Author Archives: Dan Curtis

Encore! The Best Advice Ever for a Personal Historian.

If I were able to go back to when I began as a personal historian, what’s the best advice I could give myself? Here’s what I’d say… Read more.

3 Things I Wish I’d Known Earlier About Being a Professional Personal Historian.

Want to avoid some pitfalls as a newcomer to the personal history business? Read on.

We  love our work. Right? But that doesn’t mean we  can’t be blindsided by some unsuspected snag. Looking back on my seven years in this work there are a number of things I wish I’d known earlier. Here are just three:

1. Some personal history clients can be darn right disagreeable.

It’s true and I have the scars to prove it.

For the most part, working with people on a personal history project is a satisfying experience. That’s why early on I was lulled into a dream-like  state, believing all my clients would be simply wonderful.  Wrong! One “client from hell” snapped  me out of my reverie.

What did I learn? I now make sure that I only work with clients that are a good fit and that I like.  In addition, I’m very clear from the outset about what I will or won’t do.  And I always make certain clients sign a contract.

2. Keeping up with changing technologies never stops.

A few years ago I invested several thousand dollars in the latest prosumer camcorder. It was a beauty. Now it’s  obsolete. It doesn’t shoot in HD and isn’t flash-based.  I’ll soon have to purchase a new camera which will also necessitate an upgrade of my editing software.

It’s not just keeping up with the latest equipment and software.  You’ve also got to budget for these upgrades. I’m embarrassed to admit that in this department I’ve been somewhat lax.

What’s the lesson?  Build into your production budget a rental fee for your equipment. Make sure that those fees go into a designated new equipment fund. And keep repeating to yourself: “This too will soon be obsolete.”

3. Working in an unregulated profession has it’s disadvantages.

There’s no certification or governing body for personal historians.   Some are experienced veterans and others are just starting out. Some charge nothing or very little while others charge thousands of dollars.  For potential clients this can be confusing. They may well ask why they should pay you a professional fee when someone down the street is offering a bargain basement deal?

What’s the answer?  I’ve learned not to sell myself short and not to be “nickel and dimed” to death. I sell myself on my years of experience as an award winning  documentary filmmaker.  I promise a professionally produced personal history that my clients will be thrilled with or they get their money back.   If they still prefer to go with “Joe”  down the street and are happy with a less qualified person and an inferior product, I’m not going to sweat it. Life’s too short.

Conclusion.

So what are some of the pitfalls you’ve faced as a professional personal historian and what did you learn? Love to hear from you!

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Photo by iStockphoto


Monday’s Link Roundup.

This Monday’s Link Roundup has a site that will thrill the Über Grammarian. If that’s you, don’t miss The Online Dictionary of Language Terminology.   If you’re a Joan Didion fan, you’ll want to watch Joan Didion Reads From New Memoir, Blue Nights, in Short Film Directed by Griffin Dunne.  My favorite this week is How Friends Ruin Memory: The Social Conformity Effect. For personal historians it’s another reminder that the stories we record may have little to do with what actually took place.

  • 6 Ways to Sell Without Selling Your Soul. “Sure, you want to build a successful business, but not if it means losing who you are. Somehow, someway, you have to figure out how to make money without abandoning your values, and yet a part of you wonders … Is that really possible? The answer: Yes.”
  • The World Memory Project.The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has gathered millions of historical documents containing details about survivors and victims of the Holocaust and Nazi persecution during World War II. Ancestry.com has spent more than a decade creating advanced technological tools that have allowed billions of historical documents to become searchable online. Together, the two organizations have created the World Memory Project to allow the public to help make the records from the Museum searchable by name online for free.”
  • Joan Didion Reads From New Memoir, Blue Nights, in Short Film Directed by Griffin Dunne. “A mere twenty months after Joan Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, died of a heart attack, Didion’s only child, Quintana Roo Dunne, contracted pneumonia, lapsed into septic shock and passed away. She was only 39 years old. Didion grappled with the first death in her 2005 bestseller, The Year of Magical Thinking. Now, with her new memoir Blue Nights, she turns to her child’s passing, to a parent’s worst fear realized.”
  • Framing a Creative Elevator Pitch. “The aim of an elevator pitch should not be to make a sale, get a job, or nab a sack full of money from a venture capitalist. Rather, it is to start a conversation. The ideal outcome of an elevator pitch is for the other person to look at her watch and say, “I’ve got a free hour. Let’s go have a coffee and talk about this.”
  • A Woman Of Photos And Firsts, Ruth Gruber At 100. “At the age of 100, Ruth Gruber is responsible for a lot of firsts. When she was just 20, she became the youngest Ph.D. ever at the University of Cologne in Germany. She was the first photojournalist, much less female journalist, to travel to and cover both the Soviet Arctic and Siberian gulag. She documented Holocaust survivors and the plight of the ship, the Exodus 1947.” [Thanks to Pat McNees of Writers and Editors for alerting me to this item.]
  • How Friends Ruin Memory: The Social Conformity Effect. “Humans are storytelling machines. We don’t passively perceive the world – we tell stories about it, translating the helter-skelter of events into tidy narratives… But our love of stories comes with a serious side-effect: like all good narrators, we tend to forsake the facts when they interfere with the plot. We’re so addicted to the anecdote that we let the truth slip away until, eventually, those stories we tell again and again become exercises in pure fiction.”

