This is the first in a series of three articles titled “My Virtual Office.” Each part will go over in detail my opinions and experiences surrounding a handful of web-applications that I really can’t live without. This series is geared toward the self-employed freelance writer, photographer, and software consultant, but it is probably applicable to other small businesses as well.

For the past several years I have been using a growing number of web-applications to help run my small freelance business. These applications take care of quite a bit of work for me. They help me keep my accounting in order, they help me keep track of client relationships and even act as a value added service when working on projects in certain cases.

In this first part of this series I will cover one of the most important aspects of any small business: bookkeeping. If you don’t keep proper records of your business expenses you will have a hell of a time come tax season. What’s more is that without a good mechanism for invoicing your clients, getting paid becomes a real hassle.

I'm pretty excited about David Alan Harvey's new project called burn Magazine. Not only is the website really slick and smartly designed, there is some really great content on there as well. His promo video, which I believe premiered at this years LOOK3 festival, is a little polished for my taste, but it gets the point across. So, I'm eager to see where he goes with this site and what is to come. I'm also happy to see someone using Wordpress and SlideshowPro in a fairly basic but good looking manner.

Keep and eye on this one!

If there is one question I receive on a regular basis it's something like the following:

Dear Micah, I want to become a photojournalist, where do I start?

I figured that rather than trying to field everyone's emails one by one, I should write up my thoughts on the topic in a blog post. This is partly me being lazy, but I'll turn that laziness right around and call this post a "service to my community."

Before I begin I need to make a small disclaimer. I don't consider myself a professional photojournalist. I guess I used to call myself that, but I have since re-branded myself as just myself. Notice that my website just says "Micah Walter" and no longer has the "photojournalist" tag-line.

This has to do with a number of things that have happened to me over the past few years, but mostly because I am doing quite a few other things besides photojournalism.

It's video day today here at micahwalter.com! I have just uploaded the first in series of one-minute "Live Portraits." I am currently uploading them to flickr as they meet the "less than 90 seconds" rule, but I also have them on Vimeo.

So far there is just this one, but I made a special page for them over here. 

Briefly, these are shot on a Sony HV1-1VU HD cam in 24p mode ( might go back to regular for this ). I am still playing with what to do with them once they are done. So far I have just done some basic contrast enhancement in Adobe Premiere, but I am also curious how they would look in B+W.

With the recent announcement of the new iPhone 3GS I am really curious to see how this whole video blogging trend takes off. Will we see video-tweets? I haven't seen much in the way of video samples from the iPhone as of yet, but I hear it's pretty nice. I know, not 720p HD, but still, it's a phone!

Regardless of how good or bad the iPhone video quality will turn out to be, I am sure it will spawn a new community of video-bloggers. People will have this thing wherever they go, and probably some type of ability to upload video to Flickr.com and other photo/video sharing websites.