Time marches on

There's a little amphitheater behind the music building at Mills College. If you look at the work of Imogen Cunningham you'll see it occasionally (see this one as an example).

This is just from my little point and shoot. They're not really using it now - it's pretty messy but nothing a pressure washer couldn't fix. But the thing that amuses me? The safety rail. I wonder when they added it and if it was in response to somebody actually slipping or if they were just being paranoid. It's not a very strong looking rail, and I'm guessing most people don't use the stairs much anyway. They've also painted that wall in the front (not pictured in my shot) bright white and it looks kind of strange versus the concrete - you don't really get the same effect in the wider angle shots.

In other news, I have three model shoots scheduled in March. I had four but it's looking like I'm going to have to reschedule one to April. Unfortunately the one that was rescheduled as the first one so it will be a couple of weeks. Which is also probably when I'll get the test copy of my book and if the quality is fine I'll do things like post the cover and pricing and so forth.

More on the book

Well, that was painless. Blurb's software for assembling a book is really very user friendly, especially for this kind of book where you're mostly swapping pages around. I actually did the whole thing in one session with a baby in my lap, although the big monitor helps. One bit of good news is they can print everything flush to the page without borders, so the image size will be a tiny bit larger even though the pages are a bit smaller than Lulu.

So now we wait. I get a copy (which will take a while - they have to print it and send it UPS ground from Lord knows where). I decide if the quality's impressive enough versus Lulu to justify the 50% price increase (sigh) and if I need to make any little tweaks. I may need to reorder another test book if I make enough changes that I feel nervous, but otherwise I just mark it as public and roll with it.

These aren't a big money maker compared to the prints, but they're fun, and people give them as gifts so in some ways they're kind of a permanent advertisement (put the URL in the book!).

Craigslist Find

I got this on craigslist - red Weber kettle, old style wood handle, three vents on the bottom instead of the modern "one touch" system with a big handle. As far as I can tell it was made from 1976-1978. That's when I was 6-8 years old, so I like to think of it as the charcoal grill we would have had if my family had some common sense. (I have happy memories of outdoor cooking but also of lots of problems with the cheap cooker and almost non-functional electric charcoal starter. With one of these and a chimney starter there would have been a lot less cursing.)

Cost? $15. I had to do a little sanding and put some tung oil on the handle to make it look nice and protect it, and I removed a little light surface rust here and there, and I went ahead and replaced a couple of key parts like the grills. Luckily Weber hasn't changed their grill dimensions since then so you can just pick that sort of thing up at the local hardware store... that's a sign of a great product, by the way - 35 years later and you can still get parts for it.

Book progress

So I went through the 47 shoots I identified earlier and came up with 86 shots, which is more than I want because I want to keep it under 80 pages and you lose some pages to title pages and such (although two will be front and back cover shots). This isn't really a problem because some will naturally drop out when I start caring about what order they go in. It's basically an exercise in pairing up pictures - compare and contrast - maybe two pictures of the same model that are interesting, or the same lighting, or two different models in the same location, or similar poses, or similar moods, or very different moods... you get the idea. And it seems like there's always something that doesn't quite fit. So with any luck maybe some will just drop out.

The next steps are to figure out exactly what dimensions I need, if I'm going to use their software to assemble everything or use a word processing program and generate a .pdf, and then just sit down and do it. That last bit usually takes a while if you're not just throwing everything together at random.

I'll probably also try some cover mockups with a fake title. Finding a cover is always challenging - you need not only a strong image and one that sums up the book but one with a lot of empty space where you can put text! So even if I can't make the final version sometimes it's useful to make some mockups so I at least know what image I'm using so I won't use that in the book itself.

Book update

So I started item #3 (these don't all necessarily have to be done in order) - checking into Blurb. Here's what I found.

1. With the options I need, the Blurb books are slightly smaller (8x10 versus 8.5x11) and cost about 50% more. This is supposed to be a low cost alternative to prints so cost matters!
2. Opinions on print quality vary. Some people seem to think one's better, some the other. But I do notice the more recent ones are impressed - they may have had a major quality upgrade at some point.
3. The way their pricing works it's not per page, it's within a range, so if I go with them I might as well go with 75ish images to keep on the high end of a tier.
4. It's not that much more expensive to print a 80 page book versus a 20 page one so there's no point in doing a pre-test, I might as well upload all the images.
5. They apparently have some nice formatting software which might be easier than doing a PDF.

