Might as well post everything....

There's a lot of times a shoot an event for my own enjoyment without anybody acutally hiring me to photograph, which was the case a couple weeks ago when I shot the 3 gun nation shootoff. In cases like this I usually just post the shots to flickr and put a slide show of the coverage on my site with no intentions of selling any images. But in this case, my images caught the eye of one of the competitors (who also happens to be a photographer)and he contacted me about the photos in my gallery, said he really admired several of them and I ended up making a sale. Now he could have just downloaded the images off of flickr, but I guess the fact that he was also a photographer kept him from doing that or he was just an honest guy. Anyway, image protection isn't what prompted me to write this post, sales is. The fact is I should be posting all my favorite images from these personal events in my sales gallery - who knows how many sales I've lost by not giving viewers the opportunity to purchase, most won't be inclined to take the initiative to inquire about a purchase like my fellow photographer/shooter. While I always like it when people get enjoyment from my images even when they don't buy, that's no reason to not offer all my images for sale. Besides, it's a business and businesses are created to make money... Sometimes I forget that.

A couple of Changes at 10framesasecond.com

Well, a blown out motherboard on my main box shutdown any work on the website for a couple weeks. But now, after many a box from Newegg.com, I'm rockin a killer Intel dual with 8G of ram (my first ever Intel build - but that's another story)
To celebrate the new box's power I'm tinkering with putting some video on the site. Alma usually films each game from the stands and this week the camcorder's battery was dead so I gave her my G9 and showed her how to take video with it - you know what? That G9 blew away our camcorder in terms of video quality and ease of getting out of the cam and into the box - think the Camcorder's going to start gathering dust. (Good, cause before this the G9 was gathering dust - but that's also another story)
Video was converted to .FLV using the Flash encoder in the CS3 suite and it was surprisingly snappy. Uploaded to my site, used the Shadowbox plugin to do the fancy video rolls in my Wordpress blog. - May just take off the wrapper and embed the JW FLV player which works pretty good.

Don't know where I'll take this right now, Thinking I may host the latest week's game. maybe market a DVD for a couple bucks with photo orders or wrap the whole thing up with some stills and make some flash based slideshow/screensavers for download...

Taw#6: Dynamic Menus in Wordpress

Okay, its not a photographic technique but it is something I learned this week that was used for my photographic website, 10framesasecond.com - dynamic menus. Initially I was going to build a website from scratch, and I started out doing that but then I found out how easy wordpress is to use, and the blog format suited routine updates to the site without any further coding. However, one thing I didn't know how to hack into wordpress was how to highlight the current location the user was at in the navigation menu. In HTML code I just would have the change the appropriate menu item's class when the page loaded. But in wordpress, you don't really work in HTML directly and my menu was in the static header and doesn't change with each new page load. I notice one of my templates using an is_home function and I dug a little deeper and found the is_page function which would let me do exactly what I wanted - here's my code:

if(is_page('products')){echo 'class="here"';}

just place this little bit of php in the opening 'a' tag and if the page your user is on is called 'products' it will insert the 'class="here" into the HTML which will cause the browser to used the css info to highlight the item.
pretty simple once ya get the right function. A more comprehensive explanation is here.

Label those Cards!

You know I knew why they put the little labels on the backs of CF memory cards, I mean why would I label something that gets erased and re-written?
Well, last Saturday, I was shooting Ryan's Football game and they were really playing well and I was ripping off the frames. Filled my first 4GB CF by about mid way through the 4 quarter and had to swap it out.
After the game I was excited to get home and process an post the pics of the games my site. But I practically freaked when I reached into my pocket to retrieve my card and discovered that I must have lost it out on the field! I was so bummed I really didn't care about loosing the card at that point it was all the images on the card.
Alma tried to cheer me up by suggesting we go back to the field in the morning to look for it - but I knew it would be gone, someone would have found it during the games that were after ours. So early the next morning we used the trip to the field as an excuse to go out for breakfast. We got to the field and the whole family fanned out 'CSI' style searching the field. There were people getting prepping the field for the morning's soccer matches so just when I was thinking we should just get out of there and get some breakfast, I saw it, lying in the grass on the sidelines where I was shooting! What luck, the card was intact and undamaged. The pictures were posted - no harm, no foul.
Well now I know what that label is for now - It's just enough room for my name and phone number and that's exactly what's on each of my CF cards now.

10framesasecond: Step 4 - some nice touches.

With the 2 main sections of my photog site complete, I wanted to put up some nice touches to give my clients a better user experience than what I've seen on some of my competitors. At this level (non-pro) most of the sites I've seen are really, really basic, usually using canned formats or 'site-building' software offered by the host providers. I thought the more I could do the separate myself from that, the better - And I'm a geek - so 'geek-on'.

First I put up a little 'About us' page that is pretty common but I was honest in the write up that this is a 'side-job' for me and a way to subsidize my hobby - so I didn't try blow myself up into some Pro photographer.
Next, I put up an events calendar that will show all my upcoming games and events that I will be shooting. Thanks to Google, this was about the simplest thing to implement on my site, just had to create a separate '10framesasecond' calendar in my Google account and setup the public sharing options in the 'Manage Calendars' section of Google Calendar. Once complete, Google provides a little snippet of code that you embed in your page and, Presto! you have a super versatile calendar on your page. Any changes I make on my Google homepage are automatically displayed on my site. These guys at Google are just too smart...

