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Blurb Seminar

Books  Comment
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Blurb put on a great seminar on new bookmaking possibilities at the Palm Springs Photo Festival.
Blurb makes possible small run, limited edition books, a majority of which wouldn’t be published in the mainstream publishing world. In comparison to high end traditional offset printing Blurb’s final product is a limited run, lo-fi approach. The cost per item is greater than traditional offset printing, but you can produce as few books as you like. You assume the financial risk, not the publisher, but you can limit or even eliminate your risk. There are only six sizes (harcover or softcover, with three different binding process. You have a limited choice of paper stocks – standard and premium. The color management is good but not excellent.
Blurb books look similar to traditional books, but they’re different. Really different. How? Create your own online private or public bookstore. Quickly and easily design your own book yourself with Blurb’s online software. (Some have done it in as few as 20 minutes.) Blurb will then produce as many or as few copies as you like and send them where you want them within a week. You can make them available for purchase by others. Blurb can fulfill orders for you. And if you make a profit, they’ll send you a check. You can update your book at any time; within hours or for the second copy ordered. And last, but certainly not least, everything in the text in your Blurb book is searchable; a Google search will find text in the captions for images! That’s amazing!
Blurb is a powerful new addition to the creation of book. They printed over 400,000 titles in 2008. This is a huge paradigm shift for the way we make books and share our work with others.
Check out Blurb here.
Check out my Blurb book Antarctica here (and stay tuned for the updated version coming soon).

Photoshelter Survey on Websites

Business  Comment
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At the Palm Spring Photo Festival, Grover Sanschagrin (Founder, Vice President) of Photoshelter shared great statistics from a recent survey they conducted  on website usage. They polled over 550+ photo buyers discussing what they liked/disliked in photographer websites. The focus is heavily oriented to stock photography. While everyone will use the information in different ways, it’s useful for everyone with a website.
71% will leave after 15 seconds
87% want an immediate price
67% like images larger than 700 pixels
40% look at 4-6 galleries , while 21% look at more than 7
77% don’t watch slideshows
98% objected to watermarks (wouldn’t buy those images)(though transparent
Three golden rules for websites?
Make it easy to use.
Make it simple.
Make it memorable.
Check out the survey here.

Content Aware Scale

Software - Photoshop  Comment
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I’ve been out in the field for two long days during my workshop at the Palm Springs Photo Festival. One of the techniques we practiced is exploring how using Photoshop’s Transform and Content-Aware Scale can change the way you make exposures – opening up possibilities for both strengthening classic compositions and also for making new compositions you might otherwise pass by – or not see.
The classic Photoshop Transform tools have been long overlooked and underutilized. Now, in Photoshop CS4, we’ve got a new way to Transform our images – Content-Aware Scale. This will scale specific areas of an image more than others. Many photographers scale an image to resize it. Sometimes portrait photographers squeeze images 10% horizontally to make people look thinner. But how many photographers use these tools to create more compelling proportions in their images? How many use them as a tool to strengthen or weaken relationships in their images by making areas of an image closer to or further away from one another. Few. These are new tools. They’re not hard to master technically. Activate the tool of your choice and then push or pull. Simple. (Favor squeezing instead of expanding to avoid upsampling artifacts.) This may be challenging for some to feel comfortable with as an accepted practice. We accept the distortions of lenses. Why is this type of post-processing any less acceptable? This is challenging to master perceptually. Incorporating these new tools into your ways of seeing takes practice. Once you do master them, you’ll find you’ll make new types of exposures with these possibilities in mind. You’ll learn one more way of seeing your subjects. New possibilities bring new ways of seeing. To master them you’ve got to use them – a lot. It takes practice. Try it. And keep using it. This technique can make an amazing difference in many images.
Learn these and other techniques in my upcoming Workshops.
Find out more in my downloads.

