While working in my archive, I felt like these two images went well together. So, I did a quick diptych in Adobe Lightroom.

On the left, 5,000 revelers take to San Diego’s Mission Bay during Floatopia. On the right, a fundraising dinner at a home on Country Club Drive in La Jolla.

Maria Ayala and her daughters squeezed a second shoot in with San Diego photographer John Salgado during Help-Portrait, Dec. 4, 2010.

Recent months have seen a ramping up of my writing activities, something I’m happy to see joining my photos in various outlets, or even standing on its own. I’ve been both a regular blogger for the San Diego Union-Tribune’s Sketchbook arts blog and written about Help-Portrait for VoiceofSanDiego.org’s Behind the Scene arts blog. I also recently wrote and photographed a news article for the La Jolla Light about that community’s latest mural.

What’s cool about my series for the Union-Tribune is that each week I ask a local photographer a few questions about their work, and in every instance they’ve provided thoughtful answers that have increased my knowledge of the medium.

It’s a great exercise, so I suggest you give it a try. All you need is a blog — and it doesn’t even have to be your own. Worried your favorite photographer won’t think it’s worthwhile? Make a deal with them. Ask them to post their answers for you on their own blog if you don’t have one.

I ask questions that speak to my own curiosity — ones that I would like answered even if I wasn’t sharing these photographers’ words with anyone else. It seems to have worked out so far. Here’s one of my favorite pieces, with San Diego photographer Noah Doely, who works with glass plate photography.

Election center in San Diego was a banquet hall full of jockeying constituents clustered around their champions.

Politicians are interesting enough, but the people that believe in them garnered most of my attention.

Every time a video camera turned on for an interview, the supporter’s signs would come up and form a wall of endorsement, even if their candidate wasn’t the one talking on screen. And lost elections didn’t sway supporters from holding fast, keeping their signs at the ready.

See a bunch more photos here.

Washington-based artist Dale Chihuly showed up at Luis Kahn’s Salk Institue in La Jolla for a short photo op with his latest exhibit of glass sculpture.

Revelers enjoy the Floatopia event in Mission Bay near Fanuel Street Park in San Diego, March 20, 2010. Roughly 5,000 people took to the water to skirt an alcohol ban on San Diego's beaches.

Like tan, overdeveloped leafcutter ants carrying inflatable rafts ten times their size, several thousand students and twenty-somethings swarmed Mission Bay on the first day of spring for a water party known as Floatopia. Revelers set themselves adrift on buoyant objects running the gamut from large inflatable castle to overnight twin mattress in an effort to spend spring break appropriately inebriated. Floatopia took its name from a similar event in Santa Barbara, and appeared in San Diego after a loophole was discovered in a recent alcohol ban that covered San Diego Beaches, but not the water.

Ultimately no one drowned, though police and lifeguards were kept busy issuing citations and keeping everyone safe.

Floatopia had over 10,000 confirmed guests on its Facebook event page, though the number of revelers in attendance was closer to 5,000. The page summed it up best, as always, in all capitals:

“GET DRUNK!

GET FU**ED

HAVE FUN

BE REPONSIBLE

SEE YOU THERE!!!!!!!!!!”

Kasey Connors from Escondido enjoys Floatopia in Mission Bay near Fanuel Street Park in San Diego, March 20, 2010.

A reveler carries a raft, the bottom of which tore open during Floatopia.

See more images from Floatopia – Images by Will Parson

One roll through this cheap plastic camera yields twelve photos. Of those twelve, which I took while quickly walking up and down the boardwalk in Pacific Beach at sunset, here are eight nine I’m willing to reveal.

This weekend I traveled to East County San Diego, where distance from the coastline starts to manifest itself in a way that’s consistent with many areas in California – with a populace that’s more rural and more conservative. Several hundred people gathered at a well-kept public park in El Cajon to voice their dissatisfaction with taxes and the government that collects them.

I tried to see past the signs and star-spangled denim, and found a group of humble folks who were just plain mad. Mad, and tired of a government they feel ignores them to such a degree that some of those same people decide to dress as revolutionaries to seal the commonalities with the British-suffering colonial America.

