If you happen to be at your local REI store, or any other place that carries the individual Sierra Club notecards, take a look for these two images. I was fortunate to have these two selected to be in the Winter 2008 lineup, and finally got my complimentary photographer’s samples yesterday. I am quite happy with the reproduction quality, particularly on the Joshua Tree image because I was worried the dark tones might blend together too much. Both look good. These images are also symbolic of a few things;
- The Joshua Tree image was made with a 4.1 MP DSLR (Nikon D2H) – in the great MP race, sometimes people forget that images made with older technology still have a lot of value. I continue to sell prints made from images from this camera. I am careful on enlargement sizes with detailed landscapes, but in general, the files are more resilient than a lot of people may give them credit for.
- The images were sold based upon an editor’s review of a custom web lightbox created with Adobe Lightroom. I password protected the directory of the special web gallery, and sent the editor the link and login info. It is a time saver on both the photographer’s end (particularly in using a program like Lightroom to create it) as well as the editor as they can quickly scan through images they may be interested in. Higher resolution images were then provided based upon the picks. I see requests for submissions via lightbox on a more frequent basis – and it is certainly more efficient than zipping JPEGs together or submitting via CD. It certainly is a changing world from the days of sending sheets of slides.
- I think I would have been downgraded in a ‘judging’ setting for the sandhill crane shot because I left the adult out of focus (intentionally). Perhaps it doesn’t fit some ‘rules.’ It was more important for me to have the adult as more symbolic figure instead of in sharp detail. I was more interested in the image showing a story. I am certainly happy to see such a shot published, and the same shot has also sold for prints. Of course it is now off the market for greeting cards for awhile because of the licensing agreement with the publisher.
- It is still quite a guessing game on what may or may not be selected. This certainly wasn’t my first submission, and have had many returned in the past with no picks at all. I still watch the racks of notecards that I come across and try to submit what I think may be something different.
I would love to hear from anyone who happens to see these in their local shops. I still need to get to my local REI myself to see if they carry these two particular cards. If you are interested in either of these and don’t have a local shop to get them from, drop me an email, if I have samples, we may be able to work something out.
I already have an assortment of rocks around the house, but wanted some patterns that are a bit more exotic – like Amethyst and petrified woods. So I did a bit of Ebay’ing for samples that caught my eye, even have a few nicely patterned rocks from China.
The ol’ saying of making sure your ducks are in a row couldn’t ring truer when it comes to backing up your computer. As I wrote about in my previous post, my PC decided it wasn’t going to boot on me a few weeks back. After messing around and not getting anywhere, I ultimately restored a disk image from the prior month and got it back in working order. But since my backup was a month old, a few other things saved my butt in losing a month’s worth of database information in Lightroom, website updates, etc. You may want to give these strategies some consideration to give yourself a little piece of mind. Of course the best practice is to not let a backup get a month old, but hey – nobody’s perfect.
