I’ve been busily working for the last couple days getting Jenn’s site all back in order. Not only did we migrate her from Blogger to WordPress (like I did), but we also redesigned the entire site adding a lot more content and a brand new look.

It’s still early and I’m sure we’ll tweak some, but everything is mostly in place.

Being totally new to WordPress, it took a while to get used to their componentized templates and heavy use of PHP for stitching it all back together. Easy work for some, but maddening for a first-timer.

I thought I’d give a shout out to some of the developer’s out there that lended their wares to the effort.

The JavaScript slideshow gallery on the front page is from Jon Design’s Smooth Gallery 2.0. It was a fairly easy incorporation and seems to be fast and quite flexible.

The other is Dagon Design’s Secure Form Mailer plug-in. I had reused the PHP scripting from my old site and got it to work, but it felt cobbled together and offered little in terms of spam protection. We’ll give this plug-in a try and hopefully Jenn’s inbox will stay clear of unwanted mail – or not more so at least. Head over to Jenn’s contact page and drop her a line…

Hey all! It’s been a super busy couple of months. I’ve been a bit pre-occupied at work among other things.

Among those other things though have been helping Jenn with her shop and getting some of her ‘branding’ elements in place. New business cards are on their way along with some new website assets (when the cards get here). We’ll be getting some fabric labels for her handmade goods soon. Oh and we had rubber stamps made for addressing her shipments.
I’ve also been learning a bit of PHP (well, how to copy and paste it from tutorial sites and modify it) and so I have a new email system for the site. Click the contact me link in the right sidebar and drop me a line. I might even reply!
I did a bit of freelance work recently and grabbed myself a license of zBrush as a result. I plan to have fun with it at some point – although for those who aren’t up to speed on the whole zBrush thing – the user community has been waiting for an updated Mac version for quite some time now and it should be here at any moment. For now, I’ll install it on my Boot Camp partition, which just means I won’t use it much until the Mac version ships.
Speaking of shipping new software… Alias 2009 is right around the bend. Yup. Any day now.
As soon as we get our copies at work, I’ll put up a mini review. Maybe they’ll even have fixed the ‘tab key’ behavior that has become one of those little niggling under-my-skin things. It’s the first thing I check with every release of Alias, and then immediately file a bug report and then feature request. I’ve done so since version, um, 9? We’re coming-up on version 15 (a.k.a 2009) now; but whose counting?

Every once and a while Jenn gets asked about the photos in her shop. I’m proud to be her photo guy!

I’ve had the privilege to do a lot of product photo shoots with Teague’s photographer Doug Evans. And he’s shared more than a few tips with me. Thanks, Doug!

Here’s my little set-up:

• Camera: Canon 20D
• Lens: Canon EFS 17-85 mm IS zoom
• Lighting: 3 500 watt tungsten heads
• Ground: a sheet of clear plexiglass (from Home Depot) on top of white foam core (from Staples)
• Backdrop: more white foam core

I love my camera. I’ve had it for a couple years and it has never let me down. If you’re interested in photography, I highly recommend getting a digital SLR. I had 35 mm EOS 650 since high school and had a lot of fun with it, but it wasn’t until I started shooting digital that I (think) I really started to understand photography.

Now for the dumpster diving. My lights were a lucky find. One day while walking past a dumpster I saw a big black suitcase-looking thing. Curious, I pulled it out and found a nice little set of photo lights! I used them as decoration for a long time until Jenn needed photos of her products. I tried using desk lamps, but my exposures were way too long to be useful. So I plugged in those lights I had found long ago, and they worked! I’ve used them for all the 900-some photos I’ve shot for Jenn.
Oddly enough, my tripod was a dumpster find too. Either I’m lucky or I have a problem.

Happy shooting!

Update!

A few things came to mind after I posted this, um, post.

I didn’t mention that I try to shoot at f5.6 with a 72 mm focal length. This is the max that my lens will do. Sometimes 72 mm is a bit too long because my tripod can’t get up high enough or whatever, but that’s my goal. Of course, being a non-full-frame sensor on the Canon means it’s really like shooting at about 115 mm. Shooting at f5.6 gives me a fair amount of shallow depth of field effect.

My exposures are usually about 1/20 of a second. I did mention that shooting with a desk lamp resulted in exposures too slow to be useful, and 1/20 isn’t really a fast shutter speed either, but it’s way faster than what I was shooting at. I would love to have some real flashes, but that is getting too fancy even for me – unless I found some in a dumpster.

I shoot RAW format and do all my image processing in iPhoto 7. I love iPhoto. It does a great job with RAW files and I love that the latest version makes nondestructive edits to your files – like Aperture, but cheaper. I do much of my exposure and gamma correction in iPhoto along with any white balance tweaks. I calibrate my camera when I shoot, but sometimes there is a slight drift a few K here and there. Did I mention that I love iPhoto?

I do any pixel level editing in Photoshop. Usually this involves miscellaneous touch-up and bleaching out the background to a pure white. I try to get the background pure white during the shoot, but in evitably, there is a bit of vingetting due to the zoom lens, or I have to shoot just slightly dark to capture the texture in the white felt that Jenn likes to use. White on white isn’t easy, but that’s what Photoshop is for.

I have some Automator scripts set-up to convert the large 8 megapixel images down to something manageable for the web. I keep 3 versions of every file – the RAW file (in iPhoto) a editted TIFF at full resolution (these are suitable for printing) and the low resolution JPEG. We keep the images cataloged by date and I archive to DVD-ROM at the end of each year.
I also find DIY Photography a great resource for tips and tricks.

I hope the added info was helpful, maybe even interesting…

Cheers,
J.