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wannawrite · 6 years

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The Royals - PWJ

who?: Wanna One’s Park Woojin genre: 🌺 type: bullet point TW: gang au

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The Royals PJH | PJH2 | KD | KD2

part one / two

mafia! AU

what secrets does Woojin hide up in the clouds?

kind of a soft mafia! AU for a change of scenery. Thanks for requesting anon!! Hope you guys anticipate more.

disclaimer: pictures used do not belong to me and credit goes to their original owners everything that is written here is purely fictional DO NOT READ IF TRIGGERING

Park Woojin

code name: 6

nickname: Sparrow

by his friends and enemies alike

he’s deadly quiet, demure even

Woojin is the pilot in charge of The Royals fleet of private jets

no one has a clear headshot of Woojin as he always has on a dramatic fighter jet pilot’s mask

rumour has it that he’s only a boy of 20 years of age, has taupe coloured skin kissed by sun rays and a key identification factor

his snaggletooth

but that’s the only word on the street

Woojin was the most low-key member of The Royals, keeping his profile low and head hidden

no wonder he was called Sparrow

always flying off before anyone’s hand could clasp around him

fast

nimble

brown haired

speckled

another gossip column mentioned he was a good friend of Lee Daehwi, another member of The Royals

and that was how he became a key figure of the secret society realm

Woojin had always dreamt of being a pilot

when he was young, he had wanted to be an airforce pilot

lol how things have changed

his mother was a head officer in Incheon’s flight control tower

that was where the influence came from

his father had been a pilot

a little love story bloomed from there

obviously, they married and had two children

it was a happy family of four, all enthralled by the idea of jetting through the clouds

one day, a tragic accident had claimed his life

Woojin was a bit too young to remember specific details but he had a calling to fulfil his late father’s legacy

he wanted to succeed his father’s wish for him to continue flying planes

a national airforce fighter jet pilot would have been ideal

but he was happy to settle for the position of head pilot of Seoul’s notorious mafia

Woojin was sent to pilot school when he was a middle school student

only when he was a high schooler did he start practicing and honing his skills with real planes

small delivery planes that is

cute

Woojin was the kind of guy who took photos with every plane he had piloted

every single one of them were kept in an album in his mother’s house

yes, his cute snaggletooth was featured in ALL of them

his sister would scrapbook some candids and send them over to The Royals HQ in Seoul

sparrow’s scrapbooks were the talk of the town

Woojin was in charge of a lot of things

excessive things

almost too much

but he loved his job and lived for the thrill of flying

whether it was a goods plane, passenger plane, he just adored piloting planes

oh and it wasn’t exactly hard to renew his license when he had contacts in the business

occasionally, Woojin traveled back to his flying school to assist teachers

or take more classes since he is 20

still gaining knowledge

well, that’s how you got to know him

when you were young, your grandfather would tell you stories of the days when he was a fighter pilot

a pilot

he met your grandmother during his flying days as well

fascinated by his stories and tales, you too were determined to pilot plane

it was difficult

your parents did not favour this idea and your grandparents were your only supporters

in secret, they coached you on whatever knowledge they had

wings, propellor...fly!

you spent hours and hours poring over ancient plane encyclopedias, enriching your mind and spurring on your motivation

and then one day, your grandparents came home with an enrolment letter

into pilot school :D

you screamed and cried with joy

then worried about how your parents would react but your grandparents gave 0 f*cks

they the realest

‘just go, we know people there who will treat and teach you with the best of their abilities.’

and so you started to attend classes in secret

hehe hehe

it was all good

your coach loved you

your love for the planes and even theory classes was unexplainable

not one of your parents knew what you did almost every day after school

until you nearly crashed a plane and were severely hurt

that’s when your parents found out and damn...it wasn’t exactly a pretty scene

the amount of yelling and screaming was enough to shake the whole hospital

you had cried so much that the IV drip had to be replaced TWICE

idk if its a thing but it now is

though it took some time, they finally opened up to the idea of piloting

they managed to see things from a different perspective and wrap their head around it

and now they fund your studies :D

okay, so now the fun starts

you knew Woojin as Park Woojin, the guy from pilot school

your classmate

who is kind of too advanced for your class

Idk what game he playing

if someone asked you about him, you would say y’all talked

but not a lot

considering his attendance had been quite hectic and intermittent

and you did hear some fishy theories about him from the gossipers

Jenna claimed that he worked with the local gang, operating planes so he could import drugs from overseas

sounds a bit dumb but believable ??

you don’t trust Jenna anyway

but her words linger in your mind, unable to dissipate

just simple, harmless gossip

another source stated Woojin was a spy for the FBI, making sure not a single soul could leave the country so easily with their own plane

crazy

how much time do these people have?

you noticed that Woojin was close to many of the staff and instructors

definitely not trying to start your own theory here

he was a person to be curious about, intriguing

just your luck, Woojin ended up being your flying buddy for a term

idk hOw thIS WORKS SO IT GONNA WORK THIS WAY

quite an awkward pairing if you must say

but your instructor liked how you trusted your theory work and equipment, eyeing every reading carefully

he thought it would be a good match for Woojin, who trusted his own instinct but was a firm and steady pilot

day one: silence filled the space between the two of you

the instructor gave y’all an hour to read the manual, study, bond whatnot

yet, half of that was spent buried in books and theory videos

safety books

going over basics

reading about gear care

even though you knew Woojin was an expert in those aspects

there was just no talking

shhhh

quieter than your school’s library

that was most people’s impression of the quiet and cunning little sparrow, tricking people into thinking he’s demure and secretive

see, that’s how all those ludicrous rumours are born

finally, you just HAD to engage in conversation

THE SILENCE WAS JUST TOO STRANGLING

but he was hard to talk to

woojin barely said three words before the conversation lapsed

you pressed your lips together, unsure of what to do

you started to scribble, drawing cartoonish planes and clouds

that was when Woojin commented that your plane looked more like a bird

‘pfp...see if you can draw any better,’ you challenged

Woojin took another pencil from your case

‘Try me.’

And so that’s how you spent your ‘study session’

Since you do have quite a competitive spirit

You brought a whole ass portfolio of drawings the next day

Just so Woojin could get a taste of his competition

Banter, banter

After leafing through yours, he pulled out his own digital file of sketches

And his own little scrapbook

+2 for artistic talent

soon, the piles of non-work related books were growing in your locker

there were a couple more pencil scribbles on the picnic table

other students found rough paper with sketches almost everywhere

even on mock test papers

eventually, your instructor realised something was terribly off when both of you failed the month’s test

as punishment, you guys had to do clean up duty

and more homework

taking away your hands-on flying class for a month

but it was fun

partners in crime play together

partners in crime die together

so slogging after class was much more enjoyable in the company of each other

plus, the ice cream feast after was always rewarding

you guys would purposely take a long route to the bus stop to pick up convenience store ice cream

woojin would try to convince you that his flavour choice was much better

time was killed with the playful banter at the bus stop

many times you found yourself wanting to ask about all the rumours circulated about him

but you realised that Woojin was that kind of guy who would make a joke out of it

and take words like those lightly

bonus!

he had a great sense of humour

variety king

days resembling those wore on

but you were never tired of them

and it seemed like he wasn’t either

every occasion was constantly different from the previous one

another flavour of ice cream to sample

more areas to ‘clean-up’

messing around with the coaches

days at the academy were always divergent

so it was weird when Woojin didn’t show up one day

that time you managed to shrug off the anxieties and assumptions

then, he disappeared for two following days

that you definitely couldn’t ignore

you didn’t attend the same school as him and no one else at the academy knew him very well

when coaches were questioned, they seemed uninterested but assured of his safety

‘Don’t worry,’ said your instructor. ‘Woojin knows his way around things. Perhaps he just hasn’t been feeling very well.’

mhm

you watched how his irises flickered from yours to the surroundings

and back

any trace of uncertainty was erased when you took a second glance

‘Anyway, I have his assignment folder. Could you pass it to him for the summer? Thanks.’

‘Make sure it gets to him safely. Don’t pass it to a third party.’

his footsteps quickened as they grew more and more out of earshot

you scoffed in disbelief, feeling the effects of being alone while everyone else was buddied up

how were you ever going to find Woojin?

His mobile phone was turned off too

or he just wasn’t responding to your texts

you: hi woojin

you: I have your work file

you: can we meet so I can pass it to you?

you: you okay? haven’t seen you in a while

woojin hadn’t read those messages

Sighing, you closed the application and continued with your classes

forcing yourself to pay attention to content was harder when Woojin wasn’t around

every moment you swore that your phone buzzed in your pocket

unfortunately, it was just your imagination

there were no texts from him even at the end of the day

you fell asleep that night with an uneasy heart full of worries

woojin: yeah of course

woojin: Thanks btw

woojin: sorry about it

woojin: aha you won’t see this asap since its 2am

woojin: but tell me where to find you tomorrow

what a debonair comment from him

is that even an adjective to describe a phrase?

your face feels a bit warm

stop making a big deal out of nothing!!!

you: how about 11am at the Starbucks near my place

you text him the address

shockingly, Woojin’s response is immediate

Woojin: see you :)

a smiley face

what does this mean?

he’s happy to get his work, that’s what it means

calm down

the red alarm clock reads 8.30am

there’s time to freshen up

there’s also time for you to imagine every possible outcome of this meeting

which is taking place outside of class time

would it be awkward?

strange?

don’t overthink this

after much deliberation, you make it to Starbucks 15 minutes before the agreed time

all is calm at your seat near the window, drink on your table

and clutching Woojin’s file so closely as if it would grow legs and run away

then, two young men approach your table

‘Hi,’ one of the voices said. ‘You’re here for Woojin, aren’t you?’

you’re hesitant to answer, wondering what sort of relationship Woojin would have with them

your reply is cut off by the other guy speaking

he chuckles

‘I’m Jeno and he’s Jaemin. We’re Woojin’s friends and he sent us to collect his work,’ he says.

you observe how he hides his hands behind his back, how he presses his lips together too often

liar

Don’t give it to a third party

pass it to him personally

Jaemin’s hands reach for the file. ‘Now if you just-‘

‘I don’t think so.’ Your words slice through the tension. ‘Woojin is supposed to collect it from me himself.’

The message sent is clear

Don’t f*cking touch this file

Jaemin’s jaw seems to clench while Jeno begins to crack his knuckles

‘Well,’ Jaemin begins, his arms retreating. ‘Woojin has something to attend to so he called us to get it. It was a last minute arrangement.’

Jeno scrolls through his phone, pulling up ‘Woojin’s’ texts

The messages are indeed are from a contact called Woojin, he lacks an avatar though

‘I’ll message him right now.’

however, messages from him rain in

Woojin: hey if anyone with the names Jaemin and Jeno talk to you, get away

Woojin: i didn’t send them, we don’t get along

Woojin: even if you don’t encounter them, I need you to go home this instant

Woojin: I’m so sorry, I can’t meet you today

his texts confirm your suspicions but now you’re curious about his relationship with them

How long could teenage boys hold grudges for anyway?

you: i’m talking to them rn

you: ...what should I do

you: jaemin’s pretty adamant about getting your stuff

Woojin: shit

Woojin: one of my friends is nearby, his name is Jaehwan

Woojin: go with him

Woojin: now, go to the barista and tell them you want a cupful of whipped cream with chocolate sauce

you look up from your phone, a bit taken aback by the information

your guard is well up now

‘Well?’ Jaemin almost hisses before he catches himself

‘Hmm, I’m waiting for his reply. He wants me to order him a coffee.’

your heart wants to thump out of your chest

even your lips begin to dry

something just isn’t right

your brain and body aren’t reacting positively

As the last word leaves your lips, the barista whispers into a well-concealed in-ear

out of the corner of your eye, you catch one of the employees ripping her apron off and tossing it into the bushes

she was outside of the store, clearing dishes from the outdoor seating area

when she draws close, she makes a noise about not seeing you in a long time

but her eyes watch Jaemin and Jeno in the back

It’s to throw them off

Good plan

who came up with it?

the two mysterious boys grow increasingly irritated

it shows clearly in their actions

furious whispers

side glares

constant drumming of fingers

the girl’s eyes flicker over your shoulder for barely a second

an unnoticeable look

‘Jaehwan’s here,’ she says just as the bell chimes

‘You’re in good hands now.’

her smile is genuine and so is her embrace

you and Jaehwan don’t even exchange a slither of a greeting

in fact, you can’t catch your breath as the same lady ushers you out through the kitchen door

it’s only a matter of seconds before Jaemin and Jeno are alerted of your disappearance

that’s when their rage would be on the loose

Jaehwan frantically bundles you into a nearby car

honestly, you aren’t convinced he’s the best company

perhaps better than the previous Js

‘Where’s Woojin?’ you heave out. ‘I need to talk to him.’

