Mike Broadway – PhotoBlog

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/