So I think I'm going to go with that route in mind - reformatting the images to Lulu's spec and changing printers won't be difficult if the quality isn't high enough to justify the price.

Book notes

So here's my to do list:
1. Identify shoots since last book - done - 47 that are suitable
2. Identify 1-2 pictures from each shoot, including keeping an eye out for good cover shots
3. I've traditionally used Lulu - check Blurb since they seem to be popular now. What's their pricing, are there any format gotchas, and see if it's worth sending in a minimal short form book just to test quality. (Depending on minimum page lengths and stuff)
4. Make final decision on printer
5. Get their templates and per page dimensions
6. Format everything to that spec
7. Come up with a !@#$ title (always the hard part)
8. Format covers to their spec
9. Assemble book, including title page, choosing picture order. Identify any text that needs to be written.
10. Write the text, format that.
11. Send to printer for test run.
12. If it looks good make it available for sale

I'm not sure how long it's going to take given my other commitments, but I have three shoots scheduled but they're all in the last two weeks of March so let's see how far I can get before then.

Little updates

The posters thing didn't perform and I've removed it. There was interest but somehow no actual sales. But hey, now I know, and oddly enough sales of some of the high end stuff have been really strong. It's interesting - I used to sell mostly 8x10s but now it's mostly 11x14s and 16x20s.

I would like to have some lower cost option, partially because it lets people try out my customer service (excellent!) without risking lots of cash, so I'll probably step up plans to whip together a book. Same sort of thing I've done in the past, for those who have one, 60ish pages, and I skipped a year so I have two years to choose from so I'll probably do anywhere from 0-2 pictures per shoot. There's not a lot of text so it's pretty straightforward if you already have the pictures - basically just a question of choosing and assembling everything, then I'll probably try a different print on demand company just to compare, and then go ahead with whichever one impresses me the most. I'll try to get those first steps started because it does take a while to get a sample back.

I have some cool shoots scheduled, but none as soon as I'd like, sorry about that. But if even some of what I have planned works out I think folks will be pleased.

Funny Google result

I'm getting a little extra traffic for the search term "tiger rant" where apparently I was placing pretty high but I'm the first result on the second page. Why? This post where I was irritated at the San Francisco Zoo who seems to think it's OK if the tigers get out and eat people as long as they're unpleasant people. 'cause, you know, tigers always stop at one.

Somehow I suspect that's not what they're looking for, but such is life on the Internet.

I think I'm in love

Little updates

My experiment selling posters is ongoing. The results so far have been underwhelming to say the least, but I said I'd give it until March 1st so if you want to get one now's the time. I really don't mind trying things and having them fail but I'm not going to leave the site cluttered up with a bunch of options that nobody wants - I already offer way too many and it confuses people (the major effect so far of offering posters is now I'm getting questions from people verifying before purchase that the lab prints are regular photographs and not press-printed posters - something they were never concerned about before).

Obviously I haven't posted any new work in a while. Sorry about that - if I realized we'd have the kind of unsettled often raining weather we've been having this season I would have been more aggressive about getting some studio shoots scheduled. I'll see what I can do to jumpstart that a bit - the good news is that with my new computer gear and workflow I can get sets up very fast. If you're tired of swinging by and not seeing anything new I suggest poking through the archive section if you haven't already - I'm about due for another purge.

Normally I'd include a paragraph about how nice it's been to watch Olympic curling but our men's team in particular... ugh, I don't even want to think about it.

20 years of Photoshop

Yep, version 1.0 of Photoshop came out 20 years ago. Obviously it was originally designed for scanned film and drawing and such and not digital cameras. It's almost synonymous with "retouching" at this point although the program does much more. I use it, although I spend much more time in its sister product, Lightroom, which was built from the ground up for photography and is much faster and workflow oriented.

