What is it?
A pinewood derby is often confused with a soapbox race. There are vast differences. First off we will not be riding in our pinewood cars unless you happen to wight less than 5oz (the official race weight). So no hill is required and an event may be held in any space large enough to fit the amount of people attending. This is a first event so I expect less than a hundred participants. We have an eight lane track available to us for the race night and some highly experienced people to help us put on the derby.
You may have experience with a Pinewood derby
You may have even participated in a pinewood derby as a child and it was great fun watching our fathers compete by spending their nights carving, sanding drilling and painting our cars for the big day. Well our time has come to build our own cars and compete, if you are up for it. This time you get to build the car.
This is the point
I am helping organize and sponsor this event because I want to have a community and creative event for #phx. I expect greatness out of this community, after all we are the foundation for what is the greatest city ever.
Creatives, Families, Technical, Entrepreneur, All
Sign up, Build a car, Show up. It is that easy. Plus you get to have fun, eat, network and mingle with the best and the brightest Phoenix has to offer.
Organization
The finall things that need to be worked out are final registration, tshirt design, distribution of materials, event location. These things should all come together in the next two weeks and the launch date for full registration will be the 8th of Sept.
Love the idea and want to do more?
Twitter, blog and promote the event as much as you like. Events are more fun the more people that are there to participate so spread the word. 
Use the hashtag #phxpwd on twitter/plurk etc. Thanks to all that showed interest in this event from the beginning. There are already 25 people preregistered, lets see if we can make it even better, I know you can #phx.
Building a community through education and transparency.
A soft edit is usually the first step a photographer will take after a photo session. I like to wait a couple hours and return to the whole session and look over the images one by one. Being very particular about what is in and what is out. For me I usually eliminate about half the images on the first pass, so typical session with 60 to 100 images is now around 30. Since I prefer to converse with my subjects as I am photographing a lot of this is just what I call “closed eyes and open mouths.” If you have been following my experiment on flickr you may have noticed I like to include one of these bloopers in the set, partly for fun and partly to help the audience to understand the process of photographing a single subject.
Exceeding expectations:
I didn’t expect the response to soft edits that I’ve received, seriously my mom doesn’t even read my blog. So to have a community build up around such a simple idea really excites me. I notice both parties starting to learn and grow together and yet it remains accessible to experts and beginners. Since I started to treat my business with authenticity and transparency I’ve only seen positive results, now I don’t think I could ever go back.
Upcoming Special:
I’ve been toying around with the idea of having an avatar session special and I am very close to having all the details worked out. Stay tuned for more information.
Final thoughts:
I am always looking for ways to improve the experience. Any questions or suggestions for improvement are welcome in the comments below.
Three and a half months ago when I started my business in Phoenix, Arizona I think I was the only person in the world that believed how far I could spread my brand and my business as a photographer in such a short time. Of course I started by attending the Chamber meetings and in turn was invited to visit many other traditional networking meetings, which resulted in several coffee meeting pitches being directed my way. Luckily I ignored the sales pitches that would have me paying to get a higher google rank and stealthily avoided paying up to $3000/ year to network with exclusive groups and learn secret business advice. The Chamber has good intentions but I felt like the community aspect was missing most of the time. It was an old boys club mentality, and a heavy push marketing environment.
I intentionally focused locally because it was never my intent to build an empire. I knew from looking at the market in Phoenix I could easily compete at the highest level of photography. So I started to build my bridges not at all by traditional means. First thing I did was start this blog, then began building my network through linkedin and extensively using twitter and facebook to build bridges into the community. I started following the daily rants and raves of the Phoenix twitter community and attending events that were more social in nature and less network business card race inspired.
This is what I was looking for and how the Chamber had failed me, this was a group of people that understood the benefit in having a long conversation even if that person never bought or sold you anything. It became a requirement for me when meeting someone new to converse with them and not just hand them my card and grab theirs. I’d like to continue to differentiate between networking and bridge building because at some point the work I did became a process of resource sharing instead of resource guarding. Networking in most instances becomes an unmanageable list of resources that may buy or sell to you. A bridge for me refers to something local, immediatley useful and built to facilitate two way communication.
PodCampAZ is one of the first great sucesses for my business. I found out about PodCampAZ on twitter and became involved with the planning process by just showing up and offering my services where ever I could as a volunteer. At PodCampAZ I continue to work with some of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met and after a couple weeks found them starting to use me and share me as a resource within their communities. In social media it seems that when you give a little you really do get a lot back.
Results: And I’ve just begun.
- My self published book “Phoenix 20″ is going to be in the hands of the Mayor after my book signing.
- I have a partnership with Mighty Imaging to sell prints from their art store.
- I have about 100 local contacts that follow me on twitter and most of those I would consider friends and some of them are even clients now.
- Almost any event I attend lately someone knows my name before they meet me. (and they’ve already heard good things about my photography)
- I have a community of people who comment and learn about my business by following my recent work on flickr.
- I will have a billboard of my fine arts work on display on the 202 in Chandler in partnership with oibillboards.com by the end of this week.
Social media pays. Even my wife is starting to believe.
Do you have any similar experiences or did you find social media to be a waste of time? Feel free to share with my community in the comments below.
The day is set: Saturday, June 14th 7:30p.
Event listed here: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/710412
This is as much a celebration of an personal accomplishment as it is a gathering of community. Tyson Crosbie published “Phoenix 20″ on May 15th and will be having an open house signing party. All who enjoy art, culture and downtown #phx are welcome to attend.
Some wine and beer provided. BYO is encouraged.
A special thanks to those of you who ordered a book for the event. It is what I love so much about Phoenix, that if you show up and work your ass off the community will reward you. It only took two days to reach my goal for the party and orders just keep coming in. If you would like a copy of the book at the party you may order below until June 2nd and I will pay your shipping.
Don’t know what the fuss is all about? Read this new article in Phoenix Art Space.
Tomorrow is the online release of my Phoenix 20 series. I am excited and nervous. I am excited to have a new audience that will view the work, I am nervous that I don’t have a strong enough connection to my new audience to get any feedback about the work. I am also curious about how my new online network will aggregate, judge and ultimately ignore or promote the work. I would love to know why or why not.
In the art world if you recommend something to another person and that person doesn’t like it your taste is questioned. This is very bad because “good taste” is the ultimate art collectors, curators and academics commodity. Good luck trying to break into that very tight herd unless you can distract (controversy) or convince (politic) the leaders of the community to support you.
I have a feeling social media may have a more democratic answer to this problem, though I don’t believe it to be an intrinsically better system. I think it has the potential to do great things and level the playing field, which is one of the reasons I am in this space and trying new things. However it is important to remember that democracy in it’s purest form has the potential to be even less forgiving and may be a far more difficult herd to tame.
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