Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Thank you so much for all your great questions on my new biz blog. I plan on answering every single one - eventually! The winners are those that posed the "top 10" questions. I've already started posting answers. I'll be in touch with the winners within the next several days.
Again thanks for visiting, thanks for participating, thanks for supporting. This blog - when I can devote time to it - will now officially go back to being about knitting, and knitting only.
With the occasional cat photos thrown in, of course.
Filed Under: Contest
Friday, February 13, 2009
I've gotten my hosting issues resolved and now FatOrangeCat Studio is officially rearing to go! The FOCStudio portfolio is up, the FOCStudio BLOG is up, and business cards have been distributed to neighbors. We had a fun neighborhood association get-to-know-each-other-better dinner the other night and I did bust out the cards. No one had ever seen Moo cards before, so to my delight it was a little like picking and trading Garbage Pail Kids cards as they tried to decide which card they'd like to keep, based on the image on the back. Love the Moo cards!
I'm still not 100% done with everything. There are some photos I need to add and tweak in the portfolio, some details I need to flesh out, and copy I need to write. The one area I'm having the most trouble with is the "About" section for my blog. I know I always go straight to the About section when I come across a new blog, so it's important I set the right tone. And since this is a business I must be more open and honest about what and who I am, without using any cutesy pseudonym. We're talking full names here.
But I have trouble talking about myself when not prompted. I have no idea what to say that would be interesting...and incredibly witty...and insightful...and serious. And yes it needs to be all those things at once.
So, it would be great if you could help. This is what I propose: Leave a message on any post on the biz blog and ask me a question, whether it be about photography, my favorite drink, how much VanBuren weighs, what Bunny's other nicknames are (he has a lot!), what the weather's like today, whatever. It will give me something to write about!
No matter if you don't have a specific question, just drop by and say hello!
OH and if you could make no mention of this knitting blog, I'd really appreciate it. Not that you WOULD. But in case. I'm trying to keep them separate. It's a slight neurosis of mine. ********
ETA: OH MY GOD! So many FANTASTIC questions already! I'm going to be answering them all! Keep 'em coming! - Feb 13
*******
In return, I'll be giving away 5x7 prints of Sundara Yarn. As mentioned in an earlier post, these were taken back in the summer/early fall '08 when I had the privilege of being her product photographer.
1. Sundara Yarn Stock Pile, (2) 5x7 prints and (1) 5x7 print mounted on foam core.
What does a print mounted on foam look like? This:
The board is about a quarter of an inch thick, and is extremely sturdy. Totally unbendable. It can be framed as usual, depending on the depth of the frame you use, or hung unframed using plastic or metal formboard hangers. I haven't actually tried this myself. I'm testing this out to see if I'd offer it as a product.
2. Sundara Yarn Pretty in Pink, (2) 5x7 prints
3. Sundara Yarn Fresh Greens Trio, (2) 5x7 prints
4. Sundara Yarn Violet Trio, (1) 5x7 prints and (1) 5x7 mounted on foam core
5. Asiatic Lily, (1) 5x7 print mounted on foam core
OK so this isn't yarn, but it's a SNEAK PEAK of a series of florals that I'll be working on for the spring. Next to orange cats and knitting while watching baseball, I love flowers best. At one time in my life I even wanted to be a florist. Haha!
That's (10) prints total that I'm giving away. I'm not sure yet how I'll draw winners yet, but it probably won't be randomly. Maybe the 5 questions I decide to answer get the prize, plus 5 comments...Something like that.
So stop by the FOCStudio blog anytime between now and Tuesday Feb 17 (or so), and really, THANK YOU SO MUCH for all your encouragement and support!
Filed Under: Contest | Pet Photography
Thursday, February 05, 2009
I said to myself that I would consider my photog business officially launched once I got my portfolio up, my blog up, and my business cards in. All three. I've been working the last month on the site, and finally my cards have come in. They're MOO business cards and they're fantastic. I ordered just a set of 50 first, to see how they look. I picked 45 of my favorite photos, and interestingly some of them did not translate well at all onto a little card. Anyway that's fine, because I plan to order 200 next using just 20 photos so that I can have duplicates. With these 50 I'm going to have a hard time giving ANY of them away since they're all one-of-a-kind, for now.
The group of cards on the left made the cut.
Ha, I just realized I didn't take a photo of the other side. I'll do that later. Very happy with these cards. They're the recycled "Green" versions, by the way, but still sturdy.
