I Joined A Motorcycle Gang

(Originally posted to www.glennlewisphotography.com March 27, 2015)

Fine, if we're being honest here, I didn't really “join” a biker gang. I co-founded a biker gang. Originally called “The Sons of Mild Disorder and Confusion,” I think we're in the process of renaming ourselves the more politically correct (and accurate, given our new members) “The Sons and Daughters of Mild Disorder and Confusion.”

Just read it...

Originally consisting of the three founding members, myself – Glenn “MFGB” Lewis, Jordan “Yup” Yip, and Luke “Kingslayer” Armstrong, our mission has been to ride our badass hogs around our island home of Jeju, South Korea, turn some heads, and raise hell.

Jordan "Yup" Yip

Glenn "MFGB" Lewis

Luke Kingsley "Kingslayer" Armstrong

Wait, that isn't true. Our actual mission statement is: “We ride together. We die together. Bad Boys for Life.” But it might look more gangster if it's written: “We ryde together. We dye together. Bad Boyz 4 Lyfe.” It's “gangster” to spell things incorrectly, isn't it? Specifically, 'i' should be replaced with 'y' whenever possible, in order to show just how gangster we really are. Of course, changing 'die' to 'dye' might cause some confusion, and fools who don't know no better might read this motto and think we're some kind of group for the advancement of illiterate fans of the dying of clothes. I don't know where we'll ultimately land on that one.

Wait, that isn't true, either. Our actual actual mission has to do with the objective of riding around and exploring Jeju when the weather is agreeable, exploring weird and / or abandoned places, and taking funny pictures of ourselves in and around these places.

This being primarily a photography website, here are some photos of a few places we've been:

There's a huge hotel just up the highway from where I live, and it seems that the construction stopped abruptly some years ago.  Today, it is huge, empty, and at times, scary.

Had this place ever been completed, I think this would have been a sauna / pool area.

The basement.  Probably scary at night.  A bit scary during the day.

Luke.

Jordan.

Tammy.  A true Daughter of Mild Disorder and Confusion.

Me.

The Sons and Daughters of Mild Disorder and Confusion doing what they do best.  Taking weird pictures together.

Long exposure fun.

Still in the basement.

Still in the basement.

Plants are starting to grow inside.  I don't think much has happened here in years.

If we were going to release an album, this would be the cover.

Or maybe this would.

This gives some kind of scale to the site.

Another shot to give some kind of scale.

I think this would have been the front of the hotel, if it had been completed.

A couple of the rooms were even furnished.  I have a hypothesis: Perhaps a few rooms were furnished in order to show to potential investors.  Could have been a nice place.

No idea what to say about this.  A child's bed with a chandelier on it.  A child's chair.  A child's easel.  Behind me as I took this picture, there was a full-size desk and chair.  There was a Korean Bible (this IS Korea, after all) and a pen on the desk.

Anyone for a swim?

Our next adventure took us to "Jeogi Art Village" and the "Jeju Museum of Contemporary Art."  We found it completely by accident, as is the M.O. of the Sons and Daughters of Mild Disorder and Confusion.

Jordan enjoying some of the contemporary art.

Luke enjoying some of the contemporary art.

This is the first time I've ever ridden a flower-headed cheetah.

"Help!  I'm being eaten by a dinoshark!" is not a sentence most people get to say in their lives.

...nor is "I'm going for a ride on that dinoshark."

"Look, a monkeysheep!" is one more example of things people don't often get to say.

"To victory, on the back of tricorilla!"

#nofilter

#unedited

#forrealsies

#untouched

And one more SaDoMDaC (It's pronounced "Saddam Dack") photo classic, again from the Jeoji Artist Village.  This shot is actually a nearly 360-degree panorama.

One Month In

(Originally posted on www.glennlewisphotography.com on March 18, 2015.)

I "launched" www.glennlewisphotography.com roughly five weeks ago.  All that was involved in the launch was (1) creating the website, and (2) telling my friends and family about it, and hoping word-of-mouth and social media savvy (which I'm sadly lacking, for now, but am hoping to improve on this in the future) would carry me forward.  And I suppose it has, to some degree.  Ultimately, I would like this website to provide income for me to settle into photography as a career.  Obviously, this isn't something that happens overnight, and it certainly isn't something that happens when there isn't even a "purchase" button to be found on the site.  I'm aiming to fix this specific problem as soon as July, when I return to Colorado.

