Last year I got a cheap store-brand flash. It's been serving me fairly well, but I had two problems with it: First, it could not rotate left-right, only up-down, second, it takes AA batteries rather than a high-quality LiIon battery. On the second part, my subjective impression was that the flash recharged a lot faster with alkaline batteries than with rechargables. My flash recharge was really slow with rechargables, much better with alkalines. However, this test very clearly shows something else. I'm wondering now if I just had really crappy/old rechargables, and will have to try new ones. However, it appears I'll have to deal with AAs no matter what flash I use, that's what they all take. In which case, I'll live with the lack of left-right rotate for a while longer.

"Three hapless fellers"

"Self portrait #2 (attempted Pusztai style): After"

It strikes me that my hair really does have a slight red tone to it.

"Christmas lights at Tivoli"

"Old growth"

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.

"Examining beauty"

"Self portrait #1 (attempted Pusztai style): Before"



"Broken"

"Center"

"Reed in the morning light"


"A tablefull of autumn"

I've spent some time sorting my keywords recently, after watching the fabulous Luminous Landscape video on organising. It's taken a couple weeks, but then I only have about 1400 keywords and a decent starting point on a structure.

Along the way, I tried doing plants according to the scientific hierarchy with kingdom, family, species, clade etc. It was fascinating work (for me at least), but when I got to "grass" and took a look at the pictures in question, it struck me: Do I really want every picture that just happens to have grass as the background to include Plantae, Angiosperms, Monocots, Commelinids, Poales, and Poaceae in its keywords? Not really. So I scratched that idea and made a much simpler structure - for instance, arctic wolf is now in wolf inside canine inside mammal, and that's it. It's a good lithmus test for hierarchies: Would I want these parent keywords along whenever I use this keyword?

I have a few keywords left over that I'm not sure what do do about, especially the almost 3000 pictures that I have actually managed to tag with Nature.

( Found a couple tricks on the way: )

I did another wedding photography session, this time for pay (though somewhat discounted since they are good friends of ours and I'm still new), and it came out absolutely beautiful. Even though I've been warned against wedding photography and children photography, the combination here was great.

I've also taught not one but two classes on Lightroom, and hope to do one again next spring.

Browsing through a photo series by Vlad Artazov (quite cute in its own right), I was struck by the effect when it halfway through changes from B&W to colour. The color images, even though they have nice colours, have less impact and seem harder to read. The story doesn't come through nearly as easily. Yet more proof that B&W is an important skill to learn.

I am now officially a wedding photographer. While no payment was involved (it was a wedding gift for a pair of very good friends of ours), I was the main photographer for them. The results were pretty good in my opinion (they will be put up here when and if the pair okays it). I would not be averse to doing it again for money, though I might want to rent an extra body for it.

Some things learned:

* Shoot for getting there at least an hour early, just to account for problems, getting lost etc. If possible, check out the place some days in advance if you don't know it well already.
* Have a large reflector. The small one I have will bounce light into a face, but not onto a full body.
* Have a good flash and plenty of backup batteries. I ran through one set of batteries. A good flash can be rotated as well as turned up and down, and recharges quickly (look into LiIon AA batteries, they might give enough power, NiMH batteries certainly don't)
* The lenses don't matter so much, but you gotta have a standard zoom (something like 24-150 mm equiv). A fast portrait prime is a good thing too.
* Learn to do a good fill flash for indoors.
* Look for different angles/framings. One of the more interesting shots was a silhouette kiss taken framed between two candles.
* If shooting outdoors, have something the bride can sit on. White dresses get really dirty really quickly.
* Avoid sunlight if possible. The black vs. white contrast is a killer.
* Consider the age of the inlaws before you ask the to sit down on their knees:)
* Talk, talk, talk. You pretty much can't talk enough during the photo session proper.
* If possible, get shots of everybody at the tables (if there's a formal dinner) and the seating arrangement. Then you can match up people and names afterwards.

These are the best results from the portrait photography class I took through local adult education organization FOF:

This idea for a photo project just occurred to me on the way to work:

I have long been annoyed at what architects were able to sell to cities as being great, innovative architecture, which then turns out to be ugly or boring or impractical or all of the above. That's actually one of the few things that have ever tempted me to get into politics, just to be able to be on a committee to choose designs and go "No! That's ugly! Go away!" when needed. However, it'd be a lot of bother to get elected and do all the other stuff just to have that pleasure on occasion.

Instead, I could dig out the original architect's impressions and put them up next to a photo -- from the same spot, with the same perspective -- of how it turned out in reality. Maybe do it as a triptych with the original drawing, a photo converted into drawing style, and a full photo. Since I can't pass a law to require all architects to live in the buildings they design*, this would be one way to put the spotlight on "architectural marketing".

* And for children's books authors to read their books to children every night:)

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.

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.

These two photo show the difference between using a reflector and not:

Without reflector:



With reflector:



It's more than just a little more light, it gives volume. Definitely a useful tool.

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.