James Balog – Extreme Ice Survey

Photographers  Comment
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Jim Balog has been doing an absolutely fascinating photographic project. He and a team of glaciologists have put cameras around the world and set them to take exposures every hour. The changes they’ve tracked have been astonishing – even to the most learned scientists! You’ve never seen anything like this. Few people have. Until now. This project is important photographically – it’s extended the way photographers work and think about developing projects. The focus on movement/change represented by still photographs, many presented as time lapse series moves us ever closer to blurring the lines between still and video. It’s a project of historic proportions in so many ways.
This project presents important evidence in the quest to understand climate change. Here’s the bottom line. “Over 100 million people live within three feet of sea level—the very amount that experts expect seas to rise by 2100. Cities will spend trillions on coastal defenses, low-lying regions such as Florida and Bangladesh will be devastated, and many island nations will cease to exist. Overall, the consequences will test our ability to adapt like never before.” The debate is not whether climate change is happening. 90% of scientists agree it is. The real debates are how much, how fast, how much is geophysical, how much man contributes, what we can do about it, and are we prepared to react to it.
Watch Extreme Ice here.
Learn more about James Balog here.
Balog ends the series in a place that has captivated me – Iceland.
Check out my Iceland workshop here.
See my work in Antarctica. Images. Text. Book.

Earth Hour – Saturday March 28, 8:30 – 9:30pm

Environment - Causes  Comment
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This year, Earth Hour has been transformed into the world’s first global election, between Earth and global warming.
For the first time in history, people of all ages, nationalities, race and background have the opportunity to use their light switch as their vote – Switching off your lights is a vote for Earth, or leaving them on is a vote for global warming. WWF are urging the world to VOTE EARTH and reach the target of 1 billion votes, which will be presented to world leaders at the Global Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen 2009.
This meeting will determine official government policies to take action against global warming, which will replace the Kyoto Protocol. It is the chance for the people of the world to make their voice heard.
VOTE EARTH by simply switching off your lights for one hour, and join the world for Earth Hour.
Saturday, March 28, 8:30-9:30pm.
Find out more here.
And here.

PSW – The Fine Art of Digital

Event - Lecture  Comment
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This evening is always one of my favorite events. DiVitale, Glyda, McNally, Maisel, Versace, Caponigro, Peterson. We all show recent work and talk about our creative processes. What we do. What we produce. Why we do the things we do. The really important stuff. It’s always different. I never do the same thing twice.
The evening is full of great pearls of wisdom. Like Joe McNally’s “If you want to take more interesting pictures, go to more interesting places.” Or, Jay Maisel, “Let the picture come to you.” Or Vincent Versace’s quotes of Ernst Hass, “Don’t take pictures. Be taken by pictures.” and Cartier Bresson, “Give me inspiration over perspiration.”
Tonight I’ll be showing new work from my recent voyage to Antarctica in January 2009.
See my work in Antarctica here and stay tuned for new updates.
See my text on Antarctica here and stay tuned for updates.
Watch for my Antarctica Blurb book update later this spring.
See upcoming destinations here.

PSW Keynote – Configurator & Watermarker

Event - Seminar  Comment
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Adobe’s John Loiacono, Russell Brown, and John Nack gave a great overview of all the key new CS4 features making a compelling case for upgrading. They noted that there have been many free enhancements to the product line since the release, including great updates for Camera Raw. If you upgraded, but didn’t get these updates, get them! And there’s a new utility that let’s you make your own custom panels – Configurator. NAPP has made a new panel to help make watermarking your images a breeze. It’s free to members.
Missed the event? See it here!
Check these other blogs for co-coverage of the event.
Corey Barker
John Paul Caponigro
RC Concepcion
Dave Cross
Jim Divitale
Laurie Excell
Martin Evening
Richard Harrington
Scott Kelby
Matt Koslowski
Deke McClelland
Joe McNally
John Nack
Moose Peterson
Jeff Schewe
Colin Smith
Ben Willmore
David Ziser
Find out more about Photoshop World here.