I'm the first to admit that I haven't really done a lot of black & white photography, just a few images here and there for weddings and portraits, just barely enough to know that it is a whole new world that requires more than just desaturating an image! So after seeing so many black & white landscapes on Moose Peterson's blog I thought it was time to have a go for myself.
Here's a side by side comparison of a few photos from a recent hike up Mt Feathertop, let me know what which images you prefer and why. You may want to click through to see the larger image.
Mountain Ash vertical panorama
Fire ravaged clearing
Resilient snow gum
There's more photos from the trip (including more B&W images) in my Mt Feathertop flickr set and some of the ones above are already up on Redbubble.
Photographer Robert Benson likes to have the right tool for the job, and, if it doesn't exist at a reasonable price, he heads for the garage. A couple of years ago he came up with a long range radio (literally) trigger when he found pocket wizards wouldn't give him the range he needed and now he's engineered (and posted for sale) a wireless DSLR external monitor. It has been made using off the shelf products and will work with any DSLR that has 3.5mm miniphone jack for A/V or video out. It is based around a 7" or 10" portable, battery powered monitor will display whatever is on the camera LCD be it video, live view or reviewing photos. Pretty cool stuff, check it out on his blog or view the video below.
I picked this one up from @DSLRinformer on twitter. Litepanels (who produce LED video lights) have just released a LED light panel with strobe function at NAB 2010!! No idea on the flash specs but it's a cool concept. Check out the NAB video here.
Adobe has been showing off some pretty nice new image processing software recently, with a new beta version of Lightroom 3 and a sneak preview of Photoshop CS5!
I've just downloaded the beta 2 version of Lightroom 3 and will hopefully have a look soon but the items of most interest are the tethered shooting and the new improved noise reduction feature. I hope they are as good as they say. More LR3 info here, here and here (and many other places).
Adobe is really plugging a new feature of CS5 called "Content-Aware Fill" which analyses the background image and provides kinda of intelligent fill when using things like the heal tool and as an option when something is deleted. It can also be used to fill in the surrounds of an image such as a panorama, looks pretty useful and will make touching up images MUCH faster. There's a great preview video here.
Just saw this article about a new type of QuantumFilm image sensor by Invisageinc that could replace CMOS!! It looks pretty amazing and will apparently be in cell/mobile phone camera by the end of the year!
I've been doing a lot of research and thinking (and a little action) into the best way to try and sell some if my photos. While I've done some event photography and shot some weddings, my real passion creating amazing landscape, nature and still life prints... so I figure I should follow it. This article is basically some rambling and thinking out loud, hopefully it will give you some ideas about directions to go in photography or maybe you can leave some comments giving me some direction. Anyway here it goes...
Right now I have many of my 'art' photos for sale on Redbubble, I also have them displayed on my web site with links to my bubblesite where appropriate. I also use my web site to sell photos from events I've shot, so I could use this option to sell my art photos as well. I really like Redbubble because I don't have to do anything when someone orders a photo. I don't like Redbubble because the base price is high, the don't offer 'normal' prints and they only have a few products I really like.
There's also a printer in Brisbane called Brilliant prints who do excellent affordable canvas prints and have recently started doing block mounted photos prints which look great and are even more affordable (I have to two photos below block mounted on my wall). But the don't do framing, cards, calendars or 'normal' prints. I've often wondered about giving up on redbubble and just using these guys and maybe supplement it with another standard photo printer but it would be a lot of work to set-up (print sizes and cost on web site) and I'd have to do 'stuff' whenever an order came through. I'm still pondering this option if I could find a (singular) good printer and framer to work with.
Another option is that I've just joined Imagekind who do 'normal' prints, framing and canvas printing in a Redbubble type set-up with lots of size, paper type, mat and frame options. But they are US based and I don't want to have to point to both redbubble and these guys from my web site. Just to make things interesting I've got a Zazzle account that is somewhere inbetween Imagekind and CafePress (I also have an account with these guys but the 'free' account isn't much use to me) which I'm using to create posters, postcards and different calendar formats.
The other thing I've found is that people are more likely to buy a print or calendar if it is physically there in front of them, particularly for less-computer-savvy generations. This is hard, because it means you need to have up front $$ to buy the products and you need somewhere to display them. It is even more important if you are going to sell postcards, these are normally bough from a store, somewhere near when the photo would have been taken. So this involves doing more research into printers that have products you want at good prices which also involves buying in bulk to save $$ but first requiring you to spend more $$.
This means I now have images strewn all over the internet, three sales sites (four if you include my attempts with cafepress), one flickr site, facebook site, my web site, I have a blog (two actually), a twitter account, myspace account, a printer in Brisbane and are pondering getting calendars, prints, cards and/or postcards physically into various stores/galleries/cafe's. Which all adds up to one big mess.
So I hope you weren't expecting me to come to a conclusion about the best way to do photo sales coz I'm going to leave it there for now and keep thinking and working to, well, see what works. Let me know if you have any comments, thoughts or ideas. If you are in the same place as me, GOODLUCK!
Ever wondered what dung beetles have to do with photography, night vision and road safety? Check out this article for nature inspired pixle binning, HDR and image processing being used to try and help drivers see in the dark.
By day I'm a boring transport engineer, but by night I transform into a photographer/swing dancer/volleyballer/hiker/4wder/karateka/mountain biker/swimmer. I'm based in Melbourne, Australia and specialise in landscape and nature photography. I also shoot various social & sporting events and am hoping to find the time to improve my portrait and commercial product photography.
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