Jaehwan begins to exit the parking lot, sunglasses on.

‘Sorry, reaching him will take a while. And, sorry for the suddenness of everything. You must be...surprised.’

‘That’s an understatement,’ you blurt out. ‘I’m utterly confused and terrified!’

‘I don’t even know where I’m going and who’s taking me!’

all your emotions are in a jumbled mess

being with Jaehwan feels like sitting in a lion’s den but with a metal cage surrounding you

safer but not wholly

staying with Jeno and Jaemin would mean the lions would have devoured you before your feet even reached the bottom of the pit

Woojin didn’t answer any of your calls

Jaehwan notices your hopeless attempts at contacting your friend

‘I’m sorry, he isn’t available at this moment.’

‘And why the hell not! He told me to meet him! He doesn’t have any plans! He could’ve come to meet me! I just want to give him his work file!’

The outburst makes you feel a ton better

Like the bag of bricks, you carried had been carrying was thrown at someone you hated

Suddenly, the road sign reading ‘Incheon Airport’ catches your attention

especially when Jaehwan seems to be en route

‘Why are we headed to the airport?’ You question, unsure if you want an answer

‘We’re going to see Woojin,’ Jaehwan replies casually.

‘W-w-we’re going out of the country?’ The stutter is inevitable

Jaehwan appears to furrow his brow as if puzzled

‘Um...yeah. Jihoon and Sejeong will deal with your accommodation,’ he informs, not that it is very helpful

Who and who?

‘Does Woojin even tell you anything?’ Jaehwan asks as he drives to the airport carpark

He shakes his head in disapproval when you answer with a ‘no’

‘I don’t have my passport,’ you say

your words don’t even affect Jaehwan, he simply says that a Kang Daniel has got you covered

again, who, what and how?

‘C’mon. Let’s go. I’m sure Woojin has all the answers to your questions.’

Jaehwan pushes your back, urging you to move quicker

‘What the hell,’ he curses under his breath. ‘Hurry up, I see...uh, J and J allies.’

there isn’t time

Plus, you don’t have the courage to turn around and glare them in the eye

Contrary to your assumption, Jaehwan skirts around the ‘Private Jet’ counter and settles for a commercial flight queue

he says something about it being too risky to dispatch one of his company’s private jets

the jets come as no shock

After all, Woojin does needs his planes

it’s likely his close friends are all like-minded and share the same interests

Jaehwan speedily dashes for the ‘First Class’ row

he speaks to the counter staff in such a quiet tone even you can’t decipher his words

‘Don’t worry about your passport, I have connections.’

don’t actually do this!!!

that makes your stomach clench and twist with nerves in the most horrid manner

somehow

your passport appears

it isn’t a replica, it isn’t a faux document

it’s in the flesh

...did someone break into your house?

‘Yeah,’ Jaehwan answers your unspoken question. ‘Of course someone stole this from your tabletop. You need to get better security.’

you face blushes red in embarrassment

'I’m a pilot,’ you manage a counter attack

your new friend only chuckles

jumping snaking immigration queues is something you could accustom yourself to

ahhh, the luxuries

soon, you’ll be able to join the ‘CREW ONLY’ line

Before you know it, you’re seated in the first class section of a reputable airline

woah

this is new

you don’t want to know where Jaehwan or Woojin or whoever has the money to pay for all this

then again, these people own a fleet of private jets

Jaehwan advises you to chill and enjoy the flight

but the bundle of nerves only tightens in your stomach

You’re on your way to Hong Kong

with a small bag of essentials and the clothes on your back

Jaehwan’s in the same situation

yet he seems so used to it, there’s no point being anxious

tbh you’d rather pilot the plane than ride in it

why would Woojin be in Hong Kong?

did he fly there on impulse?

does he even know the route?

he did just receive his pilot licence......

no, he couldn’t possibly

it sounded like a hasty getaway

A sudden change of plans

as if he was in trouble.....

Who are these people Jaehwan mentioned?

Is Woojin hiding anything from me?

Of course he is! Jaehwan knows but he feels that only Woojin has the right to tell me

besides, he’s asleep

how can he be sleeping at a time like this?

it’s barely 2pm

the day is going just fine

hopefully, things start looking up from here

Hong Kong...

Woojin...

I’m coming for ya

#Admin L #wanna one #wanna one scenarios #Produce 101 #produce 101 scenarios #park woojin

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thephototeam1 · 2 years

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Event Photographers in London - The Photo Team

Looking for Event Photographers in London?

You've come to the right place. We are a multi-award-winning photography company, specializing in events, conferences, exhibitions, headshots, and all other types of photography. We have been shooting events and portraits for more than 10 years as The Photo Team, however have a combined experience of over 35yrs within the company. We have the best photographers working with us, so have every faith in booking our services. Read on to learn more. The most important step in finding an event photographer is to do your research.

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Choosing an Event Photographer is an important part of making sure your event is documented in beautiful and timeless ways. A London photographer should be able to tell the story of your event and the guests and the atmosphere of the occasion. Whether it's a corporate party, a wedding, or a birthday, a great photographer can capture the moment in a way that will make the event unforgettable. You will have a digital library of images and video to keep as a reminder of the event for years to come.

A professional event photographer should be able to capture the essence of an event. Their work will tell the story of the occasion. The photographs and videos will be a lasting memory of the event. This is a great way to create a lasting impression on the guests. A professional London event photographer will have a large variety of experience and can handle any kind of event. You will never be disappointed with the results of his work.

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When it comes to capturing the ambiance of an event, a professional photographer should be hired. A photographer who can create a visual memory of the event will give you the memories of the occasion. In addition to this, the images and videos should be edited to create a memorable experience for the guests. And if you have a budget, you'll want to choose an experienced event photography company in London.

#Event Photographers in London

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mana-sputachu · 7 years

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Hello!! I just stumbled across your blog. Your art is very gorgeous and inspired me to start drawing humans. Do you by any chance have any beginning tips? I have absolutely no idea how to start and I’d appreciate any tips, like how to get proportions right, how to use references/where to find them, etc. As an animal artist and 2bg fan; good job on your work. I especially think your headshot of Max Black was lovely ;w;

Aaaah! First of all, thank you! The fact my art make you decideto drawing human figure makes me really happy! Also sorry for the late reply, itried to decide what to write… i don’t think i’m the best person to ask tbh,99% of the time i don’t know what i’m doing orz but i’ll try to give you a fewgeneral tips that i hope will help you!

One thing you will always readabout drawing tips is drawing from life: take your sketchbook and go outsidesketching people and places. And it’s a very good advice but… i can alsounderstand that awkward feeling when you do it because people may notice youdrawing (seriously, i’ve been able to do it only in airport or during aflight). So, while this is still a good advice, here’s an alternative: CroquisCafé is a youtube channel that posts videos with variousnaked models in it and with a great variety in body shapes (mostly females).It’s perfect to do some gesture drawing and it’s also good when you’re artblocked. There are also a lot of sites (like this one) that offer the same service but usingpictures, you can set up what kind of models you want and the time that has topass between each picture. I personally prefer Croquis Café but i’ll put itthis option too, just in case.

Study anatomy. Whatever kind ofstyle you want to achieve, knowing anatomy is important. There are a lot ofgood tutorial here on tumblr, and a lot of blogs reblog them along withreferences and other useful stuff (like these: 1, 2 and 3). I also have one where i reblog tutorials and stuff, here, if you need it! I dunno what you’re tryingto achieve, like drawing human portraits or super realistic figures orcomic-like figures, but either way find a good anatomy book to study, like Burne Hogarth or Andrew Loomis books.

Speaking of anatomy, a good exercise i used to do wheni was attending school of comics was this one: take a picture from a magazine(naked or underwear models are better, so you can see the anatomy), put a sheetof transparent tracing paper (or just a new layer if you’re using photoshop)and trace the figure trying to stylize the body in simpler geometrical shapes:

This way you can learn to drawthe body in simpler shapes, this also helps when you have to move the figures,pose them or put them in a scene. This trick also work for singlebody parts (head, hands, feet, ecc):

This way you can learn to stylizethe human figure into simpler shapes, creating your own “mannequin” to move andpose as you please!

References: Google is yourfriend. No, literally! When i need a pose, i usually google it (and beingweirdly specific about it). Another good resource are stock photos: DeviantArthas a lot of users that offer their pictures as free stock to use for drawings( @senshistock is a good start point, her gallery is huge and offers various kindof pictures. She ha salso an app that can be used for gesture drawing: http://www.senshistock.com/sketch/ ).Be sure to read their disclaimer tho! Also, the already mentioned art blogs oftenreblogs references pictures.As for how to use them, you cantry the excercise i mentioned before, check proportions, learn about variousbody shapes, and, once you’ll get better, you can use them and mix them for theposes you need it, and also collect them so you’ll have a good resource foreverything (not only human figures, but dresses, animals, backgrounds, weapons,ecc). Another good exercise is to look at your reference and sketch it, usingthe mannequin.

I’m sorry if this post looks short or not really goes into deep,but since you said you’re at the beginning i tried to keep it simple and coversome basics, but if you need anything else just let me know (even via pvt) andi’ll see what i can do once i have more time!

#tutorial #drawing tips #anatomy #not really sure if this can count as tutorial tho #sorry orz #text post #brokefriendsforever

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studioserra · 4 years

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What Is Commercial Photography? Great Tips to Get Started

Commercial photography is popular these days. But it’s not all about large teams creating images in a studio for big ad campaigns.

This article will help you understand what commercial photography is and how to get started.

What Is Commercial Photography?

Commercial photography includes a wide range of photography niches. It’s the creation of high-quality images for commercial purposes.

Let’s break down the common types of commercial photography. Then we will get into all the commercial photography tips you need to know to succeed in this industry!

Common Types of Commercial Photography Shoots

Fashion Photography

This is what most people think of when you say “commercial photography”. This type of photography can be in a studio or outdoors. It can involve paid models who are modeling a product.

For fashion photographers, each shoot is unique. Knowing how to pose people and give direction is a huge skill. This is very useful for this type of work.

Product Photography

This is another large category. You can take product photos in a studio or outdoors. Photographers mostly shoot in a studio, so they have a solid backdrop for online use.

Doing this type of work will require that you get familiar with working in a studio. This includes controlling studio lights to get the desired effects on your products.

Food Photography

Yes, this category of commercial photography may remind you of people taking photos of their food for Instagram. But it can be a great niche to do as a professional!

You’ll want to work with a food stylist to get the food looking its best for the camera. This type of work also involves editorial restaurant shots. This means being quick to set up your equipment in a restaurant during a set time frame. At the same time, you need to create lighting that makes the food look enticing yet natural.

Environmental Portraits

This means taking photos of people in their work environment.

For example, you may go to a plant nursery and take photos of some of the employees tending to the plants. You’re showing how the nursery maintains a high level of care for their products.

You’ll be working on-the-go most of the time. And you may need special permissions for some sites.

Headshots

The most common type of commercial photography out there is a headshot. These photos promote the person’s products or services.

Headshot sessions are quick and fun. But they require a connection with your subject and giving them direction on posing in a limited time frame.

