San Francisco Nudes - Blog

Little updates

2010-03-14T19:04:00.001-07:00

If anybody's looking for some really excellent imported wild fennel seeds, check out Sausage Debauchery's eBay store. I hadn't made sausage for a while - it's actually pretty easy, and fun, and yummy, but the fancy-pants fennel definitely makes a difference. (Update: His website's live now - Sausage Debauchery).

As long as I'm plugging random folks, I get casings and the curing salts for when I make bacon from Butcher Packer.

Blurb printed the book sample faster than expected and it turns out they ship them from Washington so I should have it Wednesday according to the shipper.

My lab does framing now and I ordered some for the studio and they look GREAT. Part of why I got them was so I can have some pictures handy, up on the wall, where I can point and say that's an 8x10, that's an 11x14, that's a 16x20 and they can see what they look like framed without running around the house and finding some. I'll also offer it as a service to portrait clients - I got a little sample thing with pieces of the different frame choices and all that. It probably doesn't make sense as a website option, so I won't be adding it in any formal way, but if you've been thinking "Gosh, I'd love a print, but I hate getting things framed" drop me a note and we'll talk.

And as I'm sure everybody's tired of hearing, there's lots of cool shoots scheduled, but we're not there yet.

Time marches on

2010-03-10T11:09:00.000-08:00

There's a little amphitheater behind the music building at Mills College. If you look at the work of Imogen Cunningham you'll see it occasionally (see this one as an example).

This is just from my little point and shoot. They're not really using it now - it's pretty messy but nothing a pressure washer couldn't fix. But the thing that amuses me? The safety rail. I wonder when they added it and if it was in response to somebody actually slipping or if they were just being paranoid. It's not a very strong looking rail, and I'm guessing most people don't use the stairs much anyway. They've also painted that wall in the front (not pictured in my shot) bright white and it looks kind of strange versus the concrete - you don't really get the same effect in the wider angle shots.

In other news, I have three model shoots scheduled in March. I had four but it's looking like I'm going to have to reschedule one to April. Unfortunately the one that was rescheduled as the first one so it will be a couple of weeks. Which is also probably when I'll get the test copy of my book and if the quality is fine I'll do things like post the cover and pricing and so forth.

More on the book

2010-03-09T10:09:00.000-08:00

Well, that was painless. Blurb's software for assembling a book is really very user friendly, especially for this kind of book where you're mostly swapping pages around. I actually did the whole thing in one session with a baby in my lap, although the big monitor helps. One bit of good news is they can print everything flush to the page without borders, so the image size will be a tiny bit larger even though the pages are a bit smaller than Lulu.

So now we wait. I get a copy (which will take a while - they have to print it and send it UPS ground from Lord knows where). I decide if the quality's impressive enough versus Lulu to justify the 50% price increase (sigh) and if I need to make any little tweaks. I may need to reorder another test book if I make enough changes that I feel nervous, but otherwise I just mark it as public and roll with it.

These aren't a big money maker compared to the prints, but they're fun, and people give them as gifts so in some ways they're kind of a permanent advertisement (put the URL in the book!).

Craigslist Find

2010-03-08T14:45:00.000-08:00

I got this on craigslist - red Weber kettle, old style wood handle, three vents on the bottom instead of the modern "one touch" system with a big handle. As far as I can tell it was made from 1976-1978. That's when I was 6-8 years old, so I like to think of it as the charcoal grill we would have had if my family had some common sense. (I have happy memories of outdoor cooking but also of lots of problems with the cheap cooker and almost non-functional electric charcoal starter. With one of these and a chimney starter there would have been a lot less cursing.)

Cost? $15. I had to do a little sanding and put some tung oil on the handle to make it look nice and protect it, and I removed a little light surface rust here and there, and I went ahead and replaced a couple of key parts like the grills. Luckily Weber hasn't changed their grill dimensions since then so you can just pick that sort of thing up at the local hardware store... that's a sign of a great product, by the way - 35 years later and you can still get parts for it.

