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.

5×7 Folded Card

View the entire collection of cards.