March 24, 2010, 9:42 pm
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.
March 21, 2010, 7:48 pm
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:
Or just go to Fotomoto and browse their catalog at http://www.fotomoto.com/
September 23, 2008, 8:40 pm
Edge of the Unconscious
I don’t think I would ever single out one photograph that I have made as the most significant or pleasing to me, but if I was forced to pick my top five then this would probably be the first one I selected.
The picture was taken on a July day in the summer of 2006. The right half of the picture is filled with a concrete boat ramp that stands next to the main ferry dock on the island of Iona, off the west coast of Scotland. The dark lines to the right of the man are the shadows of the railings of the main dock. The rings set in the concrete are used to tie up smaller boats as they load and unload passengers or fishing gear. That is how the picture came about but that is not what it means for me; this is not a holiday snap for the family album.
Detail
The man contemplating the water is older than I am but not by so many years that I cannot identify with him. At first sight he is overweight but that is an illusion, mostly, caused by the positioning of his left arm. He is barefoot; appropriate for a tourist paddling at the seaside but maybe he is something else? Maybe he has been shipwrecked or maybe he is on a pilgrimage in shoe-less penance? Those might be pajamas he is wearing; he might be in a hospital awaiting tests? It is hard to see in the full picture but in the detail, shown to the right, you can make out a bag around his shoulder – he is on a journey.
Water and the sea can be symbols for many things. In Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, the ocean is a woman to be loved and honored but also “something that gave or withheld great favours.” The sea is the original source of life and continuing source of food, a parent, yet it offers no guarantees or compassion. The sea grants and then takes away Santiago’s prize.
In dreams, Carl Jung wrote, the sea is a symbol of our Collective unconscious, “because unfathomed depths lie concealed beneath its reflecting surface.” When you cross the sea you do not know what lies under you; you cannot see where you are going or where you came from. The sea represents the unknown and the unknowable; the sea represents mystery.
In Christian baptism, going down into the water symbolizes death. Walking on water is the test set by Jesus of Peter’s faith and trust. At least Peter tried.
Perhaps this man is waiting for Charon the ferryman to take him across to Hades? The rings might be used to chain reluctant passengers but this man is not tied, he will not run.
You can read your own story from this picture. I choose to see a man on the edge of the unknown, aware of both beauty and danger but trusting the beauty more. A man taking a moment to think back over his life before continuing on the road forward, with Van Morrison, Into the Mystic.
September 19, 2008, 5:32 pm
Into the Surf
You have to be hardy to run into the Pacific from anywhere along the U.S. coast; it’s cold at the best of times. In this case it was at Carmel, California, in the early 90s. The evening light was almost gone – the perfect time for Ernst Haas style motion blur.
The VFXY Photos theme for the week is “Sunsets”; as you can imagine there are no shortage of submissions – who doesn’t have a sunset in their collection. This will be my offering. You can see all the submissions to the current VFXY theme at /photos.vfxy.com/themes/.
This is also one of the images in the recently assembled collection of people photographs that you can find on the main Web site under People.
