Working on a new Photography web site

[Mike Jackson]

Hi all,
I have been working on getting TetonImages.com up and running for a few days. If you have time and are interested, check out:

http://www.tetonimages.com

The site is still in the formation, but you can get the idea now. The little image above is the corner element to give you a slight preview. I shot just over 90,000 images in 2006! Wow! These are justa few of the better ones. I have lots to add as I have time to build the additional sections and find images in other folders to include.

M. Jackson

[Doug Bernhardt]

So....how is the fishing? Something tells me you've found a new avocation. Gorgeous stuff and I have a HUGE softspot for the shots of the tree with the Tetons in the backgnd. Saw several of that subject in different light.

[Mike Jackson]

Hi Doug,
I certainly spent more time last year with a tripod than a fly rod. I still like to fish, but the photos have offered a new and big challenge. Ideally, I hope to be on the banks of the Firehole River in Yellowstone at sunrise getting photos of a friend fishing in the steamy fog, then get to fish during the middle of the day when the light is normally too bright and harsh. Then, back to the camera in the late evening when the light softens and get richer again.

That old limber pine tree used to be close to the road and everyone took shots of it. The park service changed the road route a while back and you have to walk in to it now. I went to that spot four different times (early in the morning) before I got those spetacular rows of clouds and fog bank. I went back three or four times this summer and never got anything even close, except for a few interesting ones with the light painting and flashlights. People around here call it the Old Patriarch Tree.

Most of the better scenics are taken just as the sun starts hitting the clouds and sometimes catching the tops of the mountains. This time of the year, that happens around 8:00 AM, so getting them isn't too hard. In the summer, I had to get up between 4:30 and 5:00 am to get to the spots before the light did its wonders. Of course, I got up and made it to the spot on a lot of occasions, only to get shut out by a thick bank of clouds that formed in the east.

It is nice to hear you enjoyed seeing them.

Mike Jackson

[Raymond Chapman]

Just tremendous photos, Mike. It always amazes me that whatever you attempt to do you jump in with both feet and never let up. The photos are beautiful and bring back a lot of memories of the little time I spent there. Needless to say, you live in God's country.

We do have scenes like that in Texas....you just have to eliminate the snow, the trees, the rivers and the mountains.

Good luck with the new business endeavor. Say, how many of those glass art prints do you have left?

[Doug Bernhardt]

Yup...both feet. I have a question for ya Goldie. Do miss the sign biz? I mean as in the high end things you were up to. Fancy millwork and your lathe? You know the stuff I mean. I have been into a small but involved wood sign these last couple weeks and it got me to "thinkin' on you"

[Mike Jackson]

Hi Doug and Raymond,
I spent a good portion of the afternoon adding photos and working on the way the site works. A site like that is always going to be a "work in progress", but things are falling into place now. Most of the newest additions are in the Scenics and also the Deer/Elk sections.

Raymond, there is a big deal in the photo world that happens down yonder in Texas. I don't have the specific details, but it goes something like this. A photographer/entrepeneur managed to talk a farmer into conserving a section of his farm land and turning it back into its natural setting. They built photographers blinds and so forth once birds and wildlife returned. They began a Photo Contest inviting some of the big boys in the wildlife photo world down for the contest. Eventually, more and more farmers became involved. Now the farmer and the photographer become teammates to see who can get the best photos and win the award money. The farmers add in logs and cattails to their little ponds and I hear some even have sunken chambers next to the water so the photographer can sit in the blinds and be dry, but also at water level to get the shots of the ducks, insects, and so forth. Pretty cool! Of course the contest is only once a year, but the land is preserved for wildlife and habitat all year.

Doug, I sometimes miss the hands-on and creative part of making the custom signs. That actually is a fleeting thought, however, as I also come back to the reality of what it takes to run a business here in Jackson Hole. We have our little home/office business going okay and I'd hate to take on a whole new rental building to gear back up. I still work a lot of hours as always, but most of it is here around the house when I am not out taking photos or spending time with the kids.