Commercial Architectural Photography

This category involves photographing a space for commercial purposes. This can be to showcase the architect’s design or to show the appeal of a retail store.

As with food photography, you’re often working with tight time frames. And you’re shooting around the flow of customers.

With spaces, including a few well-placed people in the shot often helps to give the photo life and context.

Tips for Commercial Photography

Commercial photography is an exciting yet competitive industry. Some of the world’s best known photographers are commercial photographers. Here are 6 commercial photography tips to help you get a leg up in the commercial world.

Keep Your Network Active

As a commercial photographer, having a network of good professional relationships is very helpful. Not only is it good for referrals, but it also serves as a pool of resources.

Don’t own a studio but need one for a shoot? Maybe you know a commercial photographer who has his own studio and can rent it to you by the day. Have a fashion shoot coming up and need help? Maybe you know a stylist or a make-up artist that can come in and create the look the client needs.

Even knowing people with connections to different locations can be helpful. When a certain spot works as the perfect backdrop for your client’s vision, you can ask them.

Having a healthy and active network is essential. You won’t be calling on strangers from an online listing to help in your shoots. You’ll be calling on trusted professional colleagues who you know can do a great job.

Be Professional

Professionalism will get you further in life than you can imagine. As a photographer, bring your A-game to every photo shoot. Build a positive reputation, encourage trust, and help you with your efficiency.

You may be a great photographer, but work ethic, motivation, and ambition will differentiate you from others.

Being professional includes being reliable. Always be punctual (try to be ten minutes early), be well-prepared, and meet deadlines. It is also important to be polite and respectful to everyone, and having a good attitude.

Being reliable will ensure that you are hired again, and again! A good way of making sure that you meet all expected demands is to keep a daily planner and take lots of notes. Consolidate your work schedule so that everything that you do is timely and happens according to your plan.

Keep notes on important information that you may otherwise forget. The key to success as a commercial photographer is organization.

Keep Your Gear Up To Date

It is true that in general, good photography depends on the photographer and not the gear. However, commercial photography is a little different.

In order to compete with the intense and demanding market, you have to make sure your gear is up-to-date. Commercial photography adapts to the latest technological advances. What was once industry-standard a year ago is no longer applicable.

Commercial photography likely involves printing. Having a camera with the highest number of megapixels you can afford is an absolute must. Sharpness is also important, so make sure your lenses are equipped with luxury glass.

Many commercial photography job postings and castings will require a gear list from you. Be ready to send them what you work with. This isn’t exclusive to camera gear. Clients will also probably ask you what editing software and computer you use.

Bonus Tip: If you can’t afford brand new gear, don’t worry! Develop a relationship with a rental shop and rent what you need.

Stay in Tune With Trends

Like being updated with technology, being aware of current photography trends is equally important.

Every year, every season even, brings new aesthetic trends in the photography world. With the social media climate, these trends are even more important than ever.

It is your responsibility to research and be informed on what kind of visual images are popular.

Find Your Distinct Voice

To stand out from your competitors, you need to offer something different. This can be in the form of your personal style, unique concepts, and methodology.

Allow your artistic voice to shine through your work. If you do this, you will attract jobs that compliment your work style. You will get projects that you enjoy and can excel in, which will result in a mutually beneficial outcome.

Creativity Is Important

When working with your distinct style, remember to be creative. No client wants a copy of some other image. So, try something different and create something fresh. Think of how you can depict the product in a completely new way.

It is important to be aware of your client’s needs and vision. A client usually has a specific purpose in mind when requiring photography for commercial use. So keep these in mind, and experiment in moderation so that your work still fits your client’s needs.

No Rookie Mistakes

Commercial photographers can not be amateurs. When a client hires a commercial photographer, they have certain expectations about quality. There is no mercy for hobbyist behaviour in commercial photography. Rookie mistakes will not be forgiven at a certain level. So, make sure you work out all of those kinks.

Education is extremely important. Keep developing your skills. Take seminars, classes, read books, experiment on your own time, and you’ll soon make sense of those photography basics.

How to Get Paying Clients

Once you are ready to start paid projects, how can you get clients? Follow these 3 tips to get your next project!

Have a Solid Portfolio

Portfolios are of the utmost importance in this industry. Ensuring you have a solid body of work should be one of your top concerns if you want to be a photographer.

This is especially true in commercial photography. The industry is so heavily saturated with photographers trying to break in. Having a compelling portfolio will set you apart from other commercial photographers.

But how do you create a portfolio? Include a variety of images in your portfolio that showcase different styles, subjects, and apertures. Don’t be afraid to try some creative portraits. Have some shots from both a studio and natural light.

Also, only include your absolute best work. Don’t add too many similar images or too many photographs of the same subject and arrangement. Your portfolio should be concise and diverse.

Keep Business Cards and Contact Information on Hand

Commercial photography is built on relationships and information. You should carry photography business cards and up-to-date contact information wherever you go.

Pass this around to anyone who seems relevant, because you never know who you might meet on set.

Recommendations Speak Loudly

Photography is a relationship-oriented profession. Recommendations make a huge impact. Be professional, meet expectations, and prove that you are worth recommending.

When choosing between two commercial photographers, a client will always go for the one with a positive recommendation.

Working With the Client

So you found a client. But what next? As a professional commercial photographer, there are some things to keep in mind while in talks with potential clients.

Be Extremely Clear on Your Client’s Needs

Transparent communication is vital in setting up honest expectations. You don’t want to set high expectations and then be unable to meet them.

So, here are some questions you should ask your clients.

Does your client need a set number of photos?

Do they have a hard limit on their budget that may affect how much you can do for them?

Are they working with a tight deadline?

What sort of specific shots do they already have in mind and must get?

Do their requests need any special props, locations, wardrobe, consultants, etc?

Double Check Your Quote to Include All Possible Costs

It’s common for the client of a commercial photography shoot to ask for certain extra things. These can be arrangements, items, or assistance, all of which add to the final cost.

Be sure to think through your quote. Make it clear to your client that if extra costs arise, the final rate may change. This is where open communication becomes vital to avoid unmet expectations.

When creating your initial quote, you may want to include a base rate that assumes certain items. Then show them line items for possible additional costs. These will depend on their needs or requests.

Discuss Intended Photo Use and Usage Rights

The use that commercial photos will get is very different from, say, family portraits. These photos are not going on someone’s wall or being sent to Grandma in a card. They will be for commercial use to generate more income for a company.

This means that your rates will need to be quite different. Be sure to have a discussion with your client about what type of use their photos will get. The different commercial use of your photos should affect the rate and also the shoot process.

For example, a client might use a headshot for social media profiles and a postcard flyer. But, they might use an environmental portrait to promote a new luxury resort.

This can be in a national print magazine, online ads, and the resort’s website. In this case, the headshot client may need lower resolution files. And they will create less profit from the photos. But the resort will require high-resolution images that they’ll use across the country. This will help them to generate a significant amount of income.

Once you understand your client’s needs, get specific. This includes what rights the contract grants them. Adjust your rates depending on these needs.

Conclusion

Commercial photography can seem out of reach. That’s only if you think of it as large, complicated shoots for international corporations.

When taking a closer look, there are lots of needs, big and small, that fall under the umbrella of commercial photography.

One way to get started is to begin with small jobs. As you grow more comfortable with the process, you can then build on them and accept larger requests.

#studioserraphotography #commercial photography #landscape photography #professional landscape #fine art photography #san diego photographer #san diego photography #scenic photography #real estate photography

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onlinemarketinghelp · 5 years

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High-Paying Side Gigs That Earn $1,000 or More Per Month https://ift.tt/3cxfENI

Everyone wants to earn extra money, but is it possible to earn $1,000 per month on the side? After interviewing several people who did it, it’s safe to say that many people can. With the right combination of skill, marketing, and elbow grease, you can land a $1,000-per-month side gig.

In this article, we outline 11 side hustles that allow real people to earn at least $1,000 per month.

Based on interviews with real people with side gigs, we also suggest side gigs where you can earn at least $25 per hour, which makes $1,000 per month achievable in many cases.

If you're looking for more ideas, check out our 80 Ways To Make Money At Home.

High-Paying Side Gigs

Flip for a Profit

Sell Your Great Credit History

Freelance Writing

Photography

Book Gigs as a Musician

Dog-Sitting

Hustle for Charity

Event Marketing

Digital Marketing

Providing Virtual Assistant Services

A Few Other Self-Employment Options

Don't Be Afraid to Work for Someone Else

How Will You Earn $1,000 Per Month on the Side?

Flip for a Profit

The key to earning a profit? Buy low and sell high. But is that maxim easy to put into practice? And can you earn a $1,000 per month just by buying high and selling low?

Even people with no particular expertise can scour big-box stores for items on clearance that they can sell for a profit on Amazon. This guide actually gives great detailed instructions on how you can do this. The amount of money you actually earn from retail flipping will depend a lot on how good you are at finding deals, the amount of money you have to put into your inventory, and your ability to sell items quickly.

People with expert knowledge in specific areas may actually have a leg up when working to flip items for a profit. Many mechanics will buy broken-down cars, and then sell the parts for a profit and the rest of the car for scrap pricing.

Another surprisingly lucrative field for experts is sneaker flipping. Omar of Raleigh, North Carolina is an avid sneaker collector, and rarely lets a pair go. However, he has made up to $200 per pair of sneakers that he resells, and suspects he could earn up to $1,000 per month if he didn’t love his collection so much.

The easiest way to flip for a profit? Get your materials for free. Robert A. of Raleigh, North Carolina does landscaping work as a primary job. If he sees a pile of metal or appliances out on the curb, he’ll load up his truck and takes the metal to the recycling center to get scrap value for it. A full truck bed usually brings $75 to $100 (or more if he has a lot of copper in the load). In a good month, he can earn up to $1,000 per month just from scrapping, though his usual take is lower.

Whether you’re flipping garbage, used clothing, sneakers, cars, or houses, buying low and selling high is a great way to earn money on the side. To flip for a profit, you will need to know prices well, and you need to be able to take advantage of deals as they come to you. Generally, you’ll also need a vehicle to make flipping profitable.

However, with enough expertise, becoming a flipper can yield $1,000 per month on the side.

Sell Your Great Credit History

Do you have a credit card with a perfect credit history, and less than a 15% utilization ratio? Then you could sell authorized user positions on your credit card to people looking to establish or improve their credit history. This is called selling tradelines, and it’s one of the most lucrative side hustles available for cash-strapped people.

So how do you go about selling tradelines? Well, you could go around door-knocking and trying to find people willing to buy, but you might have better luck signing up as a credit partner with an established tradeline sales company like Tradeline Supply.

Right now, you can earn $50 to $300 in commission for every authorized user position that you sell through Tradeline Supply. Each credit card may allow you to add between 5 and 20 users.

If you’ve never heard of selling tradelines you might be a bit skeptical about this. I know that I certainly was. Here are a few answers to questions you might have:

Authorized users stay on your account for two months, but your entire credit card history goes on their account.

Authorized users never get access to your account. You’ll know the name of the person buying the tradeline, but they won’t know your name. Tradeline Supply does screening to make sure that the person buying your tradeline is legitimate.

Authorized users never know the account number for the tradeline you’re selling. Even when the tradeline shows up on their credit report, the account number is a digital code produced by your bank.

Selling tradelines is completely legal. Congress, the CFPB, banks, and credit bureaus all know about the practice. They don’t like it, but it is squarely legal.

Interested in selling your credit history? Sign up with Tradeline Supply to get started or read our Tradeline Supply review.

Freelance Writing

Whether you read articles about finance, weightlifting, cooking, or art history, someone had to write the article. Some online writers write as a hobby, and don’t earn much (or anything) from their writing. However, plenty of sites hire freelance writers to produce compelling written content for their audiences.

As a freelance writer, you might also write newsletters, magazine or newspaper articles, technical manuals (for software or machinery), white papers, or even “website copy” which is just the words on a company’s website.