Book progress

2010-03-07T15:04:00.000-08:00

So I went through the 47 shoots I identified earlier and came up with 86 shots, which is more than I want because I want to keep it under 80 pages and you lose some pages to title pages and such (although two will be front and back cover shots). This isn't really a problem because some will naturally drop out when I start caring about what order they go in. It's basically an exercise in pairing up pictures - compare and contrast - maybe two pictures of the same model that are interesting, or the same lighting, or two different models in the same location, or similar poses, or similar moods, or very different moods... you get the idea. And it seems like there's always something that doesn't quite fit. So with any luck maybe some will just drop out.

The next steps are to figure out exactly what dimensions I need, if I'm going to use their software to assemble everything or use a word processing program and generate a .pdf, and then just sit down and do it. That last bit usually takes a while if you're not just throwing everything together at random.

I'll probably also try some cover mockups with a fake title. Finding a cover is always challenging - you need not only a strong image and one that sums up the book but one with a lot of empty space where you can put text! So even if I can't make the final version sometimes it's useful to make some mockups so I at least know what image I'm using so I won't use that in the book itself.

Book update

2010-03-06T13:45:00.000-08:00

So I started item #3 (these don't all necessarily have to be done in order) - checking into Blurb. Here's what I found.

1. With the options I need, the Blurb books are slightly smaller (8x10 versus 8.5x11) and cost about 50% more. This is supposed to be a low cost alternative to prints so cost matters!
2. Opinions on print quality vary. Some people seem to think one's better, some the other. But I do notice the more recent ones are impressed - they may have had a major quality upgrade at some point.
3. The way their pricing works it's not per page, it's within a range, so if I go with them I might as well go with 75ish images to keep on the high end of a tier.
4. It's not that much more expensive to print a 80 page book versus a 20 page one so there's no point in doing a pre-test, I might as well upload all the images.
5. They apparently have some nice formatting software which might be easier than doing a PDF.

So I think I'm going to go with that route in mind - reformatting the images to Lulu's spec and changing printers won't be difficult if the quality isn't high enough to justify the price.

Book notes

2010-03-05T13:24:00.000-08:00

So here's my to do list:
1. Identify shoots since last book - done - 47 that are suitable
2. Identify 1-2 pictures from each shoot, including keeping an eye out for good cover shots
3. I've traditionally used Lulu - check Blurb since they seem to be popular now. What's their pricing, are there any format gotchas, and see if it's worth sending in a minimal short form book just to test quality. (Depending on minimum page lengths and stuff)
4. Make final decision on printer
5. Get their templates and per page dimensions
6. Format everything to that spec
7. Come up with a !@#$ title (always the hard part)
8. Format covers to their spec
9. Assemble book, including title page, choosing picture order. Identify any text that needs to be written.
10. Write the text, format that.
11. Send to printer for test run.
12. If it looks good make it available for sale

I'm not sure how long it's going to take given my other commitments, but I have three shoots scheduled but they're all in the last two weeks of March so let's see how far I can get before then.

Little updates

2010-03-01T15:56:00.000-08:00

The posters thing didn't perform and I've removed it. There was interest but somehow no actual sales. But hey, now I know, and oddly enough sales of some of the high end stuff have been really strong. It's interesting - I used to sell mostly 8x10s but now it's mostly 11x14s and 16x20s.

I would like to have some lower cost option, partially because it lets people try out my customer service (excellent!) without risking lots of cash, so I'll probably step up plans to whip together a book. Same sort of thing I've done in the past, for those who have one, 60ish pages, and I skipped a year so I have two years to choose from so I'll probably do anywhere from 0-2 pictures per shoot. There's not a lot of text so it's pretty straightforward if you already have the pictures - basically just a question of choosing and assembling everything, then I'll probably try a different print on demand company just to compare, and then go ahead with whichever one impresses me the most. I'll try to get those first steps started because it does take a while to get a sample back.

I have some cool shoots scheduled, but none as soon as I'd like, sorry about that. But if even some of what I have planned works out I think folks will be pleased.

Funny Google result

2010-02-25T16:49:00.000-08:00

I'm getting a little extra traffic for the search term "tiger rant" where apparently I was placing pretty high but I'm the first result on the second page. Why? This post where I was irritated at the San Francisco Zoo who seems to think it's OK if the tigers get out and eat people as long as they're unpleasant people. 'cause, you know, tigers always stop at one.

