Categories
How-Tos Other how-tos

fotomoto: prints and e-cards made easy (and 50% cheaper!)

Picture 3.pngUPDATE: February 2012 – I’ve long since disabled the Fotomoto plugin as part of general redesigning – it never generated a single penny anyway! Ah well.

A few photoblogs I visit, such as Daily Dose of Imagery and Chromasia, have recently added the Fotomoto toolbar to their front page and seeing as it’s pretty damn good, so have I. It’s currently free and requires nothing but plopping the Javascript into the HTML code for your photoblog installation. There’s also a little bit of CSS customisation code if you need to tweak it, which you probably will if you don’t want large blue underlined links spoiling your design!

Then you set the prices for every conceivable permutation of print, select which photos you don’t want to sell for any reason, and you’re done. Fotomoto take 15% of any sale, and you automatically get sent a cheque every time you accumulate over $200 in profit (although if you haven’t made that much you can still request an early payment). The toolbar also allows people to send e-cards of any image for free. Finally, it tracks what images have been bought as prints or sent as e-cards, which you can check out when you log into their site.

All in all, there doesn’t seem to be a downside really, as it’s a completely free service to sign up to with Fotomoto’s 15% commission only being taken when you actually make a sale. Hopefully it will stay that way – although there’s a slightly ambiguous line in the Quick Start documentation:

Thereʼs no subscription fee for using the beta version of Fotomoto. This means that adding Fotomoto to your site is free!

Will they start to charge a subscription fee once it’s out of beta?

The only other caveat is that they currently only accept US Dollars and the printing service they use is in North California. At present I’m not sure what the standard delivery charges are around the world* so that might discourage UK or EU customers – although they can always just get in touch directly and I can order from my UK printer.

Having said that, according to the Mint statistics for my site currently 26.45% of my visitors are from the US and 16.29% are from good old Blighty, so I suppose it makes financial sense to appeal to the largest market…

Anyway, to celebrate the incredible ease of buying a print I’m offering 50% off all prints for the next month – just use this code at the checkout: 0A0D5C

Enjoy!

  • UPDATE: I’ve just checked out the ordering process for myself and for a limited time Fotomoto are doing free delivery to the UK – so get yourself a bargain!
Categories
Editorial Photographic

how my gran won a photofriday

Nannan.JPGOccasionally I submit an entry to Photofriday – depends on the subject matter and if I have anything which is worthy! Last week the subject was ‘Grandmother’ so I submitted my favourite shot of my gran, Winnie. I shot it a few years ago with a borrowed Jessops flash, top-mounted (this was before the days of reading Strobist!), bounced off the wall behind me, then converted to B&W in Photoshop. I was just firing test shots off and missed a whole bunch of her pulling funny faces, but this is still a lovely shot of her so thank you to everyone that nominated! 🙂

Categories
Gear & gadget reviews How-Tos Photography how-tos Pictorial Reviews

hitting the street with the lumiquest softbox III

OWN_8822.JPG(UPDATE: February 2012; after I posted this I realised that some of the latter shots were a bit dark; the effect of the Softbox is visible but needed a bit more power, and it was underexposed overall. For many, many months, years in fact, I always meant to dig out the shots and lift them a bit in Photoshop but never got around to it.

So, I’ll just leave them the way they are and leave a note to myself as to why: it was very bright daylight and I wasn’t able to see the camera LCD clearly. I was gauging relative light ratios from the image but not looking at the histogram. If I had, I might have dialled in more power or opened the aperture a little.

Also, I’ve since invested in Pocketwizard Flex and Mini units which make outdoor flash triggering a breeze; Nikon CLS is very unreliable in strong daylight. Okay, on with the post.)

I got a LumiQuest Softbox III last week and wanted to put it to use straight away. Its main appeal to me is as a close in soft lighting source for portraits, useable handheld if necessary with no real awkwardness. I could use it at events to get awesome off-camera lit portraits anywhere, worlds away from the usual top-mounted flash look even when bouncing said flash off a ceiling. I could also use it as a soft fill against an umbrella key, or for moodier top lit shots, something I can’t quite do with the umbrella.

Basically, versatility and portability!

For a long time I’ve wanted to have the confidence to walk up to strangers and ask permission to shoot a portrait of them, totally for free, just because I think they look very photogenic. Missed lots of potential opportunities that way, so I decided to take the Softbox out for a walk along Putney Embankment last week. It was a sunny afternoon and I told myself the worst that could happen was people I asked said “No.” and that’s fine because there’s loads of other people to ask.