Freelance writers build up their client base in a variety of ways, but the most important factor for writers is to have a portfolio of articles in a specific niche. Valerie Rind, a corporate lawyer by day and a freelance writer on the side explains, “You can’t get a writing gig without experience, and you can’t get experience without an established portfolio. I knew an editor at a reputable publication and we agreed that I would write an article for free. Once I had an article with a byline, it gave me a small amount of credibility. After that, I never wrote for exposure.”

A common method for building up a portfolio is to start a blog, and then reach out to other (slightly larger) bloggers to request a guest post on their site. Another method that people commonly use is creating a free portfolio on a site like Contently.

Once you have established some credibility, you have to start pitching your services. Rind recommends, “Sell yourself with confidence, even if your experience is a bit thin.”

When you find someone who is interested in your writing, you’ll need to talk rates. Rates for articles vary widely by niche, and by the budget of the company hiring you.

A blog site will generally pay anywhere from $30 to $200 per article (depending on the niche and your experience). Other sites, including media sites or large company sites can often afford to pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars per article. Finding clients (especially higher-paying clients) is the key to earning $1,000 or more each month.

We break down 14 ways that you can get paid to write here. Or, jump into this online course about how you can earn more money writing >>

Photography

If you own a great camera, and you’ve developed your photography skills, you may be able to earn $1,000 or more each month while working on the side.

Dana Haynes of Raleigh, North Carolina started her first foray into paid photography by shooting friends’ weddings in college. Though she only earned $500 per wedding at first, she recommends wedding photography as a great niche for budding photographers, especially those with young and broke friends.

“Weddings are the one time your peers are willing to spend a significant amount of money for photography,” Haynes told The College Investor. She also added that most young people probably have a built-in network of friends getting married.

Years after shooting weddings, Haynes revived her photography practice after watching hours of free online courses, and photographing friends and family for free. People would share her pictures on Facebook, and she slowly got her name out. These days, Haynes works primarily in birth photography, but as a hustler, she also photographs families, bands, marketing, headshots, and weddings on the side.

Although Haynes and many other photographers will get their start by shooting for friends or family, Haynes recommends keeping your business as professional and well-managed as possible. “You're photographing these incredibly meaningful moments in folks' lives. You want to make sure you're making contracts, managing dates/times, and keeping up with communication. You can’t compromise on the business end if you want to serve people well,” Haynes said.

Book Gigs as a Musician

Making it in the music industry is a notoriously difficult career choice, but Beau Humphreys and his band Saturday Night Superstars have turned their musical passion into a lucrative side gig. Since playing music on the side means giving up weekends, the band opted to become a wedding band which allows them to command higher paydays.

Every member of Saturday Night Superstars has over a decade of performing experience under their belt, so comparing their income to your early-stage income might not be completely fair. That said, the band members can easily clear $1,000 each when they perform at least two gigs in one night.

As a keyboard player, Beau actually has the opportunity to book side gigs with his side gig. He’ll often play keyboard during the wedding ceremony, cocktails, a dinner, and of course perform with the band that night. When clients book the whole range, Humphreys may be able to earn $1,000 or more in a single night.

As with many of the other side jobs in this article, booking the first paying gig can be the most challenging for musicians looking to earn extra coin. The Saturday Night Superstars band’s first paying gig was a Christmas party at a golf course. The owner of the golf course heard the band’s showcase a few weeks earlier, and took a chance on booking them. Humphreys recommends that musicians should always promote their services to their existing networks. A great website with quality audio and video goes a long way in making you easy to book, but word-of-mouth marketing is the most important way to market your services as a band.

Dog-Sitting

If you have more love than your pet can handle, being a dog-walker or a pet-sitter can actually bring in decent money. Kristin Larsen, founder of Believe in a Budget, side hustles as a pet-sitter in her local area. She simply signed up with a local pet-sitting company and found plenty of work. Generally, she makes $20 for a 20-minute walk (she walks dogs during her lunch breaks), and up to $60 per night when she takes care of animals overnight.

Depending on the locations of your clients, pet-sitting may allow you to serve several clients every hour. However, that’s not guaranteed to be the case. To maximize your earnings, you need to be careful to work for a company that won’t send you all over the globe to serve clients.

A flexible schedule is ideal for this side hustle (plenty of people want dog-walkers while they are away at work), but it can work with a variety of schedules as long you can meet your clients’ needs.

If you can’t find high-paying employment with a local pet-sitting company, you could try finding clients through Rover.com. You could also start your own business. Crystal Stemberger, founder of Crystal’s Cozy Care Pet Sitting, started with a few simple posts on her HOA’s website and a few free ads on Craigslist. Over time, her business grew to become one of her primary sources of income.

Check out Rover, a new app that allows you to become a dog sitter online. Get started with Rover here.

Hustle for Charity

Dan Batcha, an independent insurance agent based out of Blaine, Minnesota, has put his side hustle times towards making the lives of military veterans a little better. Back in 2015, Batcha and his then-girlfriend decided to give gifts to people in need rather than exchanging gifts with each other.

With a little boost from social media, they managed to collect and give nearly $7,000 worth of gifts to five military families. Since then, they’ve managed to serve as many as 10 families with $11,000 worth of gifts in a single season, through an organization called Civilian Santas.

Throughout the year, Batcha spends around five hours per month speaking to local churches and schools and organizing the back end of the non-profit. Closer to Christmas he’ll spend up to 15 hours per week coordinating wishlists, meeting families in need, collecting gifts and donations from others, and of course delivering gifts to the families.

Growing Civilian Santas hasn’t been easy, but Batcha has big dreams for the organization. In the next year, he’d like to serve a Thanksgiving meal for veterans and their families, and host a Christmas in July 5K run to raise awareness and funds for the cause.

Event Marketing

Lillian Karabaic, a financial educator (who often dresses as David Bowie), and founder of Oh My Dollar! is no stranger to high-paying side hustles. One of the higher-paying options is event marketing or becoming a “promo girl.” This side job involves setting up events, talking to people, and handing out samples. If you’ve ever seen a Bud Light girl or girls driving around the Red Bull vehicle and handing out drinks, you’ve seen a promo girl.

Karabaic says that vendors from yoga studios to alcohol brands hire people to promote their products. It can be a lot of fun, and very lucrative for an outgoing person, but the hours tend to be late nights (for alcohol) or weekends for other vendors.

If you know someone who is already an event promoter, you might want to ask them to put you in touch with their primary contact. Otherwise, you can find your first few events through Craigslist gigs, Facebook (search your city and brand ambassador) or event staffing agencies (search for event staffing in your city).

Once you have an established relationship with certain brands or with certain staffing agencies, you’re likely to get called on again.

Digital Marketing

When someone says they are a digital marketer, it could mean that they post ads on their personal Facebook page. It could also mean that they are a skilled web designer who optimizes web pages. However, most people who make money on the side as digital marketers help small business owners enhance their digital presence.

If you’re interested in becoming a digital marketer, you can pick up a lot of the skills by starting your own blog, and learning through trial and error. However, if you’re more interested in expediting the process, we recommend taking a digital marketing course. Based on feedback from happy customers, we recommend the following courses:

Facebook Side Hustle Course (specifically designed for beginners)

Market Motive’s Digital Marketing Certification Training Course (Note: You do not need a certification to be a digital marketer, but this is a comprehensive course.)

Providing Virtual Assistant Services

A close cousin to digital marketing is providing virtual assistant services. Virtual assistants provide digital support (including web support, digital marketing services, and more) to bloggers and other business owners. A virtual assistant can be a jack-of-all-trades or extremely specialized. Their job is to make the lives of other business owners easier and better.

Many virtual assistants work with just a few clients, so their time commitment is relatively small. One virtual assistant that I interviewed responds to customer inquiries and complaints for a small retailer that lists products on Amazon. In general, she works no more than four hours per week.

Many other VAs eventually find that being a VA is more lucrative than their day job, and quit to take their VA activities full-time.

If you’ve ever run your own website, you probably have some of the skills necessary to become a virtual assistant, and with the help of Google, you can probably figure out the rest. That said, some courses that expedite your learning process include:

$10K VA

Become a Pinterest VA TODAY!

A Few Other Self-Employment Options

When seeking sources for this article, we found several people who earned high hourly wages from their side gigs, but didn’t earn $1,000 per month. Most of these people reported that they didn’t want to take on more clients, but they felt that they could if they put in the effort.

Based on these reports, we determined it’s reasonable for someone to earn $1,000 per month on the side if a person were willing to put in the time to build up and maintain their client base.

Here are some ideas:

Tutoring (especially for LSAT and other test preparation options - even online tutoring options)

Teaching music lessons

Hairstyling (surprisingly, cosmetology work including hair-braiding may require a license in your state; however, those that did this work privately reported earning between $25 to $30 per hour after costs)

Catering or baking for private events (depending on the laws of your state, you may have to do all catering from an industrial kitchen or have a business permit)

Car washing or detailing

Voiceover acting (consider this quick-start guide if you’re interested)

Don't Be Afraid to Work for Someone Else

As a general rule, the most lucrative side gigs require self-employment, self-marketing, and maybe even entrepreneurship. That said, it is possible to earn a wage from a side job while working for someone else.

Most people we interviewed averaged just four to five hours per week at their side job, so they didn’t always earn $1,000 per month. However, several people came close to $1,000 and they all earned at least $25 per hour. They also had to report that it seemed likely that they could work more if they needed the money.

Here are some ideas:

Officiating sports (high school level or higher)

Tending bar

Waiting tables (especially on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights)

Teaching group fitness (especially bootcamp classes, though this may require a personal training license in your state)

Tax preparer (February through April only)

Interpreting for hospitals (especially sign language and Chinese though the necessary languages could vary by region)

Providing courier or delivery services (like DoorDash)

Driving as a partner for Uber or Lyft (driving during peak times can probably boost your effective hourly rate)

Nursing (working just a few shifts each month allows you to keep your license active in many states)

How Will You Earn $1,000 Per Month on the Side?

The $1,000-per-month side gig is likely within your reach, if you’re willing to put in some time and effort on the front end. In general, you’ll have to be willing to promote yourself, pitch prospective clients, and develop valuable skills to get started. However, once you have an established side gig, it becomes easier to keep the revenue coming in without excessive effort (aside from actually doing your job).

Side gigs require you to give up your most valuable asset (your time), so it makes sense to try to maximize your earnings from the gig.

That said, a lot of people report that their side hustle isn’t just about making extra money. Some people are building skills that are necessary for a promotion in their primary career. Stay-at-home parents report that they love getting out of the house and using a different part of their brain. Others report that they enjoy having a paying artistic outlet, even if they earn more or have a steadier income through their day jobs. Honestly, things like free alcohol, free bagels, and free t-shirts enticed many people to start side hustles.

No matter your motivation, starting a side gig is a great way to get ahead financially. Just be smart about starting it, so you don’t waste your time earning less than minimum wage.

The post High-Paying Side Gigs That Earn $1,000 or More Per Month appeared first on The College Investor.

from The College Investor

In this article, we outline 11 side hustles that allow real people to earn at least $1,000 per month.

Based on interviews with real people with side gigs, we also suggest side gigs where you can earn at least $25 per hour, which makes $1,000 per month achievable in many cases.

If you're looking for more ideas, check out our 80 Ways To Make Money At Home.

High-Paying Side Gigs

Flip for a Profit

Sell Your Great Credit History

Freelance Writing

Photography

Book Gigs as a Musician

Dog-Sitting

Hustle for Charity

Event Marketing

Digital Marketing

Providing Virtual Assistant Services

A Few Other Self-Employment Options

Don't Be Afraid to Work for Someone Else

How Will You Earn $1,000 Per Month on the Side?

Flip for a Profit

The key to earning a profit? Buy low and sell high. But is that maxim easy to put into practice? And can you earn a $1,000 per month just by buying high and selling low?

However, with enough expertise, becoming a flipper can yield $1,000 per month on the side.

Sell Your Great Credit History

Right now, you can earn $50 to $300 in commission for every authorized user position that you sell through Tradeline Supply. Each credit card may allow you to add between 5 and 20 users.

