income of $87,500. Earnings for advertising, architectural, fashion, editorial and other categories were also reported.
2. The disparity between incomes of male and female self-employed photographers was striking: men earned $104,900 on average, with a median income of $67,500, while women reported an average of $27,900 and a median of $32,500. (Male respondents also outnumbered female respondents by a ratio of 3 to 1)
3. Photo editors reported 2005 earnings of $63,500 on average, with a median income of $57,500.
4. Photo editors reported that their incomes topped out sometime between 13 and 20 years on the job, while reps reported that their incomes peaked, then declined sometime between 13 and 20 years on the job.
5. Account executives reported incomes of $68,500 on average, with a median income of $67,500.
6. Art directors and designers reported incomes of $93,000 on average, with a median income of $72,500.
7. Studio managers’ incomes averaged $40,600, with a median of $36,000.

So — To stock or not to stock? That’s the question. Beyond navigating the complicated web of intellectual property law I say — being well rounded never hurt anyone. Why not balance income from the two opposites sides? I’m off to print out more model release forms.

If you didn’t know, I am the mayor of the Confucius Temple in Beijing, China 北京孔庙. Its the second largest Confucian Temple in China after the one in Confucius’ hometown of Qufu. I must say, it is a lot of work governing a temple built in 1302. Lots of paperwork, middle-management types and inter-office politics exist in ancient deity too.

I’m also the mayor of Beijing’s Bell Tower, originally built in 1272 during the reign of Kublai Khan. Does that make me more powerful than Kubla Khan? You can decide. But in the meantime, Foursquare tells us who is in charge.

If your unfamiliar with Foursquare — its a rapidly growing geo-based, social media network with economic incentives for both users and businesses. Read more about them here. Users can “check in to” locations – a business, a subway stop a 900-year-old ancient Chinese tower. Anything. If you want to become mayor of a place, all you have to do is:

What is “The Mayor” all about?
If you’ve been to a place more than anyone else we’ll crown you the “The Mayor” of that place. We see lots of bars and cafes now offering “Mayor Specials” – a free coffee or appetizer or maybe a special discount to the mayors of their venues. Watch out though – if someone else comes along who has checked in more days than you, they will steal the “Mayor” title back from you.

Earlier today I saw @newmediajim check into the White House, which made me ask the question, if Obama is the President of the White House – who is the Mayor of the White House? Furthermore, who is the mayor of the Sphinx or the Eiffel Tower. With over 1 million users and 40 million check-ins, as of Monday, May 10, 2010 here is my list of the top 10 coolest mayors in the world :

• 1) The White House: Aya m
• 2) The Great Sphinx of Giza: Eohyung l.
• 3) The Eiffel Tower: Nicolas M.
• 4) The Acropolis: Kakos Lykos
• 5) Tian’anmen Square: Trevor H.
• 6) Machu Picchu: Leon V.
• 7) The Taj Mahal: Jeff Clinton
• 8 ) Stonehenge: Mister R.
• 9) Yosemite National Park: Carrie H.
• 10) Angkor Wat: eohyung l. 용인시, 경기도 (Yes, apparently the guy who is the mayor of the Sphinx in Egypt is also the mayor of Angkor Wat in Cambodia – he’s also the mayor the men’s bathroom on the first floor of the White House)

Although there is no mayor yet, people have checked-in all around the world: at Easter Island, the Galapagos Island, the Great Barrier Reef to Chichen Itza or Uluru. Mashable says today:

Location-based social network Foursquare counted its 40 millionth checkin a “couple days ago,” according to a tweet from one of its developers.

The number shows that Foursquare’s growth rate is accelerating: Five weeks ago, the company announced that the total number of checkins had reached 22 million. In short: Foursquare appears to have doubled its checkin rate in just over a month.

So as it grows, so will the competition of mayorship. I’ll be happy if I can hold on two 1 of my 2 ancient temples. Given the choice, what would you be mayor of?

While you think about that question, here are some more photos from in and around the temple that I govern.

Last week I answered some questions for journalist Steve Buttry on my thoughts on photojournalism and entrepreneurship. I had the pleasure of sitting in on one of Steve’s lectures a couple years back in Reno and have kept in touch with him through Twitter since. Recently, Steve was recognized as Editor & Publisher’s 2010 Editor of the Year for:

“his leadership in transforming the newsroom not simply to adapt new technology to newsgathering, but to engage the community in deeper ways reflecting the two-way communication that is today’s media reality.

