My Quiet Life

A few interesting things:

• I signed up for Capture Music City. It’s some thing the Tennessean appears to have built for submitting photos, which will be selected based on popular rankings and published in a book. I am generally very wary of these “SUBMIT YOUR PHOTOS AND BE PUBLISHED!!!” offers, because it sounds cool, until you do a cursory value analysis. It’s not that I anticipate making large amounts of money (or any at all, in fact) from my pictures — it’s my hobby after all. But that doesn’t mean I want to be complicit in giving someone something for free — which is essentially what a lot of these offers are.

  They put out the call for free submissions in a “contest” and voila, they have a bunch of photographers sending them pictures to use, for free, in a book they can sell. Everyone wins. The only upside to you as a photographer is the publicity and name recognition — which, for a majority of these contests — is virtually nil. So, everyone wins except you. You just gave away your crap for free. The Tennessean, though, for better or worse is a ginormous publication, so they’ll at least have more exposure. So what the hell.

  So, I uploaded a bunch of crap. Go vote for all my crap. I tried to upload a selection of my pictures that were related to Nashville in some way (which is tricky if they are portraits or something). Go check it out and upload any pictures you might have. Oh, and also, when you participate in these contests, you need to be careful to read the fine print on the terms to make sure you’re not giving away ownership to your work or anything. In this case, their terms of service specify:

  You also hereby grant to us a royalty-free, non-exclusive, worldwide right to copy, edit, adapt, distribute, perform, display, and/or use, the Materials, including any derivative works created from the Materials, in whole or in part, for use in the Capture Music City book, Capture Music City DVD, and promotion related to the Capture Music City project. In addition, you grant to us the royalty-free, non-exclusive, worldwide right to use your name, likeness, and biographical information in connection with the use of the Materials.

  “Non-exclusive” is the important part — it means they are reserving the right to do whatever they want with your picture, but they’re not trying to own it. Very important.

• nashvillest.com has launched — go check it out.

The Tennessean pulled a real doozie with this piece. What a piece of crap. The title of the article is “The debate over immigration in America: What teens think”. Thinking that they were referencing some national or local study, I read it. Turns out the Tennessean did their own little “study”. Their sample set: Four students from Hillsboro — three of them immigrants.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s heartwarming to see that these kids have their head on straight, but what is the point of this article? Is it representative of teens even at Hillsboro? Probably not. Is it representative of teens in Nashville? The state? The country? No. It’s a damn waste of my time, that’s what it is. Get back to me when they’ve sent someone out to, you know, Maplewood or Antioch or something.

To that end, I’d like to report the findings of my latest study on what Nashvillians think of the Tennessean:

The Tennessean: What Nashville Residents Think:

Chris Wage, 26, a Nashville native since he was 9:

“The Tennessean stinks. It’s a horrible corporate newspaper filled with stories off the wire, fluff editorials and toothless reporting.”