As it happens, everybody I asked said “Yes.”, but I was pretty selective, and I didn’t ask that many people in the end – the thing is I seemed to have chosen the time of day that a lot of mothers were out taking their babies and children for walks, and I didn’t want to bother them! And there were a lot of joggers out too and I thought leaping into their path with a huge camera and flash might put them off their pace.

I’d done some test shots first (since deleted, should have kept them to give you a laugh). I kept the SB-800 on 1/4 power, triggered via CLS from the D200, which was in manual at ISO 100, around f/4 on average (to give my auto-focus a bit of a chance), and whatever shutter speed got the background roughly one stop underexposed.

Continue reading “hitting the street with the lumiquest softbox III”
Categories
How-Tos Photography how-tos

doctor strobist (or how I learned to stop worrying and love the light)

Sliced Poster.JPGI first picked up a DSLR (or indeed any SLR) in 2005 when I bought my Nikon D70, and for the next 3 years flash lighting scared me witless. In a medium where light is everything, being unwilling and unable to get a grip on how to light with flash was sort of an embarrassment, to me at least, and so I embraced a style of photography that studiously avoided staged lighting – which I cunningly branded ‘urban observational photography’. So, er, basically cool stuff I spotted on the street, like this revolving billboard on the left.

And that’s fine, because I do genuinely love spotting little details in day to day life and photographing them and giving them whatever treatment I think they deserve in Photoshop, but still the spectre of lighting hung over me. I’d get asked to do portraits and have to try and wriggle out of it. Similarly I tried to avoid doing weddings because although I love reportage style shooting, those portraits are what a wedding photoshoot hangs on.

Not good! Keep reading to see how it all worked out in the end…

Continue reading “doctor strobist (or how I learned to stop worrying and love the light)”
Categories
Editorial Photographic

get over your fears

I’m always interested in reading about folk that are successful doing creative things that they love to do (as opposed to punching a well-paid but tedious, soul destroying time card just for the $$$) – a couple of my favourites are David Hobby’s Strobist site, Chase Jarvis’ blog and John Keatley’s blog (yes, they’re all photographers – funny that!).

Apart from the inspiration (if an idea looks good, nick it!) and the education these sites offer, it’s also incredibly reassuring and encouraging to read their personal thoughts. As with all creative success stories, it’s rare, if ever, that you see the work that failed – no photographer puts the blurry, underexposed, badly framed photos online, right? And so it’s easy to wade through the work of someone like Chase and think, “F***, this dude rocks, every frame is priceless, how am I ever going to compete?”.

The thing is that these blogs take you beyond their priceless perfect shots and tell you more about who they are and how they work, and the ones I stick with are the ones that give it you warts and all. Chase recently Facebooked and Twittered throughout a commercial shoot, giving everyone that read the site a very transparent look at the scheduling and logistics of the shoot. Everything from what they had for breakfast to how they packed the trucks, to when each team arrived on location, to how they lit it and set up the camera, to how he shot once everything was up. He even replied to questions Twittered at him, so long as it didn’t compromise the corporate secrecy of the shoot’s subject matter. There were lots of interesting points but the stand out “Burn this to memory” point for me was that he made sure he got the absolute basic “The Client Wants This Shot” image out of the way first, and then they really went to work trying anything that came to mind, and the client loved it.

Anyway, what I’m getting to is this: I just got linked to book cover artist Henry Sene Yee’s blog, mainly to read the “How To Design Book Covers” blurb in the sidebar, quoted below:

HOW DO YOU DESIGN A BOOK COVER?

First you start with a blank page, stare and think really hard, drink lots of coffee, take lots of breaks, fix the copier jam, update your Facebook page, get over the fears that this project is the one that will finally expose you as the hack that you are, and then just trust to do what you feel is right from what you’ve read, present your ideas to find out how they live outside of your head, listen to feedback, try to leave work at a decent hour, have a life, floss, get enough sleep, have a good breakfast and come back the next day to redo it all over again. It’s that simple and fun. And if it isn’t, then get another blank page and start all over again.

There’s one phrase that stands out, for me. I see it all over the place. Chase Jarvis has used it, as has David Hobby on numerous occasions. It’s the phrase that gives me the most encouragement because it’s the phrase I say to myself before practically every single job:

this project is the one that will finally expose you as the hack that you are

Get over your fears! 🙂

With that in mind I got over some of my own personal fears this afternoon by going out on the street to literally walk up to total strangers and ask if I could take their picture using my new Lumiquest Softbox III.

I was terrified. I fear rejection!

Guess what percentage turned me down?

😉