I almost worked on Photoshop as a programmer. Back in the mid 90s... I think it was 1995 actually... I was working on developing test tools for screen savers at a company called Berkeley Systems (if "flying toasters" or "After Dark" rings a bell, that's them). Then I was put on the team for the next version of the product itself but the whole thing was falling apart and it seemed time to leave. I had two places I was looking at. One made pretty dull software - basically sat on top of a database and provided a nice interface and could track all kinds of process and workflow stuff. They mostly sold it to track trouble tickets but as an example it made a great bug tracker. And the other was Adobe, to work on Photoshop.

But the problem was, the Photoshop job wasn't for the main development team. It was working for the QA (Quality Assurance aka software test) team to instrument the product so they could track down bugs and crashes and memory leaks and such... because the software was already getting bloated in 1995. And the reason the QA department was making the hire was because the main developer group thought it unnecessary or was otherwise against it. So the job would have been half political - basically smoozing individual developers to devulge enough about the code to add hooks where necessary. And the other problem is it was a repeat in many ways of the job I'd just been promoted out of, and I wanted a business card that said "Software Engineer" and not "some oddball guy we tacked into the testing department because the real developers aren't being cooperative." It looked like a total train wreck and I didn't need two in a row.

So I took the more boring job, and I'm absolutely sure it was the right decision, but it would have been an interesting challenge, that's for sure.

Craigslist Kelp

Not a model wannabe this time, but a photographer wannabe.

So I have this extra light that I keep meaning to sell but haven't really put any energy into it. I should probably just list it on eBay but because of fees and just the pain of shipping it I've avoided it. I did however finally get my butt into gear and list it on craigslist.

Being an honest guy I mentioned this noisy fan and discounted the price $25 below what they're going for. And my God it brought out the bottom feeders. One person wrote this detailed table with the cost to ship it back to Alien Bees, fix it, and ship it back. Well, first off if the fan's going to bug you, and you want a totally new one... buy a totally new one. Especially since they go for only about 10-20% lower than new so it's just not that much cheaper. I'm not sure why they go for so much but they do. But more interestingly - he just made up the numbers. The amount he quoted was about twice their standard service charge - which includes shipping back! And he was clearly lying because he said he checked with the company but the prices are very clearly stated on their website.

Another guy said, well, the price for a new one is such-and-such and argued down from there. The thing is - he started with a price about 10% lower than they go for on the companies website (which is the only place you can get them - there are no dealers), left out shipping, rounded a couple of times (dropping $9 at one point), and made it look like I was asking some crazy price. If I were math challenged and didn't know what the actual price is I might have believed him. It was very convincing... except that none of the numbers actually added up.

I'm in no rush so I'm just ignoring the lowball offers, and actually it's been kind of fun reading them, but it amazes me that people spend the time to justify what's basically a crazy number, hoping that the person selling hasn't spent 5 minutes searching completed items on eBay to see what they're selling for.

Last time I sold one of these it went in a few hours, and it's too early to tell if I'll get some good response. (If not clearly I need to open it and see what the fan's rubbing against and bend something because people are fixating on it). I wonder if it's real photographers who are trying to save money, or if it's people who know how much they go for on eBay and they're hoping to lowball people on craigslist and flip them? I bet it's flippers because it's just too devious otherwise.

Update: Sure enough, the very next day somebody wrote to me in the morning, we hashed out some details and he dropped by the local coffee place where I meet models on his way home from work. I brought my Vagabond unit which lets you run studio lights anywhere, showed him it works, got cash, and we went. No muss, no fuss.

He's in a similar circumstance to when I started - he's a photographer but hasn't done studio stuff and wants something to learn on. It'll serve him great for that and I also used it for the first couple of years of professional work as well until I had enough lights that I didn't need it. Nice to know it's going to a good home.

The cool thing about Alien Bees is that they really do hold their value. Because of the fan I sold it at the low end of the range, but it was still only about $50 less than new. So it cost me $10/year for that light...

Anybody want a poster?

I'm trying an experiment - offering a couple of posters for sale.

Happy birthday

Happy birthday to me,
Happy birthday to me,
I just turned forty,
Oh shit.

Want to cheer me up? Buy some prints. Here's an incentive - for the next 24 hours I'll include a free signed 8x10 of my choice with your order (it will be something I have on hand - I always have some extra prints around because of minimum orders at the lab).