If you’ve never heard of selling tradelines you might be a bit skeptical about this. I know that I certainly was. Here are a few answers to questions you might have:

Authorized users stay on your account for two months, but your entire credit card history goes on their account.

Authorized users never know the account number for the tradeline you’re selling. Even when the tradeline shows up on their credit report, the account number is a digital code produced by your bank.

Selling tradelines is completely legal. Congress, the CFPB, banks, and credit bureaus all know about the practice. They don’t like it, but it is squarely legal.

Interested in selling your credit history? Sign up with Tradeline Supply to get started or read our Tradeline Supply review.

Freelance Writing

Once you have established some credibility, you have to start pitching your services. Rind recommends, “Sell yourself with confidence, even if your experience is a bit thin.”

When you find someone who is interested in your writing, you’ll need to talk rates. Rates for articles vary widely by niche, and by the budget of the company hiring you.

We break down 14 ways that you can get paid to write here. Or, jump into this online course about how you can earn more money writing >>

Photography

If you own a great camera, and you’ve developed your photography skills, you may be able to earn $1,000 or more each month while working on the side.

Book Gigs as a Musician

Dog-Sitting

Check out Rover, a new app that allows you to become a dog sitter online. Get started with Rover here.

Hustle for Charity

Event Marketing

Once you have an established relationship with certain brands or with certain staffing agencies, you’re likely to get called on again.

Digital Marketing

Facebook Side Hustle Course (specifically designed for beginners)

Market Motive’s Digital Marketing Certification Training Course (Note: You do not need a certification to be a digital marketer, but this is a comprehensive course.)

Providing Virtual Assistant Services

Many other VAs eventually find that being a VA is more lucrative than their day job, and quit to take their VA activities full-time.

$10K VA

Become a Pinterest VA TODAY!

A Few Other Self-Employment Options

Based on these reports, we determined it’s reasonable for someone to earn $1,000 per month on the side if a person were willing to put in the time to build up and maintain their client base.

Here are some ideas:

Tutoring (especially for LSAT and other test preparation options - even online tutoring options)

Teaching music lessons

Catering or baking for private events (depending on the laws of your state, you may have to do all catering from an industrial kitchen or have a business permit)

Car washing or detailing

Voiceover acting (consider this quick-start guide if you’re interested)

Don't Be Afraid to Work for Someone Else

Here are some ideas:

Officiating sports (high school level or higher)

Tending bar

Waiting tables (especially on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights)

Teaching group fitness (especially bootcamp classes, though this may require a personal training license in your state)

Tax preparer (February through April only)

Interpreting for hospitals (especially sign language and Chinese though the necessary languages could vary by region)

Providing courier or delivery services (like DoorDash)

Driving as a partner for Uber or Lyft (driving during peak times can probably boost your effective hourly rate)

Nursing (working just a few shifts each month allows you to keep your license active in many states)

How Will You Earn $1,000 Per Month on the Side?

Side gigs require you to give up your most valuable asset (your time), so it makes sense to try to maximize your earnings from the gig.

No matter your motivation, starting a side gig is a great way to get ahead financially. Just be smart about starting it, so you don’t waste your time earning less than minimum wage.

The post High-Paying Side Gigs That Earn $1,000 or More Per Month appeared first on The College Investor.

https://ift.tt/2SHdpOY March 05, 2020 at 11:20AM https://ift.tt/2LhLfs9

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eyemediastudios-blog · 5 years

Text

What To Wear On Your Headshots Shoot Day

How should I dress for a headshot photo?

First impressions count. Headshots are indispensable in business and life. There is the only one you, also because you're original, your head should represent that. We can help make this happen. You need to choose the right wardrobe.

Here are several tips to help when preparing for your headshots session

Profession

What is it for?. The business you work determines the way you dress. That is true for any work the same way it's right for your headshot. Do you dress up or casually at work?. A lawyer may put on a suit and tie while a celebrity can wear a button-up or v neck. A construction supervisor may wear a plaid collared shirt and jeans. You need to consider your profession.

Dress like you

Your headshot is going to make the first impression that will help land that job you desire. It is essential your headshot is present and looks like you. Always wear what makes you comfortable and confident. Show off your personality and maintain a professional look for your profession.

Colours

Wear colours that bring out your eyes and enhance your skin tone and hair colour. We want your eyes to pop because they are the very first thing someone notices about your headshots. What colours make you feel beautiful, handsome or comfortable in?

Keep away from distraction

Avoid busy patterns of clothes that distract from the eyes and face since your eyes must be seen first.

Your eyes are a window to your soul! For the ladies, it is a fantastic idea to put on a top that brings out your neckline and keep jewellery to a minimum. Do not wear turtlenecks or scarves, seeing your neckline will make you look slimmer. Wear what you love, like clothes which make you feel confident and comfortable! You have to love it. The camera will show the confidence on your face. If you are wearing what you love, you will like your headshots.

We want you to appreciate your headshots!

Still stressed about your photo shoot session?

If you are concerned about what to wear, bring a variety of outfits. We will help you in selecting the smartest choice for your style and profession. We love what we do and wish to help. Most of all, we expect this is a fun adventure that will build trust and help you be ready to take on your profession! Please remember you do not have to be photogenic, or feel photogenic. It is our job as photographers to put you at ease and provide a great experience.

Here are some headshots tips for a photo shoot session

Is it time to update your headshots? Maybe it's been too many years since your photo shoot? Regardless of your reasoning, here are several tips to assist you to nail it this time around.

Hire a professional photographer to help get the headshots you need to make an excellent first impression. Look like a version of you that represents the goal you want to achieve for your headshot. Look well-rested, alive and energised!

Rest

Get the proper rest leading up to your headshot session. Getting adequate sleep will help you in lots of ways. EyeMedia Studios can do magic with editing and light, but the life in your eyes needs to show in your portraits,

Hydrate

Drink lots of water on the day your headshots photoshoot and be sure to moisturise your skin. Adequate rest will also reduce the appearance of fine lines.

Prep

You should style your hair like you would wear it to an important meeting, but better. Don't shampoo the same day, second-day hair consistently styles better. That said, don't overuse hair products on wash day or you'll struggle with styling it. For medium to long hair. You should use the evening before to pre-blow-dry some volume in.

You only need your hair to stay looking good for your headshot. Use a light hold hair spray so that you can control it and touch-up during outfit changes.

Buy some shine spray to lightly spritz over your entire head once you're finished styling. This may give your hair life and reflection. Plus, you can spritz your brush with hair spray to help tame flyaway hairs.

Preview

Before you book your headshot session with EyeMedia Studios. Snap a few selfies in your styled looks. They'll be nowhere near the quality of the photo shoot, but you'll get an idea to whether you like the look.

If you are looking to book professional headshots, please get in touch. We have some of the best headshots photographers in London.

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behindthebeautylens · 4 years

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How Beauty Photoshoots Help Your Modeling Portfolio

When it’s time to show your portfolio to an agency, they will be looking for key shots every model should have in their book. One of these images will include a solid beauty shot that has the power to grab an agent or a client’s full attention and book your next job. This photo should be the first photo in your portfolio and accentuates your facial structure, your personality, and your ability to control expression. Here are four reasons why beauty photoshoots will help your portfolio and why every model should have a strong headshot to add to their book.

Your Beauty Shot is Your First Impression.

When an agency or a client opens up your book, the first photo they will see is your beauty shot or headshot. The first impression they will have is a clean, straightforward yet intimate gaze that has the ability to land you your next job. Essentially, it’s important to schedule a beauty photoshoot because it will create one of the strongest tools of persuasion in your book. Your beauty shot will also be displayed on your comp cards or “z cards,” so by putting your best headshot forward you already have a greater chance at capturing a client’s attention as they sift through options.

Beauty Shots are Essential to Your Portfolio’s Composition.

For every model, it’s important to have at least these five images in your book: Beauty, Full-length, Editorial/Fashion, Commercial, and Swimsuit. This is the standard. If any of these shots are missing from your book, be sure to work on them until your portfolio is complete. You want to take full advantage of every initial opportunity you receive with an agency by presenting your book at its best. Keep in mind, if an agency really likes your look, they can still sign you even if your book is not yet complete. However, they will urge you to continue developing your portfolio because having a solid book is the only way you can properly be seen and considered by clients. At the end of the day, the work you put into building your portfolio will have to be done with or without an agency. So keep building, keep working, and keep growing!

Beauty Shots Show Your Range of Emotion.

Beauty shots are the perfect way to showcase your ability to express emotion in front of the lens. You can have a variety of beauty shots in your portfolio, which may include smiling shots, dramatic looks, or edgy, high-energy captures. Remember that your portfolio will most always need a straightforward headshot in addition to this sprinkle of variety. Use expression to your advantage — show that you are capable of portraying different characters or embracing a variety of moods and themes. This makes you more marketable and emphasizes your range.

Different Beauty Shots Appeal to Different Markets.

Whether you want to lean more toward the commercial, editorial, or fashion market, beauty shots will be a huge asset to establishing the look you will bring to your agency and to the overall modeling industry. Including plenty of fresh, smiling headshots in your portfolio will gear you more toward the commercial side of modeling, while having shots that display your ability to sell a product and still grab the viewer’s attention will show your fashion and editorial range. If you can graze your hand upon the lining of your jaw and let out a tantalizing pout or widen your eyes so that they sparkle and shine with a bright, playful smile, then you are already showing that you can work and succeed in more than just a single market.

It’s All About Showing the Unique Beauty You Bring.

Beauty shoots are up-close-and-personal, with minimal barriers and alterations. Many beauty shots for your portfolio will be clean, simple, and straight to the point. This is the real you — the best you. In every photo, you want to command the viewer and market your beauty with confidence and poise.

Are you ready?

Are you ready to make a lasting first impression and ensure that both you and your book are prepared and presented in a professional manner? If the answer is yes, then now is the time to schedule a beauty photoshoot and secure a shot that is a solid representation of your ability to perform up-close as a model. For more on how to prepare for a beauty photoshoot and on what to expect, check out my previous blog post (add internal link to drive traffic to your other blog post and essentially back to your site). With focus and preparation, you will have a portfolio you feel proud of in no time.

#beauty #beauty photography #models #portfolio

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jobsearchtips02 · 4 years

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Gunmen Attack Pakistan Stock Exchange

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Gunmen opened fire outside the Pakistan Stock Exchange in Karachi on Monday. Though the high-profile attack ended without their getting into the building, WSJ’s Saeed Shah explains how it could set back Pakistan’s progress in showing the country is safe for foreign investors. Image: Fareed Khan/AP

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techscopic · 7 years

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Voices in AI – Episode 17: A Conversation with James Barrat

Today’s leading minds talk AI with host Byron Reese

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In this episode, Byron and James talk about jobs, human vs. artificial intelligence, and more.

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Voices in AI

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Byron Reese: Hello, this is Voices in AI, brought to you by Gigaom. I am Byron Reese. Today I am so excited that our guest is James Barrat. He wrote a book called Our Final Invention, subtitled Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era. James Barratt is also a renowned documentary filmmaker, as well as an author. Welcome to the show, James.

James Barrat: Hello.

So, let’s start off with, what is artificial intelligence?

Very good question. Basically, artificial intelligence is when machines perform tasks that are normally ascribed to human intelligence. I have a very simple definition of intelligence that I like. Because ‘artificial intelligence’—the definition just throws the ideas back to humans, and [to] human intelligence, which is the intelligence we know the most about.

The definition I like is: intelligence is the ability to achieve goals in a variety of novel environments, and to learn. And that’s a simple definition, but a lot is packed into it. Your intelligence has to achieve goals, it has to do something—whether that’s play Go, or drive a car, or solve proofs, or navigate, or identify objects. And if it doesn’t have some goal that it achieves, it’s not very useful intelligence.

