I am having so much fun with new technologies. Really. It took me awhile to embrace digital photography, then again for me to be interested in cell phone cameras as the new Holga, and now for the next generation of the Polaroid. Honestly I cried every time Polaroid stopped production on one of their films and then when they ceased production all together of their instant films I wanted to lock myself in a closet and never come out. Polaroid is awesome in all of its’ horribleness.

I have an old land camera that was my mothers. She got it as a high school graduation gift, and I only recently used it for the first time. I found some old packs of Polaroid on Ebay, it said they had been discovered in the back of a church refrigerator, what better place to keep them relatively usable right? Well, whatever the truth may be, except for the initial bit of tape being decrepit and losing that first frame, the rolls of film worked well, and I had a blast using all 5 rolls and taking all 40ish pictures. (not counting mis-fires and my mis-handlings).

While Christmas shopping this year I happened upon a little pink Polaroid box, all shiny and new, packaged in the best plastic and priced to sell at a mere $89.98 at Sam’s Club. I thought it must be a new camera but upon closer inspection, found out it was a little instant printer. Don’t get me wrong, I like big prints. My current show features 20×30 framed prints. Big, I like. Big. But this little tiny pocket-sized printer was intriguing. The prints coming out of it are 2×3 inches, so petite! It had me reminiscing my first medium format camera, a Bush Pressman 2 1/4 x 3 1/4 sheet-film camera my dad had used in college working for the school paper. Back to the days of WeeGee.
I happen to love to shoot medium format, and when I got my Mamiya RZ 6×7 I was an addict. My favorite thing to shoot next to black and white, is color slide film. It is just so pretty in the larger format. Ahhh, but I digress.

Here is this little tiny printer, a polaroid instant printer at heart, 10 pictures to a pack of paper, portable and fun. I loved it the moment I saw it. The best thing about it, well I don’t know if it is the best but one of the fun things about it is its’ bluetooth capability. I paired it with my new LG Lotus and printed a few quick pictures. Fun, cute, prints! There is something I never expected from my cell phone camera! But there is more, USB capable it works with pictbridge so I can hook up my big Canons to it as well! Now I have to do some more experimenting with this little thing to know its’ full potential, but in reality, polaroid instant prints have always been a benchmark in professional photography. Even though it is unusable now I have a polaroid back for my Mamiya, because film is expensive and re-shoots are often impossible. Yes for many shoots in the digital age, the computer would be ready at hand for any serious work, but this little printer is so tiny, and handy, I can see using it for many things. Especially for travel and sharing images with my subjects.

I could go on and on, and really I already have, but this new little toy. How fantastic! I am already hooked.

My Pink Zink was about $90 at Sam’s Club and they run upward from there, available at Amazon.com to Target, along with the media.

This black and white candid portrait of my daughter is one of those rare, elusive moments that make you feel lucky you had the camera out. Whenever you ask a young child to actually pose for a picture, there is a 50/50 chance you are going to get some sort of oddball response. But you have to keep at it, as you never know when lightning will strike. When taking photos of other families and kids, you have to put them into situations that allow them to be themselves. If you take yourself out of the equation, you are much more likely to get “the shot”. I certainly think I was able to here.

Merry Christmas / Happy Holidays to all. I have been seeing great pictures of holiday lights this season, and finally decided to try and take one of my own. The photo above is an HDR Exposure Blend (using Photomatix) of 7 exposures I took one morning. I also took some photos just using the ambient light and not doing the HDR thing. After reviewing these shots on the computer, I decided the white lights just aren’t very interesting. Normally we decorate the two large fir trees in front of our house with colored strings, but we opted not to this year. Rest assured, we will next year. That will give it some “life” I think. So instead, I will go out in search of other homes in our neighborhood to take pics of. I had better hurry, only a week to go before most people take their lights down.

Oh, and I should point out that the inspiration for this, besides the photos I linked to above, was a Strobist article about holiday light pictures. As is the norm with Strobist help, this article was wonderful for a rookie like me.

My daughter goes to an in-home preschool/ daycare with a few other kids here in Lakewood. My wife thought it would be cool for me to go over there and take some “class pictures” of them. So I took my new Homemade Softbox and went over. I think the pictures came out pretty well. But let me say this about groups of young kids (ages 3-4) - you have to have patience. When one would start to do something silly, the rest would start doing similar things and bedlam would ensue. It was all good fun though. They were excited to be in front of the camera and look nice for their parents. And thanks to Whit House Custom Color, I’ll have prints by the end of the week, in time for the holidays.

