Photographer for hire

If you like my photographic style, and would like to hire me for a photography session in or around München, drop me an email. Just don't expect me to be cheaper than a professional photographer - I don't want to underbid already hard-pressed people depending on this for a living. Also don't depend on me for anything hugely important, like big advertisement campaigns or really expensive weddings. I am, and for a while at least will stay, a proficient amateur. I have practised until I can get it right. Professionals have practiced until they can't get it wrong. With a professional, you will get a good result. With me, you might get a great result, or you might get a failure.

But if you like what you see, and want me to try it out on you or yours, I'm always up for challenges. I even do kids and animals well, much to my own surprise.

Crestock

As I was idly browsing through some photography sites, I saw mention of Crestock, a Scandinavian stock photography company. In terms of payout, it's about the same as iStockPhoto and Alamy, but it sounded like it was a nicer page -- which can count for something, as esp. Alamy's upload system is a major roadblock in getting my pictures up. So I signed up, picked the 10 photos I have sent to iStockPhoto, made sure the keywords, titles and captions in Lightroom were up to what I had at iStockPhoto, and uploaded them directly to Crestock from Lightroom using FTP. Rock!

On the upload page, I could go directly on to processing the uploaded photos. It gave me an overview of all the photos, showing titles, descriptions and keywords for each. I quickly noticed that I'd exported some keywords I shouldn't have, and that Danish characters (æ, ø, å) were mangled. Fortunately, it was one click to edit each photo, really fast to edit, and back to the overview immediately. Slick. It's going to be a problem with the Danish chars, but I've reported it and will cope for now.

The short of it is: If you have your keywords in order in Lightroom, uploading a bunch of pictures is one menu selection, one page load and three mouse clicks (exactly) away. That simply rocks. It leaves me to do the thing that I have to do, namely pick out the good pictures, develop them correctly, and assign keywords well. All things I have a good program for.

It'll be a while before I get feedback on my photos, they're apparently a bit overloaded, but I'll let you know how it goes.

Images on RedBubble, not on DeviantArt

I have been uploading a number of my older pictures on RedBubble. I am quite happy with how it works, upload is simple and fast, and they provide not only website creation tools, but also embedding of slideshow or semi-shops within your own website.

I am not uploading on DeviantArt, as I am less impressed by the overall quality of the pictures there, and I would have to pay $25 per year to be able to get more than about 10 % of the sales price. Given my sales so far, this would be money out of the window. If RedBubble gives some results, I may revisit other sites. Or just stick with them. I like them.

Storefronts

Signed up for at DeviantArt and RedBubble after an evening of researching the alternatives -- there are many, but there were too many issues with the rest. I am 1000words at RedBubble and LarsRaeder at DeviantArt. My main purpose with this is to have a place where it's easy for people to order prints of my photos. I don't expect them to advertise for me, but I don't want to roll my own web shop yet.

No pictures up there yet, but there will be soon.

Rejected

Just got rejected at iStockPhoto, where I applied by sending these three photos:







I'm not very surprised, in fact I'd have been more surprised had I passed the first time. I saw a post on their boards by somebody who'd been in the stock photography business for 30 years, yet had an 80% rejection rate with iStockPhoto. They're tough, much tougher than the more expensive Alamy. No wonder I haven't had a sale through Alamy yet.

On the bright side, they give pointers to very useful advice along with the rejection, which was on grounds of composition and subject matter rather than technical matters. I am aware that those are my weaker points, I have technical matters pretty well under control.

Ditching Karrigell

Karrigell is too complex for my needs. I'm going with mod_python for the web service backend and PHP/JavaScript for the frontend.

Going with PHP for the backend would make it easier to move to an external server that might not have Python, but starting with Python allows a quick start and giving some KPA-MySQL access code back.

The Publisher mod_python handler is excellent, exposes functions with their parameters. Extremely easy for web services. Combined with JSON for transfer of data, the web service side of it is pretty much taken care of.

The trick now is the right division of labor between PHP and Javascript. Unfortunately, there's not a lot of obvious tutorial for Prototype.

Setting up Karrigell according to http://karrigell.sourceforge.net/en/apache.htm (second version)

Moved autostart script to /usr/lib/cgi-bin

Enabled rewrite module.

Added handler for .cgi.

Still no worky:(

More postcards, and reuploads

Put out 12 more postcards in Vesterport 3 (the place with Cryos).

Uploaded the right-size images to the webpage, so none should now look too small.

Made two presets on Lightroom export, and noticed a "minimize metadata" button that's probably a good idea for the JPEGs.

Started passing out postcards last wednesday. Have now covered all obvious mail boxes in the industrial area south of us on the way to Bauhaus (10 postcards). Today did Høreteknik, Ældresagen and IF Erhvervscenter. No responses yet.

Making postcards

Made a new set of postcards today. In Dia, made a background layer with the print markings, and then one layer for each side. Exported them by hand to EPS (could have been done on the command line, but there were few enough I didn't bother). Concatenated all the EPS files and ran epstopdf on the result. Sent the PDF off to discountprint.dk - 378 for 50 of each of two postcards. Would have liked 100 of each, but that woulda been over 600, more than I'm willing to plonk down right now. If nobody bites on the first 50 postcards at all, then I guess the company sales idea is a flop, if somebody does bite I'll get money to get more.