Somehow I suspect that's not what they're looking for, but such is life on the Internet.

I think I'm in love

2010-02-23T18:56:00.000-08:00

Little updates

2010-02-20T17:03:00.000-08:00

My experiment selling posters is ongoing. The results so far have been underwhelming to say the least, but I said I'd give it until March 1st so if you want to get one now's the time. I really don't mind trying things and having them fail but I'm not going to leave the site cluttered up with a bunch of options that nobody wants - I already offer way too many and it confuses people (the major effect so far of offering posters is now I'm getting questions from people verifying before purchase that the lab prints are regular photographs and not press-printed posters - something they were never concerned about before).

Obviously I haven't posted any new work in a while. Sorry about that - if I realized we'd have the kind of unsettled often raining weather we've been having this season I would have been more aggressive about getting some studio shoots scheduled. I'll see what I can do to jumpstart that a bit - the good news is that with my new computer gear and workflow I can get sets up very fast. If you're tired of swinging by and not seeing anything new I suggest poking through the archive section if you haven't already - I'm about due for another purge.

Normally I'd include a paragraph about how nice it's been to watch Olympic curling but our men's team in particular... ugh, I don't even want to think about it.

20 years of Photoshop

2010-02-19T06:52:00.000-08:00

Yep, version 1.0 of Photoshop came out 20 years ago. Obviously it was originally designed for scanned film and drawing and such and not digital cameras. It's almost synonymous with "retouching" at this point although the program does much more. I use it, although I spend much more time in its sister product, Lightroom, which was built from the ground up for photography and is much faster and workflow oriented.

I almost worked on Photoshop as a programmer. Back in the mid 90s... I think it was 1995 actually... I was working on developing test tools for screen savers at a company called Berkeley Systems (if "flying toasters" or "After Dark" rings a bell, that's them). Then I was put on the team for the next version of the product itself but the whole thing was falling apart and it seemed time to leave. I had two places I was looking at. One made pretty dull software - basically sat on top of a database and provided a nice interface and could track all kinds of process and workflow stuff. They mostly sold it to track trouble tickets but as an example it made a great bug tracker. And the other was Adobe, to work on Photoshop.

But the problem was, the Photoshop job wasn't for the main development team. It was working for the QA (Quality Assurance aka software test) team to instrument the product so they could track down bugs and crashes and memory leaks and such... because the software was already getting bloated in 1995. And the reason the QA department was making the hire was because the main developer group thought it unnecessary or was otherwise against it. So the job would have been half political - basically smoozing individual developers to devulge enough about the code to add hooks where necessary. And the other problem is it was a repeat in many ways of the job I'd just been promoted out of, and I wanted a business card that said "Software Engineer" and not "some oddball guy we tacked into the testing department because the real developers aren't being cooperative." It looked like a total train wreck and I didn't need two in a row.

So I took the more boring job, and I'm absolutely sure it was the right decision, but it would have been an interesting challenge, that's for sure.

Craigslist Kelp

2010-02-10T08:56:00.000-08:00

Not a model wannabe this time, but a photographer wannabe.

So I have this extra light that I keep meaning to sell but haven't really put any energy into it. I should probably just list it on eBay but because of fees and just the pain of shipping it I've avoided it. I did however finally get my butt into gear and list it on craigslist.

Being an honest guy I mentioned this noisy fan and discounted the price $25 below what they're going for. And my God it brought out the bottom feeders. One person wrote this detailed table with the cost to ship it back to Alien Bees, fix it, and ship it back. Well, first off if the fan's going to bug you, and you want a totally new one... buy a totally new one. Especially since they go for only about 10-20% lower than new so it's just not that much cheaper. I'm not sure why they go for so much but they do. But more interestingly - he just made up the numbers. The amount he quoted was about twice their standard service charge - which includes shipping back! And he was clearly lying because he said he checked with the company but the prices are very clearly stated on their website.

