My first podcast show of the season.

Yesterday I recorded my first audio podcast in over ten years. I will have to say, it went very well. Little technical trouble with my equipment setup, but in the end we recorded a show. My technical setup is a MacBook Pro, using Adobe Audition software to record a mixing box, feeding off two Sure SM58 microphones. Most of my audio equipment came from the first podcast that I did when I worked for The American Century Theatre company in Northern Virginia. This was one season with me, their photographer and the media agent, talking to the staff about the upcoming play. It was actually the last year that I worked for the theater company. Leaving wasn’t my choice, they just wanted fresh blood in the game. But the taste of doing a podcast was born in me.

It took me some time to get back on the horse, as they say. I didn’t have the time when my primary job at the agency was to send me to document crime scenes and agent involved shooting scenes.

My wife is also my partner on this podcast project, she is helping with the guests and with quality decisions about the show. She even helps our first guest with the questions that I pre-interviewed with the guest. The first attempted at the recording had some issues. The microphone was a little farther away and made it sound like she was in a room talking. What I found out was the audio setting for my laptop, jumped off the setting for the external mixer that was supplying the audio signal to the computer, and instead it went with the internal audio and microphone. My voice sounded fine because I was closest to the microphone and my guest was sounding like it was far off, which she was. After some conversation and several glasses of wine, I could fix the issue. My guest wanted to redo the audio interview anyway, so we did the interview again. My guest reviewed what she said and was happy with the outcome.

I will add the intros and exits onto the recording will make the whole interview about twenty minutes long. This is not bad for a first attempt. The total length of the interview is about eighteen minutes, and I am happy about that. It goes to show you, a couple glasses of wine lets the lips flow easier.

Developing a line of questions for my podcast interviews.

The hard part of any interview show is to get guests and develop the right questions to ask. It’s like a paper that your writing about your guest and you get them to tell you. So the questions are important. I did a search on the web about, “What to ask a business person.” Found some interesting questions, but they don’t always fit the person that I am asking.

My first two guests are a husband and wife real estate team. They been in the industry for a long time. Sold a lot of homes, had some interesting and I hope crazy clients. I hope to get them to tell their store. It will only be audio, but I will transcribe the audio for the website and post it with the audio.

My next series of subjects that agreed to be interview with my accomplished by online technology and actually be recorded in video. With SquareSpace not uploading video’s I think because of the size. I will have to upload to my test YouTube channel and provide a link.

Of course, I will past those video interviews to the normal podcast online methods and send out the link. It should be fun. Even getting my fiancé/ wife into it and she’s helping with the guests and figuring out what to ask them.

If you have any suggestions about who to interview, drop me a not and I will look into getting them on board.

Tested out the Site Store

I printed up one of my photographs as a 16 x 20 print mounted on Gatorfoam to test out the process for my online store. Pretty easy, SquareSpace makes the process easy for a business man. I do have to say, it’s not for large number of images, say taken at a wedding or event. I’m currently not shooting those like I did in the past, so if I return to that type of business in my retirement days, I will have to look for another online process. Maybe by then, third party websites that offer that type of selling, will pair up with SquareSpace and fix a obvious issue.

My test print is of the two roses, and should arrive on Monday by UPS delivery. Maybe I do an unboxing and posted on the website some how.

Podcasting Notes

I have my first group of business people lined up for my audio podcast called, “Just Questions.” They are all in real estate and the financial industry, ranging from just a beginner, to those well established in their industry. I’ve always wanted to produce a show and use it to promote my photography. This is the start. Interviewing people I want to do business with, getting them to know me, and I them.

Being Published

It’s always nice to be published, even more so from work that you produced over twenty years ago.  A old co-worker emailed me asking my permission to use my name with her research project that is going to be published in the “Journal of American Society of Questioned Documents Examiners.”  

At my agency, in the past, they didn’t like individual names associated with work that goes into public domain.   Not sure if it’s actually policy, or because my supervisor didn’t want to give me credit for the work that I produced.  But, today, I guess things are different.  With all of the certifications going on in the forensic world, people want to know who worked on what.  

So I worked on the photography aspect of this project.  It’s one thing to have an opinion on a subject, it’s another to be able to prove and show record of it.  That’s what I did, figured out how to document photographically her educated professional opinion on the subject of trash marks produced by electronic photocopying machines.  All coping machines leave marks from the process that is unique to each machine. It’s one way to tell what xerox copy is from what machine.

I hope to show you some of the work when the article gets published in the future.