Whoops

Background: I keep a few pictures listed cheap on eBay (basically to attract new customers - it's a form of profitable advertisement).  And while the shipping's free if you buy at this site, on eBay I charge shipping because otherwise the prices are just too low, especially for international sales, and anyway it encourages people to buy more than one so they combine shipping.

Somebody in Europe complained that the shipping's too high for an 8x10 so I added it up... and realized I was actually losing a dollar on shipping for every item.  So I increased it by a buck.  Probably not what he intended.

It's an unfortunate situation - priority mail international's gone way up over the last couple of years, plus now eBay charges fees on shipping, and PayPal charges fees on the shipping, and even if it's something that goes into the free envelope the prints will get ruined if you send them that way.  So I buy pre-cut cardboard of just the right size to protect an 8x10, which isn't any huge deal but it all adds up.  You can send a letter cheaper, but if you want to send an 8x10 print to Europe and expect it to get there un-mangled it costs about $20. 

If you go cheaper than that you start getting damaged prints, which means you're now paying to re-ship plus you have pissed off customers.  Every time I've tried saving money on shipping it's ended up costing more - that's why I use rugged $3 tubes instead of the free triangular boxes to ship 16x20s as an example.  It was just too expensive to use the free shipping materials.  Does anybody appreciate it?  Probably not, but they sure notice when the free stuff fails...

PS To be fair I did have another guy in Europe complain about shipping a couple of months ago and he was right - I actually had a typo on that particular item.  Whoops!

New Pictures: Marion

Hey, what do you know - I just uploaded some new pictures.  Check 'em out - they're at discounted prices for a few days as a thank you for people sticking with the blog through my hiatus.  When I switch templates I might also pull some of the "behind the scenes" shots where she has her sweatshirt on.

Metal Print Reminder

Just a reminder that there's one day left on the metal print auction.

The print's up for sale

For those of you interested, here it is.  I am probably going to regret this but I started it at the normal price for an 11x14 and not much above my cost.  I am hoping this image is popular enough that it might start a little bidding war... but you never can tell with eBay.  Anyway, it's a test - if there's an interest in metal prints I'll get some more or list it as a standard option on the site.  If there's not, well, I can always hang it in the studio to show the portrait clients an example of what that kind of print looks like.  It's really beautiful and should impress!

Metal Print

So here's a metal print from WHCC.  It's on aluminum, high gloss finish.  They have a couple of mounting options and this is the simpliest - it's just a block on the back with some holes to hang over a pair of nails.  I really like it.  It's nicer than at least one of the two labs I used before (I never even saw the print from the other, it went so poorly).

So the next question becomes - does anybody want to buy these?  They're very cool, but even though they're way more reasonably priced than from the other labs they're still way more expensive than a regular photographic print.  So I'll run a test - I'll put one up on eBay in a couple of days - probably Monday - and we'll see.  I'll post a link when it's up.

Great morning

Hey, I did a shoot.  We got lucky and after getting rained out once our second attempt was on a lovely but cold day along the bay.  More later - I just grabbed a teaser shot out of the middle somewhere.  It'll be a couple of days before I really get a chance to sit down and look at the pictures.

5D Mark II price and other little tidbits

So with the Mark III coming out they dropped the price of the Canon EOS 5D Mark II (Amazon link).  It's $2200 which is an improvement.  It's still a camera that I was never impressed with, although if God Forbid my 5D bites the dust at least there's some option cheaper than the $3500 Mark III.

Lightroom 4 is out.  Since I do very little manipulation to my images usually that's all I use - it's a rare image that I import into Photoshop.  The feature set seems kind of minimal (improved fiddling with the image, geotagging stuff, more video support), but it's only $79 to upgrade or $149 new (also an Amazon link, although you can also download a 30 day trial from Adobe if you want to check it out).

The third thing... I've had a couple of models contact me recently who were in a new phase of their life where prospective employers might not have been thrilled to see their nudes.  They'd used their real, unusual first names while modeling.  I'm generally willing to do a name change after the fact but you know how the Internet is - it's not always easy to totally purge that kind of thing, and Google remembers things a long time even if it's deleted from a website.  If you're thinking about modeling, do feel free to use a fake name.

WHCC has metal prints now!

This is pretty exciting - I've tried getting metal prints (printed on aluminum, not those metallic paper prints) before and the small labs that were doing them were universally incompetent and dishonest. Both overcharged me over what they said the price would be.  One I ended up returning the prints unopened since that was the only way to resolve it - they refused to let me keep them at the price I was originally quoted.