Steve’s motivation and direction in journalism is an exciting breath of fresh air and something to keep your eye on in the future. While many in the industry are stuck in the doom and gloom mentality, Steve is pushing creativity and innovation in technology to make “the complete community connection.” You can (and should) read about Steve’s ideas in his Blueprint for the Complete Community Connection as well as his call for a mobile-first strategy. Steve recently left Gazette Communications and started a new path as the Director of Community Engagement of TBD.com, Jim Brady’s digital local news operation covering the Washington area for Allbritton Communications. This new startup is right up my alley and I’m excited to watch how things play out for them. From what I can gather, they seem to have the right attitude toward navigating today’s media environment. This attitude is even symbolic in the new Web site’s recently decided name “TBD.com.” They had trouble finding a name for many months. Finally, they wrote on their site:

In a mixture of humor and frustration, Editor Erik Wemple began signing his emails, “Editor, TBD.com.”

Before long, we realized Erik had stumbled upon the perfect name for our site. The traditional news culture is that you don’t publish or broadcast a story until all the questions are answered, all the t’s crossed and i’s dotted. The evening newscast or morning newspaper is presented as a finished product, the culmination of a day’s work for the news staff.

But TBD will never be a finished product. On the web, on mobile devices and on our 24-hours cable news channel, we’ll always be in motion: constantly updating, improving and evolving; seeking more details, reaction or community conversation. We’ll be a place you visit to watch the news unfold in real time.

Traditional journalism says you answer the five W’s in a story: Who? What? When? Where? Why? We’ll answer them, but perhaps a couple at a time, with the rest TBD. We’ll be honest with our community about what we know and what we don’t know. We’ll tell you what questions we’re still pursuing and tell you how you can help us find the answers.

This attitude could break down barriers and walls which have separated journalists and readers since the Guttenberg. It should kick many journalists off the pedestals they sometimes stand on and could create a different type of news flow many newsrooms are striving for, but can’t break tradition enough to actually get it. Add a notion of new media story telling for a mobile and Web based audience and I’m sold. Who know’s, maybe they’ll even make Google Wave useful …

Advice, thoughts and ideas on global imagery

You can read Steve’s original entry here. Some people mentioned they thought it was a good read for aspiring photographers — with Steve’s permission, I’ve reposted the Q&A here. Steve’s questions are in bold and I am the regular type face.

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Jonah Kessel and Carmen Sisson discuss
entrepreneurship and photojournalism

April 28, 2010 by Steve Buttry
One of the classes I will be speaking to at the University of Iowa today is a “Global Images” course. I will be discussing changes in visual journalism in the digital age. Some of the differences I wanted to address are the necessities of multitasking, online promotion and entrepreneurship.

I asked two excellent visual journalists I know who are multitasking entrepreneurs with strong web sites, Jonah Kessel and Carmen Sisson.

Jonah is a designer and photojournalist who fits perfectly in the Global Images course. In the past year or two, he has worked in Algeria and China, and has produced stunning images from both countries. Carmen is a freelance journalist struggling to make a living with writing and photography in the South. Her Fearless Journalist blog about her travels and struggles is one of the most compelling personal chronicles about journalism that I have seen.

As a good blogger does, Carmen answered my questions with a blog post that I will let speak mostly for itself. She offers lots of practical career advice for photojournalists, like this nugget:

Learn to like numbers. There’s a tendency among freethinkers to eschew all things that smack of corporate ennui. But here’s the thing: Those boring spreadsheet columns ARE freedom. Take as many business classes as you can, even though they’re not required.

Jonah answered in an email, which he gave me permission to post here. It follows in full, lightly edited, with my questions in bold:

First, a general description of how I (Jonah) am navigating the visual business world today. I have two Web sites — a blog and a more commercial style showcase site (formerly kesselimaging.com, now merged into jonahkessel.com for SEO purposes).

