My Mom is turning 90 this year. There’s only ONE THING she wants and that’s tickets to the US Open Tennis matches in New York in August. Well, that ain’t gonna happen from me! My Mom has lived and breathed tennis for her whole life, but I will have to leave her obsession for my sister’s to handle. While trying to figure out just what to get her, I stumbled over some of my son’s photos from his travels as a jazz musician for the Royal Caribbean International cruise line. He’s worked cruises in the Caribbean (Antigua, Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Saint Martin, etc.), Mexico, and the Mediterranean (Spain and Italy), and taken photographs in each locale. He’s really funny, as many of the shots he sends me are pieces of tourist attractions with his face obscuring most of it. He seems to love shooting photos from the front of the camera. A pictoral confirmation that his feet were on the ground where the attraction resides, I suppose.
My first thought was to make a photo collage of some of his shots for Mom, but then remembered she shoves pictures into drawers, folds them, or sticks them on a cork board and customizes them with thumb tack holes, everywhere. I’ll never forget when I asked her to send me some childhood photos of one of my sisters–they arrived folded in half in an envelope! Who in their right mind folds photos? In another of her bizarre gestures, she sent me some of my Dad’s framed documents stuck in a box with no protection. Needless to say, all I got was a lot of glass shards, broken frames, and some very scratched up documents. It took me weeks to get all the teeny glass fragments out of my carpet. I shudder to think of the many ways she might maim any photographic gift I send her way.
Back to my gift dilemma…
While perusing photo gift pages on a few sites, I saw some mugs. My Mom drinks tea and coffee; it’s probably the only thing she still cooks. I figure Mom can’t mutilate a mug, so I found a reasonably priced one for sale at VistaPrint. Mugs are useful budget gifts that can deliver a personal message every day without withering and dying like flowers or ending up in the trash like cards. Think about it, who can’t use a mug?
I did a quick Photoshop edit on a few of my son’s shots and voilà! A respectable personalized present. So, I ordered three. That way if she breaks it, there’s another one buried away on my shelf as a replacement, plus I figured my son might want one (or he might just roll his eyes).
If you think about it, a customized mug is a really great way to show off your photographs and deliver reasonably priced presents to almost anyone. Stay tuned for a review of the quality of my mug. Here is what I ordered:
Oh, and by the way, if you enter Royal Caribbean’s new “Win a Vacation of a Life” contest, you could end up on the ship where my son plays, if you win second prize!
Great Blue Heron Photo Cards
I just sold a number of my photo cards to a local coffee shop. They have them on display in a basket on a large wooden bookcase. I’ve sold cards at small fairs previously, but not ventured into the local shops before. It is exciting to see your own work made available to the public in a venue you didn’t create. One of the cards sold the very next day too! I haven’t been back this week to see if any others wandered out the door.
I have not found the perfect place to print cards though. I need to produce them for about 50¢ each to make any money from them. I printed some myself, but those are costly to produce. I estimate they cost me at least $1.75 each in printing and ink costs alone. Most of the online printers offer good prices when you order large quantities, but I have yet to discern which photos on cards people want to buy. I have hundreds (possibly thousands) of local wildlife shots and I do not want to print any one of them in large quantities only to find out no one wants that particular picture. For example, I rather like the photo below, but one of my valued critics doesn’t like the way the heron’s beak disappears into the fish.
I order cards at Shutterfly.com because they have sent me a number of free offers, for which I am grateful. The problem is, that it is very difficult to make a blank card without one of their background templates and text. I always have to find workarounds. The second batch of cards I ordered were not folded correctly. Each card had an 1/8th inch lip overhang in the front. I suppose that shouldn’t be a deal breaker, but it really irritated me. I hope the quality control is a bit better in this batch of cards. The picture below is one of cards I ordered just tonight. I also orders cards of the shot shown above, but with a soft edge. All I can do is take them to the coffee shop and see if they sell.
I edited the heron walking on the log photo almost exclusively in Lightroom 4.3. Usually I start in Adobe Camera Raw and use Photoshop CS6, but this shot was already in my Lightroom catalog. I have to edit most of my heron shots from years past because the 2012 camera raw process is so much better than the previous version. I dread the next update! My only issue is that I was disappointed in Lightroom’s ability to remove the chromatic aberration in the shot. It doesn’t show up in the small size, but I cannot print it much bigger without that funky green line across the bird’s back showing up. I reedited it in Camera Raw and Photoshop later to see the difference, and I thought the lens correction within my camera profile did a much better job through Photoshop then through Lightroom. So much for the tools functioning the same across programs.