So, roughly one month in, where do I stand?  I use Squarespace to run my site, and they provide some metrics.  In the last month, I've had 381 "page views," meaning an average of 17 a day.  This is a pretty small number, and even less encouraging when it is considered that a "page view" is not the same thing as a "visit."  A "visit" counts as a series of page views by an individual.  I've only had 84 "visits" in the last month.  These numbers are what they are, and can be viewed optimistically, or pessimistically.  I'm optimistic they will rise as time goes by.

"Fisheye Forest," originally posted March 4, 2015.

It's also interesting to look at trends, such as specific days that gather a significantly higher number of views than others.  For instance, I had 69 unique page views  on March 4th - a huge number compared to my average of 17.  I posted "Fisheye Forest" on March 4th.  Every time I post a photo, I post it here, onwww.glennlewisphotography.com, as well as on my Facebook page, 500px, Flickr, Smugmug, and Google Plus.

Was there some kind of link between my having posted this particular photo and the increased traffic I experienced this day?  Well, I got 232 views of this photo on 500px, and it reached a peak "pulse" of 88.6, an impressive but not incredible rating based on another metric, this time specific to www.500px.com.  By way of comparison, I've averaged about 143 views per picture I've posted on 500px.

How about Flickr?  "Fisheye Forest" only had 70 views on Flickr.  And Google Plus?  Uh, I'm pretty clueless about what the hell I'm even doing when I get on Google Plus, so I don't really have any idea.  My Facebook page?  It's got 7 "likes," which is among the most of any of my photos.  (Not particularly encouraging)  And I'm not sure that anyone in the world has viewed my Smugmug page, at all.  It's basically a clone of this site, and in the future, I'll have to consider if it is really worth keeping both of them up and running.

So far, this post reads like a bunch of "here are some not-encouraging factoids about my photos," so let me now mention the things that have happened in the last month that ARE encouraging.

"Sanbangsan Sunset," originally posted February 26, 2015.

I have over 21,000 views on 500px.  I think this is good.  There are photographers on 500px who probably get this many views in a day, and perhaps I will, someday, too, but I am happy with this number, given the limited time I've been using the site.

I posted "Sanbangsan Sunset" on February 26, 2015.  It's odd, but for some reason, specific photos really take off on some sites, but not on others.  On 500px, this photo only reached a "pulse" of 48, which is not an impressive number by any account.  However, the same shot was chosen by Flickr to be featured on "Explore," which basically means it was shown on Flickr's front page.  It gathered over 8,500 unique views and over 200 "faves."

My Google Plus profile has over 52,000 views, even though I have no idea what I am doing when I use it.  These numbers are encouraging.

I am ultimately concerned, though, that all these metrics are kind of meaningless.  The sites on which I've been posting my photographs are generally used by other photographers, and artists don't make a living by selling art to fellow artists.  Ultimately, I am going to need to get regular folks to take enough of an interest in my work that they'll be willing to shell out a few hundred bucks to display something I've made on their walls.  I've got some good ideas on how to go about doing this, but none of them are really applicable until I get back to the US.  Until then, I guess I've just gotta keep doing what I'm doing.

To Post or Not to Post...

(Originally posted on www.glennlewisphotography.com on March 10, 2015)

... that is the question.

I've been putting my photographs all over the place in an attempt to "get my name out there" for a couple weeks, now.  I have accounts on Smugmug,500px, Google Plus, Flickr, and of course, Facebook.  My goal, for the next year, and hopefully significantly longer, is to post a single picture, every day, on each of these sites.  There will be days, like when I am traveling, that I won't be able to post.  And that's fine.  I'm posting in this way because if I were to simply post every picture I deem worthy of posting at once - like, now, for instance - what would I talk about and show off to try and garner interest?

Choosing what to post is quite difficult.  I purchased my first DSLR in 2007, and between then and now, my hard drive has accumulated (as of May 10, 2015) 41,594 .jpgs.  I'm not entirely sure what that means as far as pictures I've actually taken in the last 8 years, because I've certainly deleted many more pictures than I've kept.  My hard drive also has 10,467 RAW image files.  These are duplicates of .jpgs, but duplicates that I deemed to be of high enough quality that they may some day be worth editing.  I have 6,778 .tiffs.  These are images that I've created by editing the RAW image files.  All told, my eloquently-named "Pictures" folder contains 69,581 files and 1,813 folders occupying 729 Gigabytes of hard drive space.  Trying to edit and sort through this number of photos in order to choose those that will ultimately be posted on all my sites has been quite an imposing task, but one upon which the last couple years on Jeju have allowed me to make tremendous progress.