I did learn one thing though - I definitely need to get some sort of mobile backdrop system for portraits. Relying on surfaces on location just isn’t giving me the kind of background I want. Oh Santa…

This weekend I decided it was time to build the homemade softbox featured in my article of Do It Yourself Ligh Modifiers. With shopping list in hand, Natalie and I went to Michael’s to get everything we needed (and a craft for her to do at the same time).

Once we were at Michael’s, I had to make some substitutions. They want $35 for a piece of mat board, so I opted instead for a 3 pack of white poster board pieces. Also, the staff there had never heard of mylar drafting film. Wasn’t totally sure what to do, but as I was walking down the drafting/ needlepoint supply aisle, I spotted something called “plastic canvas”. I grabbed a couple sheets of varying sizes and hole densities and figured that would work.

Than I got into the construction phase. Cutting the foam was pretty straightforward (the authors tip about using a thin sheet of plywood for a cutting board was perfect). Then I started cutting the posterboard. In the authors revised directions, he indicates you should leave extra around the edges (on the trapezoidal pieces). I did this, but I am not sure what function that serves. As I was finalizing construction, These oversized pieces were difficult to work with and I still don’t see the point. Somehow I managed to get it all together though.

Since I wasn’t using the drafting mylar (I’ll check Hobby Lobby next time), I needed a different way of adhering the diffuser. I used 12 velcro squares and cut them all in half. I then mounted the hook pieces to the 1″ strips of foam on all the sides of the box. I glued two pieces of the plastic canvas together (hot glue is awesome) and trimmed it to fit the opening in the softbox. Next I mounted the loop parts of the velcro on the plastic canvas to match the locations on the softbox frame. Pressed it all in and voila - softbox done.

The photo above is one of the sample pictures I took. The photo at left is another. Since I was using the flash off camera with my Cactus remote trigger, I had to fiddle with the flash settings a few times. The photo at left is still overexposed, but a quick treatment in Lightroom makes it suitable, as you can see in the photo at right.

In the time since I made my original post, I think the author of the instructions for this softbox has made some revisions. I’d love to see more detail on why the trapezoids should be oversized, since it caused me problems. But overall, I am happy with the output from this box. I am actually going to be playing with it later today when I do “class photos” for my daughter’s small preschool class here in Lakewood. I’ll post up another time about how that shoot goes.

I was experimenting with different lighting and backdrops for a product photo (I am selling this train set on CraigsList). I used white foam core for the base and background. Lighting was off camera flash bounced up off the ceiling. Nothing special, just experimenting. Everyone should experiment once in a while. In the digital world, it’s only a write to the memory card.

A few months ago I took some photos of a very corporate restroom, thinking (for some crazy reason) that they might make good stock photos. I put them up on iStockphoto and pretty much forgot about them. In fact , over the last several weeks, I pretty much forgot about stock photography altogether. I have been travelling for work, trying to figure out how I want to do the real estate photography thing, taking senior pictures of my daughter, taking pictures of the Lakewood High School cheerleaders, and still trying to have a family life. Yep, pretty busy, just like you.

Then I came across a blog post about fotoLibra. I checked it out. I liked what I saw. I made some uploads and then wrote about it briefly yesterday. And in that writing, I made a mistake.

I said I hadn’t made any money off of my stock photo endeavors so far. After I wrote that, I checked in at iStockphoto (haven’t done that for a very long time). Sure enough, I have had some sales. 3 to be exact, garnering me total commissions of $3.92. For the bathroom photos. That’s right - the bathroom photos. Not the pretty picture of golf carts all lined up in the morning, not the pretty cactus or the corporate biz jet. The bathrooms.

It’s kind of funny really. Some friends of mine thought I was crazy taking a photo of a bathroom, much less a few of them. But you never really know what people want (which is why I like fotoLibra), but apparently I must have at least a little bit of an eye for it. To the tune of almost $4 right now. Woohoo. I might go buy a Chai at Starbucks. That’s only enough to pay for a small though.

Hopefully this is the start of something wonderful. Hopefully fotoLibra is more successful. I really want them to succeed. But as long as my photos are selling somewhere, I guess I am happy.

I have finally finalized the pictures for the Lakewood High School Spirit Squad (cheerleaders). The last step was to put the “squad” photos into a template with the name of the school, the year and “team” and some mascot logos.