My heart is in editorial photography and multimedia storytelling. However, to get by financially as well as stay employed as a staffer (and having benefits) my work spans an enormous range of visual fields including wedding photography, commercial food photography, videography for television and private businesses, Web and print design as well as commercial advertising including billboards or product photography. Last year I redesigned three newspapers including the China Daily (The National English Language Newspaper of the People’s Republic of China), La Voix de L’Oranie (a French daily tabloid in Algeria), and Sawt Al Gharb (an Arabic daily newspaper in Algeria). Previous to this I had designed and redesigned tabloids, broadsheets and magazines in the US.

• • •

What sort of traffic do you get from the site?

The following stats are not counting bots. Over the past 6-months my blog received over 5,000 unique visits with an average user visiting 7.63 pages. The average user spent 6:05 on the site. The commercial site received over 7,000 unique visits in the same time period. Some of these stats are a little deceiving because of Flash. One page might have 50 images on it, but the analytics will only count 1 click with the user only visiting 1 html page.

Of this traffic, 46.79 percent came from direct traffic, 43.71 percent came from referring sites and the remaining 10 percent came from search engines.

From the 43.71 percent of traffic coming from referring sites, 15 percent came from Twitter, 15 percent came from Facebook and another 15 percent came from other social media aggregators such as ShareThis, hootsuite, visualeditors.org, etc.

Does it generate freelance business for you, or do you sell any pictures from the site? Or is it mostly a place to showcase your portfolio for prospective employers?

Both the sites generate freelance business as well as help sell prints and licenses. Print sales are minimum; however, there is no effort involved in the print side – I’ve been using free automated services that print and ship. On an average month I’ll take in $100 with prints – on a good month $500.

The big goal is to sell licenses to use photos. One license, depending if it’s an editorial use or a commercial use, generates anywhere between $50 to $800. When I have images which I feel will be useful to an individual person or company I setup direct URLs for potential customers and send them links like : www.kesselimaging.com/stevebuttry.

I then monitor these pages individually to gage how much interest the potential buyer has in the images – or if they even look at all. Once that link is hit, and I haven’t given the link to anyone else I can track the visiting IP address to confirm if its who I’m trying to sell images to. If I then see 10 IP addresses on the images with 300 hits, I have a heads up on them that they are interested and can gauge a price. I’ve sold images to an enormous variety of people like this from commercial airliners to political parties to restaurants.

I also use this method for weddings. Before I left the US, about 15 percent of my income was coming from wedding parties. These days I’m busy enough I don’t have to do this anymore, but for years of being paid poorly in the US, this was a pretty helpful tool to gaining extra income to buy gear.

I also track IP addresses for potential employers. I’ll send links to interactive resumes, or even PDF resumes and can watch if potential employers click on them. Especially after college trying to get jobs, and applying to hundreds, I found that at least 75% of job offers never even looked.

Now, I rely heavily on my sites for potential employers. I believe it would almost be impossible to get a job in today’s market without having some type of Web presence for employers to see. The days of sending out photo books and portfolios are long gone – either people already know who you are and or you have to sell yourself online. In the past when I have been applying for jobs, I have designed entire Web sites specifically directed at a single potential employer that may include flash animation, html, video and photos.

Any insight you have on photojournalism today? Your observations on photojournalism and consumption of photography from your travels?

Well – that’s a broad question – here’s a couple thoughts:

ON GLOBAL MEDIA: On a global scale, we don’t all share the same definition of what the media is, or what its supposed to do. The role of journalism in China is very different to the role it has in Malaysia, Madagascar or the US. It’s completely normal for a journalist in Africa to only write articles when they are paid to do it directly from a source. It’s also normal for that same journalist to sell the story to three different newspapers with three different bylines. The openness of the media in Germany might make the US media look mild hitting at points. I’ve seen articles be translated 4 times before it goes to press. More than words can be lost in translation.

This can complicate global communication and create a lot of misunderstanding when a journalist reports from one society back to another often implementing their values onto another set of cultural beliefs.

As the globalization of mass media increases, I see more commonalities in the look of the media we consume. However, a wolf in sheep’s clothing is still a wolf. There are very deep-rooted cultures behind the media we consume.

ON GLOBAL PHOTOGRAPHY: Although photography is highly subjective in nature, I used to believe we could all agree on “what a good picture was,” although we might disagree on “which the best picture was.” Working internationally I believe that thought isn’t so true. Our inherent cultural understanding of society which is heavily influenced by the environment which you grew up in makes this subjective nature even more subjective.

