You might want to click on the image above to see it in a much larger resolution, so that you can better see the detail of the spiral galaxy.  I have every intention of doing the earth-in-eye image eventually, but for now I am adequately satisfied that this fulfills my self-imposed requirements for the completion of January 30th’s mildly overdue entry in my 52 project.  All done!

Next 52 project: “Colorization”

Click for a larger version

I am not normally a fan of either black-and-white or film grain effects since neither really apply in the digital world, but I have to admit there is something to be said for removing the color so that the viewer doesn’t get distracted from the subject matter.  I think “grainy B&W” is often used as an excuse for poor photographers to rescue a poor image, but on rare occasion it really does work as an artistic tool.

Now that I finally have “Money” all done I can proceed to catch up with the rest of my overdue 52 images.  The next one on the list is “eyes”.

No more!

With warmer weather coming I should be able to move about my largely-unheated house more freely, so I should be able to catch up on all the projects that have been falling along the wayside.  Thanks to some recent changes in my personal life I am also quite hopeful and pumped up with more energy than recent weeks, so with any luck this will be my last excuse for not progressing on the 52 project.  After all, I wouldn’t want to let down my massive throngs of internet followers (hi Farrar!). 

CLIK AND BAI MEE!!

I am simultaneously micro-reviewing SmugMug’s pro printing and sales service AND using the opportunity to try to sell some of my painfully cute kitten photos!

I needed a system for allowing clients to interact with my photographs; an ordering site where they can select the images they like, get them printed in a huge array of sizes, surfaces, materials and objects, and have the products shipped directly to them without the need for me to intervene and micromanage it. I found one that seems to work well for my level of technical requirements and professional quality, and at as competitive a price as I have seen so far: SmugMug. If you are a photographer who wants a system where people figure out their own print sizes, quantities, surfaces, crops, etc., someone else makes the prints, ships them out, bills the credit card and deals with all product returns or tech support, and all you do is upload some digital images and collect payment checks, then you need to check out SmugMug’s pro accounts.

For me, the ability to have my SmugMug ordering site “hidden” behind my site name was an absolute requirement for a print sales business like SmugMug. My print order URL is “prints.donstrattonphotography.com”, which is a subdomain pointer on my domain host that points to my area on SmugMug, so it all look more like it is “my website”. Most SmugMug pro users I have seen are not savvy enough to know how to do that on their own, so usually the URL is more like “joeblowphoto.smugmug.com”, which I feel detracts from the focus on MY branding. I also tweaked the SmugMug page layout until it more closely matched the look and feel of the rest of my web site, and I could have gone really nuts by integrating my CSS and defining ONE look and feel across both sites, but I chose to be semi-lazy and just used the basic controls available via the SmugMug account settings.  After setting some basic print prices and services I wanted to offer I had a gallery all ready to start taking on paying customers immediately.

You can check out the results on my Tonkinese cat photographs gallery.

–Don

During one of the only days where the sun came out I got this moody shot as a new storm front was blowing in from the left of the scene and obliterating the last of the afternoon sunshine on the right of the scene.  There was just enough light from the late afternoon sun to put a hint of color and detail in the storm clouds, while really setting off the big fluffy clouds from the sunny morning.  The bare trees provide a nice contrast against both extremes.  Once again I am satisfied that I acheived the subject goal.

Next week: “Money”

First up as you walk in, the Professional Photographers of America have a large info booth set up where they were handing out info pages extolling the “value of membership”, “certification pays”, and a couple other topics.  I admit I wasn’t sure I saw any reason to join them, but since they seem to have ties with insurance programs tailored to photographers I guess it won’t hurt me to check it out on the web.  I have in the past checked out their “certification” program, and I am sorry to say I see absolutely no merit in it what so ever.  Members or PPA staff are welcome to try to change my mind, but these days passing an exam doesn’t prove you are a photographer… photographs do.  Yes, any monkey with a digital SLR can call themselves a “pro”, but being a pro is not about passing an exam, it is about delivering the goods.  Conversely, I don’t think many of history’s best photographers would have passed the PPA exam, and I think we can all agree Ansel Adams was not too bad at snapping a pic now and then.

Along similar lines, the TN PPA had a small table in the back staffed with some friendly people who were aggressively stopping anyone with a TN city on their expo bagde.  I’m not a real big “joiner”, and extremely suspicious of photo industry organizations as I don’t typically see a practical use for them, but I signed up for their newsletter and took a pack of information from them which I will follow up on later.

Dury’s had a fairly large booth and appeared to be doing hand-over-fist business, to the point where it was pretty much impossible to get close enough to the booth to just peruse the gear and see what show specials they might have been running.  Still, I picked up one of their show catalogs, and it is always nice to see a local photo business doing well.  Maybe some time I will swing by their store and see what they have.

