February 10th, 2010
Morning Fresh Dairy xPlore Outdoors ad
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Coloradoan xPlore Outdoors magazine gave us a good opportunity to run a full page ad this week so we thought it would be a good idea to try out something a bit different.
Generally when people think about Morning Fresh Dairy’s advertising they thing of Clover, the cute calf on their milk labels. There is another side to Morning Fresh Dairy, the drivers. For a while now the ladies in the Morning Fresh Dairy office have been wanting to run a fun ad featuring them. Judging by the reaction we are getting from this ad I believe the office staff may have started something here…
Posted in Graphic Design | Comments (0) |
December 31st, 2009
Live example of mfDockMenu working with Joomla!
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While working on this website project I found a cool menu effect to highlight their products. The module is mfDockMenu, the difficult thing about using this module is that there are not any live examples of it working with Joomla! After tweaking and going through the comments a number of times to try different things I was finally able to get it to work and now have a working version of the script on a Joomla! installation co-existing with Front Page Slideshow.
If you have any questions on how to make it work please feel free to contact me via email.
Posted in Joomla! | Comments (0) |
October 27th, 2009
Our latest web project is a web re-design for local Fort Collins massage business Tranquil Health Massage & Wellness Center.
Their original website was done by Dex Media which was part of Tranquil Health’s yellow pages advertising package. Gayle Martinchick, owner of Tranquil Health Massage, contacted me because she wanted to cut some of her costs associated with her Dex Media website. By canceling her Dex Media website and having her newly redesigned website hosted with us she will save approximately $2000/year in hosting and search engine optimization costs. Not to mention that her re-design represents her business much more professionally than the dated design that Dex provided.
The results of our search engine optimization has been very much worth the investment. If you enter ‘Fort Collins Massage’ in google you will see that Tranquil Health Massage & Wellness Center is on the first page. This term is searched an average of 3600 times / month! Another key element to the SEO strategy is placing a listing on Google Local Business Center, Tranquil Health Massage receives over 700 impressions a month through this free service which has led to a multitude of actions by potential customers.
Posted in Local | Comments (0) |
May 29th, 2009
Me with some of the familiar faces of Photoshelter
(Rachel, Me, Allen, Grover and Andrew – Photo by Mellissa Diggles)
If you have read my blog before you will know that I am a big fan of Photoshelter. If you are not familiar with Photoshelter, they are the place on the web where photographers get seen and sell their work. It is my opinion that Photoshelter provides photographers with the most complete set of tools available to maximize the benefits of the web. With my Photoshelter customization website northerncoloradophotography.com, I am able to set up a searchable archive for my stock images, provide traditional customers with access to their images via the web, offer online order fulfillment, and seamlessly integrate all of this with my existing portfolio website and blog.
While on a family trip to the east coast for our niece’s wedding I took the opportunity to visit the hub, the center, the heart of Photoshelter. When we got to Union Square where Photoshelter is located we noticed that a commercial photoshoot was going on, very cool, I thought that Photoshelter was behind it so I looked around a bit but came to the conclusion that they weren’t – the funny thing is that when looking at Photoshelter’s blog today there is a post about it – you can read about it on A Picture’s Worth.
Anyway, we found the building located at 33 Union Square West and headed on up to the second floor. When the elevator opened I saw the Photoshelter logo and knew we were in the right place. First I want to mention how friendly everyone is and how my family and I felt very welcome. After introductions and a brief tour I talked a bit with Allen and Andrew about marketing a photography website. They shared with me some of their insights and let me know they are getting close to unveiling the next set of PSA upgrades – can’t wait to see exactly what they are…
What I gathered from my visit reinforces what I already know, Photoshelter is about photographers. A company that is continuously providing us with web based infrastructure, effective web marketing tools and the knowledge to utilize both with the free SEO resources of sites such as Google, Twitter, Facebook and whatever comes next.
Thank you again Photoshelter for your hospitality. Allen, my family agrees, the pizza at Patsy’s is delicious!