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Encore! How to Salvage a Damaged Audio Cassette.

audio tape brokenThis article was inspired by a personal history colleague of mine  in Victoria.  She wondered if I knew anyone who could fix an audio cassette that no longer seemed to work in her recorder. I confessed that I didn’t have any recommendations. So I got to thinking, “How difficult is it to repair an audio cassette?” I did some research.  Then I took apart a cassette  and amazingly put it back together again!  It requires patience and a steady hand but it’s not an impossible job… Read more.

20 Free Photo Retouching Tutorials for Personal Historians.

Where do you start to learn some of the basics of Photoshop? There are a bewildering array of Photoshop tutorials available online. But most personal history newcomers want lessons that relate more specifically to their work.

With this in mind I’ve selected these 20 free tutorials. Let me know if you’ve found a site, not listed here, that’s been particularly useful to you.

  1. Giving your Photograph an Antique Look
  2. Remove an object from background using content aware filling in Photoshop 
  3. Color Correction Basics in Photoshop  
  4. Old Paper Background Texture In Photoshop
  5. How To Repair Scratches, Tears, and Spots on an Old Photograph
  6. Local Contrast
  7. Super Fast and Easy Facial Retouching  
  8. Classic Vignette Photo Effect In Photoshop 
  9. Correcting a Red Over-Saturated Photo
  10. Overlapping Text With An Image In Photoshop
  11. Using Photoshop to Color a Black & White Photo From Scratch
  12. How to Change Skin Tone in Photoshop
  13. How To Straighten Crooked Photos
  14. Darken Overexposed Photos With The Multiply Blend Mode
  15. Brighten Underexposed Photos With The Screen Blend Mode
  16. Crop, Straighten and Open Multiple Scanned Images
  17. Fix Tone and Color with Levels In Photoshop
  18. Restore An Old Duo Tone Photo
  19. Shadow Recovery of Backlight Problem
  20. Worn, Torn Photo Edges Effect In Photoshop 

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Photo by Bart van de Biezen

Monday’s Link Roundup.

Another Monday’s Link Roundup brimming with a harvest of goodies. If you’re looking for a thoughtful essay on memory, take a look at Memoirs and Memories. And for a fascinating item on the history of traveling libraries, you’ll want to read Some little-discussed history of the traveling library.

  • Asking Permission. “As I work on various projects I often see images that I’d love to include in a publication. Locating the owner is often difficult. But before you can use an image in a publication or on a website, you need to obtain permission from the owner. Here are a few tips to help.”
  • Books: A Living History. “In Books: A Living History, Australian historian Martyn Lyons (of A History of Reading and Writing in the Western World fame) explores how books became one of the most efficient and enduring information technologies ever invented — something we seem to forget in an era plagued by techno-dystopian alarmism about the death of books.”
  • 10 Traits that Make You a Master Networker—and Grow Your Business. “Networking is more than shaking hands and passing around business cards. Based on a survey I conducted of more than 2,000 people throughout the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia, it’s about building your “social capital.” The highest-rated traits in the survey are the ones related to developing and maintaining good relationships.”
  • Memoirs and Memory. “…as I came to see that our memories aren’t really patchy; they’re patchworks, oddly and randomly retrieved bits and scraps that we weave together into something we believe to be a more integrated, seamless fabric than it really is… I don’t worry that the scenes are significantly inaccurate or even remotely embellished. I worry about what’s not there and might have made for an even better story.”
  • Is This the Future of Punctuation!? “People fuss about punctuation not only because it clarifies meaning but also because its neglect appears to reflect wider social decline. And while the big social battles seem intractable, smaller battles over the use of the apostrophe feel like they can be won.”
  • Some little-discussed history of the traveling library. “Mary L. Titcomb, who sent out that first traveling library in 1905, popularized it evidenced via all kinds of metrics. In fact today, all 50 U.S. states still have traveling branch library services. “They’re traveling cathedrals of beauty and truth and peace,” says Anne Lamott.”

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Encore! What’s the Difference Between Memoirs, Autobiographies, and Life Stories?

My mom far left with her sister, mother, and brother

I must admit that I haven’t given much thought to the finer distinctions between life stories, memoirs, autobiographies, and personal essays until I came across Sharon Lippincott’s fine blog The Heart and Craft of Life Writing .  In a January post she loosely defines an array of life writing approaches: … Read more.

Do You Want To Be a Successful Personal Historian?

Why do some succeed and others fail? In a word – persistence.   It’s that ability to get knocked down, pick yourself up, and keep going. Success of course is entirely in the mind of the beholder. Success to one person is failure to another.

Increasingly people find their way to my blog looking for the key to a successful career as a personal historian. I don’t have a magic formula. But what I do know from years of experience is that without persistence  nothing of real value can be achieved.