I like the idea, and I like some of the samples I've seen and the prints from the one lab, so I've kept an eye out for a more professional lab to start carrying them.

Well, WHCC started carrying them.  They're a mainstream professional lab that I use for most of my printing needs (I have accounts with pretty much everybody and I have one or two minor issues with them but they still win out for most things).  They're promising 2-4 day turnaround time (as opposed to two weeks) and they not quite as crazy expensive as I remember the other ones being.

Details at the WHCC site.  I'll probably get two 11x14s - one picture of the kids for home, and one nude to sell.  I'll be looking both at the quality and if anybody actually buys the nude when I put it on eBay. :-)

Canon 5D Mark III announced

No real surprises as far as I can tell.  Here's the announcement and a pre-release review.  On paper it looks pretty much exactly like the camera I was hoping for as an upgrade to my 5D... except the price, which is $3500. 

The 5D was originally supposed to be the budget full frame model (budget compared to the 1D models).  I got mine right at the end of its run for about $1400.  I got lucky - everybody was expecting the Mark II to come in at about $2K but instead it was $3K and the prices for the original soon shot up.  I was never really tempted by the Mark II - it seemed to be lacking in some areas (autofocus) and despite the megapixel increase I never really saw any examples of image quality that were any better.  I think it's pretty telling that they basically kept that the same in this model - they overextended last time. Anyway, the Mark II is down to $2400 but the new model is $3500 - more than double what I paid for my 5D and a 50% increase over the current model.

I'm not willing to make the compromises necessary to go to a crop frame sensor for studio work, so basically it doesn't make sense for me to upgrade unless Canon revisits the notion of a more affordable full frame camera or my 5D dies.

Anyway, I have time to ponder it.  At this point I don't trust Canon enough to somehow screw up any given camera so I wouldn't be an early adopter anyway.  Given that I'm just getting a shoot schedule going for this year and it's probably going to be fairly light maybe I'll just put off the decision until next year and hope the price has dropped by then.

Test Video

Here's a quickie video test - just some underwater and volcano footage from my recent vacation.  There's no sound - this was originally a family video with lots of kids running around and suitable music (that I don't own the rights to).  Which is fine for showing off on the iPad, but not so much for posting to YouTube.  Anyway, it's slimmed down to just the basics, but if you want to see a little underwater point and shoot video of fish swimming around, you're in luck...

Yosemite

I'm back from a couple of days in Yosemite... and there was basically no snow.  Luckily I got some nice "winter wonderland" shots in November (you can see some here) because it was just kind of brown and dead looking in the valley.  There was a little snow around 6,000 feet and above but I think only because we got a storm about a week before.  Still had fun, and I like getting away for a couple of days around my birthday, but not very photogenic.  On the plus side it was pretty much perfect hiking if you don't mind it being 40ish - there were very few people and there were a lot more visible animals than you usually get this time of year.  We saw a really absurd number of deer, as an example.

Hopefully we'll get some March storms - some years March is very wet and we really need it.  We're at something like 40% of normal rainfall for this time of year.

Canon D20

About time, but Canon updated their underwater camera. I'd considered the D10 for this recent trip but it was pretty dated.  See here for details, but basically the upside is that the D20 is a lot more convenient than using an underwater case, but doesn't provide the same level of depth protection. They even make an underwater case for it in case you want to dive. But it would be a lot handier for, say, romping around in shallow water with your toddler than the case - less setup, less bulky, etc. etc.  Similarly for rafting or anything else where you don't want some huge case but want some water protection.

Argh

I've been sick, but I'm up rolling again. I'm behind in lots of things, but I did post some Hawaii snapshots up over on the Facebook page.

Back in town

I just got back from some travel, mostly to the big island of Hawaii.  I took lots of underwater pictures and I'll try to get some of those up shortly.  I bought a (relatively) high end point and shoot - the Canon S100 - for the occasion and I really, really like it.  Shoots in RAW mode, nice small format, image quality's definitely a step up from any point and shoot I've used before although obviously not up to DSLR standards.  Expensive for a point and shoot but cheap compared to a DSLR.  It's a good compromise if you need to travel light, or just want to always carry a camera with you that has fewer compromises than the one in your cell phone.  The Underwater Case works well - this is the third Canon underwater case I've had over the years and the only problem I've ever had was when some bored rich teens stole one of them (sigh).

The video's really nice, too - I'll put together some of the underwater video as well. 

So basically the plan is to wrap all that up and then think about doing some outdoor shoots once we get some rain and clear out all this junk in the air.  We've been having a mini drought but the rain people say the jet stream mumble mumble blah blah rain next week maybe.