You’ve had the nagging feelings, right? The money just isn’t rolling in the way you thought it would. The contest awards aren’t piling up. And, funny, you haven’t been sent to Vancouver to explore the Olympics in your signature style.

So is it time to put down the camera and fill out an application at Starbucks?

Peter Phun, a longtime shooter at the Riverside Press-Enterprise who now writes a very helpful photo blog, has made a list of 25 things that might indicate that it’s time to give up the dream and put on a tie.

1. You still can’t get a picture accepted by iStockphoto after maxing out your credit cards on gear.
2. Your contest entry in the “feline” category, captured during a thrilling photo safari on the plains of the Serengeti, loses out to a picture of a cat napping on a sofa.
3. When your studio is burglarized, all your photo gear is taken along with the picture frames and mattes — but your photos are mysteriously left behind.

The rest of the list is over here. (Link via Black Star Rising )

And also, if you’re looking for more help trying to figure out if you’re any good, maybe take a look at Chris Hester’s very funny set of Bad Photography over on Flickr. If your shots look like his, umm … yeah. Not so good. (That’s his shot above.)

It’s simple and quite glamorous, really:

“On the day of competition, he leaves his room at 6 a.m., armed with ski boots, skis, long underwear, hats, gloves, crampons and the critically important hand warmers. Carrying 40 pounds of camera equipment — and a computer — he takes a chair lift, then skis to a second chair lift that brings him farther up the mountain. From there, he either skis down to his shooting position or walks (very carefully) with crampons to the spot where he will settle in for a day of photographing in freezing temperatures.

“I take plenty of hand warmers and I tape them to the inside of my sweatshirt,” Mr. Mills says. “I put them around my kidneys, because all your blood goes around your kidneys, so it really helps to keep you warm when you’re basically stuck on the side of the mountain with your feet and ice crampons stuck in the ice. There’s not a lot of movement. You can’t just walk around because you’re basically at a 45-degree angle.”

Well, ok, not really so simple or so glamorous.

There’s a slideshow of Mills talking about how he does his thing at the NYTimes site over here.

(Photo by Associated Press photographer Fernando Vergara)

The video is a little like walking around in a dream state — things look real, but are quite definitely altered. Trippy, surreal, Dali-esqe and mesmerizing are other adjectives that come to mind.

I stumbled upon it via the Brian Auer’s Epic Edits blog, who came across it via John Nack of Adobe, which is to say that the video has been out there for awhile, but I don’t think it’s gotten much play. It should, though.

Mustardcuffins himself hasn’t offered up the secret sauce about how he made this (and rightfully so, in my view), but Digital Anthill has taken a shot at figuring out the methodology. You can take a look at that here.

Click on the picture to go to the World Press Photo site for a look at the other winners. An exhibition of the work will visit 45 countries and more than 100 cities during the year, with a confirmed U.S. date at the United Nations headquarters in New York for most of the month of July.

Who needs boring discussions about crosspoint autofocus or fps or lens choices? Cut to the chase:

I’m a Canon gangsta
and you’re a Nikon shorty
face the facts but hey look on the bright side
at least we’re not a Pentax!

And from Joey L’s very excellent blog, a note about his new rap career:

Yeah I can take pictures, but I can bust a rhyme too. I don’t even know how I should begin this blog… except… that… My alter ego is born. Okay, it’s true- I have started a gangster rap crew which refuses to rap about anything non photo-related. Actually, we can’t rap about anything else simply because we don’t know about anything else.

Yeah, polish my lens.

I’m not a sports nut, even though I was the sports editor of the Chronicle for 10 years (1987-1997). Maybe I was overly influenced by the line from Joseph Heller’s Catch 22: “”Like Olympic medals and tennis trophies, all they signified was that the owner had done something of no benefit to anyone more capably than everyone else.”

Whatever. I’ve always believed that the Bay Area has its sensibilities and priorities in order. While the Giants and 49ers have diehard loyalists, I don’t think fans in the region can generally be characterized as “rabid.” (I grew up outside New York and went to school in Boston, so I know from rabid.)

Still, every year when the Cal band came marching through the newsroom, I’d find to my own surprise that I’d get a lump in my throat. It all seemed wholesome and sweet and uncomplicated — the traditions, the fun and, around here at least, a feeling that yeah, go ahead and have a blast, because the game is great, and it’s worthy of respect and honor, but it’s not life or death. Your life won’t be changed in any significant way if your team wins or loses. And that’s exactly the way it should be.

Now, though, there’s the added poignancy of seeing a college football marching band in the context of tradition that’s in decline — the newspaper. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t believe that newspapers will go away. Well, maybe newspapers will go away, but not news operations, or news people. There will always be news, and there will always be demand for it. It’s just the delivery system that’s in a painful process of change.

Approximately 15,000 people lost their newspaper jobs in 2009 as a result of that change. And many lives have indeed changed in significant ways because of it. And there aren’t any marching bands making note of it. But the game will go on, the news game, no doubt about it.

And somehow it’s fitting that it happened in (and over) the Nevada desert.

Stick around for the ending, too.

Regarding the idea for the commercial, the blog PocketLint notes that

“The Space Chair is in fact virtually identical to a work by UK artist Simon Faithfull, as commissioned by the Arts Catalyst in 2004, called Escape Vehicle No.6 – a film which was recently shown at the BFI Southbank.

This time, the project was done with Toshiba HD cameras. Eight of them were strapped under a weather balloon, a chair was attached, and the whole thing floated 18 miles high. When the balloon eventually burst, the rig came crashing back to Earth — at 700 mph.

The first issue, produced by one-woman show Laura Bruno Miner, features guest design and photography from Steph Goralnick and pictures from Lomokev, aka Kevin Meredith, plus the work of 23 other people on the theme “Overseas and Overwhelmed.” (Check it out for yourself over here.)

In Steph’s very entertaining feature interview, she gives the lowdown on Phootcamp, NYC doings and the (upward) arc of her creative career, plus lots of other fun things. (I am proud to say I have one of Steph’s rings, gifted to me as we discussed (futile) attempts at keeping camera gear safe in the sandstorms of Burning Man.)

Pictory’s emphasis is on storytelling, in words and pictures. All photographs have detailed captions that let you know what’s going on, and where. And that’s one of the main requirements for submitting to Pictory — you have to write good captions.

The magazine is a beautifully presented collection of work that takes best advantage of the visual storytelling tools available in the digital age, while still acknowledging the power and importance of the written word.

Nice going, Laura. All that work is paying off.