And it is here that one difficulty (of many) appears.  How prolific should I be?  Obviously, the more pictures I post, the lower the average quality will become.  I've looked at profile pages of some excellent photographers on 500px who have been members for years and years, and some have only 50 pictures posted.  The fifty pictures some of these photographers have are of unbelievable quality, in some cases better - and I hate to admit this - than the 50 best pictures I've ever taken.  But, in the case of these photographers, they only provide fifty pictures to look at, which I think has a legitimate downside.

Similarly, there are photographers who have thousands of photos posted.  While many of these thousands of photos might be of excellent quality, there are too many 'mediocre' shots for these photographers to stand out.

I don't know where I want to fall on this spectrum.  I tallied the photos I have already posted, as of today (141), and those I intend on posting (390).  531 pictures, total.  That seems like a lot.  And that doesn't take into account the shots I'm hoping to get on my next adventure, which begins in less than two months and will likely be the topic of my next blog post.

I just removed a few pictures a couple hours ago as I thought about this issue.  Here are the four I took down:

Trashed.

Deleted.

Removed.

Taken off the site.

I like all these shots.  I think they're objectively good... but probably not great.  The two images on top - the crows and the bee - were in my South Korea album, which had 59 pictures already - probably more than what is needed for what I feel will ultimately be one of my weaker albums.  More specifically, while the crows are kind of cool because of the black and white contrast, they're just crows.  Everyone's seen a million crows, and no one wants to purchase a print of a crow.  As for the bee, I have a fair number of better bee shots, and a fair number of better flower shots in the same gallery, so it probably isn't worth keeping an inferior duplicate.

The bottom two shots are from my Nepal album, and raise another difficulty.  I'm aware of my subjectivity in deciding what is a 'good' photo, but I'm not sure awareness is enough.  I like these shots, and again, I think they're good.  And while I think viewers might find the picture of the donkeys interesting, it faces the same difficulty as the crows.  There probably aren't many people out there that want to purchase a picture of donkeys.

I'm now realizing, as I type this, that pictures like these will make good filler for this blog, as I move forward with this whole endeavor.  They might not be sale-worthy, but perhaps an accompanying story will make them at least post-worthy.  On the blog, if nowhere else.

Is 531 pictures too many for someone just trying to get into photography professionally?  Maybe.  I guess I'll have to give this some more thought.

When Being Professional and Being Honest Collide

(Originally posted on www.glennlewisphotography.com February 22, 2015)

I launched this site a little over a week ago, and I'm still trying to figure out in what direction I should take it.  This dilemma applies specifically to the professional vs. honesty conflict I have to deal with when thinking about my photo comments, and blog posts, etc.  This probably isn't a black-and-white issue, so wherever I land will be neither 100% wrong, nor 100% right.

The honest truth is that I am not currently a professional photographer, but some clarification on the way the terms are interpreted is necessary.  I'm not a "professional" because I don't make my living at photography.  Yet.  Perhaps within a year, I'll be able to unhesitatingly claim to be a pro.  That's the dream, anyway.  Having looked at a fair number of "professional" photographers' sites, I can confidently (although, admittedly, with an unfair bias) conclude that my work is good enough to exist, and hopefully stand out, in the world of "professional" photographers.

So for now, do I make my site, and my comments, and captions and the personality I try to portray on everything I do related to my photography, clinically neat, politically-correct, and for lack of a better term, bland, in order to appear professional, while being self-aware that this is not an honest reflection of my personality?  Or do I make non-PC jokes and write my captions casually, as though I were talking to a friend?

It's tricky.  I pride myself on my honesty.  I want my writing to reflect my personality and opinions, but I'm aware that making jokes about praying mantises eating their siblings isn't likely to help me sell pictures of a praying mantis.  But this is something I would likely joke about when telling a friend about my interesting photo I just took of a praying mantis.  So what do I do?  I guess I toe the line, for the time being.

One nice part of being unestablished is that I can write blog posts like this, since in all likelihood, no one will read it.  Years from now, who knows.  But for now, I guess it serves as some kind of a photography-related diary.

"Dear Diary, does anyone have any thoughts or opinions on this matter?  If so, they're encouraged to leave a comment."

First Blog Post

(Originally posted on www.glennlewisphotography.com on February 14, 2015)

First blog post.  What to talk about?

Well, after years and years of talking about trying to turn my photography hobby into a career, I'm finally making moves to make it happen.  One year from now, I'll either be earning enough money at this to, you know, eat food and stuff, or I won't.  In which case I'll probably be teaching English somewhere sandy and a bit behind-the-times on social issues.