Another guy said, well, the price for a new one is such-and-such and argued down from there. The thing is - he started with a price about 10% lower than they go for on the companies website (which is the only place you can get them - there are no dealers), left out shipping, rounded a couple of times (dropping $9 at one point), and made it look like I was asking some crazy price. If I were math challenged and didn't know what the actual price is I might have believed him. It was very convincing... except that none of the numbers actually added up.

I'm in no rush so I'm just ignoring the lowball offers, and actually it's been kind of fun reading them, but it amazes me that people spend the time to justify what's basically a crazy number, hoping that the person selling hasn't spent 5 minutes searching completed items on eBay to see what they're selling for.

Last time I sold one of these it went in a few hours, and it's too early to tell if I'll get some good response. (If not clearly I need to open it and see what the fan's rubbing against and bend something because people are fixating on it). I wonder if it's real photographers who are trying to save money, or if it's people who know how much they go for on eBay and they're hoping to lowball people on craigslist and flip them? I bet it's flippers because it's just too devious otherwise.

Update: Sure enough, the very next day somebody wrote to me in the morning, we hashed out some details and he dropped by the local coffee place where I meet models on his way home from work. I brought my Vagabond unit which lets you run studio lights anywhere, showed him it works, got cash, and we went. No muss, no fuss.

He's in a similar circumstance to when I started - he's a photographer but hasn't done studio stuff and wants something to learn on. It'll serve him great for that and I also used it for the first couple of years of professional work as well until I had enough lights that I didn't need it. Nice to know it's going to a good home.

The cool thing about Alien Bees is that they really do hold their value. Because of the fan I sold it at the low end of the range, but it was still only about $50 less than new. So it cost me $10/year for that light...

Anybody want a poster?

2010-02-08T06:29:00.000-08:00

I'm trying an experiment - offering a couple of posters for sale.

Happy birthday

2010-02-07T00:01:00.000-08:00

Happy birthday to me,
Happy birthday to me,
I just turned forty,
Oh shit.

Want to cheer me up? Buy some prints. Here's an incentive - for the next 24 hours I'll include a free signed 8x10 of my choice with your order (it will be something I have on hand - I always have some extra prints around because of minimum orders at the lab).

Nom nom nom

2010-02-05T09:10:00.000-08:00

Sigh

2010-02-02T13:30:00.001-08:00

Blogger sucks. They're discontinuing the kind of blog I have - where I use their tools to write it, but then it's pushed onto my local site. Using the surviving options it's possible to set it up using a custom domain - but not into a subdirectory. One thing I like about the current setup is that the blog's just another part of the site with basically the same look, etc. and this is going to be a step away from that. The good news is that it appears that I can use a subdomain, so basically instead of

www.san-francisco-nudes.com/blog it becomes
blog.san-francisco-nudes.com

It's not quite as clean but it's doable. One obvious disadvantage is that I won't be able to use my current stats package but since I just updated it since September obviously I don't pay too much attention to that anyway. I suspect there will be a lot of other little annoyances but we'll see.

It's not clear yet if I'll be able to keep my existing templates or if I need to start with a modern one and tweak it to make it look basically like the site. Probably I'll need to start with a new one which would give me the more modern/useful archive column in the sidebar and such.

There's supposed to be a migration tool available at the end of February, so I'm not going to do squat about it until then, but sometime between then and March 26th when they kill service I'll be moving over. In theory it's supposed to be pretty transparent with redirects from the old URL to the new one but we'll see.

Just checking in

2010-02-01T15:40:00.001-08:00

I'm still alive and all that. I have a couple of models lined up to do stuff if it ever stops raining (three or so where it's vague, one where we're basically checking in every weekend to see if anything looks good in the next few days). If it keeps up a whole lot longer I'll book some studio work, but between portrait work and my "to do" list being outdoor heavy I'd really like to shoot some models outdoors.

