Palley: I’m doing it all myself, and sometimes I’d love to have somebody help me, because I’m getting all these requests when I’m on the road. I don’t really want to be in the middle of a fire negoti- ating with people about publishing rights. But it’s not a big enough part of my business right now. SEJournal: When the fire season comes to an end, what sort of work do you do in the off-season? Palley:A lot of the stuff I do isn’t pure journalism. I do com- mercial and advertising work to pay the bills. Especially in a place like Los Angeles, you can’t make a living as a freelance photogra- pher doing only journalism. From a business standpoint, it’s not possible. Unless you’re living out of your truck, it doesn’t work. So in the off-season, I do corporate PR for the energy industry, fos- sil fuels, oil, natural gas pipelines, trying to make things that you wouldn’t necessarily think are interesting appear more visual. It’s all location work outdoors. To be totally honest, a lot of times I enjoy that work more.
Fighting fire with fire, a member of the Big Bear Hotshots utilizes a drip torch to iignite unburned fuel during a firing operation at the 2015 Lake Fire on the San Bernardino National Forest.
Photo: © Stuart Palley SEJ News New Member Profiles Enhance Networking
SEJ members will find it easier to network with a new online profile system. It’s similar to social media: you can connect with other SEJ members (Connections tab — think Friends), share photos and photo albums, post your status and access a directory. Use the My Profile tab to change your password, configure pri- vacy settings and access messages from SEJ and invoices. When your renewal time comes around, you can click on an invoice in your profile and easily renew your dues.
Searching the new directory is easier and has more search op-
tions. Select the Directory Search tab and opt for Search SEJ Mem- bers to find an individual, or all members in, say, New York. Search by Group to find all Associate members or all the students. A note about privacy: only members can see information about other members. The only exception is the Freelance Directory (you have to opt in) — and we’ll get that up and running by Winter. Are you doing volunteer service for SEJ on a taskforce? You can keep all the communication here, with messages coming into your email. If you’re tired of searching through email for that mes- sage telling you the next conference call date, you can find com- mittee messages in your profile under the My Features tab. The site isn’t perfect yet; SEJ staffers are still ironing out the
There’s less drama, it’s better pay. And I realize I’m not going to be doing fire projects forever, because eventually I’ll probably have a family and a house and kids to send to college, so I want to be fi- nancially responsible in the long term. But I also don’t want to stop doing something that is very important to me personally and which people perhaps enjoy seeing. But it’s not going to last forever. SEJournal: When you stop doing this sort of fire coverage, do you have any other environmental interests that you might de- vote your cameras to in the same way? Palley: I’m very interested also in water issues. My masters’ project in grad school was on the Salton Sea, in southern California. It’s turning into a very slow unwinding ecological disaster. I’ll prob- ably return and work on it a little more. As I have with fire, I want to try to do it in a different way. I’m also very interested in light pollution. Doing these fires in remote places has shown me how much the urban interface sometimes interferes with our night skies, so I’m exploring that too.
wrinkles. Most of the trouble seems to be with logging in. If you have any difficulty — or any questions — email
sej@sej.org. Find your profile here:
SEJ.memberclicks.net You’ll need to log in. For now, it’s a separate log-in from
SEJ.org. (Hint: do the same log-in for both.) Then mouse-over the My Stuff tab and select My Profile. Happy networking!
14 SEJournal Fall 2016
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