The first really worthwhile place to grab swag was the Kodak booth, where on one of the four sides they had sample packs of paper for inkjet printers.  Granted, I don’t even have a decent photo inkjet but a friend of mine does and he’ll enjoy the paper.    They also had a large bowl of Lifesavers mints out, and some old man came by and grabbed such an obscenely large fistful he couldn’t leave for a minute because he kept dropping them all over the counter.  Man, the things some people will do for a free piece of candy at a trade show.

onOne software (with the pretentious mixed case name) was demo’ing their stuff, and I stopped to watch the demo for Mask Pro 4. They showed a Pshop layering using a bridal shot with a crappy gray sky on one layer and a nice sunny cloudy sky on another layer, and used Mask Pro to intelligently select colors to keep and replace. I fully expected it to look like crap once the guy started painting into the bride’s transparent veil and around her hair, but it did an amazingly good job! Yes, it did eat a little of the detail, but for 30 seconds worth of work it was nothing short of miraculous. I already knew that their Genuine Fractals product was the way to go for upscaling images with the least objectionable results (definitely the tool to have when your original shot just doesn’t have enough pixels), but now I have something else to admire them for.

datacolor (yet another pretentious lowercase name) was showing off their goods, but all I was interested in was the SpyderCube, a tiny chunk of monochromatic plastic that may be the most ingenious color calibration tool since the invention of the Macbeth/Gretag/Xrite/whatever. This unassuming scrap of refined petroleum product is a cube the size of a child’s building block, painted with a black, gray and white color scheme, a shiny silver ball on top, a tripod mount on the bottom, and a hole drilled halfway into the body. This deceptively clever gizmo, dropped into your photographic scene, gives you a surprisingly large amount of information about color balance, black point, white clipping… look, if you don’t know what it is and you are a serious photographer do yourself a favor and go take a look. you will thank me for it. It was nice to see one in person… now I feel more confident about hacking one up in my workshop.

The most clever product I have never heard of comes from NRD, a company that specializes in electrostatic air solutions for the electronics fabrication and manufacturing industry. Yes, really. These guys suddenly realized one day that they were already making the ideal tool for cleaning the sensors on digital cameras, and crufted up a product to market to the photographic professional who was sick of jabbing dangerously abusive cleaning tools into their pricey DSLR. What it does is de-ionizes a stream of air blown from a standard Giotto rocket blower, so that the resulting puff actually causes the dust on your sensor to lose its electrostatic charge and blow cleanly away in the blast of compressed air. Friggin’ genius! It is called “Firefly”, it lists for $200, but with the secret handshake the rep gave me you can get it for $50 off; just go to the website and enter “TS25″ as the promo code. Better hurry, as I suspect that code will only last a short while after the end of the expo!

Which brings us to the last company: SmugMug.  They had the best swag, a cheap yet effective camera strap that is just begging to be haxx0r3d into an R-strap… so I grabbed 3 (sorry d00dz! I swear I’ll make it up to you!).  They were there with their parent company, bayphoto (gah, more pretentious lowercase/nospace!), showing off all the great photo papers and surfaces they offer.  I got into a lengthy discussion with one of their people, who despite claiming he was not the web guy was extremely well-informed (not many grunts know what a CNAME is) and showed me how their custom print sales system looked to end-users.  I had already decided that SmugMug was the way I wanted to go for print sales, so it was nice to get to confirm what I knew and pick up little value-added tidbits here and there.  For those who do not know, and in brief, SmugMug’s “pro” account will let you upload photos to them, set pricing above the actual costs, and allow you to have your customers choose which ones they want printed, in what size, and on what paper/surface.  SmugMug handles the credit card billing, shipping and all customer service issues like reshipping damaged photos or even correcting color/density/etc. until the customer is satisfied… something I found utterly unbelievable due to the potential for a fussy customer to abuse the system, but they assured me that they stand behind the work 100%.  Color me impressed.  I also got a promo code from them: use “PPA30″ to receive 30% off the signup fee (but only for about a week after the show)!  The pro account is regularly $150, so that is a hell of a deal!  I’m all over that!!  While I was there I grabbed some sample books of their papers, which will come in handy for future sales to my photography clients.  Good job, SmugMug, good job.  I look forward to working with you.

Here is one of the better shots from this week’s theme, “Cold”.

To start my project off I created a spreadsheet with the last Saturday of every week, for all of 2010.  I then created three columns for ideas; “easy”, “medium” and “hard”, and I started filling them in with all sorts of thematic ideas as they occured to me.  “Cold” was actually in the “medium” column, but I got a lucky break during the cold snap we had last week when some nice icicle structures started to form on my ancient wood porch in my backyard.  I experimented with some macro shots, but it actually looked a lot like a running stream of water taken at a high shutter speed so I decided to back up a bit an include a little more of the surroundings.  The crusty, mossy wood of my porch roof makes for an interesting contrast with the clean gray icicles, and the heavily out-of-focus background of the leafless trees in the yard adds a nice brown tone as a backdrop.  I shot at about f2.8 so that I would use the lens optics near the sweet spot of sharpness, while still allowing such a shallow depth-of-field that the foreground and background would get thrown into a nice soft haze.  All in all I am satisfied with it.

Next project, “Sky”.