Just gotta do it

So my dreams of having a sweet automated process for handling pictures almost came true, except that it was taking too long. So, I'm doing it half automated, half by hand, and let me just tell you that it is TIME CONSUMING. Trying to break into the photography business is hard knocks! I might as well work at McDonalds because that would pay more!

The one thing that I have figured out is using aperture to export images on a web page, but have it customized to use my own template. I am using fancybox to create a nice lightbox effect for my photos. I'll have to share my process at some point, but barely have time to write this post, much less a how-to on all that I'm doing. The cliff notes version is that I use Aperture to export all the thumbs and regular files, then opening up each of the files in an editor and using regular expressions to replace file names. I need to still figure out a fast way to change the page links and get the style sheets looking nice, but I hopefully should be able to drop a div into the Beyond Just Dance's home page. We'll know for sure tonight, because I'd like it online before tomorrow night's Flower Power 70s party! Ciao for now!

Organizing in Aperture

Last night was spent organizing and consolidating all my photos in aperture. I utilized referenced external masters so that I could export my projects for metadata rating on the go without having the monstrously sized masters along with them. It works beautifully! I exported some projects to dropbox, opened it up from my laptop and rated pictures without needing the masters. I am able to rate the images and reimport the project with all the ratings and organizational changes that I made.

I also decided that I'm just going to do plain text along the bottom. It's my first picture set and it's only going to get better. Here is what I did:

So figuring out how to market these is a bit of a learning process as well. I plan on uploading the pics to the internet, so people can look at them for free all they want, but if they want higher quality and printable images, those will cost. How much? This is also a learning process. Hopefully I can come up with a good and efficient system, because right now, things take FOREVER. I'm confident that with my mac and my skillz that I'll find a way, hopefully sooner rather than later.

Image Resolution, Photoshop Actions, and $.

It's amazing how much I didn't know about how photos were edited and printed! Today I was doing research on image resolution and learned that, while 72 pixels/in is sufficient for the web, if I wanted a high quality print, I'd need to be printing at 300 pixels/in. So I took one of my favorite photos of the night and created 4x6, 5x7, and 8x10 versions of it and sent it off through Aperture to be printed, just to see how it turns out. I've never had any image sent off to be printed before, so learning how they get delivered, what they'll look like, the type of paper, etc. I believe will be valuable. This is the photo btw:

I'm also starting to learn about photoshop actions and getting some sort of process going on. I'm an engineer and I'm a big process guy, coming out of an Agile Development background, that thinks doing things over and over again is dumb. Problem is, I'm pretty dumb in the photoshop world right now, so learning actions is going to take some time. I plan on using it to add some kind of banner to the bottom of the pics. Lots of pics. And hopefully by Friday...

So, obvious by my self imposed time crunch, I would like to sell some of these pictures at some point, and having them as normal pics would be kind of lame, no matter how good the are. Sprucing them up should be good. Which leads to the final thing I've done today, which is sign up for dotphoto.com to see how it works. I'm probably going to end up putting another test photo up there and ordering again, just to see the ordering process and quality that comes out of there. That is, until I get some kind of store going on for the dance studio, and, hopefully, eventually for me.