For the past few weeks, I’ve working on some SEO for this site. I just realized that, although this site is over a year old, I never claimed it on my profile in Technorati. Oops…

So, this quick post has a simple purpose. I need to insert this code - G75ZCYP56J99 – into a post so that Technorati can add the blog to my profile and I can move on with my life. Nothing more interesting. Although I do plan on writing up a post later about putting together a starting gear kit for a photography studio.  Someone had asked that question in the comments on my post comparing the Canon t1i vs t2i vs t3i, and I thought it was a sufficiently important question to devote a whole post to answering it.

More on that later today…

So a while back, I wrote about a problem with my friend’s Olympus FE-4020. It’s been a great little camera, and she loves the color. But, when she came back from a trip to Florida it wouldn’t work. The lens was stuck open, it wouldn’t move in and out, and it made a funny noise like the motor was trying to run.

She did what she usually does, and asked me what was wrong. The camera was less than a year old, and Olympus has a one year warranty on most of their products. Since I couldn’t immediately find a way to fix it, and I wasn’t sure that I could fix it if I opened it up, I figured I’d give the warranty a go first. I assumed it would cost more to fix it than the camera was worth, but if the warranty covers the bill…

I filled out the form on Olympus’ warranty information website. I needed to fill out the “alternate Repair Submission Form” for US customers. Put it in a box with the camera and shipped the whole thing off to the repair center in New York. I had to pay for the shipping out of pocket, but I figured the $5.95 (USPS Small Flat Rate Priority Mail Box) was a reasonable expense.

A week went by, and I didn’t hear anything from Olympus. Thought I would get some kind of confirmation (e-mail at least) that they received the camera, but nothing. Two weeks, still nothing. About three weeks after I shipped the camera out, I came home to find a box at my doorstep. It was the camera… fixed!

I’m a little annoyed at the lack of communication. However, the camera is completely fixed. The lens assembly must have been replaced, and it opens and closes fine. The camera turns on and off again, and it takes pictures like it used to. Now, unfortunately, my friend is in China so I’ll have to ship this to her the next time I sent a care package overseas…

So, if you’re having a similar problem and it’s under warranty, ship it off to Olympus. I don’t know how much it would cost to fix it if you paid for the repair, but the cost of shipping is certainly a reasonable expense when you’re talking about reviving a $100+ camera.

Suppose you decide you want to pursue a side business as a photographer. You’re not ready to dive in and open a studio full time, but you want to be able to take clients and do sessions or projects from time to time.

One problem you’ll run up against is – how do people get in contact with you? Surely you have an e-mail address and a cell phone… but do you want people to use your personal cell phone and personal e-mail address? Probably not.

Although you could spend a lot of money on a second cell phone, you can actually get a free phone number, voice mail box, and e-mail for your photography business from a service you probably already use – Google.

Enter Google Voice

When I first launched Olinda Gibbons Photography, we didn’t do a whole lot of business. It certainly didn’t justify a new cell phone number or a separate cell phone plan. But I wanted to be able to give out a phone number without giving out my own cell phone number.

That’s when I tried out Google Voice. It’s a free service from Google with a couple cool features. For our purposes, it does three things.

You get a free phone number. If you want to change to a new number, you’ll have to dish out some cash, but you can choose an area code and point of origin for this number. So, if you want to appear local, pick a number that matches the town you’re near. When people call this Google Voice number, a few things can happen.

You get a free voice mail box. You can set up a special business greeting for your voicemail, a clear advantage over using a personal cell phone. You can set your Google voice number to do not disturb, so people are automatically routed to this mailbox. You can also receive transcripts of your voicemails via e-mail, sms, or an app for your phone (the transcripts aren’t always the best, but you’ll usually get the gist of the message).

You can route these phone calls to your cell phone, or send them straight to voicemail. Let’s say you don’t want to take calls during your regular work day. Set the do not disturb in the morning, and turn it off when you’re off work. During the day, people will get your voicemail; in the evening, the calls will come to your cell phone. You can also receive calls at other phone numbers, if you want to use a different phone, like your home phone.

Better yet, the phone calls that you receive and make from Google Voice are all routed through your Google Voice number. If you have a limited number of minutes on your cell phone plan, you can add the number to your friends and family plan and all of your business calls will magically be free!

At some point, you may want to upgrade to a separate physical phone. But, in the meantime, why not make use of the free services available to you?

I’ve been working on small websites for the past five or six years, and in that time I’ve used two web hosts. I started with IX Webhosting, and I left at the end of my second year. I would not recommend them at all.

The next host I found, on the other hand, has done pretty well by me. If you’re looking for a cheap place to host your own photography blog or portfolio website, you could do a lot worse than HostGator.

I’ve been with them for going on three years, I think. In that time, I’ve had no major disruptions in service (a problem I had with IX Webhosting), and I’ve had no problems hosting multiple sites/domains on my account. The price is fair – I’m paying between $7 and $8 a month for the middle plan. I’ve been able to do everything I needed to in CPanel, and I don’t think I ever had to open a ticket or contact support to help get something working properly.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that HostGator is the best host ever or that the basic plans are good for an enterprise scale website… but they are great for personal projects or small business websites. I’ve hosted WordPress sites as well as Drupal sites, and some of these projects delivered upwards of 10k pageviews a month with no problems. I’ve used a lot of space and a lot of bandwidth (my photography studio website hosts a lot of pictures) and I’ve never heard a complaint from HostGator.

There are two very good reasons why you might want to try them out, though, if you’re looking for a host.