Anyway, I'm going to rant now. The cards are in, but I am still NOT officially launched. I've been having major headaches with my site. I ignored my own favorite piece of advice - You Get What You Pay For - and went with a cheapo hosting plan from Godaddy. Beware people. Running your site on their shared server is UN.belIEVE.ably slow. As soon as I installed Wordpress for the blog, the whole thing ground to a sticky, ugly halt. It was ridiculous. I did my due diligence and added caching and compression and tweaked some configurations, to no avail. Do a quick search on "godaddy wordpress slow" and you'll get back a hefty set of results. GOD I wish I had researched this better, what's the matter with me.
When I contacted customer service they told me to upgrade to a virtual private server and then closed the ticket. I'm like, Uh I am the ONLY PERSON LOOKING AT THIS SITE RIGHT NOW. So you're telling me this plan you offer is actually unable to handle A SINGLE VISITOR? Their online admin is unacceptably slow too. They suck. Hard. And I suck for picking them. I can't wait to move and get this show on the road already.
I had a whole giveaway contest all ready too to celebrate the launch. I'll have to postpone that until next week at least. I hope you guys can contain yourselves. Harrumph.
Filed Under: Pet Photography
Wednesday, February 04, 2009
Coming back out to scarf model part-time has proved detrimental to Bunny's full-time job as House Sheriff.
Here we see him having some words with his brother, for some unknown infraction (Veebs probably deserved it, whatever it was). Any more lip out of you and the sheriff is going straight for the jugular.
However, we can plainly see that Veebs is no longer intimated. For Bunny let Mommy wrap him in silky mohair.
Perhaps the neighborhood squirrel will show respect to authority more appropriately.
Dare he so brazenly steal AND consume a nut while looking straight into the eyes of the merciless sheriff?!?
Why yes. Yes he dares.
Sorry I did this to you Bunny.
Filed Under: Cats | Pet Photography
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Trinket Scarf, from Amber - A Winter Gathering by Kim Hargreaves
Yarn: Rowan Kidsilk Haze in Swish, just over 2 balls
Needles: US2 and US6
Mods: Shorter length, and no beads
I love this scarf so much that I had to make it again. This time the frill factor is at 100%.
I snagged the yarn off eBay for a great price, 3 balls for less than the retail price of 2, and for a discontinued color too! It's only the 3rd time I've ever been on eBay. Hate eBay. I was desperate for this golden color though.
I snagged a rabbit too, convinced him to come out from early modeling retirement. Maybe it was a bad idea. It's hard to say who exhibited more patience during this shoot, me or the rabbit. There were plenty of blurry shots, cat treats, high-pitched baby talk, scratches behind the ear, breaks, more cat treats, and still more disdainful glares from those piercing green eyes.
Forgive me Bunny! But I'm knitting a sweater and socks next, so you're off the hook for awhile.
Filed Under: Completed Projects
Monday, January 26, 2009
Starting out on a new career path is an extremely scary thing. You're not sure if it's all folly, a lapse in rational thinking because you're having an especially bad day at work. You're not sure if you'll have the time, the finances, the energy and courage to follow through. It's too much of a risk. You're already afraid of failing before you've even begun. But before you get mired in having all the right answers to questions that don't yet exist, take the first step and Say it out loud. Your dream, your fantasy, your wish. It's the biggest step. And say it like you mean it. I want! I want I want I want! For sure, just saying it out loud has been the best first step I could have made. You just never know who's out there listening...
A month after I announced out loud to myself and Duck that I wanted to be a photographer, I got my first paying gig.
At this point I still had no clue what kind of photographer I wanted to be. I daydreamed, nightdreamed constantly. Sundara and I had been emailing back and forth during this time, and in the middle of a particularly bad week at work, I blurted out, "I don't want to be a web developer anymore. It's not my true calling. I want to be a photographer." But how, right? How? I heaved a million forlorn sighs.
And who knew what would happen next? Even though I meant it, the remark at that moment was offhand, same as saying, "I need to win the lottery." But I did say it, the right thing at the right time to the right person. To my shock and almost horror, she took me up on it immediately, hired me on the spot to take product photography of her yarns for her new site. The whole arrangement was hammered out in a series of emails that were typed in all caps because I was literally screaming with excitement. By the next week, a box full of glorious yarn arrived at my doorstep, and I was officially a photographer! Paid! With money! To photograph YARN. Which many times I do FOR FUN. To Duck I said, "Pinch me!" To Sundara I said, "Marry me."