So what is involved in trying to "go pro?"  Hell if I know, I'm pretty much hoping to figure it as I go, and hoping that the quality of my photographs will be sufficient to carry me forward.  Getting this website looking how I want hasn't been particularly difficult, but www.glennlewisphotography.com is only one of several places I'm trying to get my name out.  I'm making "Glenn Lewis Photography" accounts on Flickr (I think it's a few years past its prime), 500px (which seems like a good site for sharing photos), Smugmug (where I basically have a clone of this site up), and Facebook.  If I ever get a more modern phone than this one ...

...maybe I'll even have to get Tweeter or whatever it's called.  Man, I'm already a grandpa, and I'm only 32.

I think that's enough for now.  I'm going to have to make an effort to update all of my websites and blogs and whatnot pretty regularly from here on out, so I guess I'll try and keep these things brief, so I don't run out of stuff to talk about.

I'm back

Oops.  About 26 months have passed since my last post.  I've spent the entirety of this time on the South Korean island of Jeju, working as an English teacher at public schools.  Lots of stuff has happened, but I'm not really going to talk about it.

I just want to say that I'm back.  I'm one week from finishing my job here in Korea, and I've got a bunch of exciting travels and life adventures coming up.  The biggest news, I suppose, is that I'm leaving this job in order to try and become a professional photographer.  This blog will contain a lot of photography talk.  It's going to have a lot of travel stories.  It's going to have a lot of kick-ass pictures.  And it's going to have a lot of blatant self-promotion.  Hopefully not so much that it scares anyone off!

In the next three months, I will visit China, Mongolia, Kenya, and Tanzania, en route to my home in Colorado, USA.  Before I post anything about this, though, I'm going to post copies of recent blog posts I've made on my newly-formed, personal website, www.glennlewisphotography.com.

So, read on, and join in on Glenn's Adventures!

Teaching English in Korea: Hogwon (Private) versus EPIK (Public)

This probably won't be a particularly humorous or interesting post, but it covers some stuff about teaching here, which is probably something I should at least touch upon in this blog.

As of the beginning of February, I've been back in Korea for about three months. I think this means I'm probably overdue for a post about my job, since it is, after all, what allowed me to come back to this part of the world. As I've mentioned previously, I'm now a middle-school teacher at a public school. I got the job through EPIK (English Program In Korea), the federal government's English-education program. When I was in Korea before, from August 2010 to September 2011, I worked at a “hogwon,” a private, after-school English-education academy. Aside from the fact that my job title – teacher – hasn't changed from hogwon to public school, the job itself couldn't be more different.

Sharing (albeit slightly shorter) hours with the worker drones most of them are destined to become, kids in Korea go to school Monday to Friday from 8AM to 4:30PM. As I understand it, they used to attend school every other Saturday from 8AM to noon as well, but a recent increase in Monday to Friday hours has since eliminated the fortnightly Saturday classes. A generous move by the government that hopefully will allow Korean kids more time to be kids, a concept with which a great many of them are completely unfamiliar. This means that my working hours are now 8:30AM to 4:30PM, Monday to Friday. I'm uncertain whether I'm ashamed or proud to be holding down a semi-legitimate nine to five for the first time since April, 2008.

At the hogwon I worked at in 2010-2011, I was required to be in the school from 1:30 to 9PM. This change in working hours has been the basis for the biggest differences in my experiences in Korea. And like everything else, it isn't a matter of “which one is better?” My working hours at the hogwon allowed me, if I so desired, or lacked the personal responsibility to do otherwise, to stay out as late as I desired, any night of the week. Accordingly, I had a more exciting, and in all likelihood, more expensive social life. My hours at public school, especially when combined with the fact that I live a fair way outside of town and buses don't go there past 10PM, have made my Monday through Thursday social life less exciting (i.e. nonexistent). The upside to this is that I'm probably spending less money, and I'm certainly being healthier and more productive. Before I signed my current contract, I was aware that I wanted a more personally productive year than my previous Korea-experience encouraged, and this was actually my primary motivation for going after a public school job. So far, so good.

Nearly all aspects of teaching English are different at a hogwon and at public school. Bear in mind I've only worked at one hogwon, and one public school, so the generalizations I'm going to be making may not be true across the board. Below are some of the most glaring differences, and my opinions thereof:

