One of the things that is most pleasing this time of year - is when customers from previous years return to buy a few things.  Some of these customers go back six or seven years, and every Christmas they order a few prints.

There are now eight or nine customers that I hear from once a year.  I’d like to give them something special - some little reward for sticking with me all these years. 

It’s true - I’ve tried my best - to make every single print to the best of my abilities - even when it’s busy.  And I think that every year, the prints are done somewhat differently.  Of course, they all began as chemical fiber prints.  And then with Epson pre-K3 inks; and now with Lightroom and the 7800 with the Epson Fiber paper.  I feel that Lightroom has given me more control to achieve what I guess you’d call the vision thing then I had in the darkroom - and definitely more than I was able to achieve with Photoshop alone.

And concurently - the papers and inks just got better and better.  As an example, when I work with prints now, I can easily make a virtual copy in Lightroom, make adjustments, and then compare it with the original adjustments I made.  I know that I never did this when I was working in Photoshop - although I suppose I could have.  Lightroom just makes it easier.  And if I like the second “virtual” adjustments better, I can copy them to the original with a click or two - and I’m ready to go.

I remember all the troubles I had with nomenclature when I went to inkjet.  What should I call them?  Everyone was calling them Giclee’s, no matter how they were made.  But what’s happened to the Iris printer in the meantime which was once the standard.  Yesterday I was talking with an art-seller who said that the Iris was no longer the top dog.  And although they were still calling their gallery prints Giclees - they didn’t specify anymore what they were made with since it kept changing.

Which is what I ended up doing: just call them prints.  Period. 

Anyway - all of this is to say that the b&w prints I’m doing now are (to me of course) the best work I’ve ever done.  They have that special something - that an expressive print must have.  So my thanks to the Lightroom engineers and artistans; and my thanks to the customers who’ve stuck with me through the years.

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WARNING WILL ROBINSON: TECH STUFF AHEAD.

So you see I added a couple of social bookmarking icons; which is no big thing with wordpress, but my question to you wise and younger hipsters out there - is from the list of about 30+ bookmarks I can add, which ones should I display?

I have no idea.  I do use StumbleUpon once in a while; but I am not into the social networking thing in the least.  True, I’m in facebook and linkedin, but only because someone put a gun to my head.

I’m not a joiner.  I’m not particularly social.  I put the things up for purely commercial reasons, which is that when I look at my weblogs I see that a large amount of traffic is coming from Stumble Upon.  So I figure I’ll make it easier for people to stumble over me.

Actually, what I thought would be cool would be a wishlist widget for wordpress; someplace where the customer could store various lists of stuff they might want to buy - similar to what you’d see on B&H photo.  I use that wishlist at B&H a lot.

Maybe there’s a wordpress widget out there that can do it; but I haven’t found it; and although I could probably write the code myself; that ain’t gonna happen anytime soon (as fond as I have become PHP).

Oh that’s right - this is a photography blog - and sometimes I know I bore a whole bunch of people with programming type talk…   Sorry - skip this next section.

In the meantime - midphase - the company that’s hosting this blog and the storefront - well - they’ve got a nice deal on VPS servers.  Right now I’m doing all this hosting for $6.95 / month.  Which is damned cheap.

I like these guys a lot.  They’ve got CPanel, and really know what they’re doing as far as hosting wordpress.  I get something like 128mb of PHP memory to use; and an excellent support system.

I was having some timeout issues a while back which is when I started looking at their VPS option which is like $50 a month.  You’ve got to realize that I want the storefront to be as peppy as possible.  I have done pretty much everything I can (trimming down code), using SuperCache and WidgetCache…  and keeping the amount of plugins to a minimum.  What it gets down to is that $50 a month is peanuts for a storefront where the loss of one sale because someone had a timeout or had to wait too long for a page to be displayed - well that pays for itself.

SuperCache will tell you how long it took to load a page - but of course I don’t have anything to measure how many times a user ran into a slow-loading page that timed out.  I am rambling.  Anyway - all of which is to say that I’ll probably just switch to the VPS option - since there is no way of testing the difference without switching.

Won’t do it now since I’m in the middle of the last-minute can I have it by - we’re leaving town on - orders.  But next week I’ll do it.  (All supposed to be seamless, but we’ll see).

That really is what I’ve been spending my time with: tweaking the storefront; and printing and packaging orders.  For example, I have phpThumbs (I told you to skip reading this if you want photography stuff) installed with YAPB (yet another photo blog) plug-in; and I cannot for the life of me get the thumbnail part of this to work.  And I even sort of know why; and I do want to put up some thumbnail options for people to browse through; but something is screwed up in the path… Okay, I won’t go into that anymore right now.