Every week for the next several months, a shipment of yarn came to the door. Every week I photographed a dozen or so skeins in the traditional, "full-length" pose with a stark white background, post-processed them, optimized them to 3 sizes, and uploaded them to the site.
I also photographed them in additional poses, and those were included in the site as well. We called these "Glamour Shots." So fun. So so so so so unbelievably fun. A job that doesn't feel like one. Can it always be this way, please?
Sundara had given me "creative license" to photograph the skeins in whatever manner I saw fit. One thing I tried was to give the skeins some personality, if such a thing were possible in a skein. So the skeins below are actually swimsuit models. They're wearing skimpy bikinis, laying belly down on the beach and propped up by the elbows, cleavage spilling out and mouth half opened as they stare into the camera.
These initially made the cut, and then when they were on the site, Sundara was spooked. She was "scared" of them. Ha ha! Too aggressively suggestive for yarn I guess. Rar!! Hahahaha.
When I wasn't busy making p*rn, I let the beautiful colors speak for themselves.
Then came that sad day, that very sad awful day when All Good Things Must End. Sundara's new shopping cart site was crashing left and right at every update, and she had to change the way she sold her yarns. Instead stocking x number of skeins each week, she went to a monthly subscription process. It came down to a set handful of colors and base yarns each month, and with that it no longer made sense logistically to have me photograph her yarns. Sob.
The last shoot I did was for the Sock Collection.
Even sadder still is that I had to ship all the yarns back. No I did not get to keep them! (Although I did swipe a few on the way out, heh.) By now I had I think almost 100 skeins of her yarn, mostly in Sock. With a tear-stained face I gathered them together for one last hurrah.
Just recently I printed some of these group photos, as a way to test out a few printing vendors.
Sundara Yarns are worthy as "fine art" prints, no?
You never know how your first break might come about, who might turn out to be your biggest supporter. Put yourself out there, and someone just might take you up on it. When I told family of this gig, they were very confused. They were like, Yarn? All this so people can buy yarn? What? Who is she? Sun-dar-a? What kind of name is that? Dyes yarn full-time, really? How did you meet? And they get more fascinated still when I say that we have never met (yet!).
Being given a chance by a stranger could only be possible with the crazy phenomenom that is blogging. Specifically KNIT blogging. The knitting community amazes me.
So that's how I got started on photography. It was the best gig ever. Thank you, Sundara. Thank you very, very much. :)
Filed Under: Life | Pet Photography
Friday, January 23, 2009
The exact moment I decided I wanted to get really serious with photography was back in Apri/May 2008 while at my parent's house in Atl. I was helping them prepare their move to Beijing. At one point I was strolling through the internet and stumbled upon this wedding photographer's blog. Her photos just blew me away. I had kind of been stalking her blog a long time ago when it was in another incarnation, before all this. It seems her whole foray into photography was fairly recent, and the fact that someone had the ability to recognize that natural talent within them and turn it into a new career path was just, wow. Wow kapow! I was both inspired and envious at the same time. And even a little...sad? Is that the word? Sad for me and my lack of foresight/ambition/courage that I never saw it in myself to do the same. It never occurred to me that photography could be more than a hobby. I loved to do it, but never thought to push myself to take it to the next level.
Right after reading every single post and drooling over every single photo, I called up Duck and said, I want to be serious. I want to become a photographer. I had to say it out loud so that the universe would take note and keep me to my word. Because sometimes, I'm really flakey. But this made sense. I wasn't afraid.
I was however, puzzled. Now what? How does one start? What kind of photographer do I want to be? How do I set myself apart? I knew I did NOT want to do weddings. We could cross that off the list. So what then? I needed a niche. But I had no clue.
I was going to think really hard about it though. I was going to read books, play with my camera more, gain more technical knowledge, all the while thinking about what my niche could be so that when the time came, I'd be that much more prepared.
But in the meantime, I'm going outside to take portraits of my dog Mocha...
I love these photos. They make me laugh. The answer was in right in front of me but my again, my mind and my eyes were closed.
They make me a little misty-eyed too. Here she is, enjoying what would be her last spring under the southern sun. Don't worry, Mocha is doing well, but poor girl. She's had a rough 6 months. She's too old for this.
Here is the very overdue update:
My parents left for China in May. Most airlines do not allow pets in cargo from May until September, so there was no way she could go with them then. A family friend had agreed to take Mocha in until September, and they had a trial run with her when my parents went away for a weekend. They left her in the backyard, and frantic as she was to get home, she dug a hole under their fence and escaped. Somehow Mocha ended up at her vet's - probably a neighbor found her and used her collar tags to drop her off - but at the end of a single day my parents friends decided they could not host Mocha.
