all the standard images

Can you see that little photo credit there? Yeah, that’s my name. I was so excited this week to receive a copy of The Sailor’s Book of the Weather, by Simon Keeling, and finally see one of my pictures in something that I didn’t pay to print.

It’s a fun feeling.

The publisher was searching flickr for a picture illustrating centrifugal force when she found mine and liked it enough to ask if she could use it. A pleasant side effect of having my pictures online.

In case you can’t see it, here’s the original picture they used in the publication:

I shot this in November, 2006 with our old 3.1 MP point-and-shoot digital camera, so I’m not too sure about the settings, but here’s what the camera recorded on the picture:

ISO 100, 1/14s, f3.7, 10.9mm

The slow shutter speed (1/14s) is what’s producing the motion blur over most of the picture. The reason that the hand and bar are in (reasonable) focus is because I was panning, moving my camera from side to side, as I took the picture. It’s a really fun technique that you can use with any moving object with sometimes very surprising results.

For a while now, I’ve been using this blog to post some of my favorite personal images, along with the occasional shoot that I’ve been able to do along the way. I’ve often thought of how this blog would look to someone who was purely interested in me as a professional, as someone that they might consider hiring to make images for them, and I’ve come to realize that while there is much about this blog that I like, it simply doesn’t give me an easy way to present what I consider to be some of my finest images in a professional looking portfolio.

I puzzled over how to put one together, whether the basic tools provided by my blog service (wordpress.com, which I highly recommend to anyone interested in putting their own blog together) gave me the power to really craft a nice looking collection of my work. And basically, they don’t; I mean, they’re a brilliant blog service, not a portfolio host.

That’s about when I heard about carbonmade.com, a site completely dedicated to helping visual artists put together professional portfolios in a snap. And basically, they do it really well.

There’s a free account you can sign up for that allows you to post a limited number of projects with a limited number of images. On the one hand, it’s very…well, limited. On the other hand, though, this has really forced me to look at everything I’ve put together in the last year or so and decide what are actually my best images.

It was super easy to set everything up and super easy to adjust things once I saw how it was all coming together. Most of it is check-box and drag-and-drop simple with stunning results. Here’s a little sneak peek (if you want to see more, just click the picture to go to the portfolio):

Is it perfect? No. Like anything designed with simplicity in mind, there are some more advanced controls missing that I’m hoping they’ll add someday. For example, right now, you can’t customize the project thumbnail image (like the ones above). They just use the middle of whatever image is first in the gallery. So, you have to choose which is your first image very carefully to make sure there is something of interest within that space.

That said, I’m very firmly in like with my portfolio. Head on over, click around for a while and check it all out, then use the back button a whole bunch to pop back over here and let me know what you think. I’d love to hear it all, both positive and negative.

And finally, if you’re in the Wamego area (and by “area,” I mean Manhattan, Junction City, Westmoreland, Alma, anything close by…shoot, even Topeka, on a good day) and have a family, kid, kids, baby bump or senior that you’d like images of, contact me to see about the possibility of getting your session shot for free to help me build my portfolio!