Maxys Max Media and Entertainment

Tsunamis of change flatten landscapes causing us to reevaluate and rebuild.  The same process impacting people and brands. The marketplace is fundamentally different then yesterday.  How do you reconfigure and set direction?

Moving foward I'm reminded (unfortunately) of Kevin Costner's Field of Dreams "Build it and they will come".  Do you recreate based on Malcolm Gladwells "Blink" - your gut instinct and passion, or conform and risk analysis paralysis?  The old rules are "old rules". 

My favorite blogger Seth Godin wrote today about "The customer is always wrong" and the difference between a hobby and a career.  Do what you enjoy, life is short.

Sometimes it seems as if either the goal posts have moved or that you find that the path you were heading on was not going in the right direction, ie you're not happy in your job, people don't respect your work, you wish you were somewhere else and so on (note see my favorite advertisement from this years Superbowl)

How do you respond to the new market place, what do you do?

You evaluate, and decide to change tack like a sailing boat navigating across an ocean, you steer in another direction, maybe you create a new product or service?

It seems to me the ultimate destination is always centered around happiness, wealth and good health and I think it was Confucius who said - "it is not the destination but the journey that matters"

• Happiness -what can you spend hours doing, enjoying, "in the zone", with passion!
• Wealth - is there a market for your products and services?
• Health - mental, physical, emotional, intellectual, financial, spiritual, social, creative. 

When you start on any new journey there are so many unknowns and diverting noise demanding attention which can appear daunting or, maybe you are not aware of what you don't know and simply step into the darkness, learning as you go - in time your eyes and senses adjust, substance takes form.

No matter what, practice makes perfect and builds confidence in all aspects of life.  Over time we develop our knowledged eye and understand the difference between real and imagined limits.

As the Nike ad says Just Do It!  If it is right your audience will connect.

A long time ago, well before the digital revolution, I used to shoot 35mm colour transparencies (slides) - usually Kodachrome 64 because  it gave me beautiful colour saturation. 

The reality is most of those photos still sit in their sleeves in my photo library folders in the office - only seen by maybe ten - twenty people in over twenty years of photography.  The really good ones, maybe a dozen of them blown up and framed.  I've never gotten around to scanning them all - maybe one day. 

As an enthusiastic amateur photographer I took photos but I never really got into it in a big way - never really properly understood all the technical stuff like depth of field, f-stops, lighting and composition stuff.  If I liked the shot I'd shoot it and hope for the best.

When all my camera gear was stolen during the Sydney Olympics in 2000 I found it hard to spend money on stuff that was more self indulgent then practical.

For the next five years I carried around a little $150 snappy.

Anyway, during that time digital photography dramatically improved and a couple of years ago I bought my first digital SLR camera - an Olympus E-330, and then not much after that a Flickr membership.   The digital photographic journey had begun.

Today, nearly two years to the day - one of the first photos I took - of my dog Basil the Bull Mastiff sitting sadly in his kennel passed 10,000 views on Internet photo sharing service Fickr.

I remember the shoot - it was the day before my birthday and Kim and I were flying to Bali for a well earned holiday - I was still trying to work out which buttons to push.

In reflection it's amazing how fast technology has moved in those two years; how much my life has changed and how, through moving into the digital photographic world I found a new passion for my photography.

Still as always, so much to learn but more importantly, how your photos and images can make someone smile or think - all good.