We sold "some" glass signs, but not enough to keep me dedicated to continueing. We hoped people would accept them as art, but I think the products are crippled some by the "beer" glass signs that hang everywhere. Kelly is writing about some of it in the other posts.

I spent a lot of 2006 taking photos and I am now trying to get the web site set up to hopefully sell a few photo prints monthly to start supporting some of the expenses. If you happened to notice, I mentioned some of the shots being available for Stock Photography use through www.stockshop.net. I have around 250 images there and hope to have around a thousand by the end of this year. I am really just getting started on that part. The more images I have on that site, the more likely someone will find one they can use on their projects.

http://www.stockshop.net/SwishSearch?su ... %20jackson
The link above will take you to that site and load my photos. (I believe they are having server problems at the very moment, so try off and on)

Thanks for the comments!
Mike Jackson

[Bob Ficucell]

Mike,
Great shots.
A question, are you winding down your sign business, at least doing less of it, and going more into photography? Bob

[Mike Jackson]

Bob,
We have a lot of bills to pay, including tying to come up with extra money to send Tyler to college next fall, so we "have" to do jobs that pay the bills. So, when we get sign jobs, we do them, but we aren't as aggressive as we were when we had the shop. We just have minimal ads in the phone books and get a steady, but not overwhelming supply of sign jobs.

Even though I like going out and taking the photos, I don't know if I would really want to do that full time either. Most of our little "businesses" have a lot of flex in the time schedule, so I get to modify the daily schedule based on the variety of jobs we have in front of us.

When we sold Jackson Signs in 1995, I developed a little "business plan". The plan was to establish several little (flexible) businesses in which we work really hard for short bursts, then hope to recover returns over a long period of time, even if the returns from each are not that much. That is part of the reason for the name Golden Era Studios. At the time, I wasn't sure what we would be doing, but knew it was going to be a variety of operations. Golden Era Graphics was started, mainly for Darla to run, is the small sign operation. I make reproduction toy parts for Hartland Plastics toys under the Cowboy Parts umbrella (including buying and selling the little toys). That one came to us as a result of some of the casting processes we learned while doing signs. Darla does some antique repair and restoration for a local antique store, more or less under the Golden Era Graphics name. I digitized four CD collections of vintage clip art under the Golden Era Studios name. We don't sell a ton of them, but any time I do sell a CD or group of CDs, the money is basically profit from work I did spread out over the past 10 years. I spent a lot of 2005 making the Centennial Collection. So, the photography fits the pattern perfectly. I can shoot the photos when the timing and light is right, the sell either prints or get income from the stock photo use over the next few years. It was easy to fit the photography into our businsess insurance and liability because it easily fit under the "studios" name. And, of course, I have to write an article for SignCraft every other month.

So, with all that going on, each day is different and each year is different. Last year at this time, I took on a project to design some layouts for Silver Dollar City in Branson, MO. It started out to be only six game signs, then eventually turned into 230 hours of labor resulting in lots of colorized Photoshop/Illustrator images for their 1880 Exposition addition. That was a lot more hours than I had originally planned and it backed us up on other projects because they needed everything so fast.

During all of 2006, I shot a lot of photos and knew I would be working on a web site for it someday. I registered TetonImages.com last year, then got it registered with the State of Wyoming. If I can start selling prints, the income is similar to the CDs. The real work is done on a finished photo, and the income is mostly profit. I’ve sold quite a few locally to friends who have seen the prints, but need to get them out to more people through the Internet.

With all that said, if the phone rings and someone wants a 4x8 painted panel, I will stop whatever I had planned and go to the lumber yard so we can get it sealed and painted, ready to letter in a few days. I usually get the layouts ready for vinyl cutting and painting and Darla does most of the actual sign work.

I don’t know if completely answered your question…? …or maybe told you more than you really wanted to know!

Best regards,
Mike Jackson

[Mike Jackson]

Let me throw out one more little tidbit.

A long time ago, I bought one of those little flip style daily calendars with an inspirational quote on each page. One of the quotes said to make a plan, and if you couldn't write the plan down on the back of a business card, you haven't fully thought out the plan.

