In the Railyard – new JPG story up

A couple of weekends ago I went wandering around the railyard one Saturday morning. Much fun.

I sorted a few pics out, and now they’re up on JPG. Swing by and take a look:

Photoshelter plug-in for Aperture

Great news for Photoshelter photographers who use Aperture (like me) – there’s now a Photoshelter plug-in for Aperture.I’ve just installed it and sent my first pics to Photoshelter Collection (although there’s also an option for Photoshelter Personal Archive users), and all went well.This will make life a lot more straightforward for a lot of us. Roll on the rights-managed worldwide poster campaign sale of one of my images!

The future for local camera stores

Thomas Hawk and Jason Burn have some harsh but fair things to say about local camera stores. Here’s Thomas:

Well, I’m bound to make a few enemies with this one, but I just finished reading Jason Burn’s post on a bad experience he had with his local camera retailer and have to agree that your local camera store is increasingly becoming a bad place to buy camera gear.

I often wonder about what the future holds for the camera stores in here Santa Fe. There are a lot of tourists and a lot of pro photographers in town (and lots more semi-pro and committed amateurs), and more than one camera store.You’d think competition and a local market with some high-end requirements might make the stores responsive and on their games. (more…)

Room with a view

It might not sound like much fun, but there’s a bunch of people ignoring the in-flight movie and taking photos out of the window of planes.

On our (delayed) way back from Chicago to Albuquerque a few weeks ago, I realised I had my camera and lenses at my feet, and gave it a go.

Here are a couple of the results, which I have to say I like, but I realised I just scratched the surface of this topic.

Alexis Gerard has a good introduction in JPG magazine, and there’s (of course) more than one Flickr group devoted to the subject.

You’ll no doubt have to do some post-processing to counter the haze and shooting through the greasy window (or take a more abstract approach instead), but you can really get some interesting images.

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“Show big to sell big” – Mpix printing comes through

I came across that pithy piece of advice the other day – the idea being that as a photographer, if you want to sell large prints as part of your portrait or wedding business, then you should only have large prints on display in your studio.

It’s not directly relevant to me (no studio, no portrait or wedding business), but I got the idea when I opened a flat box today from Mpix.

I’d had a bunch of shots printed at 12″ x 8″, and while that’s far from huge, it was the largest I’d seen most of these images.

Laid on the dining room table (helps that it’s white), they looked great.

And I could see some patterns and connections I’d not seen before between the different photos, even though I’d pored through them in deciding which ones to print up.

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Back from Vacation

Like every camera-toting tourist who just got home from their holiday, I’m keen to show you my pics.

We travelled to Ireland (Co. Clare, and Dublin), and Italy – back to Le Marche. I packed light(ish) – the Rebel XT, Canon 24-105mm L, Sigma 10-20mm, and the Canon 50mm f.1.8 for the low light stuff.

We were bringing the laptop already, at least partly as a DVD player to keep our daughter amused on the long flights, so I got to do some editing and reviewing while I was there, which was great.

I also packed a LaCie 160GB Little Disc portable drive for backup. It seems pretty flimsy, but it’s small and light, and did the job. It’s also pretty cheap.

Anyway, here’s the Flickr set of pics.