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Sorry for the dearth of blog posts lately. I’ve been busy with a number of behind the scenes tasks. Most excitingly, I am preparing to sell fine art prints of my images at art shows. In preparation I’ve been purchasing equipment, picking images to sell, etc. I also incorporated a business, and have been applying for tax licenses, opening bank accounts, and the like. It’s a lot of work just getting the basics in place! Also, I’ve finally replaced Fotomoto with a self-hosted solution for prints. I wasn’t happy with photomoto’s high fees, with their long delay in disbursing funds (30 days!) and with the lack of control over the printing process. I added a new print ordering feature to the site, and will be printing and shipping all future orders myself. That required quite a bit of programming, but I think that the end result was work it. Finally, I just returned from a trip to Bosque del Apache. I made a couple of images that I’m really excited about. Stay tuned as I post them over the next week or two. I’ve just published a new collection of monochrome animal images. I hope you enjoy them. I’ve made a few changes on this site. First, in view of the ever-increasing size of people’s monitors, I’ve made the images on the photo blog larger. This affects both the size of the image on the page, and the side when you click on the image for a larger view/slideshow. (If this screws up the layout on your system, please let me know.)
Thanks, as always, for your support. Because I don’t already have enough to distract me from processing images, I decided to join 500px. Lots of stunning photography there (my contribution not withstanding!). Also, the site seems to have attracted mostly able/professional photographers. So far, I’ve seen a lot less dreck than on, say, Flickr. Please check it out, and hopefully vote on some of my images. If you’re on 500px, please drop me your username in the comments; I’d love to see your work. Just discovered (and fixed) a technical problem with the RSS feed. This likely affected e-mail subscriptions too. Let me know if you have any problems. Near disaster this week: my Seagate hardrive, repository of rougly 700 gigs of photos, suddenly stopped working. With no warning the drive disappeared from Windows, and even the bios wouldn’t recognize it. Minor panic as I realized that though I have an extra copy of every raw file on the drive (I make backups as I download each photo with Downloader Pro), I did not have backups of my photoshop files created over the last few months. Also, since I hadn’t backed up recently, restoring my download backups would mean deleting, again, raw files that I’d already examined and discarded once. Not fun. Plus recovering and organzing the backup raw files would be a pain, since the backups reside on a least three different systems. To make a long story short, the drive was rendered inoperable by a firmware bug. Not so hot on Seagate’s part. But, much to their credit, Seagate arranged to have the drive overnighted to them — they paid for shipping and even for the cost to package the drive. A tech called me the next day, telling me that he’d fixed the firmware and that the drive was fixed and on its way back. I should be back up and running by shortly. So, while I’m not happy about the firmware bug, I was very impressed by how well Seagate handled the repair. Doubly impressed, because I bought the drive as a “bare” OEM drive, and I expected to get a hassle about the warranty. Of course, my images will now live on a RAID system, so I won’t lose any data even if I lose a drive. And I’ll be better (really!) about offsite backups. As an experiment, I’ve created a twitter companion account (@ASK_Photography) to go with my blog. Look for updates in the sidebar at the right. I just fixed my RSS Feed to show the entire post (with images). The thumbnail galleries still look a little funky, but I’m working on it. Let me know if you have any other issues with the feed. When I migrated my old site over to the current one, I left out a number of photos that do not represent my best work. This mallard image didn’t make the cut. My brother likes this one enough, however, to complain that he could no longer find it. By request (and after more carefully evaluating the image) I’ve added it back to the bird portfolio. [SinglePic not found]
I have posted a new gallery of images from Bosque del Apache, one of my favorite places on the planet to photograph. I have posted a collection of red fox images. I hope to post some additional collections soon as I finish fleshing out the new site. Enjoy. I have added many additional images to the Night Blurs collection. Enjoy! I have been incredibly bad about updating my blog lately. I’ve also gotten way behind editing the (many) photos that I’ve shot over the last couple of months. The largely unedited shoots (Belize, Arches National Park, an early morning “photographers only” shoot at the local zoo, some nice fox kit images, etc.) are starting to pile up. So, I’ve resolved to get “caught up” in the next week. In that sprit, here’s an image from a shoot this morning in a wildlife refuge near Boulder, Colorado. It’s just an Eastern Kingbird, not the most exotic species. But I like the perch, the action, and the clean background. Back to work editing images . . . If you use Lightroom and need to throw together a gallery quickly, or if you’d like to create a photography website without learning HTML or hacking Gallery to do your bidding, you should check out the great set of Lightroom web gallery templates from Matthew at The Turning Gate. Matt’s (donationware) templates provide everything you need to assemble a professional-looking photo gallery or a whole website. Check out his demonstration gallery to see all of the various templates in action, including the “meta templates” that draw various light-room generated galleries together into a coherent website. I’ve used the Slimbox Gallery for a number of private quick-and-dirty web galleries. Also, I use the Monoslideshow Gallery to generate the XML for the Monoslideshow Gallery on the Splash Page of AndrewKelley.net |
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Copyright © 2012 Andrew Kelley Photography, Ltd. - All Rights Reserved |
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