Having no other alternative, my mom boarded her at petsmart, confined to a little room and taken out only once a day. So sad! I cried. I wanted to take her in Boston but the cats, however sweet they may be with humans, would have eaten her for breakfast, then pooped her out and covered her in litter. I called every weekend to make sure she hadn't died of a broken heart. She was there for over a month until another friend of a friend (very complicated) heard of Mocha's sad little orphaned story and took pity. She had 2 dogs of her own and was willing to host Mocha for a much smaller monthly stipend than petsmart. Mocha was signed out and was able to live in a comfortable home again. So that worked out great...
...until Mocha, after 6 weeks, turned on the other dogs. I am 100% sure this stemmed out of jealousy for the human. Obviously she got comfortable, became attached, and another animal competing for the beloved human's attention had to leave. Except Mocha forgot that she was the guest! This woman tried her best to control the situation, but when it became clear that Mocha had become the house bully, she had no choice. OH MOCHA.
So back to boarding school she went, there for another three whole months before my parents finally were able to come back and fly her out to Beijing. And she survived the flight, from Atl to DC to Beijing, without a drop of water or a bite of food. When my mom went to find her at the airport, the containers of water and food remained unopened in the crate, bowls empty. OoooooOOoooo I get so mad thinking about it.
The reunion with my mom was probably absolute heaven. City-dwelling dog, living high on the 26th floor, finally by mom's side. Except that it only lasted only about a month! My parents had to come back unexpectedly to the States for more visa BS (long story) which will keep them here for another 2 months. That's where we are right now. Moch taken to another dog hotel, this one for pets of ex-pats specifically. Apparently they're very good, she gets free reign of the office, the owner of the boutique takes Mocha home with her at nights, and she even has a photo album on facebook. They called her a "young lady." I don't like looking at it though because it makes me want to cry some more. The last time I saw her she was in my mother's garden, eyes squinting in the warm sun, sniffing roses. Now she's in suffocating, smoggy Beijing, where pantless toddlers run amok, bouncing from one foster home to the next. POOR OLD GIRL.
But when my parents go back next month, they'll be moving into a big house with a nice yard, so things can only look up for our brave little poodle.
Really though, she wants nothing more than your foot to rest her chin on. Oh I miss her!
Filed Under: Life | Pet Photography
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Today, I need no champagne to feel bubbly. I am so fizzy and filled with giddy goodness that I don't know what to do with myself. I am so tee hee hee and a hoo hoo hoo!
And as an added bonus to an already great day, I improved my photo retouching workflow by a factor of a million. Celebraaaaation. So now instead of spending literally ALL DAY to process a couple hundred photos, I've got it down to about an hour or so. Let's say two. I'd like to get it down to one hour at most, which would include the post-processing of selected raw files, optimizing them for the 1. blog (including watermark) 2. the client proofing section and 3. the portfolio site, all of which need to be re-cropped to different aspect ratios, and resized to different dimensions. This is what's kind of making things clunky for me right now, having to re-crop and resize the same photo 3 different ways.
Today's featured pet is Ms. Kitty, the proud owner of Grumperina and Husband.
One thing that I've found a little challenging when shooting cats is their natural inclination to do absolutely nothing. Veebs is especially great at doing nothing, especially when you want him doing something. One of my favorite poses well-known to all cats is the "loaf" pose, where they tuck all their limbs underneath their bodies, front legs and paws curled over the chest so they look like they're sitting on their own flotation devices, tail wrapped closely around the side. Push them out into open water and they're ready to set sail!
But however much I like it, there is really only so long one can continue taking photos of the loaf pose. All angles can quickly be covered when the cat's not moving. Thus, the cat must be engaged, whether she likes it or not. Usually they don't, but the cat must move. The cat. Must. Play.
Or not.
Pretty please? Pretty please with a mouse on top?
Yessss....yessss! You know what to do, Kitty, you know what to do!
Such a very very VERY BAD MOUSE!
So on any other day it might have been nap time, but today for a little while we were able to make it play time...
And the shoot ended with a pretty pose.
I had a ton of fun on this shoot; there were some bust-out laughing moments as we tried to get a sometimes apathetic Kitty to participate. So thank you Kitty!
Filed Under: Pet Photography
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