End of an Era

Today I delivered hundreds of pounds of note cards to theWashington Native Plant Society offices in Seattle. Yesterday, the good people from the ReStore in Bellingham picked up another truckload. After 15 years, I’m out of the note card business.

Back in 1993 when I was laid off from my day job, I went into business with a line of note cards. I invested thousands in printing and then tried to peddle them through retailers. After a year I determined I couldn’t make a sufficient living in the paper products business and changed course. Since then I continued to sell some of the cards, but mostly they were taking up space.

That space will now become a more friendly camera room for portraits. I’ve still got some cleanup work to do, but it feels good to have the cards gone. The two groups that took them, along with the Whatcom Land Trust, which took some cards earlier this month, will put them to good use in the coming years. Otherwise they would have fed the hydropulper at some paper mill.

January 28 2009 | Business | No Comments »

Animating a Glorious January Day

I got a call the other day from one of the young men in Troop 3 asking if I’d spend part of the day with them as they visited and photographed on the WWU campus and in Fairhaven.  I agreed and had a good time wandering around campus in the morning and the historic neighborhood in the afternoon. I carried my pocket camera and had a short animated video in mind while shooting.

Last week I was at the PPA ImagingUSA conference and learned aboutAnimoto. This was an opportunity to play with the free version, which is limited to 30-second videos. It works the same for longer versions, but you have to pay.

Here’s a clip from Western:

And from Fairhaven this afternoon:

Everything in the two videos was photographed with a Canon S70. The raw files were processed in Adobe Lightroom 2.2, then exported as JPEGS and uploaded to the Animoto site to create the videos.

January 17 2009 | Bellingham and Photography | No Comments »