Selling My Photos on Fine Art America
A friend of mine called me an “accomplished photographer”. Thanks Bill! While I disagree, his kind words encouraged me to finally look into the realistic prospect of selling my photos as artwork. He recommended I check out a site called Fine Art America over the more well-known Imagekind. He recommended Fine Art America for their superb marketing materials, and I can see what he was talking about.
Read MoreMy #PetalumaMade Photos
[singlepic id=525 w= h= float=right]Thanks again to all the sponsors of our #PetalumaMade Blogger excursion in the Petaluma Gap region of Sonoma wine country. And huge thanks to Kristi Trimmer and Cecilia Enriquez for putting the whole fiasco together! Without further ado, I’ll share my pictures. Reviews and thoughts of each winery will be forthcoming on Food Askew!
What do you think? Please leave feedback as I’m always trying to improve!
Read MoreSlightly Nautical Manicure
In my recent exploration of nail polishes I bought that I hadn’t yet used, I wanted to kill two birds with one stone on some Julep polishes I had hanging around. I held some swatches up beside each other and decided that I really liked Julep Margot, a metallic gold, and Julep Monaco, a cobalt blue labeled the Color of Spring 2014, together. I find that, of all the colors I wear, I don’t really wear bold blues that much, so I liked the idea of not going nuts with it and tempering the look with the soft gold.
Read MoreA Fun Weekend Doing Photography
By no means am I a professional photographer! But I have had a couple of opportunities to pretend I am one. The first was my sister-in-law’s wedding a few years ago. My husband’s aunt and I were able to get some very good shots of their wedding that everyone was very happy with. Usually I only take photographs for me, but this weekend I donated my equipment and services to the San Leandro Historical Railway Society, an organization my husband and I work with.
Periodically throughout the year, the Society holds Open House & Train Shows where they stay open for extended hours all weekend to allow the public to come check out the interior HO scale model railroad, the history museum, and our back yard G & O gauge Garden Railway display. It’s a chance, not only for the public to come enjoy, but also for the Society, which is a non-profit, to raise funds to pay our bills, maintain the model layouts, and continue to improve them. In addition, this year we’re also raising funds to repaint the 115-year-old Southern Pacific Depot that we call home. It has not been painting in a number of years, and the eves have not been painted in decades. One of the highest expenses is that it’s lead-based paint, so we actually have to hire professionals to come do lead abatement instead of just repainting ourselves. So, as a new fundraiser this weekend, I set up my laptop, camera, tripod, photo printer, and a big cardboard train for little ones to get their very own Engineer photo for just $5. We had a ton of fun (well, except for this sunburn I have on my neck and ear) and got some fun shots of some adorable little tykes. And some adults, for testing purposes (right… testing…)
I got the idea from taking my dog, Winston the Wonder Pug, to get his picture taken with Santa at Petsmart a couple years ago. For $10, I received an OKAY photo of him with a dude in a lackluster Santa suit in front of a crumpled up cardboard backdrop with Santa’s head cut off because the lady taking the picture was using a point-and-shoot camera without a tripod. $5 of the fee went to a pet adoption charity and I also received a fairly nice rubberized Christmas light frame for the picture, which I felt was at least worth the other $5, so I couldn’t feel to bad about the price. But it did get me to thinking about how much better I could do something similarly with my equipment for the Society (or any other cause).
It was an idea bouncing around in my head until this Christmas, when I found this cardboard train for a very reasonable price at Oriental Trading Company while looking at other train items they had for our Winter Open House. That’s when the gears went into overdrive. I researched the costs of the photo printer ink, photo paper, and nice photo folders to put the photo into. I’d been looking for an excuse to get a photo printer anyway, so I was willing to eat the cost on that to own the photo printer and just donate it’s service. We determined that there was a lot of potential “profit” (donation) to be made on this for not that much of an investment, so the project was approved.