If it can achieve goals in a variety of environments, if it can do object recognition and do navigation and do car-driving like our intelligence can, then it’s better intelligence. So, it’s goal-achieving in a bunch of novel environments, and then it learns. And that’s probably the most important part. Intelligence learns and it builds on its learning.

And you wrote a widely well-received book, Artificial Intelligence: Our Final Invention. Can you explain to the audience just your overall thesis, and the main ideas of the book?

Sure. Our Final Invention is basically making the argument that AI is a dual-use technology. A dual-use technology is one that can be used for great good, or great harm. Right now we’re in a real honeymoon phase of AI, where we’re seeing a lot of nifty tools come out of it, and a lot more are on the horizon. AI, right now, can find cancer clusters in x-rays better than humans. It can do business analytics better than humans. AI is doing what first year legal associates do, it’s doing legal discovery.

So we are finding a lot of really useful applications. It’s going to make us all better drivers, because we won’t be driving anymore. But it’s a dual-use technology because, for one thing, it’s going to be taking a lot of jobs. You know, there are five million professional drivers in the United States, seven million back-office accountants—those jobs are going to go away. And a lot of others.

So the thesis of my book is that we need to look under the hood of AI, look at its applications, look who’s controlling it, and then in a longer term, look at whether or not we can control it at all.

Let’s start with that point and work backwards. That’s an ominous statement. Can we record it at all? What are you thinking there?

Can we control it at all.

I’m sorry, yes. Control it at all.

Well, let me start, I prefer to start the other way. Stephen Hawking said that the trouble with AI is, in the short term, who controls it, and in the long term, can we control it at all? And in the short term, we’ve already suffered some from AI. You know, the NSA recently was accessing your phone data and mine, and getting your phone book and mine. And it was, basically, seizing our phone records, and that used to be illegal.

Used to be that if I wanted to seize, to get your phone records, I needed to go to a court, and get a court order. And that was to avoid abridging the Fourth Amendment, which prevents illegal search and seizure of property. Your phone messages are your property. The NSA went around that, and grabbed our phone messages and our phone data, and they are able to sift through this ocean of data because of AI, because of advanced data mining software.

One other example—and there are many—one other example of, in the short term, who controls the AI, is, right now there are a lot of countries developing battlefield robots and drones that will be autonomous. And these are robots and drones that kill people without a human in the loop. And these are AI issues. There are fifty-six nations developing battlefield robots.

The most sought after will be autonomous battlefield robots. There was an article just a couple of days ago about how the Marines have a robot that shoots a machinegun on a battlefield. They control it with a tablet, but their goal, as stated there, is to make it autonomous, to work on its own.

In the longer-term we, I’ll put it in the way that Arthur C. Clark put it to me, when I interviewed him. Arthur C. Clark was a mathematician and a physicist before he was a science fiction writer. And he created the HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey, probably the most famous homicidal AI. And he said, when I asked him about the control problem of artificial intelligence, he said something like this: He said, “We humans steer the future not because we are the fastest or the strongest creatures, but because we are the most intelligent. And when we share the planet with something that’s more intelligent than we are, it will steer the future.”

So the problem we’re facing, the problem we’re on the cusp of, I can simplify it with a concept called ‘the intelligence explosion’. The intelligence explosion was an idea created by a statistician named I. J. Good in the 1960s. He said, “Once we create machines that do everything as well or better than humans, one of the things they’ll do is create smart machines.”

And we’ve seen artificial intelligence systems slowly begin to do things better than we do, and it’s not a stretch to think about a time to come, when artificial intelligence systems do advanced AI research and development better that humans. And I. J. Good said, “Then, when that happens, we humans will no longer set the pace of intelligence advancement, it will be machines that will set the pace of advancement.”

The trouble of that is, we know nothing about how to control a machine, or a cognitive architecture, that’s a thousand or million times more intelligent than we are. We have no experience with anything like that. We can look around us for analogies in the animal world.

How do we treat things that we’re a thousand times more intelligent than? Well, we treat all animals in a very negligent way. And the smart ones are either endangered, or they’re in zoos, or we eat them. That’s a very human-centric analogy, but I think it’s probably appropriate.

Let’s push on this just a little bit. So do you…

Sure.

Do you believe… Some people say ‘AI’ is kind of this specter of a term now, that, it isn’t really anything different than any other computer programs we’ve ever run, right? It’s better and faster and all of that, but it isn’t qualitatively anything different than what we’ve had for decades.

And so why do you think that? And when you say that AIs are going to be smarter than us, a million times smarter than us, ‘smarter’ is also a really nebulous term.

I mean, they may be able to do some incredibly narrow thing better than us. I may not be able to drive a car as well as an AI, but that doesn’t mean that same AI is going to beat me at Parcheesi. So what do you think is different? Why isn’t this just incrementally… Because so far, we haven’t had any trouble.

What do you think is going to be the catalyst, or what is qualitatively different about what we are dealing with now?

Sure. Well, there’s a lot of interesting questions packed into what you just said. And one thing you said—which I think is important to draw out—is that there are many kinds of intelligence. There’s emotional intelligence, there’s rational intelligence, there’s instinctive and animal intelligence.

And so, when I say something will be much more intelligent than we are, I’m using a shorthand for: It will be better at our definition of intelligence, it will be better at solving problems in a variety of novel environments, it will be better at learning.

And to put what you asked in another way, you’re saying that there is an irreducible promise and peril to every technology, including computers. All technologies, back to fire, have some good points and some bad points. AI I find qualitatively different. And I’ll argue by analogy, for a second. AI to me is like nuclear fission. Nuclear fission is a dual-use technology capable of great good and great harm.

Nuclear fission is the power behind atom bombs and behind nuclear reactors. When we were developing it in the ‘20s and ‘30s, we thought that nuclear fission was a way to get free energy by splitting the atom. Then it was quickly weaponized. And then we used it to incinerate cities. And then we as a species held a gun at our own heads for fifty years with the arms race. We threatened to make ourselves extinct. And that almost succeeded a number of times, and that struggle isn’t over.

To me, AI is a lot more like that. You said it hasn’t been used for nefarious reasons, and I totally disagree. I gave you an example with the NSA. A couple of weeks ago, Facebook was caught up because they were targeting emotionally-challenged and despairing children for advertising.

To me, that’s extremely exploitative. It’s a rather soulless and exploitative commercial application of artificial intelligence. So I think these pitfalls are around us. They’re already taking place. So I think the qualitative difference with artificial intelligence is that intelligence is our superpower, the human superpower.

It’s the ability to be creative, the ability to invent technology. That was one thing Stephen Hawking brought up when he was asked about, “What are the pitfalls of artificial intelligence?”

He said, “Well, for one thing, they’ll be able to develop weapons we don’t even understand.” So, I think the qualitative difference is that AI is the invention that creates inventions. And we’re on the cusp, this is happening now, and we’re on the cusp of an AI revolution, it’s going to bring us great profit and also great vulnerability.

You’re no doubt familiar with Searle’s “Chinese Room” kind of question, but all of the readers, all of the listeners might not be… So let me set that up, and then get your thought on it. It goes like this:

There’s a person in a room, a giant room full of very special books. And he doesn’t—we’ll call him the librarian—and the librarian doesn’t speak a word of Chinese. He’s absolutely unfamiliar with the language.

And people slide him questions under the door which are written in Chinese, and what he does—what he’s learned to do—is to look at the first character in that message, and he finds the book, of the tens of thousands that he has, that has that on the spine. And in that book he looks up the second character. And the book then says, “Okay, go pull this book.”

And in that book he looks up the third, and the fourth, and the fifth, all the way until he gets to the end. And when he gets to the end, it says “Copy this down.” And so he copies these characters again that he doesn’t understand, doesn’t have any clue whatsoever what they are.

He copies them down very carefully, very faithfully, slides it back under the door… Somebody’s outside who picks it up, a Chinese speaker. They read it, and it’s just brilliant! It’s just absolutely brilliant! It rhymes, it’s Haiku, I mean it’s just awesome!

Now, the question, the kind of ta-da question at the end is: Does the man, does the librarian understand Chinese? Does he understand Chinese?

Now, many people in the computer world would say yes. I mean, Alan Turing would say yes, right? The Chinese room passes the Turing Test. The Chinese speakers outside, as far as they know, they are conversing with a Chinese speaker.

So do you think the man understands Chinese? And do you think… And if he doesn’t understand Chinese… Because obviously, the analogy of it is: that’s all that computer does. A computer doesn’t understand anything. It doesn’t know if it’s talking about cholera or coffee beans or anything whatsoever. It runs this program, and it has no idea what it’s doing.

And therefore it has no volition, and therefore it has no consciousness; therefore it has nothing that even remotely looks like human intelligence. So what would you just say to that?

The Chinese Room problem is fascinating, and you could write books about it, because it’s about the nature of consciousness. And what we don’t know about consciousness, you could fill many books with. And I used to think I wanted to explore consciousness, but it made exploring AI look easy.

I don’t know if it matters that the machine thinks as we do or not. I think the point is that it will be able to solve problems. We don’t know about the volition question. Let me give you another analogy. When Ferrucci, [when] he was the head of Team Watson, he was asked a very provocative question: “Was Watson thinking when it beat all those masters at Jeopardy?” And his answer was, “Does a submarine swim?”

And what he meant was—and this is the twist on on the Chinese Room problem—he meant [that] when they created submarines, they learned principles of swimming from fish. But then they created something that swims farther and faster and carries a huge payload, so it’s really much more powerful than fish.

It doesn’t reproduce and it doesn’t do some of the miraculous things fish do, but as far as swimming, it does it. Does an airplane fly? Well, the aviation pioneers used principles of flight from birds, but quickly went beyond that, to create things that fly farther and faster and carry a huge payload.

I don’t think it matters. So, two answers to your question. One is, I don’t think it matters. And I don’t think it’s possible that a machine will think qualitatively as we do. So, I think it will think farther and faster and carry a huge payload. I think it’s possible for a machine to be generally intelligent in a variety of domains.

We can see intelligence growing in a bunch of domains. If you think of them as rippling pools, ripples in a pool, like different circles of expertise ultimately joining, you can see how general intelligence is sort of demonstrably on its way.

Whether or not it thinks like a human, I think it won’t. And I think that’s a danger, because I think it won’t have our mammalian sense of empathy. It’ll also be good, because it won’t have a lot of sentimentality, and a lot of cognitive biases that our brains are labored with. But you said it won’t have volition. And I don’t think we can bet on that.

In my book, Our Final Invention, I interviewed at length Steve Omohundro, who’s taken upon himself—he’s an AI maker and physicist—and he’d taken it upon himself to create more or less a science for understanding super intelligent machines. Or machines that are more intelligent than we are.

And among the things that he argues for, using rational-age and economic theory—and I won’t go into that whole thing—but it’s in Our Final Invention, it’s also in Steve Omohundro’s many websites. Machines that are self-aware and are self-programming, he thinks, will develop basic drives that are not unlike our own.

And they include things like self-protection, creativity, efficiency with resources,and other drives that will make them very challenging to control—unless we get ahead of the game and create this science for understanding them, as he’s doing.

Right now, computers are not generally intelligent, they are not conscious. All the limitations of the Chinese Room, they have. But I think it’s unrealistic to think that we are frozen in development. I think it’s very realistic to think that we’ll create machines whose cognitive abilities match and then outstrip our own.

But, just kind of going a little deeper on the question. So we have this idea of intelligence, which there is no consensus definition on it. Then within that, you have human intelligence—which, again, is something we certainly don’t understand. Human intelligence comes from our brain, which is—people say—‘the most complicated object in the galaxy’.

We don’t understand how it works. We don’t know how thoughts are encoded. We know incredibly little, in the grand scheme of things, about how the brain works. But we do know that humans have these amazing abilities, like consciousness, and the ability to generalize intelligence very effortlessly. We have something that certainly feels like free will, we certainly have something that feels like… and all of that.

Then on the other hand, you think back to a clockwork, right? You wind up a clock back in the olden days and it just ran a bunch of gears. And while it may be true that the computers of the day add more gears and have more things, all we’re doing is winding it up and letting it go.