The whole "getting everything that was on my PC working on my iMac" thing continues to go well. As an example I run awstats locally to keep an eye on my web stats, but not that often so I just now got around to installing it and updating my data since September. There were no real surprises - traffic's been pretty stable over the long run with the occasional spike if some popular site links to me. I'm really happy with my iMac - I have it set up now to boot in either MacOS and Windows 7 and it's really eased the transition back to the Mac.

eBay's decided to make massive changes - they're eliminating the stores as we know it so there will be only one kind of fixed price item, which has its pros and cons. It's really not obvious what I should do - probably I'll just keep a token presence there since it's been less and less of my sales anyway, but I haven't made any decisions yet. They're trying to get everybody to commit to an expensive store subscription package by Feb 16th but they're awfully vague on exactly why you should do it so early. Sigh... but it looks to me like I should maybe just have it set so a couple of fixed priced items end every day and eliminate auctions entirely. The big reason to keep some kind of presence there is it's where a lot of my new customers from from.

Other than that I'm trying to keep the newly mobile baby from causing too much chaos (watching her is much more full time than it was when she slept more and stayed where you put her), and finishing off some of my apparently neverending homeowner to do list.

I've been posting the occasional little funny thing that's not worthy of a blog post over on Facebook - if that sounds interesting, check it out (I know the whole "fan" language irritates some people but it's the best way to keep both a private and a public page on Facebook - the wording wasn't my idea.)

The iPad

2010-01-27T14:05:00.000-08:00

I know a bunch of people who are going to want that. People who are going to want to keep it on the coffee table to play around or look stuff up while they're watching TV and other netbook functions (who would never buy a netbook because they're clunky, or a real laptop because of the expense). For students who also have access to a computer lab for the heavy lifting (which is true at most schools now I think) it would be very useful. It's certainly the best electronic book reader out there, and I bet I'm going to see them on the subway. OK, it won't fit in your pocket, but it slips into a backpack or briefcase even easier than a laptop, and it's a heck of a lot easier to deal with on the train.

Obviously it makes an amazing photographer portfolio - I already get a lot of mileage out of my iPhone when I try to explain to people what I do. It's also great for baby pictures. But I definitely have an image of some grandmas I know who would love it for baby pictures and videos and showing them off at church but also being able to do some email and web surfing without dealing with a real computer. Maybe drop it off at the kids place occasionally for more pictures. (I know somebody who does this with an iPod touch - she has a charger so it only needs to be docked very occasionally.)

Obviously it doesn't do everything, and it's not even attempting to replace the MacBook lineup, and there's going to be a better/faster/cheaper version in a year. I doubt I'll get one any time soon because I have a recent MacBook and an older iPhone already and at some point you only need so many devices. But I'm not necessarily representative of the market, you know? Other than first adopter folks I actually see it being more popular with non-geeks than geeks, but you know what? There's nothing wrong with that.

(Disclosure: I'm long AAPL)

It's bacon

2010-01-26T08:51:00.000-08:00

Hey, it actually made bacon. Really good, too. These bits look a bit odd partially because they're test strips right from the edge of the slab. The idea at this point is if it's too salty it gives you one last chance to try soaking or blanching the bacon before you slice it up. It was really good though - a nice sweet, smoky kind of taste.

It ended up taking about 5 hours smoking with charcoal and apple wood to bring it up to about 150 degrees, and then I pulled it out and let it cool. (it ends up looking a bit cooked on the outside but when you slice it, it looks pretty much raw. At 150 the fat hasn't really started to melt or anything.)

Done curing

2010-01-24T18:08:00.000-08:00

After a week of curing, it's ready for the next step. Basically the way you tell that it's done is that the meat should be relatively firm - you can still squish it but it's not floppy or anything. You wash the cure off at this point. I've put it on a drying rack which is sitting in an old cookie sheet and it goes in the fridge for yet another day. This lets it dry out a bit and form a nice surface to take the smoke when I smoke it tomorrow.

There are toothpicks in the one on the left so I can tell which is which later (I used two different curing recipes). The one on the left also looks much fattier because of which side happens to be up in this picture - that's the side that used to have the skin.

Interestingly enough it has no scent at all - no hint of not being fresh, but also it doesn't smell like maple at all.

More Monday after it's been smoked and I've fried up a test piece. If it's too salty you can blanch it, otherwise I'll slice it up and probably freeze most of it. That timing should work out well since Tuesday I have a shoot scheduled and I'd hate to be trying to keep one eye on the smoker and the other on a beautiful naked woman!