When I got to Algeria, newspapers would blur out almost all faces appearing in a photograph. When I asked “why?” I might get a response like “we think it looks better” or “we don’t wan’t to upset anyone.” There were no legal requirements to do this, but everyone was doing it. After months of discussions on what the public benefit might be to showing faces, we began showing them. After one newspaper did it, other newspapers started to follow. Often with 3rd world developmental journalism you try to make change on a micro level with the hope of others following suite to foster change on the greater media environment.

Family values in China are so strong — if you show a Chinese photo editor two photos, one with children in it and one without — they’ll choose the photo with kids in it the vast majority of the time. The value of representing youth here is so high it out weighs the visual importance of the other image.

A have lots of little examples of different tendencies in global visual communications. When someone dies, its very normal to use a black screen behind the copy. It would be extremely offensive to make a tight crop on a Chinese politician – yet, we would have no problem cropping Obama’s eyes out and using it 7-columns wide on a broadsheet (that would get you fired here if you did that with Hu). Insetting a person’s mug shot into a dark photo would imply that that person was dead in Asia (which is ok with me because I hate insetting photos). On a day of mourning, a newspaper in Asia might only print in black in white.

ON PHOTOJOURNALISM TODAY: Today’s world of photojournalism is fiercely competitive. I believe in today’s media environment a photographer needs a solid understanding in HTML as well as sound engineering, video shooting and editing and the ability to wield social media’s power in making content viral … and of course, just because you create images doesn’t mean you don’t need to know AP style and be able to write stories and cutlines. The rapidly growing mobile industry also means we have to think about many platforms. My new commercial site has different entrances for Flash users, HTML users, blind Internet users, mobile, iPhone and iPad users. If your not visible on a mobile device, your not visible enough.

Attitude may however be the most important thing. With converging media, you need to be able to work cross platform happily — I don’t know too many photographers that only shoot still pictures. You need to be able to collaborating with citizen journalist and other staffers – rather than compete with them. This isn’t an easy task. Having a positive attitude really helps with the challenges we face.

Shanghai: Exposcapes

Waiting for a crowd would be a mild statement. 70 million people are allegedly embarking on Shanghai for the World Expo which will start May 1. However, for Shanghai — the Expo began a long time ago. Preparations for the most expensive (over 4 billion USD directly funded) and largest World’s Fair ever started a long time ago. I’ve made three trips to Shanghai this month starting up a new publication for China Daily. We launched a 16-page weekly tabloid called Exposure last week, which will be covering the Expo for the next six months.

Exposure is the official English language newspaper of the Shanghai Expo. Once again living out of a hotel as the local Tenenbaum, I’ve been working out of the Shanghai bureau of China Daily setting up the infrastructure of the publication in attempt to have the publication run smoothly, without me being there. Here’s some pages of the first issue of Exposure, which is largely based on the recently redesigned China Daily.

Spending a month in Shanghai, I’ve gotten a chance to finally develop an opinion on the infinite debate between Shanghai and Beijing. Expats seem to fall on either side of the fence — and after a month here, I’m confident I fall on the Beijing side. In many ways, Shanghai doesn’t seem so much like China to me. People follow the street signs, people don’t seem to be spitting everywhere, people are even Queing. Bootleg DVD stores are hidden out of site and I’ve actually purchased a single beer here for over $20 USD. When you are used to paying 15 cents for a beer, 20 dollars seems to a bit out of proportion.

While working here, I’ve gotten a chance to have a wonder around the Expo site. While 70 million people are on there way here, when I was walking around there was almost no one there besides workers. Almost like walking in an Expo ghost town, the three-five hour lines that will soon form, were nowhere to be found.

As for the site itself — it is really pretty remarkable. The architecture is reason enough alone to wonder around all day. Everything is larger-than-life, and you really feel miniature walking around the global village. A lot of these photos were taken with my Canon EF 14mm f/2.8 USM II. I happened to get a rare blue sky day – and some unusual cloud coverage. With an interesting sky and bizzarre buildings, the 14mm did a great job making some interesting frames.

Digital Picture Review:The Full-frame corners are impressively sharp for a lens this wide. The biggest noticeable difference in image quality generated by stopping down the aperture is from the decreased amount of corner shading. The Canon EF 14mm f/2.8 L II USM Lens delivers a smoothly changing but somewhat strong amount of shading in full frame corners when shot wide open. This is not unusual for a wide lens – and is mostly gone by f/5.6. Users of 1.6x FOVCF bodies will notice little or no vignetting.