Back to the previous post: Our plan was to start multiple small businesses which each contributed to our income, even if we had to work extremely hard for short bursts to receive the income over a long period of time.

Oh yes, there was another inspirational quote that also said to make a plan, and if the plan was not working, make another plan! (That more or less echos our plan to sell glass "art". We weren't selling enough to want to keep doing them daily)

Both quotes have guided me a lot over the past 12 years.

Mike

[Bob Ficucell]

Mike,
Thanks for the reply, yes you answered it.
I have always been impressed with your talent, and over the years, have just heard less from you about signs, with exception of this site, and a handful of articles in Signcraft.
So I thought you were maybe giving retirement some thought.
Glad to hear you'll still be around with use awhile!
Bob

[Ron Berlier]

As always you're work, whatever it is, is quite inspirational!

With over 90,000 pics what methodology/system are you using to track what you have?






Edited: I need to type slower

[Mike Jackson]

Hi all,
It is around 9:30 PM tonight on Jan. 11. I have been working on the site off and on all day trying to organize the categories and get a better interface going. Check it out if interested.

Ron,
I have to laugh. I am dealing with that issue all the time and still searching for good solutions. Right now, I have six 300 gig firewire drives connected to the outside of my computer plus the two internal drives. That sounds like a ton of memory, but actually three are used to back up the other three. Each RAW image coming out of my camera is 15 megs and each opened file saved in TIF or PSD can swell to 50 megs easily, and that is if the file is flattened. With layers and layer masks, it can really grow.

The secret I am now having to learn is to throw away (delete) all but about 10-20% of a days shoot. That can get really hard to do when quite a few are almost identical and all sharp. The problem at this moment is I didn't dump the iffy ones from the past couple of years and have a ton I wish I didn't have. That really means I need to go through all the folders and delete the "bad" ones and keep the good ones. With files backed up on other drives, it is easy to recopy bad ones into folders that have been culled.

I have been using DigitalPro4 software for a while and it has a few good features to help organize and cull the images. It hs a nice Loupe feature so you can hold it over the eyes or face and delete the file if it is not sharp and clean. Otherwise, I just make folders for big topics like Antelope, Moose, Deer, Elk, Berries, Swans, Foliage and so forth and try to drag images into the correct folders. The software has features to add key words and captions, but I am still learning how to make that work for me.

Knowing the overhead for keeping all the images is costly, it is easier to delete the poor and middle of the road shots. It helps me to think, "if someone wanted a photo of a bear out of this folder, which ones would I use?" If I have half a dozen of basically the same shot and one is better, there really isn't a need to keep the other five. Using the "motor drive" (continuous shooting) of the digitals, it is easy to shoot a burst of five shots of the same subject or animal. Usually the second or third one is slightly sharper than the first one and sometimes the animal moves ever so slightly to allow me to get some catchlight in their eyes in one or two, but not the rest.

http://www.tetonimages.com

Check it out again!

Thanks,
Mike Jackson

[Ron Berlier]

Mike,

Thanks for the detailed feed back and wow that does sound like a huge amount of storage space until you really look at what happens to file sizes as they are manipulated.


I have been reading a book that may, in the long run, make your photograph tracking a locating life much simpler. If you haven't heard of the "DAM Book" (Digital Asset Management) I really encourage you to check out this web site.

http://www.thedambook.com/index.html

You may have to read the book a couple of times as there is a great deal to digest. There is also an associated forum that the author maintains and there are very knowledgeable folks there, mostly professional, such as yourself, photographers. HTH Let me know what you think.

http://thedambook.com/smf/index.php

[Mike Jackson]

Hi Ron,
I've heard of the book on a couple of occasions. It looks like a book I should own.

I glanced over a couple of pages on their site. Just on the surface, it looks like they used Adobe Bridge to do much of it. The instructor I used last fall and again this spring isn't too high on Bridge as a DAM utility, thinking of it more as a file previewer and batch adjustment program.