(Update - the smoke went fine, I'll try frying some up tonight. I'll blog it Tuesday since as it turns out I'll have more time then - the potential model was getting less and less responsive and I don't know if she intended to come or not but I finally had to pull the plug on the shoot. I just can't be confirming with babysitters if I'm not confident that the model's coming, and this is a pattern I recognize with first timers who are getting cold feet. Basically if you're a first timer and you're interested in this kind of modeling you have to have some basic communication skills or I'm just going to assume the worst and move on to the next person in line. Speaking of which I'll go ahead and schedule somebody else for the studio in the next week or two and then in mid-Feb if it's warmed up a bit I'll see about arranging some of the outdoor shoots I have candidates lined up for. On the plus side the portrait folks have been absolutely wonderful lately, no complaints there.)

Best Product Name Ever

2010-01-23T16:23:00.001-08:00

I was half jokingly Googling to see if they make baby helmets after our little one smacked her head and not only do they exist but this one has the perfect name - Thudguard

Love it!

Progress

2010-01-22T10:48:00.001-08:00

It's 5/7th cured now. It doesn't look much different to the eye - some fluid forming, more so on the one that had more syrup (this is the one with less). Sunday I'll wash off the cure and let them dry for a day in the fridge, uncovered. Yes, I do have an extremely patient wife, thanks for asking. Monday I'll smoke them and I'll update then.

By the way - I know in places where they put things like mustard in their bacon cure the idea of maple syrup is horrifying - "You Americans and your candy bacon." It's actually not the way we usually do it either, but it's good, especially with a sweeter wood like apple instead of hickory for the smoking part. And it's the kind of thing where they don't do a good job with commercial bacon (because good maple syrup is expensive) so it's a good candidate if you're trying it yourself.

I installed Windows 7 on my 27" iMac. Apple recently put out new drivers and such to make it easier. The only gotcha is that the video card doesn't get along with old drivers on the Windows DVD, and you have to do things to get around that.

1. Make a USB stick with the right drivers and have it plugged in while Windows is installing. Windows will find those and use them instead.

2. When you install the BootCamp off of the OSX disk, make sure you use the one that came with the iMac, not some random Snow Leopard disk you have around, or it will cheerfully install the wrong drivers (and you'll get a black screen until you boot off of a recovery CD and roll them back.)

(3. Then you can go ahead and install the 3.1 drivers via Apple software update.)

I also found that somehow Windows recognized my wireless keyboard right away, but not my wireless mouse, so I had to plug in a USB mouse to get things rolling.

Anyway, it works, and until I can get just a couple of remaining odds and ends running on the Mac side it will make my life easier.

Gonna be bacon

2010-01-20T08:57:00.000-08:00

Continued from yesterday...

That's the two raw pork belly chunks. One has 1/4 cup pre-mixed maple sugar curing mix and 1/4 cup grade B maple syrup, and the other has 1/4 cup Morton Tenderquick (a general purpose curing mix) and 1/2 cup of maple syrup. They get to spend a week in the fridge, being flipped every two days. I'll have a quick update in a day or two, but they won't be done curing until the 24th.

Scott Brown

2010-01-19T18:47:00.000-08:00

Now, I've always kept this as a politics free zone, mostly because I find it incredibly irritating to be reading a blog by, say, a daddy blogger or BBQ blogger and suddenly they're ranting some dumbass ill informed political BS because they assume everybody reading them must agree with them on all points, and I don't want to be "that guy".

But one interesting aspect of today's election is that Scott Brown posed nude in Cosmo. And apparently he's won. As a Republican. First one they've elected in MA since 1972. And you know what? Nobody cares. Barely was a point of interest. Helps it's an implied nude (if you didn't click the link - his hand's strategically positioned), but still, that's interesting stuff.

I mean, you're a 19 year old college student thinking about modeling nude, you're probably wondering if these pictures will haunt you some day. I don't think I want to go so far as to say the answer is "no, it's just that mainstream now". But it's interesting. And it does confirm a general trend I've seen with more and more people wanting nude portraits.

Now, if your concern is your friends might see your pictures hanging on the wall, this doesn't address that, or a variety of other concerns. But still, I have to think it would have been a bigger deal back in the day...