The business side of photography
What does it cost someone on a mobile device to view your web site? A large, photo-heavy site can be dozens of megabytes, or more, in size and cellular data isn’t free. How much would you pay to view your web site?
Here’s a web site that shows what it costs someone to view your site on mobile networks around the world. There are a couple of takeaways:
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Why do people living near an airport say they no longer hear the planes flying overhead? Why don’t people working in a sodium-vapour-lit factory notice the orange-coloured lighting? Have you noticed that if you always eat the same flavour of ice cream, you enjoy it less? Why aren’t garbage collectors bothered by the smell?
This psychological effect is called habituation. It happens because your senses naturally adapt to what’s around you.
When you spend a long period of time editing photos, habituation means your eyes will start to adapt to the images in front of you. You’ll lose your point of reference for editing. For examples: you can’t tell if skin tones are too warm or too cold; poorly white-balanced photos may start to look okay; you can’t tell if an adjustment is making the image better or worse; you can’t decide how much Unsharp Mask to use.
This is why, when doing large editing jobs, I’ll make one pass at post-processing the images and then leave the pictures for a day or two before going back to complete the work. As much as possible, I’ll edit photos about 80% of the way and then finish them another day with fresh eyes.
Similarly, after a long day of shooting business headshots, if time permits, I’ll make the proof selections on the following day. I find the extra day allows me to view the raw images more objectively. A long day of shooting anything can really tire your eyes and dull your editing judgment.
Near where I lived, there was once a Dad’s cookie factory located directly across the street from a Bick’s Pickle factory. When passing through the area, depending on wind direction, you could smell either the sweet scent of cookies or the odour of pickles. Some days, you could smell both at the same time ;-)
Having spoken with some of the employees at each company, the workers said they didn’t notice any smells inside their own factory. I thought this was probably good for the pickle people but not so much for the cookie makers.
I won’t upgrade to a newer Mac operating system unless I really have to. If it ain’t broke, why fix it? But I recently updated a Mac computer from OS 10.10 to 10.11, (yes, 1-1/2 years behind the times), because some new applications now require OS 10.11. After I updated, several popular Photoshop plugins – those from Topaz and Nik (Google) – started acting up.
The reason why these plugins were acting weirdly is because Mac’s newer operating systems, starting with OS 10.11, have Apple’s System Integrity Protection (SIP). This security feature does what its name says by not allowing non-Apple files in certain directories.
Topaz and Nik plugins had installed files into the hidden /usr/lib/ directory which is now blocked by SIP. When you update to OS 10.11, or newer, all non-Apple files will be removed from directories protected by SIP. Removed files are placed in Library > SystemMigration > History > Migration > QuarantineRoot.
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They may be the tiniest details in a portrait but they’re possibly the most important. Yet many photographers don’t understand catchlights.
You may not need catchlights in every portrait. The most famous portrait, the Mona Lisa, doesn’t have catchlights:
But catchlights are very important in a business portrait. Catchlights bring attention to the eyes which are the most important facial feature for conveying emotion.
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If you accept mobile, point-of-sale credit card payments by using something like Square, there are a couple things you need to know:
• As you’ve probably heard, Apple has removed the 3.5mm headphone jack from its new devices. Lenovo has also started doing this and it appears Samsung may do the same. The problem caused by removing the headphone jack is that credit card readers, and many other devices, use the headphone jack.
Sidenote / rant: The reasons why Apple removed the headphone jack aren’t exactly what Apple tried to spin by saying it was an act of “courage.” The move to the proprietary Lightning connector and the concurrent move to USB-C ports (which can accept proprietary restrictions) greatly increase Apple’s control of third-party devices that can connect with Apple products.
This move is expected to generate a lot of money for Apple since third-party manufacturers will have to pay for licensing, pay for Apple’s proprietary MFi chip and other components, and pay a royalty on each and every device they manufacture. By contrast, USB and 3.5mm audio connectors are royalty-free, OS-independent, device-independent and they fall outside of Apple’s control.
Been sitting at your computer for a while? Need some exercise?
A long time ago, a Yellow Pages advertisement used the slogan “Let your fingers do the walking.” Now you can let your fingers do your exercising by scrolling for a mile. (That web page is a mile long: 6,082,560 pixels at 96 ppi (monitor resolution) = 5,280 feet = 1 mile).
Twenty years ago, web-page scrolling was considered bad design maybe because most folks used slow dial-up Internet and page content had to be kept minimal. As broadband Internet became the norm, longer pages, and scrolling, became popular. Five or six years ago, scrolling went out of fashion maybe because it took too much effort or because people were in too much of a hurry to go below the fold. Today, scrolling is trendy again probably because scrolling is easier and more preferred on mobile devices.
Both the photo pages and blog pages on my web site have several long pages with lots of text. Scrolling is often required on my site. This is intentional and the reasons are:
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Two or three years ago, Nikon Canada implemented a repair tracking system that lets you check the status of your equipment while it’s being serviced. This system tells you when your gear has entered the repair process, when it’s being repaired, when it’s been completed and that your gear is either being shipped back to you or is ready for pickup. It will also tell you the cost. Sometimes you may be required to pre-approve a repair.
This system doesn’t provide up-to-the-minute or up-to-the-hour tracking. It seems to be up-to-the-day but it can vary a lot.
The problem is that the web link to check your repair status has always been wrong. Nikon Canada knows this but it’s never been corrected.
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