10framesasecond: Step 3 - adding a blog page

Next thing I though would be good for the site is to add a little blog page that I could use to get the latest news out to visitors, like what new events have been posted, any promotions I'm running, etc. And if any of my clients are 'geeky' enough they could subscribe to an RSS feed of the page so they wouldn't have to check my page to see if anything is changed.
Wordpress software is part of the Linux server hosting package I picked up from GoDaddy.com. While I have never used it before I had heard from more than one source that it's pretty powerful as far as what you could do with it and, key for me, is that you could design your own templates for it to give it your own unique look. This was just what I was looking for since I wanted the user experience to remain consistent throughout my site.
Installation was a snap GoDaddy's Metropolis application made it basically a click to install process and once it was installed on the server I just assigned it a URL, pointed my browser there boom, I had a blog!
Setting up the templates was a bit easier than Exposure Manager, it was obvious that wordpress is much more mature in the area of user customization than Exposure Manager. The Style.css file for word press is huge by comparison and the App is VERY customizable. Since I'm just using it for getting news out I didn't need all the functionality so I didn't bother working on comment sections or anything and just based my disign off the default template that was tweaked to use my Header, body, and footer background images and I was up and running.
As much as I like how super user friendly VOX and Blogger are, I can't help but think to move my family blog over to wordpress running on my server. I think security against obsolesence (or backruptcy) is what I'm paranoid of. I know Blogger is run by Google which I don't think is going to be going out of business anytime soon but I can't imagine what I'd do if I lost ten years worth of family memories due to some companies poor business decisions.

10framesasecond: Step 2 - integrating photos.

When I first started thinking about starting a website to sell photos I took during my kids sporting events, I thought it should be easy enough to create a site that I could host pictures organized into galleries and use some ruby on rails code or some of the canned photo server apps like 'coppermine' to tie it to a paypal shopping cart. I could then get orders and print them at the local Costco and make a better profit margin. Well, reality set in there was no way I was going to have the time to do all that now. Previous research I'd did on the pro photo hosting sites concluded that Exposure Manager is the best / most flexible to work with.
So I signed up and had a gallery loaded in about a half and hour. But I wasn't happy with the look - it didn't have the same 'feel' as my site so I used the template editor they provide and integrated my layout table and style sheet into the main templates and Whamo! You can barely tell you're being redirected to another site. I even mapped the URL so 10framesasecond.com is still in the address bar when your actually on the exposure manager site. Pretty cool.
Overall, Exposure Manager lets you tweak quite a bit of the UI on the site through the use of Templates and Style Sheets but their interface is a bit weak - For instance, there are options to both create a new style sheet or edit an exsisting one but for templates, there is only a create option, so every time you need to make an edit, you first need to create a template then choose which one to edit. This leaves you with quite a few templates to delete after a template debugging session.
Another thing is they don't provide templates for all the areas of the site (like the shopping cart and the multi-selection product picker). A nit pick since the pages still used the color schemes setup through your stylesheets. I'm sure Exposure Manager will progress in this area, and it is workable as it stands right now - just not as polished as I'd like to see.

Took me about 2 hours to tweak the templates into something I could use. Lots of experimentation needed here as I didn't find there documentation on this very helpful.

Launching my photo site - Step 1 Setting up hosting

Okay, this has been put off for far too long. The first sporting event of the season is tomorrow and I don't even have my website setup yet. So today, I took the morning off of work and sat down to hack it out - how hard can it be? I've done webpages before.

First step get my hosting setup with Go Daddy. Of course since I'm in a rush I can't find any of their famous 30% off deals (the last one I had expired 7/31!) Oh well, I just used the 10% from the GB1 coupon code to give a little support to Cali and her podcast. A couple minutes to process the order and wham! I got a 100GB of server space crying for some content.

Fired up Illustrator CS3 and Dreamweaver and hacked out the framework of the site. Pretty bland right now but, I think it's a good foundation to build on. I tried using as much CSS as I could and I think I'm getting the hang of it and since I'm using a site wide stylesheet, it's really nice making global format changes by editing one file. - pretty cool.

A Chat with Loyd

Talking with Loyd, and he says LLC is the way to go as a sole proprietor. Recommends Arizona Corporation Commission as a good source for the 'play by play' to get started.
Also declarations are cheapest to publish in the Gila Bend newspaper.

Some Ideas to be different

I think I can provide a couple extra touches for the sports photo site by providing some photo manipulation to the customer that isn't typical for the others out there: (Hence Premium Pricing)

• Sports Panos - Highly compress porportions of an entire Baseball field
• Composites - like ry's moto jump and Elaina's pitch
• Posters - ie: Rider of the year
• Mag covers: sports illustrated.
  
• 
  

Gotta Name - So I'm gonna do it.

Okay I'm gonna do it. Gonna start a couple web buisnesses based on my hobby. The intent isn't to get rich by any means but hopefully it will supplement a portion of my expensive hobby.
The first project will be a sports photo site based on the Exposure Manager platform - gotta cool name for it to 10framesasecond.com (yea I dreaming of a MKIII!) This site will basically sell the photo's I take of the kids sports teams I will start taking more shots of both teams and hand out cards or where a tee shirt with the web address on it.
The second is based off of utilizing the large format Epsons Cas has hooked me up with right now gonna name it GeekWithaPrinter.com. Here I'm gonna speciallize on artistic photo manipulation and canvas and fine art prints since these are where the other sites out there get a premium.