There are plenty of obstacles on the road to becoming a successful personal historian. I’ve selected four. Your success will largely be determined by whether you persist and overcome these obstacles .

 The Isolation Obstacle

Your home office can be a lonely place. This is especially true if you previously worked in a business where you socialized with fellow employees.

There are ways to minimize the isolation. You can network through social media, join professional associations, and participate in service organizations. But the truth is that a good part of your personal history work will be spent alone.

Failure to overcome this isolation and persist can give you second thoughts about being a personal historian.

The Fear Obstacle

This is the biggest obstacle to your success.

There’s so much to fear when starting a new personal history business. There’s  the fear of marketing yourself, the fear of doing the wrong thing, the fear of not having enough money to live on, the fear of being a competent interviewer, and on and on.

Fear can paralyze. An ability to keep going in spite of  your fears spells the difference between success and failure.

The Cash Flow Obstacle

If you’re used to a regular paycheck, get ready for a shock. For the first couple of years you’ll  find  more money going out than coming in.

In order to persist through the lean times you’ll need to be able to call on all your financial ingenuity.  If you don’t have a reserve of funds, or a part-time income or the support of friends and family or the thriftiness of a Scotsman, you may not be able to continue.

The Experience Obstacle

Personal historians come from a wide range of professions but no one comes to the business fully experienced.   It’s the kind of work you learn over time and largely by doing.

There are a host of basic skills you need – marketing, interviewing, editing, project management, and sales, to mention a few. Being able to clearly identify your business shortcomings and showing persistence in overcoming them spells the difference between success and failure.

Conclusion

Let me leave you with these inspiring words on persistence by American naturalist and author, Edward O. Wilson.

You are capable of more than you know. Choose a goal that seems right for you and strive to be the best, however hard the path. Aim high. Behave honorably. Prepare to be alone at times, and to endure failure. Persist! The world needs all you can give.  

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Monday’s Link Roundup.

I’m a sucker for clever animation. In this Monday’s Link Roundup you won’t want to miss a real charmer, Spike Jonze’s Stop-Motion Bookstore Love Story. And if you’re concerned about digital preservation, take a look at this Library of Congress article Digital Preservation-Friendly File Formats for Scanned Images.

  • PBS Off Book: Type. “In episode 2 of Off Book, typeface designers Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones outline the importance of selecting the right font to convey a particular feeling. Graphic designer Paula Scher talks about building identity in messaging, while Eddie Opara uses texture to create reaction. Infographic designers Julia Vakser and Deroy Peraza map complicated data sets into digestible imagery, mixing color, graphics and type.”
  • The 20 Most Iconic Book Covers Ever. “We recently read an article over at We Made This in which Nick Hornby writes that ”the days of the iconic jacket illustration, the image that forever becomes associated with a much-loved novel, are nearly gone. The stakes are too high now.” If this is true, it’s just another way that advertising is ruining our lives, since one of the things we love best about the book as art object and experience is the way well-designed covers complement and enhance your reading, and the way they figure in your mind when you remember a book.”
  • The Memoir and Children’s Privacy. “An article published in The Times on Monday [August 30, 2009] discussed the controversy over “The Lost Child,” a memoir by a British writer, Julie Myerson, who chronicled her son’s drug addiction. After Ms. Myerson’s son, now 20, condemned the book, which was published in the United States this week, debate flared in Britain over whether it was proper for the author to expose her son’s troubles and over what the boundaries should be in memoir writing. Is it inappropriate and even harmful to expose the private lives of minor children, in particular? What privacy lines should be observed, if any, in writing about family members and others?”
  • Spike Jonze’s Stop-Motion Bookstore Love Story. “…[this] lovely short film … was created by Spike Jonze—director of Being John Malkovich, Where the Wild Things Are, and so on—and the handbag designer Olympia Le-Tan. Among Le-Tan’s creations are limited-edition, felt book-clutches based on the famous covers of literary classics. Le-Tan met Jonze in Paris, and he asked for a Catcher in the Rye embroidery to put on his wall, … Le-Tan asked for a film in return.”
  • Old San Francisco Pictures Online. “If you or your ancestors ever lived in San Francisco, don’t visit this site! It is addictive. You’ll spend hours looking at the pictures! Dan Vanderkam moved to San Francisco in 2007 to work at Google. He became fascinated with his new city’s history and soon found the San Francisco Public Library’s online repository of old pictures. However, he quickly became frustrated by the site’s awkward user interface. He thought, “there must be a better way.”
  • Digital Preservation-Friendly File Formats for Scanned Images. “From a preservation standpoint, some digital file formats are better than others.  The basic issue is how readable a format remains over the course of time and successive waves of technological change.  The ideal format will convey its content accurately regardless of advances in hardware, software and other aspects of information technology.”

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Encore! As Personal Historians, How Do We Rekindle “The Sacred” in Our Work?

Last year I had the privilege of hearing First Nation elder STOLȻEȽ ( John Elliot) of the WASÁNEĆ (Saanich) territory address the 16th Annual APH Conference in Victoria, B.C.  He spoke reverently of the stories that were passed down to him about the land and sea and animals and the values to live by… Read more.