Neil Leifer on WordPress

WordPress

One of my favorite photographers, Neil Leifer, has a beautiful new WordPress.com-powered site. For the past few years I’ve had this photo in my office:

Ali - Williams (Overhead)

The story behind it is pretty interesting, taken from this interview with Larry Berman and Chris Maher:

Chris/Larry: It’s actually quite a different question to say what are your favorites verses what do you feel are your best photographs.

Neil: I know, and my best picture ever, in my opinion, is my Ali Cleveland Williams picture that I shot from overhead. I don’t usually hang my own photos, I collect other people’s pictures. But that picture’s been hanging in my living room as long as I can remember. I have a 40×40 print of it which is hung in a diamond shape with Williams at the top. That’s the guy that’s on the canvas on his back.

Chris/Larry: It’s remarkably abstract for a sports picture.

Neil: I think it’s the only picture in my career that there’s nothing I would do different with it. You look at pictures and think that you can always improve them no matter how successful the shoot is. Part of what motivates you to go on to the next shoot is every once in a while you get a picture, whether it’s the cover of the magazine or an inside spread, that’s as good as you think you could have made it. And then a week later you see a couple of things that you could improve slightly. A month later you might see a few more things. It doesn’t diminish the quality of that picture. It simply means that there’s always room for improvement.

Chris/Larry: You’re learning for the future?

Neil: Exactly. It’s sort of what motivates you to go on. If I were to do the Cleveland Williams Ali picture again, I would do it exactly the same. And more important is that no one will ever do it better because it can’t be done like that anymore. Today the ring is different and the fighters dress in multi colored outfits like wrestlers. Back then the champ wore white and the challenger wore black.  Today, when you look down at the ring from above, you see the Budweiser Beer logo in the center and around it is the network logo that’s televising the fight. Whether it’s Showtime or HBO, they have their logo two or three times on the canvas. The logo of promoter of the fight, Don King Presents, is also visible. That’s why that picture couldn’t be taken today. So not only did the picture work out better than any I’ve ever taken, but it’s one that’ll never be taken again.

©Neil Leifer

Chris/Larry: Where are you in this picture?

Neil: I’m at 11:00 o’clock, as I remember it. I’m in a blue shirt leaning on the canvas with a camera in each hand.

It’s always an honor to have a great creator make their home on the web with WordPress.

Fusion

Asides

This is a big deal. There are a lot of big deals happening right now, it’s honestly a very exciting time to be in tech. I feel like a sailor in a tumultuous sea, and they should have sent a poet. T. S. Eliot was actually the inspiration for WordPress’ tagline “Code is Poetry” and I’m reminded of this from The Dry Salvages:

O voyagers, O seamen,
You who came to port, and you whose bodies
Will suffer the trial and judgement of the sea,
Or whatever event, this is your real destination.”
So Krishna, as when he admonished Arjuna
On the field of battle.
Not fare well,
But fare forward, voyagers.

Meeting Ben

Asides

While in Florence I had the pleasure of meeting Ben Hammersley who took us to have real Tuscan food, which apparently involves parts of a cow you wouldn’t normally expect to eat. We chatted about a whole range of topics and I learned quite a bit about everything from solo polar expeditions to DNA hacking.

Do the work

Asides

There’s a way to run a company like managing a government, with reports, surveys, and abstractions.

There’s a way to run a company like building a ship, where every board and seam has to be understood and checked.

Both can be successful, but you need to decide which you want to do.

WordPress [actually Automattic] has scored an important victory in court against a man who abused the DMCA to censor an article of a critical journalist. The court agreed that the takedown request was illegitimate and awarded WordPress roughly $25,000 in damages and attorneys fees.

Yes! Good laws become bad when people abuse them. Here’s the source: WordPress Wins $25,000 From DMCA Takedown Abuser (s/WordPress/Automattic/).

Free Sun Server

Asides

I put in an application for a free Sun server to try out for either WordPress.com or Ping-o-Matic, depending on when/if it arrives. Everything we’ve done on WP.com has been Dell thus far, and honestly they’ve been pretty good with the exception of one box that they’re going to replace soon. Our biggest DB server (a Dell 6850) does north of 300 queries per second, but it weighs as much as me and uses a crazy amount of power, which is expensive. Of course as more and more of our infrastructure becomes distributed, high performance boxes don’t matter as much.