And, isn’t it, like… not only a stretch, not only a supposition, not only just sensationalistic, to say, “Oh no, no. Someday we’ll add enough gears that, you wind that thing up, and it’s actually going to be a lot smarter than you.”

Isn’t that, I mean at least it’s fair to say there’s absolutely nothing we understand about human intelligence, and human consciousness, and human will… that even remotely implies that something that’s a hundred percent mechanical, a hundred percent deterministic, a hundred percent… Just wind it and it doesn’t do anything. But…

Well, you’re wrong about being a hundred percent deterministic, and it’s not really a hundred percent mechanical. When you talk about things like will, will is such an anthropomorphic term, I’m not sure if we can really, if we can attribute it to computers.

Well, I’m specifically saying we have something that feels and seems like will, that we don’t understand.

If you look, if you look at artificial neural nets, there’s a great deal about them we don’t understand. We know what the inputs are, and we know what the outputs are; and when we want to make better output—like a better translation—we know how to adjust the inputs. But we don’t know what’s going on in a multilayered neural net system. We don’t know what’s going on in a high resolution way. And that’s why they’re called black box systems, and evolutionary algorithms.

In evolutionary algorithms, we have a sense of how they work. We have a sense of how they combine pieces of algorithms, how we introduce mutations. But often, we don’t understand the output, and we certainly don’t understand how it got there, so that’s not completely deterministic. There’s a bunch of stuff we can’t really determine in there.

And I think we’ve got a lot of unexplained behavior in computers that’s, at this stage, we simply attribute to our lack of understanding. But I think in the longer term, we’ll see that computers are doing things on their own. I’m talking about a lot of the algorithms on Wall Street, a lot of the flash crashes we’ve seen, a lot of the cognitive architectures. There’s not one person who can describe the whole system… the ‘quants’, they call them, or the guys that are programming Wall Street’s algorithms.

They’ve already gone, in complexity, beyond any individual’s ability to really strip them down.

So, we’re surrounded by systems of immense power. Gartner and company think that in the AI space—because of the exponential nature of the investment… I think it started out, and it’s doubled every year since 2009—Gartner estimates that by 2025, that space will be worth twenty-five trillion dollars of value. So to me, that’s a couple of things.

That anticipates enormous growth, and enormous growth in power in what these systems will do. We’re in an era now that’s different from other eras. But it is like other Industrial Revolutions. We’re in an era now where everything that’s electrified—to paraphrase Kevin Kelly, the futurist—everything that’s electrified is being cognitized.

We can’t pretend that it will always be like a clock. Even now it’s not like a clock. A clock you can take apart, and you can understand every piece of it.

The cognitive architectures we’re creating now… When Ferrucci was watching Watson play, and he said, “Why did he answer like that?” There’s nobody on his team that knew the answer. When it made mistakes… It did really, really well; it beat the humans. But comparing [that] to a clock, I think that’s the wrong metaphor.

Well, let’s just poke at it just one more minute, and then we can move on to something else. Is that really fair to say, that because humans don’t understand how it works, it must be somehow working differently than other machines?

Put another way, it is fair to say, because we’ve added enough gears now, that nobody could kind of keep them all straight. I mean nobody understands why the Google algorithm—even at Google—turns up what it does when you search. But nobody’s suggesting anything nondeterministic, nothing emergent, anything like that is happening.

I mean, our computers are completely deterministic, are they not?

I don’t think that they are. I think if they were completely deterministic, then enough brains put together could figure out a multi-tiered neural net, and I don’t think there’s any evidence that we can right now.

Well, that’s exciting.

I’m not saying that it’s coming up with brilliant new ideas… But a system that’s so sophisticated that it defeats Go, and teaches grandmasters new ideas about Go—which is what the grandmaster who it defeated three out of four times said—[he] said, “I have new insights about this game,” that nobody could explain what it was doing, but it was thinking creatively in a way that we don’t understand.

Go is not like chess. On a chess board, I don’t know how many possible positions there are, but it’s calculable. On a Go board, it’s incalculable. There are more—I’ve heard it said, and I don’t really understand it very well—I heard it said there are more possible positions on a Go board than there are atoms in the universe.

So when it’s beating Go masters… Therefore, playing the game requires a great deal of intuition. It’s not just pattern-matching. Like, I’ve played a million games of Go—and that’s sort of what chess is [pattern-matching].

You know, the grandmasters are people who have seen every board you could possibly come up with. They’ve probably seen it before, and they know what to do. Go’s not like that. It requires a lot more undefinable intuition.

And so we’re moving rapidly into that territory. The program that beat the Go masters is called AlphaGo. It comes out of DeepMind. DeepMind was bought four years ago by Google. Going deep into reinforcement learning and artificial neural nets, I think your argument would be apt if we were talking about some of the old languages—Fortran, Basic, Pascal—where you could look at every line of code and figure out what was going on.

That’s no longer possible, and you’ve got Go grandmasters saying “I learned new insights.” So we’re in a brave new world here.

So you had a great part of the book, where you do a really smart kind of roll-up of when we may have an AGI. Where you went into different ideas behind it. And the question I’m really curious about is this: On the one hand, you have Elon Musk saying we can have it much sooner than you think. You have Stephen Hawking, who you quoted. You have Bill Gates saying he’s worried about it.

So you have all of these people who say it’s soon, it’s real, and it’s potentially scary. We need to watch what we do. Then on the other camp, you have people who are equally immersed in the technology, equally smart, equally, equally, equally all these other things… like Andrew Ng, who up until recently headed up AI at Baidu, who says worrying about AGI is like worrying about overpopulation on Mars. You have other people saying the soonest it could possibly happen is five hundred years from now.

So I’m curious about this. Why do you think, among these big brains, super smart people, why do they have… What is it that they believe or know or think, or whatever, that gives them such radically different views about this technology? How do you get your head around why they differ?

Excellent question. I first heard that Mars analogy from, I think it was Sebastian Thrun, who said we don’t know how to get to Mars. We don’t know how to live on Mars. But we know how to get a rocket to the moon, and gradually and slowly, little by little—No, it was Peter Norvig, who wrote the sort of standard text on artificial intelligence, called AI: A Modern Approach.

He said, you know, “We can’t live on Mars yet, but we’re putting the rockets together. Some companies are putting in some money. We’re eventually going to get to Mars, and there’ll be people living on Mars, and then people will be setting another horizon.” We haven’t left our solar system yet.

It’s a very interesting question, and very timely, about when will we achieve human-level intelligence in a machine, if ever. I did a poll about it. It was kind of a biased poll; it was of people who were at a conference about AGI, about artificial general intelligence. And then I’ve seen a lot of polls, and there’s two points to this.

One is the polls go all over the place. Some people said… Ray Kurzweil says 2029. Ray Kurzweil’s been very good at anticipating the progress of technology, he says 2029. Ray Kurzweil’s working for Google right now—this is parenthetically—he said he wants to create a machine that makes three hundred trillion calculations per second, and to share that with a billion people online. So what’s that? That’s basically reverse engineering of a brain.

Making three hundred trillion calculations per second, which is sort of a rough estimate of what a brain does. And then sharing it with a billion people online, which is making superintelligence a service, which would be incredibly useful. You could do pharmacological research. You could do really advanced weather modeling, and climate modeling. You could do weapons research, you could develop incredible weapons. He says 2029.

Some people said one hundred years from now. The mean date that I got was about 2045 for human-level intelligence in a machine. And then my book, Our Final Invention, got reviewed by Gary Marcus in the New Yorker, and he said something that stuck with me. He said whether or not it’s ten years or one hundred years, the more important question is: What happens next?

Will it be integrated into our lives? Or will it suddenly appear? How are we positioned for our own safety and security when it appears, whether it’s in fifty years or one hundred? So I think about it as… Nobody thought Go was going to be beaten for another ten years.

And here’s another way… So those are the two ways to think about it: one is, there’s a lot of guesses; and two, does it really matter what happens next? But the third part of that is this, and I write about it in Our Final Invention: If we don’t achieve it in one hundred years, do you think we’re just going to stop? Or do you think we’re going to keep beating at this problem until we solve it?

And as I said before, I don’t think we’re going to create exactly human-like intelligence in a machine. I think we’re going to create something extremely smart and extremely useful, to some extent, but something we, in a very deep way, don’t understand. So I don’t think it’ll be like human intelligence… it will be like an alien intelligence.

So that’s kind of where I am on that. I think it could happen in a variety of timelines. It doesn’t really matter when, and we’re not going to stop until we get there. So ultimately, we’re going to be confronted with machines that are a thousand or a million times more intelligent than we are.

And what are we going to do?

Well, I guess the underlying assumption is… it speaks to the credibility of the forecast, right? Like, if there’s a lab, and they’re working on inventing the lightbulb, like: “We’re trying to build the incandescent light bulb.” And you go in there and you say, “When will you have the incandescent light bulb?” and they say “Three or four weeks, five weeks. Five weeks tops, we’re going to have it.”

Or if they say, “Uh, a hundred years. It may be five hundred, I don’t know.” I mean in those things you take a completely different view of, do we understand the problem? Do we know what we’re building? Do we know how to build an AGI? Do we even have a clue?

Do you believe… or here, let me ask it this way: Do you think an AGI is just an evolutionary… Like, we have AlphaGo, we have Watson, and we’re making them better every day. And eventually, that kind of becomes—gradually—this AGI. Or do you think there’s some “A-ha” thing we don’t know how to do, and at some point we’re like “Oh, here’s how you do it! And this is how you get a synapse to work.”

So, do you think we are nineteen revolutionary breakthroughs away, or “No, no, no, we’re on the path. We’re going to be there in three to five years.”?

Ben Goertzel, who is definitely in the race to make AGI—I interviewed him in my book—said we need some sort of breakthrough. And then we got to artificial neural nets and deep learning, and deep learning combined with reinforcement learning, which is an older technique, and that was kind of a breakthrough. And then people started to beat—IBM’s Deep Blue—to beat chess, it really was just looking up tables of positions.

But to beat Go, as we’ve discussed, was something different.

I think we’ve just had a big breakthrough. I don’t know how many revolutions we are away from a breakthrough that makes intelligence general. But let me give you this… the way I think about it.

There’s long been talk in the AI community about an algorithm… I don’t know exactly what they call it. But it’s basically an open-domain problem-solver that asks something simple like, what’s the next best move? What’s the next best thing to do? Best being based on some goals that you’ve got. What’s the next best thing to do?

Well, that’s sort of how DeepMind took on all the Atari games. They could drop the algorithm into a game, and it didn’t even know the rules. It just noticed when it was scoring or not scoring, and so it was figuring out what’s the next best thing to do.

Well if you can drop it into every Atari game, and then you drop it into something that’s many orders of magnitude above it, like Go, then why are we so far from dropping that into a robot and setting it out into the environment, and having it learn the environment and learn common sense about the environment—like, “Things go under, and things go over; and I can’t jump into the tree; I can climb the tree.”

It seems to me that general intelligence might be as simple as a program that says “What’s the next best thing to do?” And then it learns the environment, and then it solves problems in the environment.

So some people are going about that by training algorithms, artificial neural net systems and defeating games. Some people are really trying to reverse-engineer a brain, one neuron at a time. That’s sort of, in a nutshell—to vastly overgeneralize—that’s called the bottom-up, and the top-down approach for creating AGI.

So are we a certain number of revolutions away, or are we going to be surprised? I’m surprised a little too frequently for my own comfort about how fast things are moving. Faster than when I was writing the book. I’m wondering what the next milestone is. I think the Turing Test has not been achieved, or even close. I think that’s a good milestone.

It wouldn’t surprise me if IBM, which is great at issuing itself grand challenges and then beating them… But what’s great about IBM is, they’re upfront. They take on a big challenge… You know, they were beaten—Deep Blue was beaten several times before it won. When they took on Jeopardy, they weren’t sure they were going to win, but they had the chutzpah to get out there and say, “We’re gonna try.” And then they won.