The other thing of note, is that I hardlyuse the 4800 for anything but printing labels, packing slips etc.  Everything from a 5 x 7 to a 24 x 36 - (okay not really 24 since I don’t do full bleed printing, although I could) - but everything is setup to go through Lightroom to the 7800.  It’s too much of a PITA to keep two sets of ink and two sets of presets, and the 7800 is just plain faster and at this point (being newer) more reliable in terms of not getting clogs…

So anyway - everything has worked out this year in terms of streamlining the process.  I don’t keep layered Photoshop files around (it’s all done in Lightroom).  I introduced the option of buying the prints without mats, and that is very popular.  About 60% of sales are without mats, and that makes me happy since it takes time to do the matting (even though the window mat is precut for me); and makes packaging much quicker and simpler (since the overall size of the item is so much smaller).

If you’re shipping an 8 x 12 print, or a few prints of that size, you put them in plastic bags; sandwich them between two larger pieces of cardboard (16 x 20) and then I put them in a large kraft envelope, sideways so that the envelope can be folded over in half.  Print corners are protected this way; and the whole thing is nice and sturdy; and the whole business can be done in a few minutes.

Shipping larger matted prints is still more tricky, and no matter what system I use, I still end up having to put pre-cut corners on the package, not to mention the time involved in actually attaching the photo to the mat with the clear hinges I use, and taping the back and front of the mat together etc.  The customer may think they’re getting a great deal - but it saves me a lot of time.

And finally - this is my first holiday season where I’m totally reliant on Lightroom - and that has made all the difference.

ps. Okay - if you’ve read this far — I’ll go back to the beginning thing: so what social bookmarks do you use or better yet - which one’s do you think the storefront browsers would like to have?

pss.  I upgraded this blog to wordpress 2.7 which went smoothly, except I see that the navigation bar at the top doesn’t work properly (or at all) anymore.  Also, I was using a plugin called Simple Tags in this blog, and that doesn’t work either.  The big wordpress change is the dashboard; and at least for me - you’ve now got sticky posts which is something I needed and was doing with code in the theme. (That welcome box you see in the storefront).

So it’s nice to have the same theme for both this blog and the storefront so I can test stuff here.

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The guy squeezing them together is the head bagel maker. Whenever he sees me with the camera he forces his workers to pose for me. In return for a print I always get some treat.

Quite a character. When he asks how I am (at 6 a.m.) and I say - tired. He retorts: tired? Everybody’s tired. He’s one of these people I run into that seems unusually wise.

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And so now with the new single column design, I can start to add larger jpgs — up to 900 px - both here and in the store.  Nice.  Something else to put on my todo list.

I’m also combining all my lightroom catalogs into one big one since it’s a PITA when I want to print stuff that’s in separate catalogs at the same time, i.e. on one piece of paper…  Which happens a lot.  I do love Lightroom - but I’ve got one suggestion for them, and maybe it will show up in the next version.  I haven’t figured out a good way to print images of different sizes on the same piece of paper unless I fool the layout by actually making them all the same size in PS by adjusting the canvas size. 

In other words, if I want to print an 8 x 12 and an 8 x 10 on a 13 x 19 inch pieces of paper, I’ve got to make the 8 x 10 into an 8 x 12, so that I can print them together.  Otherwise, LR wants to futz with the size of the 8 x 10 — or maybe I’m doing something wrong? 

So I see I’ve got something like 40,000 images in the big combined catalog; and then I remember that for every negative there’s another 35 that were never scanned.  In other words, the house is filled with sheets of negatives that aren’t in the catalog.  So let’s say that I’ve shot (digital & negatives combined) 200,000 images.  (It’s probably more than that).

The store has about 200 images in it.  What is that - like a thousand to one ratio.

Makes you wonder.  A thousand images for every one that ends up in the store.  How do you figure that, not to mention the time, when you figure out the cost of a print?

I think that self-editing has got to be one of the big skills for any photographer - especially these days where the shots to keeper ratio is much higher than when we were doing film. 

And boy - talk about storage - wait til I get my hands on the 21mp baby.  I’ve got my eye on that.  Backordered at B&H - but I’ve made enough money this year to spring for it.  Can’t wait to finish up the xmas rush and shoot with that baby.  Not to mention that it’s got that live view absolutely silent mode; and all the fun ISO stuff…  Yep… that will be fun.

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