Shanghai: Cityscapes

Life outside the Expo garden is still very impressive in Shanghai. The recently remodel Bund area is a site worth seeing, although — like most tourist attractions in China, you will be seeing it with about 1 million of your closest friends.

The Shanghai Bund has dozens of historical buildings, lining the Huangpu River, that once housed numerous banks and trading houses from the United Kingdom, France, the United States, Russia, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands and Belgium, as well as the consulates of Russia and Britain, a newspaper, the Shanghai Club and the Masonic Club. The Bund lies north of the old, walled city of Shanghai. This was initially a British settlement; later the British and American settlements were combined in the International Settlement. A building boom at the end of 19th century and beginning of 20th century led to the Bund becoming a major financial hub of East Asia. The former French Bund, east of the walled city was formerly more a working harbourside.

In large part, I was stuck in an office during the day while I was here, so I got a chance to test out the Canon 5D Mark II’s ability to shoot at high ISOs at night and I’ll agree now – the camera does perform exceptionally well compared to my Canon 1D Mark II. Many of these shots, are taken with a Canon L series 70-200mm f/2.8 IS USM are taken past 1000 ISO, without a tripod.

I do use Noise Ninja, by Picture Code to help eliminate fractals and noise issues common with high ISOs and night time photography. I’ve tried lots of noise reduction software, but I am huge advocate of this product. I’ve purchased lots of worthless Photoshop Pluggins in the past, but this one has real value.

This is the continuation of a blog formerly hosted by PixelPost. The old blog contents are all still available here.
So why the massive overhaul(s)?

Welcome all to Nomadically Curious Visual Thoughts — Part II.
Its been years since I’ve actually had time to stop doing side projects for other people — and update my two Web sites. Although I don’t really have time now either, I stopped taking most outside Web projects so I could improve my photographic Web pressence. Along with this new blog, I’ve also launched a new commercial site at jonahkessel.com. This site takes the place of my former commercial site kesselimaging.com.

While both sites were in need of redesigns, for SEO purposes and to make a more congruent look and feel between the two, I merged the commercial site and the blog under the domain name jonahkessel.com.

New Photo Blog

The goal of my last blog was to be as simple as possible. All I wanted was one image to show at a time – forcing people to focus on the image with out bells, whistles or gadgets and widgets.

While I still believe in the same philosophy, it ended up being — too simple. While PixelPost does have many themes, none could meet my needs for multimedia. I also wanted to incorporate more of a visualization of time into the blog. Now, you will be able to see more than one post at a time on the landing page. The new comment system now allows for threads and a more visible discussions forum than the former blog.

I also wanted to expand the focus of the blog to include technical discussions on photography, gear and software. To help visualize these conversations a new platform was needed, and Wordpress became the best option.

The blog will continue to show you images from my work and my travels.

New Commercial Site

While the former photo blog functioned alright, the former kesselimaging.com did not. I put a lot of thought into the new site — mostly concerning load times, usability, searchability, upkeep, SEO, the mobile platform, multimedia and longevity of code. The former site — built independently in Flash using Action Script 2.0 was invisible to the mobile platform, loaded slow and in general had a pretty low Web profile.

Although most of you will see the new site in Flash, it has an HTML back — making it accessible to disabled users, and crawlable by bots, spiders or search engines. There is also an iPhone and iPad portal for Apple users that is not based in Flash, and allows me to share content while staying out of the war between Steve Jobs and Adobe.

The former site required all manual updating — there was no actual backend file management system. After browsing through hundreds of photographer’s Web sites I eventually decided to have a custom made site by Livebooks, a company whose reputation in the photo world has expanded tremendously in recent years. Although I designed the front end that you see on your computer, Livebooks has a visual backend that allows me to easily manage content quickly and remotely.

While I wouldn’t describe Livebooks as cheap or quick (it took about 4 months for my site to go up), I am happy with the editSuite (the backend) as well as the site and their customer service, despite some hickups along the way. Most importantly, looking into sustainability of the site — I’m very excited to have a company that is keeping up with technology to be hosting my work and finding solutions for a changing industry.