In any case, I ended up feeling drawn to these people, not just because of my own conservative upbringing, but as I’m always drawn to people who feel strongly and earnestly about an issue.

Speakers included congressional candidates, California gubernatorial candidates and 52nd District Congressman Duncan Hunter, whose brief speech seemed mild in comparison to the other speakers. Several even happened to express hatred for the same endangered fish.

Lashing out at all my University of California, San Diego writing professors (and journalists worldwide) lamenting the decline of the paid writer, I had shunned financial independence and turned to the Web. I wanted to survive on freelancing, even if it meant only eating rice and hot sauce and creating a permanent ass imprint on my couch.

Little did I know that I was well on my way to become an online sweatshop worker.

I had joined what Jay Rosen, professor of journalism at NYU, and other critics have been calling “content farms,” such as emerging Web behemoth Demand Media, and this may be the future of the paid writer. We don’t have to like it, but content writing is being outsourced to the poor and the desperate.

Off to Work We Go

In early November, I signed up for Demand Studios, the factory of parent Demand Media, which pays between $7.50 and $20 per article and provides a ready-made list of titles. In the month of November, I made $407.50 writing articles like “African Restaurants in San Diego,” “How to Identify Inedible Plants in Oregon,” and “How to Find a Wife in Bulgaria.” In December, I wrote about drug tests, checking accounts, flight regulations and kilts. In January, I narrowed my focus to hotels and restaurants, scouring obscure Web pages, reading hundreds of reviews and wandering the streets of distant cities using Google maps.

I branched out in January as well. I signed up for Odesk and Freelancer.com, which connect freelancers to clients that pay various rates, usually about $3 for every 400-500 word article — often less. One client was asking for 100 articles on Christmas traditions worldwide and the average bid was between $200 and $300. The best paying job was for a photographic step-by-step Kama Sutra. They wanted 350-400 shots of an attractive couple and were willing to pay up to $3,000, but I didn’t know anyone willing to model.

I was accepted at Suite 101 and Life 123, where providers are paid based on readership and ad revenue, but promoting my articles at social-networking sites like digg, stumbleupon, mixx, and reddit proved to be more work than actually writing an article. I was hired at WiseGeek, a site with set rates like Demand Studios, but I still haven’t managed to tackle the heavy research needed to write such technical titles as “What is an Isometric Contraction?” and “What is Follicular Unit Transplantation?” They want around 500 words and pay $10 an article. They pride themselves on assigning writers a “personal” editor.

Pay it Forward

Notes in my weekly planner show that I made roughly $3 per hour in the month of January, and after putting myself through hell trying to make a living, while keeping the standard of my work up (I would still never use any of my Demand Content as a writing sample), I am exhausted.

It’s not exactly working in an impersonal factory, as some critics have come to characterize these online content-providers; my couch is really nice. But there were times I was searching for references, came across a Demand Media piece, and cringed at the thought that some of my work might be equally as trite, or worse, poorly written. It’s easy to lose focus when you’re plugging out 10 unrelated pieces a day for less than $100, and the titles rush by on the conveyor belt of search-driven content.

After a month of eating rice and hot sauce and hardly finding time to distract myself by youtubing Lady Gaga videos, I was almost ready to try something more lucrative than writing, like selling crack to middle school kids — or worse — working in public relations.

I made $937 in January. Some of that I spent on food, less of it on whiskey. I am starting February — the shortest month — poorer than I was at the beginning of the year.

But I’m still looking for jobs, and while I dislike working in an online writing factory, where I can’t meet or even have dialogue with my “careful” editors or fellow writers, I don’t have a lot of other options.

I mean, to be honest, I don’t even know where to buy crack in San Diego, let alone where any of the middle school kids hang out.

(For a great profile of Demand media, check out Daniel Roth’s article in Wired magazine.)

To give you an idea of this particular street’s character, while wandering around, a man in a truck pulled over to ask me if I was taking photos of prostitutes. I thought the question was odd for a Sunday morning, but to be fair, I had indeed passed some a minute before.