First, the coupon codes. At the moment, there are a few active coupons that will get you the first month hosting free. If you use the coupon code FALL2k11PENNY, you’ll get $9.95 off your order. If you picked the monthly payment, that’s a full discount down to $0.01. Low risk there. If you want to sign up for longer, you can get better pricing, and you can use the coupon code 25OFFFALL2K11 to get 25% off. [Note: That doesn't cover the cost of a domain. If you need a domain, don't register through HostGator, as the prices are high. I always register domains through Moniker.]

Second, the Google adsense voucher. You get $100 of free Google adwords with every account. That’s a nice bonus, especially if you’re starting a portfolio/studio website and you want to get some exposure. It can be hard to get people to find your products through natural search quickly, but a little paid advertising can go a long way. I used a voucher to advertise my new comp card design/printing services, and I had an order in my inbox the following morning.

So what are you waiting for? Go start your website. Sign up for HostGator, grab a domain at Moniker, and start up a WordPress blog.

By the way, the links to HostGator in this post are affiliate links. If you follow them and sign up for an account, I will receive a commission. However, I only promote products that I actually like. The only two affiliate systems that I participate in are HostGator and Amazon. Both have provided me with great service in the past, so I don’t feel any qualms about getting paid to promote those services here. I don’t have an affiliate account with any other web hosts.

So yesterday was the big going away party that I’ve been planning for. I didn’t get around to building the photo booth (that’s on the agenda for this week), so instead we just took pictures throughout the party and printed them as the night went on with the Selphy CP800.

The party was a blast, and the scrapbook came out great. I was really happy with the way the printer performed, but not everything went as smooth as I hoped. Some thoughts after the jump.

Keep reading…

There are a couple of concerns you may have when comparing different printers. But, at some point, you probably want to think about the bottom line. How much is it going to cost to print?

The best way to compare printers on this metric is to devise some kind of standard measure – i.e. cost per print. If you know how much a 4″x6″ print will cost with Printer X and how much a 4″x6″ print will cost with Printer Y, you can make a nice, simple decision. Right?

Maybe. Let’s take an example. Keep reading…

For the rest of the summer, I’m going to experiment with a new posting schedule. I want to stick with the basic schedule of posting once a day (unless an idea needs to be broken down into multiple posts), but I want a little more structure to the topics that I write about. Over the past two months, I’ve gotten stuck in some trends – like writing a lot about InDesign, then a lot about Lightroom – and I think it would help to diversify a little.

I identified seven main topics that I want to cover, and I’m going to attempt to write something about each topic each week. Tentatively, the schedule is going to look something like…

• Monday – Photography Gear / Gear Reviews
• Tuesday – Lighting Examples / Advice
• Wednesday – InDesign or Other Random Topic
• Thursday – General Shooting Examples / Advice
• Friday – Photography Books / Book Review
• Saturday – Lightroom Processing / Techniques
• Sunday – Photoshop Processing / Techniques

That means tomorrow, we’ll start things off with a review of a photography book that I recently read. I think I’ll start with Minimalist Lighting: Professional Techniques for Location Photography by Kirk Tuck

If you’re subscribed to the RSS feed for this site, you’ve probably noticed that I try to post on average once a day. I missed a couple posts this weekend because I was away camping, but I try post only once, and occasionally twice, a day so as not to flood your reader. I don’t have that much to say about photography that I need to write eight posts a day… if I have a lot to say, I try to save it for the next day.

In any case, over the next two days you’ll notice a flurry of posts. I wanted to write up a post about how to install Canon’s utility software without the CD, and in order to help people find it better through Google, I decided to break it down into a bunch of similar but slightly different posts. So, the posts today and tomorrow may seem kind of repetitive – check back in on Wednesday and I’ll be back to the normal one post per day.

I was going through the Adobe InDesign templates that I’ve shared on this site, converting them to CS5.5 and to backwards compatible IDML files, and I noticed something interesting. The same files, opened / converted / saved in CS5.5 are quite a bit smaller than those saved originally in CS5. The IDML files are also smaller – a fraction of the size of the comparable INDD file.

Here’s an example. The first comp card template that I shared is a small, one page document with four image frames and some text. The original INDD file that I created in Adobe InDesign CS5 is 1,804kb. That is for a file that is one page, contains four blank image frames, contains two text frames, and maybe a dozen or two dozen words. Yikes, that doesn’t seem very efficient.

After I opened the file and re-saved it as an INDD file in Adobe InDesign CS5.5, the file size was more than cut in half – 864kb. Perhaps the really interesting part…? The IDML file is only 31kb - less than 2% of the size of the original InDesign CS5 document.

A similar document, a two page comp card template with no images/links, follows the same trend. The original INDD file created by InDesign CS5 clocks in at 2,012kb. The new INDD file saved in InDesign CS5.5 is only 880kb. Meanwhile, the IDML file is a mere 34kb.

Presumably the IDML file will lose some of the functionality allowed by the latest version of InDesign. Nonetheless, it’s interesting just how inefficient the old INDD files are as well as how efficient the IDML file is (which is basically a compressed collection of XML files).

Earlier in the week, I noticed to my chagrin that INDD files created in Adobe InDesign CS5.5 are not inherently backwards compatible with Adobe InDesign CS5. Doh.

After doing some reading, it turns out this isn’t too out of the ordinary. It seems that regular Adobe users are used to this kind of obsolescence. This is, however, my first upgrade cycle, so it kind of caught me by surprise.

Keep reading…