So that was Phoot Camp. It was this crazy group of photographers, just having pure creative play together. They might do a scavenger hunt with photos or a big crazy group shot in the water with kayaks or just any number of insane, goofy things that were just for the pure fun of friendship and joy and photography and creative play.
Phoot Camp was sort of an accident that happened while I was working on the “serious” online magazine project that I collaborated with NPR and the New York Times on. It's funny how the goofy side project changed my life and my career trajectory much more than the serious one. But maybe there’s something there, about what happens when you're trying to be the person that the world will respect, versus following the joy.
What motivated you to try something like Phoot Camp? Had you been to something similar?
My inspiration was Foo Camp (Friends Of O'Reilly), put on by O'Reilly Media, the tech publisher. They had done an event—gosh, it must have been 15 plus years ago—where they invited a curated group of people in the tech industry to come into their empty offices to connect and learn from each other. They made it an “unconference.” Anyone could say ‘I'm going to teach about C++ in this room at this time.’ I heard about it and thought it sounded like the coolest thing ever, and modeled Phoot Camp after it. Fun fact, I later got to attend a Foo Camp for journalists, NewsFoo!
When you're looking for collaborators, how do you recognize when somebody will be a good creative partner?
I try to only spend professional and personal time with people who play well with others. Whenever possible, I curate my events and the team of people I work with. It’s a huge value of mine to work with people who are enjoyable to be around. That's part of why I call my creative studio Buddy Buddy. It about the process for me, just as much as it is about the end result or the outcome. It's about having fun all the way through, feeling respected, feeling appreciated, and working with people who reciprocate that.
You met Ryan Schude for the first time at Phoot Camp?
Yes. I had published him in the photo magazine before that, so we knew each other over email. He's been a huge part of the event. He’s wonderfully strange, in a very lovable way, and extremely talented. He epitomizes that sharing and mentoring concept that I think is a such an important part of California work culture.
He loves to teach other people how to do what he does or how to do what they do better. He never comes from a place of ego. He has a gentle leadership style that people love. People can tell he's comfortable in his skin. They love his mentoring and teaching spirit. Ryan and I have been through a lot together, along that journey of teaching ourselves event planning the hard way. Venues falling through at the last minute, and all kinds of funny messes we got ourselves into in our 20s due to wishful thinking.
But it’s funny how that played out with the SFMOMA project. Our third collaborator, Dylan Hosey, our set builder, had his entire studio and workshop burn down two and a half weeks before the SFMOMA event. Obviously, we were so bummed to see such a life-changing, tragic event befall a friend. It also left us without our set builder, who had been working at cost and not charging for his design time. We didn't have money to replace him, yet we had a commitment to create something worthy of the SFMOMA a few weeks later.
In that moment, I was so happy for everything that came before and having had all those experiences in the past where we had to hustle and find a new venue or figure something else out at the last second. This time, it wasn't our fault. It wasn't our own irresponsibility that landed us in a crunch. But we had learned how to handle the crunches through those other experiences together!
How has technology changed the way you work over the past decade?
Something I've loved is the way Adobe has done Creative Cloud. Things like Libraries have been a great way for me to share color palettes, logo assets, and all sorts of things. I love having access to it. The other thing that's been really useful is Slack. I love being able to have a good history of messages of things organized by thread.
I also love the way sharing has gotten so much easier with Dropbox. I used to think, ‘Wait, am I sharing the link or the folder?’ I used to get confused, but now I think it's kind of effortless to share Dropbox folders through links. I just hit that button that says, ‘Share’ and copy the link.
I use Dropbox every day. I think selective sync is really easy to use. I love being able to toggle folders off on my Dropbox when my computer gets full.