It was during this process that some small details started to shine through. The biggest one that jumps out from the photo above is that not all of the girls were holding their arms the same way. The devil is always in the details. The unfortunate thing is I didn’t see it until it was too late. While I feel like I am doing some things well, clearly I have a lot to learn still.

Trying to determine where to host an online gallery is a pretty big deal. There are a plethora of choices, from software to host your own on your own website, to full fledged service offerings that will host all your images, maybe do some marketing for them, and offer a shopping cart system. It seems that every day a new one crops up, and one or two fold. It’s pretty difficult to keep up with them. On top of that, they all have different pricing, which factors into decisions as well.

So, what is an up and coming photographer to do? I have sat back for as long as I could and watched how other people built their sites and learned from them regarding what they did and didn’t like about certain sites. And then I decided to wait until I had to make a decision. For normal hosting of my photos, along with the community features, I really like Flickr. But Flickr doesn’t offer any ecommerce capabilities, and that site isn’t really geared towards sales at all.

Then I stumbled across Imagekind (via Flickr). They have an entry level offering that is free, so I put some pictures on it to see what happened. I linked to it from this site (”Prints For Sale“). I have 16 images there, and they have garnered 96 views, 3 comments, and 0 sales. Certainly I was hoping something would sell, but so far, nada.

Then I did the Lakewood High School cheerleader shoot last weekend, and I needed substantially more capacity, along with some other features. I took this as an opportunity to try out another service - Zenfolio. They have a two week free trial offer that gives you all of the features of the top level account, but limits you to 1GB of storage. There are some pro’s and con’s to the service, but all in all I am happy with it. So much so, that I have subscribed to it for a year. I am not 100% sure how I am going to market my prints on this site, but it definitely made it easy for me to keep the cheerleader pictures private for each girl. Additionally, I was commissioned earlier this week (at the last minute) to do a corporate headshot. I was able to quickly setup a “gallery” for the headshot proofs to go into. After the shoot, I uploaded the pics, my watermark was automatically applied, and the company was able to choose which image they wanted to buy. The bonus? That commission covered the cost of the Zenfolio site for the year. Now, anything I make off of print sales from the cheerleaders will be profit. Not too bad a deal at all.

I am aware that Smugmug is the heavy hitter in this industry, but for some reason I didn’t like what I saw there. I certainly have some issues with the Zenfolio people, but I have taken it up with them and it sounds like they are working on things. I’ll continue on there for the duration of my subscription, but I will also keep an eye out on the competition. If someone clearly does it better, at a similar price point, it would make sense to move. But if Zenfolio proves they can meet my needs, I’ll stay on, and likely become a strong advocate (for whatever that is worth). I work in a customer service type of industry too, and I know what my standards are. Let’s see if Zenfolio can keep up.

BTW - I am probably giving up on Imagekind for now. I’ll still keep the WordPress plugin for Imagekind up and running. I don’t know for sure if anyone is using it, but I suspect some are. Let me know if you do.

As we were driving into the Bear/ Sprague Lake area on Sunday, we drove alongside Mill Creek and I noticed that it had a significantly-sized channel with a lot of boulders in it. I filed it away in the back of my mind, thinking it warranted more inspection. I think Megan noticed it too.

After we wrapped up with all the shooting at Bear Lake and Sprague Lake, we started to head out of the park. It had rained pretty good, and the roads were pretty wet. As we crossed the bridge over Mill Creek, Megan and I agreed that we should at least check the site out. I was a bit concerned because of how much it had rained. The rocks looked pretty slick. We walked all the way from where we parked down to the bridge (where I took a photo of the underside of the bridge because of George Barr and his book. I still had reservations because of the wetness of the rock, but Megan wanted to do it and was confident she could if she went barefoot.

Throwing caution to the wind, we went out into the boulder field/ creek. I wouldn’t want to try this in May/ June when the runoff is raging through there, but at this time of the year the creek was pretty tame. I found what I thought was a good rock for Megan to pose on. I got a good number of shots of her on that rock. Some laughing, some serious, but all good I think. I decided to “think outside the box” a little and moved her off to one side of the frame. That resulted in the picture above. When she saw it in camera later, she was really excited. Didn’t catch what she thought of it full size on the screen. Guess I’ll have to dig into her myspace page - I am sure it is there if she liked it.

For me though, this image could be used to convey so many thoughts. I could easily see it being some type of album cover (or something along these lines at least), or an advertisement, or just an interpretive piece for the viewer to decide what it means. For some reason this image is very powerful to me. Maybe I am reading more into it since I took the image. Definitely possible. Doesn’t matter though, I really like it.