Just within the last week I finally realized I could plug my Nikon D5000 DSLR directly into my laptop via USB (only took 4 years to figure it out) and purchased an inexpensive but invaluable Pixel Wired Remote Shutter Release Control so I could set up the perfect positioning for the tripod and camera and just hit the buttons while looking at the screen. I’m very adept with creating Actions in Photoshop, so I was able to color correct the images and then use my previously created image and action to add the fun little train and date image to each picture. Provided there were no technical complications (like the printer turning itself off), it only took about 5 minutes between taking the picture to having a printed photo in a nice folder to hand to the visitor.
The pictures will be visible sometime this week at SLHRS.org, but here’s one I can share of my niece Joy, who came down to explore! We were able to work out the kinks of the placement, the printing, and the general semantics, which means our photo opportunity will go much more smoothly at our next Open House in September. If you’re local to San Leandro, CA and interested in receiving updates, you can sign up for the San Leandro Historical Railway Society Newsletter. We’d love to have you come on down to the Depot!
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Fusion Dance Project 2014 Recital Photos
It’s just as easy to be proud of a “niece” as it is to be proud of a niece.
What do I mean? I’ve mentioned Joy before. Joy is the 3-year-old (nearly 4) daughter of one of my oldest and best friends Jennie. We’re so tight, that immediately without question when Joy was born, our group all became Aunties. I see Joy and Jennie FAR more than any of our actual nieces, which are all children of my husband’s siblings and live in different states. So I’d easily say that I’m closest to Joy at the moment. I know her mom is very proud of her, as am I by extension, for doing so well in her first-ever dance recital, the Circus Carnival Dance Show from Fusion Dance Project in Hayward, CA. Here’s Joy, on the far right.
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How well can a 3 year old do? Well, she didn’t clam up and just stand there as a child in another number did. And she didn’t run off stage before the number started and have to be escorted back by her mom, as yet another child had to be. She smiled, she behaved, and she had fun, which means for a 3 year old in a toddler ballet class, she did a heck of a good job. We’ll just ignore that when the number was over, she was the first one to get up off their finished kneeling pose on the stage and run off to her proud stage mom backstage!
Despite being in the back of the large auditorium, I had my trusty 55-200 mm lens with me and was able to get some great shots of the kids in their adorable costumes. My ovaries hurt! These are only shots from the first part of the performance from Fusion Dance Project, which included 24 different numbers and lasted 2 hours, so unfortunately that was as long as I could stay since I had other plans that evening.
Please enjoy checking out the gallery and please – I’m definitely open to any feedback!
Read MoreWanted: Photographic Inspiration
Being an amateur photographer (with skills somewhere around intermediate, I think) I always want to improve my skills. Four years ago I took the leap to upgrade to a DSLR from a regular old point & shoot, and have not regretted it. Since then I’ve taken a few classes to sharpen my skills and really learn more of the functions of my camera (a Nikon D5000). I’ve upgraded to a longer lens after a great experience renting one from BorrowLenses.com a few years back, and I’ve increased my arsenal of accessories, from tripods to monopods, rubber hoods to rubber skins. It got to a point last year that my dad wanted to buy me something camera related for my birthday and everything I could possibly want was up in the hundreds of dollar range (like different lenses, flash units, etc) since I’d bought all the little stuff (filters, remotes, bargain flashes) myself.
It’s gotten to the point where I don’t take many pictures anymore. A perusal of my Flickr feed (a yearly birthday present to myself to keep the Pro account) shows a set I took about a month ago, before that some I took at the beginning of February, and then before that… Christmas. I need ideas for photographic inspiration!
Where do folks find inspiration for going out and shooting? I like nature shots, flowers, sunsets, but it seems that anywhere I’d like to go, I either can’t get anyone to go with me or there’s a LOT of walking involved. Which, I’m into photography… not hiking. So I know that if I got tired of walking around some place, my pictures would suffer.
I’m still kicking myself in the butt for not capitalizing inspiration I had a couple months ago. There was a carnival in town near the Oakland Coliseum, and I thought that it would be cool night shots to go to the Martin Luther King Jr. Regional Shoreline across the estuary from where the carnival was and get the rides all lit up with the reflection of the water. But of course, before I got off my lazy butt to do it, the carnival had moved on to a less picturesque location.
So, photographers out there… where do you go for photographic inspiration? Where do you look?
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