He uses Digital Pro 4, so I bought it.
http://www.proshooters.com/digitalpro/dp4/index.htm

They tout that program as a Data Asset Manager and are actually a bit thin on the batch conversions. Actually, I've learned I can do batch conversions to the raw images in Bridge and DP4 recognizes changes made to XMP file as Photoshop opens the file. DP4 is much faster when viewing the images and has the loupe for viewing mid sized thumbnails. It also has a full screen view for an image with a forward/back option. Bridge lets you see batch adjustments made to a raw file, while DP4 still displays the original untouched RAW file. Apparently Bridge does quite a bit if they are using it for DAM. Lynda.com shows it being used to some extent, but not in great detail as far as long term management goes.

DP4 is supposed to get some new on-line tutorials which cover their captioning and keywording features during January, but I don't think they are up and running.

Some people I talk with suggest Lightroom might be the big player in the future. Apple came out with Aperture but I don't think it has really been that popular, plus it requires a powerhorse system to run it.

You can download DP4 and use it for a month or two for free, which is what I did originally. When it came time to pay, I couldn't really go back to Adobe Bridge for file viewing and management. I'd really miss that loupe and speed.

The big problem I have now is the fact I kept too many from a long time ago that should have been deleted. Winter nights are long, so maybe I can whittle them down over a period of time, but right now I am working on trying to get the site running, plus bookkeeping, taxes, and so forth during January.

Taking these wildlife and scenic photos is a bit like collecting the little toys. If the shots of the fox are all you have, you hang on to them hoping to improve on them. I am always trying to upgrade or improve my little toy collection, too. Eventually you get better, but it is still hard to go back and get rid of the old ones, if only from a time standpoint. Now, howver, I already have good shots of moose, deer, elk and sunsets, so it is much easier to delete the marginal ones from an afternoon shoot.

Thanks for the note,
Mike Jackson

[Ron Berlier]

Hi Mike,

I totally agree with you regarding many approachs to managing a huge amount of photos. The thing I really liked about Peter's book is that even though it does have a lot of material regarding the use of iViewMedi Pro software there is much more about establishing a methodology that will support current day needs and be portable in to the next generating of software using DNG files. In addition there is a lot of materail about backup strategies using DVDs.

You might to also look at the iViewMedia Pro web site where can can download a trial version. The greatest part about this product is that you can establish a "Virtual" database using reference fields similar to Adobe Bridge. Like family names, type of animal, etc. Then when you need a picture, say of all the foxes you took in the winter you make that you're search crteria and it brings up all those pictures. You don't have to keep stuff by "labeled" folders as most of us typically do. And if you want all fox pictures or only the ones taken in summer you can do it that way too. I believe this to be a huge time saver. It's just a thought, but I do recoginze the hesitation to move to new software after you've invested a lot in learning it.

Here's the software site: http://www.iview-multimedia.com/mediapro/

You can even view their user manual on line and check out it's batch handling.

Here's the forum: http://forum.iview-multimedia.com/

Of course I offer all this info for when you have nothing to do You can check this stuff out if it seems like it might be useful.

[Mike Jackson]

Just a quick update:
I work on the site as I have time. It is starting to take shape now. I added in a way to view the horizontals and the verticals of each topic, plus figured out how to include Frames to keep a navigation bar on the left in all pages. There are a few hundred more images available to be viewed, too.

I still have to work on the "business" section, but will save that until last. More than likely, I will find more photos to add in some sections, but I think most are on line now. Additionally, I will go back in and remove a few.

This is a good project for the really cold days and long nights we are having right now.

http://www.tetonimages.com

Best wishes,
Mike Jackson

[Mike Jackson]

Hi again,
I have been adding some finishing touches and minor tweaks to the site, including meta tags, rollovers and so forth. Yesterday, I set up a new email address for the site at info@tetonimages.com . I set everything up to forward to my normal email box and put into a new folder. All the emails pass through my local server to get scanned for spam and virus attachments. So, the email address has been up less than one day and my spam filter box is already full. Looks like the spammers us wildcards such as info@*.com.

http://www.tetonimages.com

I also added a Sampler Slide Show and a Recent Image page.

Mike Jackson