Photography Bay

Digital Camera News, Reviews and Tips

Chase Jarvis creativeLIVE Launches

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Chase Jarvis has launched a new online learning resource for photographers and other imaging professionals – creativeLive.  This is quite a bit more ambitious than Chase’s iPhone app, The Best Camera.  Like his iPhone camera though, creativeLIVE has a rather unique tilt to it, in that it’s free to watch the sessions when they are live.  If you want to watch them later, you can download individual classes for later viewing or if your schedule doesn’t permit you to be at your computer for live viewing.

creativeLIVE has an all-star cast of instructors coming up over the next couple of months, including Vincent LaForet on shooting video with DSLRs, Scott Bourne on Aperture 3, and Zack Arias on Studio Photography.  And, next week, after the CS5 launch, there’s a whole group of classes planned for learning the new stuff in the CS5 suite.

creativeLIVE looks like a great learning resource.  Hopefully, the business model will prove sound and it will be around for a long time to come.  Right now, I’ve got April 29 circled on my calender for Vincent LaForet’s class.

 

SDXC Cards – What the New Format Means to Photographers

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The SDXC card specification has been announced for more than a year now.  However, it’s only now that we are starting to see products supporting this new specification.  There are a few important things to note about SDXC cards and how they fit into photographers’ gear bags.

The SDXC specification comes from the SD Association, which is an industry standards organization founded by Panasonic, SanDisk and Toshiba in 2000.   If a manufacturer is going to use SD technology in product, they have to license the right to use that technology from the SD Association. Most, if not all, of the major camera manufacturers are members of the SD Association and license the patents and other intellectual property necessary for developing SD-compatible cameras and memory cards.

There are a number of different specifications that the SD Association has developed over the past decade, including SD, miniSD, microSD, SDHC, miniSDHC, microSDHC and SDXC, among others.  Each specification has its own limitations or capabilities.  For instance, the original SD specification offered storage only up to 2GB.  When SDHC came along, it took the capacity up to 32GB.  The latest specification, SDXC, offers storage capacities up to 2TB. [Read more…]

Zenfolio Debuts New Photography Presentation and Sales Solution

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Zenfolio has introduced a new photography presentation and sales solution, which allows photographers to create portfolio sites and exercise control over their sites design using Zenfolio’s Theme Designer.  Zenfolio has also improved the search engine optimization of users’ pages.

These improvements are part of a site-wide upgrade that comes to all users with no hike in price across the board.

You can read more about the improvements in the press release below. [Read more…]

Blogging Basics for Photographers: Blogging Software and Services

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Blogging Basics For Photographers - Part 2

In this second article of the series, we’re going to delve into some of the popular blogging platforms and try to come up with a good picture of what software and services make sense for the blogging photographer.

Other articles in this Blogging Basics for Photographers series:

1. Deciding Whether to Start a Blog for Your Photography
2. Blogging Software and Services
3. Web Hosting and Blog Set Up

From the top, I’ll let you know that this article (and series, in general) will be heavily biased toward WordPress as a blogging platform.  This is what I know and use, and I think that it’s the best all-around blogging platform out there.  That said, there are plenty of other great blogging services and software available, and we’ll take a look at them below.  I invite any photo bloggers out there to chime in with your thoughts on these or other blogging platforms in the comment section at the bottom of this article.  Moving on now… [Read more…]

Moo Business Cards Rock

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Moo Business Cards

I recently ordered some business cards from moo.com. They arrived in my mailbox yesterday. I’m very impressed with how these Moo cards look – and how easy they were to order.

In the past, I’ve used a Photoshop template to set up my business card designs, which I tinkered with forever before I was finally happy with the design.  Then, I ended up ordering hundreds of the same card.

Granted, that works fine for a lot of folks; however, I really liked the idea of shaking things up by using multiple images as a featured photo in the same batch of business cards.  I think other photographers might appreciate this as well.  In fact, with Moo, every single card can use a different image if you so choose.

I recently read about Moo cards from my friend Rich Legg, who seemed to be very pleased with his Moo MiniCards.  So, with a hat tip to Rich, I thought I’d give them a try. [Read more…]

Field Test Review: The Cotton Carrier

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The Cotton Carrier is another product that is meant to help you with carrying your cameras around just like the Spider. Designed kind of like a lightweight vest, the advertising for the product will appeal most to wildlife and landscape photographers. However, it may also have some appeal to wedding or sports photographers. I used the Cotton Carrier while shooting in Central Park and while also shooting the recent Yankee parade celebrating their win during the World Series. My findings, after the jump.

[Read more…]

Is the Nokia Booklet 3G Good for Photographers?

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nokia-booklet-3g-20090824-600

We’ve blogged before about laptops for photographers, but the announcement of the Nokia Booklet 3G has me excited as a photographer. You can read more about the netbook at Gizmodo and check out the intro video below. There are lots of reasons and features that this laptop has that could be useful to us photographers, although we are being promised more specs soon at Nokia World next week. Here are a couple of reasons why this laptop has me excited.

[Read more…]

10 Internet Marketing Tips for Photographers

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The following post comes from Allon Bloch, the CEO of Wix.com, which is a web publishing platform with free and premium offerings.  While some of Allon’s are a pitch for Wix.com’s service, I think that they can still apply to many services and platforms beyond Wix.  Learn more about Allon and Wix, as well as some additional thoughts on these tips from me at the end of this post.

We live in a digital age, so photographers need to locate and interact with customers wherever they live within the digital space.

Industry marketing terms like “search engine optimization,” “web design” and “social media” tend to be overwhelming, but a new wave of technology and services is specifically designed to help users cut through the web tape and achieve measurable results.

Here is a quick checklist to get you started. [Read more…]