Mike Broadway – PhotoBlog

Ross of Mull in Rain

I have no illusions about making a living from photography but I would like to be able to offer more financial support to a small number of charities working in the areas I care most about; I want to make a difference even if only a very small one. What if I could sell prints of the photographs on this site and donate the proceeds? That thinking, and Google, led me to Fotomoto this week. “Looking for a hassle-free way to sell your art?” asks the front page of the Fotomoto web site; yes, I am.

What is Fotomoto? To quote a little more from the site it “… is an e-commerce system that gives independent photographers and web publishers the power to sell their work on their own site, using a simple toolbar with a ‘click to buy’ button.

It took me only a few minutes to add the line of code necessary to enable the Fotomoto shopping cart on my web site; I tinkered for a while longer to get it to look exactly the way I wanted on the page but it really is as simple as their marketing says. I have not turned the shopping cart on yet; the technical integration may be easy but there are other questions to answer before I do that. In particular: how much should I charge and does the quality of the finished prints and cards justify the price. To that end I have placed an order for a 12×18 print and a 5×7 card. “Ross of Mull in Rain”, above, is the image I chose for the card; “Edge of the Unconscious,” used for an earlier blog posting is the one I selected for the larger print.

How does it work? How is the print made? When someone places an order for an image that you have not sold before, you are sent an email asking you to upload a high resolution version; the order remains in a pending state until you have provided this ‘original.’ It’s not really an original, Fotomoto does not accept Photoshop files and the like, it’s just a high quality TIFF or JPEG file. In my case these turned out to be 68 and 32 megabytes respectively; they took a few minutes to upload!

Now, with the masters in hand, Fotomoto has the files digitally rendered as C prints on Kodak Endura paper. The results are then packed in a flat box and shipped via UPS [edit: I misread, it was actually USPS]. Including the slightly more expensive 3 day instead of 5 day shipping option, my total was $27.29 with no profit markup. I’ll let you know in The Fotomoto Experiment – Part 2 how long it takes to deliver and whether it was worth the money.

Fotomoto takes care of the sales tax if any is warranted; they are the merchant of record so they are responsible for the taxes. The company operates out of California and thus, for now at least, that is the only state for which buyers will be hit with sales tax. A fair number of the site’s users are from outside the U.S. and may have different national tax and VAT rules to take into account for their sales but for a naturalized Texan, life is simple.

While you can’t see the Fotomoto toolbar working on my site yet, you can try it out on many others including:

• Escapism – http://www.escapism-online.com/photos.php?gid=9
• 100 Cameras – http://100cameras.tylerginter.com/?p=14 (hilarious picture of three small boys on potties)
• seven times seventy-seven – http://7times77.com/

Or just go to Fotomoto and browse their catalog at http://www.fotomoto.com/

Two mooring lines, Tobermory

The artist Andy Goldsworthy’s mode of work could not be much further from that of my landscape photography: he assembles his art within the landscape, gathering and using materials from the surrounding area, whereas I forbid myself from moving so much as a pebble or twig to improve the composition. What we do and how we do it are very different but there is, for me at least, a resonance in spirit.

I do not mean to suggest that what I do reaches anything close to the creativity, quality or power of Goldsworthy’s art. He imbibes the landscape and then responds in imaginative and painstakingly constructed sculpture; I merely frame what I see and move on. Nevertheless, despite the separation in our talent, technique and skill, we seem to be reacting to similar triggers and I take some encouragement from that. I had lost faith in natural mystery and wonder, my prime motive for making photographs; seeing Goldsworthy’s art rekindled that feeling in me.

Hopefully, “fair use” rules allow my inclusion of a few small photographs of some of Goldsworthy’s sculptures but I am not comfortable using anything larger that might risk crossing the line between fair use and any perception that I might be passing his work of as my own. If you like what you see then you must really go on and find more and larger examples from the references below, from a Google search of your own, or (better yet) by visiting some of his longer lived works at museums around the world.

The above three images are Copyright © Andy Goldsworthy.

See also:
    Conversation: Andy Goldsworthy, Art Beat, National Public Radio
    Andy Goldsworhy: Roof, National Gallery of Art
    Andy Goldsworthy Digital Catalogue DVD (Volume One: 1976-1986)
    Andy Goldsworthy, Morning Earth article

Tobermory Post Office, Isle of Mull

The VFXY Photos theme for the week is “Red”; this is my submission. You can see all the submissions to the current VFXY theme at /photos.vfxy.com/themes/.

Tobermory is the major town on the Isle of Mull, off the west coast of Scotland. It is famous for the row of colorfully painted stores that line it’s sheltered harbor. A great place to depart from for sailing, whale watching or fishing.

British postal vans are red and yellow so it is only natural that the tiny post office, one of the harbor row, should also be red and yellow. Throw in a green door, window and some clothes and you have a rather strong primary color soup.