Picking Up Small Change

We see many famous and successful professional photographers here in our shop. Award-winners, superstars, iconic ambassadors, and mentors. They are a wonderful experience and do us a great deal of good - not least in the matter of figuring out how much to charge for taking pictures. We don't have an exact number but their general advice is..." a lot ".

That's sensible. They are famous and want to have money as well as fame, so they wish to receive it from their clients. As long as they all agree on this the whole thing goes splendidly.

For those of us further down the pixel chain, the big prices are not really possible. We must take our pay in smaller amounts, though we would still like a largish share of the fame and affection. So we charge less and hope for the best.

Every so often we get an enquiry from other small photographers about what can be done to attract some of the cash. Here is a modest selection:

a. Have you seen how awful Facebook and other social site profile pictures are? This is a result of people having nothing but duck-face selfies available when they come to post time. Why not set out amongst the people you know to take your DSLR or mirror-less camera and provide them with a set of good looking FB pictures. You don't need to make vast files or charge swingeing prices - just make them look good and they'll alert others to your service. You might have all you need right now and no more to outlay...

b. Collectors of anything need to catalogue their collections and like to brag to others of what they have without opening their premises to unwanted intrusion. Stamps, coins, dolls, artillery shells...they can all be taken in studio or in situ in a small portable light tent. Your smallest DSLR or mirror-less is fine for this sort of activity and your output can be a disc or thumb drive costing practically nothing. And the best thing is - collectors always collect more. Do a good job for a fair price and they'll be back time and time again.

c. Take a picture of every object and surface in a person's home before the burglars intrude. The image just has to be clear illustration - the sort of flat light that is easily done with any small camera. Every room has 6 surfaces, and details add more images. Charge modestly but add it all up and offer to keep a copy of the images on a CD or hard drive on your premises in case they have a fire. Costs you nothing and gives them peace of mind.

d. Lots of people have websites these days selling lots of little goods - Heaven knows where they get the dreck from, or who buys it, but that does not concern you. Beetle over to their non-photographic premises with your camera, a couple of lights, and a light tent. Shoot all the little products and deliver small jpegs. Don't be proud - if they can sell junk ear-rings you can take pictures of junk ear-rings and get paid.

If you are worried about not making a fortune every time you click a shutter, remember the story of the Hollywood extra who had such a general-purpose nondescript face that he could be used in any B-grade movie. Year after year he was in the bar scene or the crowd scene or the backdrop. He collected his pay every week from the studio and at the end of it had appeared in more productions than any of the stars. Not fame, but solid meat and potatoes work.

And I like meat and potatoes.

Write Rite,Right?

Every morning I sit down to write something for the Camera Electronic blog page. Every evening I sit down to write something for my own personal blog pages*. Surprisingly, all three posts are different, even if they have a common origin in something that has happened or has been observed. This is the advantage of having a scattered mind.

This post is linked automatically to Facebook - how I do not know. It may further echo onto other social sites and contaminate them. I like to think that it does.

The best posts are the ones that attract attention, engender love, and stimulate sales - running  a close second are the ones that attract attention and cause furious anger in the readers - because this makes the readers respond just as much as the lovely ones.

We do take notice of what is written back to us via Facebook - and generally respond to it. Nearly always the response is polite, because it is not me writing it. We hope that when people express themselves in this highly visible way that they will remember that they are being seen and judged as much as we are.

Sometimes it is very helpful. Errors of fact do occur with this blog - again they are not generally deliberate, if you discount the week in January when I offered genuine portions of the iceberg that sank the TITANIC...in pint bottles. Anyway, when we are wrong, tell us gently and we will set ourselves right.

* I'm not allowed to tell you what they are but you can ask me because I am HERE ALL WEEK...

Uncle Dick

Experimental Weekend - A Note Of Caution

This has been a weekend of quiet experimentation in the dark room. Not the darkroom -  chemical work was laid aside some years ago and has not been picked up. The dark room that used to be the darkroom, but is now a not-so-dark room. I hesitate to say a light room for fear of Adobe's branding lawyers...

Right - level of illumination aside, it was a weekend of careful photo manipulation and posting on several websites. During which I gained an insight into what several of our customers have been saying - they don't want anything to do with photo manipulation and storage if it involves the cloud system.

I heard them say this but was ignorant as to the whole affair - a little questioning of other staff and of family members helped, but I still thought that the customers might have been making too much of a fuss about nothing - after all, the internet works flawlessly and all those servers and computers and experts would make sure that it all went perfectly...no?

Well, no. Not for me this weekend. Starting with an attempted hack from overseas, a reset password for Facebook, then hours spent trying to re-connect the Wordpress blogs that I write to a Facebook page, then watching selected posts drop out of FB, then drop back in again, then lose their photos, then regain them...

It was interesting work resetting and reconnecting things but it used up hours of reading, clicking, retracing, etc. Had I experienced the same misery with Photoshop manipulation or the localised resizing and reformatting of photos that is be done with Aperture or Silkypix I would tempted to unplug the entire electronic web and get out the developing tank and trays...

The day was as slow as the internet was slow and as scattered as the various places that needed to be contacted. I suspect that cloud storage and accessing would have been impossible yesterday. which leads me to the point of this post: there are still a few programs available that are not cloud-based.

I see we have some Photoshop Elements 13, some DxO programs, and some of the Lightroom ones that can stand alone on your computer. I would encourage anyone who is at the same level of computer knowledge as me ( The I is on and the O is off, do not lick the monitor screen...) to think about keeping the photo manipulation in-box as it were rather than depending upon Telstra, Berkeley, and state of the atmosphere to make it possible.

ELINT - Or The Fine Art Of Feeding The Dog

You all remember the joke about the blind man whose dog pisses on his leg. A passer-by sees this and watches the man offer the dog a biscuit. Leading to this question and answer:

" Why do you give that dog food when it has just pee'd on you?"

" So's I can find out which end to kick..."

I tried the biscuit this last evening with a mildly revealing posting on my personal blog. I followed it up with an insincere apology on Facebook. So far I have three bites on the FB page and I have filed away the information for future use.

This is akin to the air force practise of flying a snooper plane close to an enemy coast with a load of radar detectors aboard to see what sort of electronic response you get - what lights up. Clever air forces also arrange for ground-based detectors to watch at the same time in case the snooped-upon decide to send up interception. Really clever air forces correlate data from the snoop, a satellite aloft at the same time, a ship and a sub, and ground stations and file it away for future use. The best air forces decoy out an interception....and then don't let the interceptor go home again.

It's a good model for commercial and personal electronic communication. This blog is linked to Facebook and Twitter and I think our IT maven has made arrangements for anything I type to fly over there automatically. Then a flood of statistics comes back and makes pie charts somewhere on the computer. Then I get fed the pie so that someone knows which end to kick.

No no no, that can't be right.

I want to see this blog linked to Spy, Sneek, CreepRound, and ShuffleThroughThe Bins - all good legitimate electronic forums for businesses. This will increase the amount of information - and false names - that return to the central data base and will enable us to construct bigger and better pie charts with thicker crusts and more apples inside. Then all we need is a big 'ol wheel of red cheese and a pot of coffee and the REAL writin' can begin.

Eh?

Uncle Dick