Day: January 29, 2005

Wow, I’m excited this weekend. Finally, I’m fulfilling one of my pledges from the Wharton application of 2 years ago to be part of the Wharton Business Plan Competition. Our team entered a business plan summary for Phase II this past Friday and I’m really psyched! The team pulled off a great plan that looks awesome and the business is very promising. We’ll see how this turns out.

Other than that, I’m swamped with 2 cases due for Monday and other extraneous work. Advanced Corporate Finance is turning out to be more work than I bargained for, but I like the realistic nature of the courses. This is what I was hoping. With all the finance in my background (I was a VP at [Salomon] Smith Barney’s Global Quantitative Research Group), you ask why I need a another course? But after all the marketing and management I’ve taken I need one finance refresher just to make sure I distinguish wacc from crack (hint: they are both addictive!)

Advertizing management, quarter course, is finally where I wanted it to be 2 weeks ago. A typical problem at Wharton is that quarter long courses (13 classes, 6 weeks) pack about 3/4 of a Semester worth of material. Profs in these course trow everyting but the kitchen sink, which leaves students rushing from 1 class to another just doing stuff but not really spending time to learn things in depth. My suggestion to profs has always been cut down material in half, pick 2 topics you want everyone to learn well and go in depth. Nobody wins with mile-wide and inch deep materials and bulk packs. This was unfortunately the case from last semster’s New Product Management course.

After eyeing several photographs from the past couple of years, I finally updated my portfolio of Various photos. The key with these few photographs has been isolating the elements and muting the color to reach the desired effect. Photography, unlike painting, is an art of substraction. Whereas with painting or sculpting the artist creates something from scratch, continually adding elements to fulfill the vision, photographers with a good eye are trained to remove elements from nature or from the scene in order to bring out their vision from the scene. What’s interesting for me is how I’ve evolved in finalizing the photographs to account for the vision that I had when I took them. Each step of the way, I have improved on a different element or tool: color, framing, contrast, patterns, center of gravity. While some of these new photos are really old, it’s clear to me that I saw something striking but wasn’t sure how to bring it out, both digitally — which refers to the techniques in Adobe Photoshop — and in the context of the scene — what’s the emotion or theme in that particular photo. The main work for my most recent photos has been in removing or reducing the effect of color and details, while bringing out the patterns, contrasts, shapes and dynamics of the scene to the forefront.

Enjoy!