Mike Broadway – PhotoBlog

Austin Surreal

It was a case of use it or lose it, vacation time that is, so I took Friday off intending to go downtown with the camera. The day was overcast and the light flat so I postponed; Saturday morning brought the hard shadows and warm tints that I had wanted so off I went. Excluding some productive vacations, it has been 15 months since I set out to take photographs: the final step in my aesthetic recuperation.

I am happy with the results but aware that I might be too easily satisfied. Thom Hogan recently wrote an article on his site, titled “One in 76” (scroll down his 2010 News and Comments archive and you will find it), in which he says that he does not like coming home with a lot of good shots but nothing that shows he pushed the boundaries. Historically my keeper ratio has been similar to the 1 in 36 that Thom describes; my ratio yesterday was about 1 in 8 suggesting I wasn’t trying hard enough.

I have a lot of photographs of people entering or exiting a large frame like the one shown here. It’s something of a formula: find an interesting background such as a street mural or White Sands, New Mexico, or Calgary Beach, Scotland, and wait for someone to enter from stage left or stage right. This is the pattern followed by no less than 6 of the 15 images I have posted from yesterday’s expedition. It’s a good pattern, I like the images aesthetically and semanitcally, but it’s a safe approach that keeps me well inside my comfort zone: utilizing longer focal lengths and avoiding the risk of up close eye contact.

If I am to turn Saturday morning downtown into a series, going back multiple times, then I will need to go outside that comfort zone and grow a little. If I don’t then I will just end up with 16, 24 or 32 “keepers” of the same thing in different colors.

The Good Cowboy

Once upon a time, some 60 years ago in fact, you knew the good cowboys from the bad ones by the color of their hats. Not even Hollywood stories have heroes anymore.

The Paddler - Iona, Scotland - 2006

I am chuffed; Fotomoto has selected my Edge of the Unconscious picture as their “featured image” for today, April 2! It will be interesting to see if that leads to any income for Save The Children but if it doesn’t straight away, well, every bit of exposure helps. At least someone thought well enough of it to allow it to represent Fotomoto for the day.

The Paddler photograph above was made two shots later on the same afternoon and from the same vantage point on the ferry quay, Iona, Scotland. The sunlit aquamarine could be the Caribbean backdrop for a super model fashion shoot but instead it is in the North Atlantic and she is an everywoman archetype; a stand in for all of us that would rather be paddling than working in the office this April second. For this brief moment she was doing what every tired mother dreams of when the laundry still needs to be folded and the three year old upstairs just awoke, coughing.

Trees and Ripples

Color is the first thing I see, the main thing I photograph. There is no obvious subject in this image other than color itself. If you look long enough you will find the sunlit pine trees and a breeze blown pond of the Colorado Rockies, but it could be anywhere, anytime.

This is another re-found picture, overlooked for seven years, for which I owe thanks to Adobe Lightroom’s all-in-one-place catalog view of my photographs. However, I am hesitant to praise Adobe too much or too soon; I will reserve judgement until after the just announced announcement of Creative Suite 5. Earlier this week, Adobe told the press that on April 12 it would tell the press about the still later release of CS5. The updated product suite will not be available on April 12th, that’s just the date when we will be told the release date.

What this manic game of marketing musical chairs means for me is that almost certainly, yet again and as predicted, I will have been forced to upgrade to the current release of Photoshop just in time to be too early to qualify for a free upgrade to the new release. So pretty much the only thing I care to hear announced on April 12th is that my March 1st CS4 purchase qualifies for an automatic CS5 upgrade.

I had to buy Photoshop CS3 just before CS4 was announced in order to be able to read the images from a Nikon D300 camera, I had to buy CS4 just before the CS5 fanfare to convert my license from Windows to Mac. That I am getting free use of of the Lightroom 3 beta is small consolation because I am going to have to buy that when the beta runs out; having got used to what it can do I am unlikely to be willing to give it up. The free beta is both a good way to gather product feedback and a still better way to get new customers hooked. Adobe knows what every street corner drug dealer knows: give away free samples and they will have no choice but to come back and buy more.

All in all though I should be grateful, and I am, that I can afford to buy the expensive equipment that demands this expensive software. Few are so lucky.

[April 5, 2010 – looking back at this post and Thom Hogan’s 2010 News and Comments archive I realize that my title probably borrowed too much inspiration from his news report on the subject. I’m am pretty sure I first learned of Adobe’s plans from reading his site and while the sentiments that it generated are my own I need to acknowledge their origin.]

Happy Dog!

The results are in and they are good, very good; I am as happy as a dog on the beach! Three days after I placed my test order for a 12×18 print of “Edge of the Unconscious,” a gorgeous, high gloss, print arrived. The 5×7 card ordered at the same time, printed separately, is still in transit but it was always the 12×18 that mattered. [edit: the card arrived the next day, equally good but next time I will select a a white fill border.]

In my earlier Fotomoto Experiment – Part 1 post I incorrectly stated that delivery would be via UPS; my brain had dropped a letter somewhere between reading and writing as it was in fact shipped through USPS – the US Postal Service. Realizing my mistake, I had a brief but horrible vision of my local postal service worker bending the package into a U to fit the parcel box of our communal mailbox!

My fears were unwarrented; even Samson in a full head of hair would have had trouble bending this 18x24x1.5 reinforced cardboard box to fit in a mailbox! The packaging was very impressive and earned Fotomoto high marks before it was even opened. And anyway, the USPS delivers packages to the door in exactly the same way that UPS or Fed-Ex would.

I chose the Fotomoto’s “metallic” paper option since I had no idea what it was; I haven’t followed chemical printing technology in over 10 years. The dynamic range of the print is wonderful with rich blacks, subtle shadows and glistening highlights. Kodak claims 100 year plus stability for its Professional Endura Metallic paper which is as good as I can hope for from my aging Epson 2200 inkjet with archival papers.

My only dissapointment, and a small one at that, is that the print is borderless which is going to make matting a touch more awkward; I’ll have to mount it on paper first. Fotomoto staff have commented in their member support forums that they hope to offer an option for print borders down the line but it is not high on their immediate to do list.

The bottom line is the Fotomoto shopping cart is enabled on both this blog and the large web site that contains it. You can buy a 12×18 of the happy dog above for $45 plus shipping and the $26.75 profit will go to Save the Children or a related charity. I may be changing the charities around a little as this enterprise gets underway but Save the Children is a good choice to start off.

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/