EVERYDAY I FEEL BLESSED to be able to do what I do for a living—AND to be able to work with all three of my sons AND my son-in-law. They are all highly creative. Each brings a unique set of skills, tools, interests and perspectives to the table. Really, I kinda have the ultimate dream job. My wife, and my two daughters, Anna and Teryn, are also very creative. I just don’t get a chance to work with them each day.

Now, I know this will sound partial—like a bragging grandfather—but my grandkids are equally as creative. Take my 5-year old grandson, Jack...

I think it’s because they have creative parents who nurture their creativity. This morning my son-in-law, Rob, showed me a couple of stop-motion videos that my grandson, Jack, created (with help from his dad). They were shot and edited on an iPhone4 using a $0.99 app called StopMotion. Enjoy:

WHEN YOU WASTE TIME, DO YOU WASTE IT WELL?  When you waste time, do you savor the “downtime, experimentation and joy” (as Seth Godin says) that can result from having done so?

My opinion is that one day we’ll all be held accountable for time wasted poorly.

How do you waste time well?

I AM A COUPLE OF MONTHS INTO AN EXPERIMENT.  I’m using Viddy in an attempt to better journal my life.

It’s nearly impossible lately for me to find time to write in a journal. Even quick blog posts have been few and far between. So, here’s what I am trying to do...

Every day or two I just pull my phone out of my pocket and capture a 15-second Viddy. My self-imposed rules? No retakes. No editing. No fretting about quality or art direction. In fact, Viddy knocks down the resolution for quick upload and storage. With one touch on my phone I can upload the 15-second video to YouTube for archiving.

These videos have one objective—to trigger a memory of something significant that happened that day. They aren’t meant to be pretty. They’re meant to be functional.

Every month or so I’m planning to drag the next batch of 15-second clips into iMovie and export them as one video. The total amounts to about seven minutes a month. That means over one year I will have created about 1.5 hours of video (in 15-second snippets) that visually captures my year. At that point (or someday in the future), I may add an audio track to the video to narrate and add detail.

Here’s the first one. I’m about ready to do the second one. Good idea? Techy goofy? Both?

MY CHILDHOOD FRIEND, RICH, AND I BUILT OUR FIRST photographic darkroom when we were both about nine years of age in Sherman Oaks, California. We bought some heavy visqueen plastic sheeting, found some 2x4s, nails, a hammer, and a heavy duty staple gun. The outside back wall of Rich’s garage served as the “stable” wall, and the rest was a sort of “lean-to” structure that often fell down when there was a breeze. The darkroom floor was the back lawn. It was about 10 feet square and worked a lot better at night than it did during the day.

We borrowed Bryce’s enlarger, easel, and safelight. Bryce was about 12 years old and had a lot of “experience”. He was cool—showing us 8x10 black and white glossies of spider webs and stuff that he had shot and printed. Rich’s dad had a long orange extension cord that we strung from Rich’s bedroom window out through the back yard.

Golly, we had fun.

From the age of nine until my mid thirties I’m certain I shot tens of thousands of frames of black and white film. I developed all of the film myself and made contact sheets in my various darkrooms. I also printed hundreds and hundreds of black and white prints. Sometimes, I would use tints and washes to color or antique them.

I also used the same camera all of those years. A basic Pentax Spotmatic. The only bell and whistle it had was an internal light meter. Nothing else was “auto”. In many ways, that camera was my closest friend as I grew up.

At some point in my thirties, life got harder and busier. I shot less film. My eyesight wasn’t as good either, making it harder for me to see through the viewfinder of my Pentax to focus each shot. I pretty much stopped using my camera. For the following 20 years there was a photographic hodgepodge of stuff—mostly drugstore prints from one-time-use cameras that I didn’t have to focus.

Yesterday I had a few hours to kill walking around downtown Philadelphia—iPhone in hand. With help from a couple of easy-to-use apps, my iPhone is not only a decent camera, but it’s also a darkroom, art studio, archive, and publishing/sharing platform.

In a very short time I took a few dozen shots, then developed, cropped, uploaded, and shared them online—all from my phone (images above).

The process wasn’t better, just different.

But the best part about it was, at least for a couple of hours yesterday, I felt like I was nine years old again—sweating out prints in my visqueen darkroom.

STUDENTS IN MY CLASSES AT BYU KNOW that I’m a big Seth Godin fan. If you don’t subscribe to his blog, you should—even if you’re not into advertising and marketing.

I’ve pasted yesterday’s post from Seth Godin below. I’m committing my students to go through BYU kindly prompting and encouraging every professor they meet to help them make their university experience relevant and powerful. I’ve told them to push me too. I don’t mind.

Pushing Back On Mediocre Professors (by Seth Godin)

College costs a fortune. It takes a lot of time and it takes a lot of money.

When a professor assigns you to send a blogger a list of vague and inane interview questions ("1. How did you get started in this field? 2. What type of training (education) does this field require? 3. What do you like best about your job? 4. what do you like least about your job?") I think you have an obligation to say, “Sir, I’m going to be in debt for ten years because of this degree. Perhaps you could give us an assignment that actually pushes us to solve interesting problems, overcome our fear or learn something that I could learn in no other way...”

When a professor spends hours in class going over concepts that are clearly covered in the textbook, I think you have an obligation to repeat the part about the debt and say, “Perhaps you could assign this as homework and we could have an actual conversation in class...”

When you discover that one class after another has so many people in a giant room watching a tenured professor far far in the distance, perhaps you could mention the debt part to the dean and ask if the class could be on video so you could spend your money on interactions that actually change your life.

The vast majority of email I get from college students is filled with disgust, disdain and frustration at how backwards the system is. Professors who neither read nor write blogs or current books in their field. Professors who rely on marketing textbooks that are advertising-based, despite the fact that virtually no professional marketers build their careers solely around advertising any longer. And most of all, about professors who treat new ideas or innovative ways of teaching with contempt.

“This is costing me a fortune, prof! Push us! Push yourself!”

ARE YOU FOLLOWING Richard Branson’s relentless quest for orbital human spaceflights for the public? His company, Virgin Galactic, got one step closer on Sunday with the successful completion of the first piloted free flight of SpaceShipTwo (named the VSS Enterprise). The spaceship was released from its mothership at an altitude of 45,000 ft and glided to a picture-perfect landing at the company’s Mojave Spaceport.

Over 340 Virgin Galactic astronauts have already reserved their sub-orbital flights at a ticket price of $200,000 each. The first SUB-orbital flights will overlap the Earth’s atmosphere at 70,000 feet, with only a short period of weightlessness.

When the price comes down, are you game?