Posted in Photoshelter | Comments (1) |
April 9th, 2009
Just a couple of days ago I was reading the Alamy blog about their much anticipated Manage Images v2.0, the online batch image IPTC manager for the Alamy stock photography archive. If you have ever tried managing the keywording of 1000+ images you will know right away why this is a much anticipated release.
I saw that only 250 photographers would be chosen for the test phase before the first site wide version becomes live. Something to look forward to, well I guess it will be a while before I have a chance to use it…Then there it was, right in ‘My Alamy’, nice!! Plus an invitation email, I have been chosen as one of the beta testers!
Alamy.com, buy and sell images at the web’s largest stock photography site with 15.77 million stock photos. It takes a lot of photographers to produce that much professional reproduction quality rights managed stock photography. Very cool, I guess I get to be one of the first to try it…
In the invitation email participants are asked not to give any details, but as soon as I can I will…
Continue reading →
Posted in Stock Photos | Comments Off |
March 29th, 2009
The website for Morning Fresh Dairy performs many marketing tasks. One of these is the Online Order Changes form – a PHP email form with database functionality that gets used 100 times a day. With this form dairy customers can conveniently make changes to their order, cancel a delivery, or add items as needed. All of this can be done twenty-four hours a day.
The order changes form saves the office staff two to three hours of labor a day because these tasks used to be done on the telephone. Order changes also generate add on sales because of its ease of use and ability to add items to your order simply.
Functionality like this will bring very real and measurable profits to your business.
Posted in Local | Comments Off |
March 25th, 2009
This is very fun news…
Logo initial icon W - Western Spur selected for new LogoLounge project, Master Library series under initials and crests.
Rockport, my favorite publisher of Graphics Design and Logo books has selected one of my logos for a new LogoLounge project called Master Library series. The logo will be included in the initials and crests section. These are my favorite logo books, I actually own LogoLounge 1 through 4 and 5 is coming out July 1st, 2009.
Don’t do what I did and buy them at Barnes & Noble for a much higher cost, you can get them through my Amazon affiliate links at the bottom right corner of this page.
Continue reading →
Posted in Graphic Design | Comments (1) |
February 18th, 2009
Large interior with 2 studio lights
Commercial Photography Lighting Techniques: Example 8
Equipment Used
* Canon 1ds * 24mm tilt shift * 24mm ISO100 f10 .3sec
* Speedotron Brownline 800ws two M11 heads
* 16″ Reflector (Beauty Dish), about 15′ behind the subjects
* 7″ Reflector, as high as stand will go pointed at ceiling
Shooting interiors is always challenging, but before setting up the lighting there three things that are very important to assess before you start.
- What is the purpose and goal of the photography session
- What commitments did you project to the client and what expectations do they have
- What is the budget or how much time do you have
Since I was hired for this shoot by a magazine the purpose is to create feature and ad photography for their client East Moon Asian Cafe. The restaurant had a limited budget which allowed for 2 hours of photography time. Continue reading →
Posted in Lighting Techniques | Comments Off |
February 15th, 2009
Speedotron Brown Line and Beauty Dish
Commercial Photography Lighting Techniques: Example 7
Equipment Used
* Canon 1ds * 100 macro * 100mm ISO100 f13 1/60sec
* Speedotron Brownline 800ws one M11 head
* Beauty Dish (16″ Reflector) 5′ away about 45 degrees to the left of subject, ceiling height
* The direction of the light is perpendicular to the subject
* White reflector directly to right of subject just out of camera view
This room is about 12′x14′ with a dining room table in it, we did not have much space to light the subject and background separately! This is an area where the beauty dish shines. Continue reading →
Posted in Lighting Techniques | Comments Off |
January 29th, 2009
Photography Web Design Facebook Fan Page – click link to see a Photoshelter flash gallery embedded to Facebook fan page and by all means show me some love and click the like button!
Before you can add a Photoshelter flash gallery to a Facebook fan page you need to install
Continue reading →
Posted in Photoshelter | Comments (5) |