• Class sizes: At my hogwon, class sizes ranged from three to twelve students, with an average of probably seven or eight per class. I taught the same groups of students Monday to Friday, or in some cases, two or three days a week. All told, I was teaching roughly 60 different students in a given term, and 90% or so of these students would carry over to the next term. They all had English names, like Kevin or Suzy, and because of the limited class sizes, I was able to get to know each of them. At public school, class sizes range from twenty to thirty-five students, and I see each class once a week. I teach 20 classes per week, which means I see approximately 500 students each week. I am not attempting to learn their names, even though roughly half of them are either “Kim” or “Kang,” and don't feel particularly guilty about this since most of the Korean teachers don't do so either – and they share a common language. Obvious advantage: Hogwon.
• Class frequency and working hours: At my hogwon, I spent seven and a half hours per day at school, the first one and a half hours of which I was required to be in the office, even if I had no planning to do. The rest of the day, from 3 to 9PM, I spent in class, with a rare 45-minute break every now and then. I probably averaged 35 40-minute classes a week, and for the most part, these classes didn't change with the days of the week. At public school, I teach 20 different classes each week, and each class is 45-minutes long. All told, I spend 15 hours teaching each week, although I am required to be at school for 40. Since I teach roughly the same lesson to each class, this means I do very little planning, and accordingly, have approximately 20 hours per week (discounting 5 for lunch) during which I am in my office. What I'm getting at is that this job provides me with a great deal of free time. I have a computer and an internet connection, so it's easy to kill time, but I've been trying to be productive with it. Basically, I've been working my way through 5 years of backlogged photographs. It's been one hell of a chore, but it's going to be amazing once I'm done, if I ever truly am. Student advantage: Hogwon. Personal advantage: Public.
• Student ages: At my hogwon, I taught students from first through eighth grade. The younger the kids were, the more enthusiastic about learning they were. Also, the cuter they were. I now teach at a middle school, which was not my first choice, but it allowed me to come to Jeju, where I really wanted to end up. Middle schoolers, as we all know, kinda suck. I guess that's unfair, because I have quite a few good classes full of enthusiastic learners. But I also have jerks, and while I'm sure they also exist in grade school, they certainly don't exist with the frequency they do in middle school. Also, they're often pimply, self-conscious, and awkward. Hopefully I'll be able to move to an elementary school in the near future. Personal advantage: Hogwon.
• Teaching assistants: At hogwons, teaching assistants don't exist. But since classes don't usually exceed ten students, it's not too difficult to maintain a semblance of order in class. At public school, each class I go to has a teaching assistant, who is a Korean English teacher. The job of the assistant is primarily to maintain discipline, but also to help me to answer questions and translate as necessary, but as little as possible. I've learned something about assistants. Sure, everyone wants a pretty, young assistant to help in class, but the best assistants are the older women. The younger teachers are more likely to take abuse, but the older teachers don't take crap from anyone, and their classes are always full of well-behaved students. My ideal teaching assistant would be a 70 year-old ajima (an endearing and not necessarily familial term for “grandmother”) with a perm, a scowl, and a “love stick.” Yeah, yeah, now is the appropriate time to make a penis joke. A “love stick” is a ruler, or a bamboo rod, or some such thing that is used – more often as a threat than an actual tool – to encourage students to listen. It goes like this: if students aren't listening, they get slapped. Awesome. Advantage: None given, this is a draw.
• Methodology: This could be (and certainly is) the topic of many doctoral theses. I have mixed feelings on how this should be handled, so I'll try to stick to the facts. At my hogwon, each class was expected to cover a particular book (or books) in a particular amount of time. Usually, a class would be expected to make it through a reading book and a workbook every two months. If the students weren't grasping the information, too bad. They had to finish the material in the time allotted, and they had to move up to the next level. Parents wanted to hear that their children were making progress, so we told them that's what was happening, even if it wasn't. Ideally, there would be some way to separate the education from the money, since I feel it is this connection that causes most of the problems with hogwons. But overall, teaching from the books we used did result in improved reading and writing skills. Unfortunately, this left very little time for speaking and listening – critical skills that are much more easily improved in a hogwon setting with 8 students in a class than in a public school setting with 30 students per class. Frustrating. At public school, I had zero days of training. I arrived and they said “teach them English.” Zero materials, zero standards, nothing. I usually pick a topic for the week, download a relevant PowerPoint presentation, and go through it in class. Maybe there is time for some kind of activity or game at the end. It's still a bit chaotic. Methodology advantage: Public school – but this advantage is negated by the class size and frequency.
• My conclusions:
  • Students learn more English at hogwons than at public school. And unfortunately, lower-income families cannot afford to send their children to hogwons – they ain't cheap. So as with any other place on Earth (to my limited knowledge, anyway), education is more a function of economic standing than anything else.
  • Public school is a better environment for me to teach in, given my life objectives at present. I have a lot of free time at work in which I can, in theory, be productive. Additionally, my weekday life, although not as exciting as it was when I worked at the hogwon, has resulted in my living a healthier, not necessarily more fulfilling, but certainly more productive life.

If anyone made it through this whole post, I'm sorry. That was boring.