I bet IBM will say, “You know what, in 2020, we’re going to take on the Turing Test. And we’re going to have a machine that you can’t tell that it’s a machine. You can’t tell the difference between a machine and a human.”

So, I’m surprised all the time. I don’t know how far or how close we are, but I’d say I come at it from a position of caution. So I would say, the window in which we have to create safe AI is closing.

Yes, no… I’m with you; I was just taking that in. I’ll insert some ominous “Dun, dun, dun…” Take that a little further.

Everybody has a role to play in this conversation, and mine happens to be canary in a coal mine. Despite the title of my book, I really like AI. I like its potential. Medical potential. I don’t like its war potential… If we see autonomous battlefield robots on the battlefield, you know what’s going to happen. Like every other piece of used military equipment, it’s going to come home.

Well, the thing is, about the military… and the thing about technology is…If you told my dad that he would invite into his home a representative of Google, and that representative would sit in a chair in a corner of the house, and he would take down everything we said, and would sell that data to our insurance company, so our insurance rates might go up… and it would sell that data to mortgage bankers, so they might cut off our ability to get a mortgage… because dad talks about going bankrupt, or dad talks about his heart condition… and he can’t get insurance anymore.

But if we hire a corporate guy, and we pay for it, and put him in our living room… Well, that’s exactly what we’re doing with Amazon Echo, with all the digital assistants. All this data is being gathered all the time, and it’s being sold… Buying and selling data is a four billion dollar-a-year industry. So we’re doing really foolish things with this technology. Things that are bad for our own interests.

So let me ask you an open-ended question… prognostication over shorter time frames is always easier. Tell me what you think is in store for the world, I don’t know, between now and 2030, the next thirteen years. Talk to me about unemployment, talk to me about economics, all of that. Tell me the next thirteen years.

Well, brace yourself for some futurism, which is a giant gamble and often wrong. To paraphrase Kevin Kelly again, everything that’s electrical will be cognitized. Our economy will be dramatically shaped by the ubiquity of artificial intelligence. With the Internet of Things, with the intelligence of everything around us—our phones, our cars…

I can already talk to my car. I’m inside my car, I can ask for directions, I can do some other basic stuff. That’s just going to get smarter, until my car drives itself. A lot of people… MIT did a study, that was quoting a Cambridge study, that said: “Forty-five percent of our jobs will be able to be replaced within twenty years.” I think they downgraded that to like ten years.

Not that they will be replaced, but they will be able to be replaced. But when AI is a twenty-five trillion dollar—when it’s worth twenty-five trillion dollars in 2025—everybody will be able to do anything, will be able to replace any employee that’s doing anything that’s remotely repetitive, and this includes doctors and lawyers… We’ll be able to replace them with the AI.

And this cuts deep into the middle class. This isn’t just people working in factories or driving cars. This is all accountants, this is a lot of the doctors, this is a lot of the lawyers. So we’re going to see giant dislocation, or giant disruption, in the economy. And giant money being made by fewer and fewer people.

And the trouble with that is, that we’ve got to figure out a way to keep a huge part of our population from starving, from not making a wage. People have proposed a basic minimum income, but to do that we would need tax revenue. And the big companies, Amazon, Google, Facebook, they pay taxes in places like Ireland, where there’s very low corporate tax. They don’t pay taxes where they get their wealth. So they don’t contribute to your roads.

Google is not contributing to your road system. Amazon is not contributing to your water supply, or to making your country safe. So there’s a giant inequity there. So we have to confront that inequity and, unfortunately, that is going to require political solutions, and our politicians are about the most technologically-backward people in our culture.

So, what I see is, a lot of unemployment. I see a lot of nifty things coming out of AI, and I am willing to be surprised by job creation in AI, and robotics, and automation. And I’d like to be surprised by that. But the general trend is… When you replace the biggest contract manufacturer in the world… Foxconn just replaced thirty-thousand people in Asia with thirty-thousand robots.

And all those people can’t be retrained, because if you’re doing something that’s that repetitive, and that mechanical… what can you be retrained to do? Well, maybe one out of every hundred could be a floor manager in a robot factory, but what about all the others? Disruption is going to come from all the people that don’t have jobs, and there’s nothing to be retrained to.

Because our robots are made in factories where robots make the robots. Our cars are made in factories where robots make the cars.

Isn’t that the same argument they used during the Industrial Revolution, when they said, “You got ninety percent of people out there who are farmers, and we’re going to lose all these farm jobs… And you don’t expect those farmers are going to, like, come work in a factory, where they have to learn completely new things.”

Well, what really happened in the different technology revolutions, back from the cotton gin onward is, a small sector… The Industrial Revolution didn’t suddenly put farms out of business. A hundred years ago, ninety percent of people worked on farms, now it’s ten percent.

But what happened with the Industrial Revolution is, sector by sector, it took away jobs, but then those people could retrain, and could go to other sectors, because there were still giant sectors that weren’t replaced by industrialization. There was still a lot of manual labor to do. And some of them could be trained upwards, into management and other things.

This, as the author Ford wrote in The Rise of Robots—and there’s also a great book called The Fourth Industrial Age. As they both argue, what’s different about this revolution is that AI works in every industry. So it’s not like the old revolutions, where one sector was replaced at a time, and there was time to absorb that change, time to reabsorb those workers and retrain them in some fashion.

But everybody is going to be… My point is, all sectors of the economy are going to be hit at once. The ubiquity of AI is going to impact a lot of the economy, all at the same time, and there is going to be a giant dislocation all at the same time. And it’s very unclear, unlike in the old days, how those people can be retrained and retargeted for jobs. So, I think it’s very different from other Industrial Revolutions, or rather technology revolutions.

Other than the adoption of coal—it went from generating five percent to eighty percent of all of our power in twenty years—the electrification of industry happened incredibly fast. Mechanization, replacement of animal power with mechanical power, happened incredibly fast. And yet, unemployment remains between four and nine percent in this country.

Other than the Depression, without ever even hiccupping—like, no matter what disruption, no matter what speed you threw at it—the economy never couldn’t just use that technology to create more jobs. And isn’t that maybe a lack of imagination that says “Well, no, now we’re out. And no more jobs to create. Or not ones that these people who’ve been displaced can do.”

I mean, isn’t that what people would’ve said for two hundred years?

Yes, that’s a somewhat persuasive argument. I think you’ve got a point that the economy was able to absorb those jobs, and the unemployment remained steady. I do think this is different. I think it’s a kind of a puzzle, and we’ll have to see what happens. But I can’t imagine… Where do professional drivers… they’re not unskilled, but they’re right next to it. And it’s the job of choice for people who don’t have a lot of education.

What do you retrain professional drivers to do once their jobs are taken? It’s not going to be factory work, it’s not going to be simple accounting. It’s not going to be anything repetitive, because that’s going to be the job of automation and AI.

So I anticipate problems, but I’d love to be pleasantly surprised. If it worked like the old days, then all those people that were cut off the farm would go to work in the factories, and make Ford automobiles, and make enough money to buy one. I don’t see all those driverless people going off to factories to make cars, or to manufacture anything.

A case in point of what’s happening is… Rethink Robotics, which is Rodney Brooks’ company, just built something called Baxter; and now Baxter is a generation old, and I can’t think of what replaced it. But it costs about twenty-two thousand dollars to get one of these robots. These robots cost basically what a minimum wage worker makes in a year. But they work 24/7, so they really replace three shifts, so they really are replacing three people.

Where do those people go? Do they go to shops that make Baxter? Or maybe you’re right, maybe it’s a failure of imagination to not be able to anticipate the jobs that would be created by Baxter and by autonomous cars. Right now, it’s failing a lot of people’s imagination. And there are not ready answers.

I mean, if it were 1995 and the Internet was, you’re just hearing about it, just getting online, just hearing it… And somebody said, “You know what? There’s going to be a lot of companies that just come out and make hundreds of billions of dollars, one after the other, all because we’ve learned how to connect computers and use this hypertext protocol to communicate.” I mean, that would not have seemed like a reasonable surmise.

No, and that’s a great example. If you were told that trillions of dollars of value are going to come out of this invention, who would’ve thought? And maybe I personally, just can’t imagine the next wave that is going to create that much value. I can see how AI and automation will create a lot of value, I only see it going into a few pockets though. I don’t see it being distributed in any way that the Silicon Valley startups, at least initially, were.

So let’s talk about you for a moment. Your background is in documentary filmmaking. Do you see yourself returning to that world? What are you working on, another book? What kind of thing is keeping you busy by day right now?

Well, I like making documentary films. I just had one on PBS last year… If you Google “Spillover” and “PBS” you can see it is streaming online. It was about spillover diseases—Ebola, Zika and others—and it was about the Ebola crisis, and how viruses spread. And then now I’m working on a film about paleontology, about a recent discovery that’s kind of secret, that I can’t talk about… from sixty-six million years ago.

And I am starting to work on another book that I can’t talk about. So I am keeping an eye on AI, because this issue is… Despite everything I talk about, I really like the technology; I think it’s pretty amazing.

Well, let’s close with, give me a scenario that you think is plausible, that things work out. That we have something that looks like full employment, and…

Good, Byron. That’s a great way to go out. I see people getting individually educated about the promise and peril of AI, so that we as a culture are ready for the revolution that’s coming. And that forces businesses to be responsible, and politicians to be savvy, about developments in artificial intelligence. Then they invest some money to make artificial intelligence advancement transparent and safe.

And therefore, when we get to machines that are as smart as humans, that [they] are actually our allies, and never our competitors. And that somehow on top of this giant wedding cake I’m imagining, we also manage to keep full employment, or nearly-full employment. Because we’re aware, and because we’re working all the time to make sure that the future is kind to humans.

Alright, well, that is a great place to leave it. I am going to thank you very much.

Well, thank you. Great questions. I really enjoyed the back-and-forth.

Byron explores issues around artificial intelligence and conscious computers in his upcoming book The Fourth Age, to be published in April by Atria, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. Pre-order a copy here.

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clarenceomoore · 7 years

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Voices in AI – Episode 17: A Conversation with James Barrat

Today's leading minds talk AI with host Byron Reese

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In this episode, Byron and James talk about jobs, human vs. artificial intelligence, and more.

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.voice-in-ai-link-back-embed { font-size: 1.4rem; background: url(https://voicesinai.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/cropped-voices-background.jpg) black; background-position: center; background-size: cover; color: white; padding: 1rem 1.5rem; font-weight: 200; text-transform: uppercase; margin-bottom: 1.5rem; } .voice-in-ai-link-back-embed:last-of-type { margin-bottom: 0; } .voice-in-ai-link-back-embed .logo { margin-top: .25rem; display: block; background: url(https://voicesinai.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/voices-in-ai-logo-light-768x264.png) center left no-repeat; background-size: contain; width: 100%; padding-bottom: 30%; text-indent: -9999rem; margin-bottom: 1.5rem } @media (min-width: 960px) { .voice-in-ai-link-back-embed .logo { width: 262px; height: 90px; float: left; margin-right: 1.5rem; margin-bottom: 0; padding-bottom: 0; } } .voice-in-ai-link-back-embed a:link, .voice-in-ai-link-back-embed a:visited { color: #FF6B00; } .voice-in-ai-link-back a:hover { color: #ff4f00; } .voice-in-ai-link-back-embed ul.go-alexa-briefing-subscribe-links { margin-left: 0 !important; margin-right: 0 !important; margin-bottom: 0.25rem; } .voice-in-ai-link-back-embed ul.go-alexa-briefing-subscribe-links a:link, .voice-in-ai-link-back-embed ul.go-alexa-briefing-subscribe-links a:visited { background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.77); } .voice-in-ai-link-back-embed ul.go-alexa-briefing-subscribe-links a:hover { background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.63); } .voice-in-ai-link-back-embed ul.go-alexa-briefing-subscribe-links .stitcher .stitcher-logo { display: inline; width: auto; fill: currentColor; height: 1em; margin-bottom: -.15em; }