Digital ImageMaker World

Life does sometimes get in the way of photography. We’ve had a few dramas and distractions here over the last month. Some of these are continuing but the end is, I think, in sight. The rest are resolved.

The thing is, some of these issues and the people involved have been quite emotionally draining. It is hard to get motivated for creativity sometimes when that is going on, though when you can make it happen the creativity really does help you to get past things. This is the key, somehow you have to make good, positive things happen and keep your focus on them. Eventually the other stuff doesn’t seem so important.

Some quite positive stuff has been happening lately. I’ve been running workshops from a new venue and they have been going well. We spent a lot of time converting a garage into a joint studio for my wife, Adriana, a painter, and myself. While not huge it is now a nice space to work in and feels good for us both. It also offers us what we have always talked about, the opportunity to explore some joint artwork developments.

My first book is off with possible publishers for consideration and my second book, a photography title, is near to completion. DIMi has been redesigned and now has some new behind the scenes features, which will pay dividends shortly. The An ImageMaker analog photography site is up and awaiting the first articles, while The Digital ImageMaker Gallery of photography and digital art is now up and running and has the first group of invited photographers and artists working on their galleries and statements.

Lately I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about just how important a creative outlet is to the frame of mind of creative people. For myself having a creative outlet, my photography, actually working for me is a key to overcoming life’s hassles from the issues of being school council president at my daughter’s school, having negative people having a go at you and having things that you thought were a done deal turn flat. Stresses happen but with an outlet you can weather them.

I’ve seen some really positive examples recently. Bonny Lhotka, one of the three who published the great Digital Art Studio book (our review of the book can be read here) sent me her latest activity, a training DVD in doing inkjet transfers. The DVD, Inkjet Transfer Techniques, is outstanding and was an excellent next step for Bonny. Through watching it I also noticed she had moved to selling some unique products (clear film for inkjet printing to do the transfers with) that make perfect sense and nicely extend her activities. Another comes from my spiritual counseling work that I do with people. I recently really helped a client to get a different perspective on their life. That’s what it is all about.

When life presents you with some challenges, try to find a way to keep positive and to keep creating. If you do, you may just create a much more positive future for yourself.

We’ve been going through a site redesign at DIMi (www.dimagemaker.com) to better handle some major expansion we are doing.

Over the next couple of weeks we are opening a variety of new features, from free web hosting of galleries for selected photographers and artists, dimagemaker.net, (people can apply) to a companion site for analog and fine art photography (AnImageMaker.com) to on both sites (D and An ImageMaker) exhibition and portfolio reviews (a move into art and photographic criticism prompted by discussions offlist with a number of people) and more (newsletters, for example, and a big, multipronged push into fine art photography).

The free web hosting of galleries of work (with artist statements, profiles and links to their other sites) is a way to give back to the people who use the site and make good use of a large slab of excess hosting space and bandwidth we had. I’m hoping this will develop further as we are looking at ways to promote the people who we have on board (we can handle about 4,000 people giving each around 15MB of free space) and are putting in place networking opportunities between the exhibitors. I’m hoping things like joint exhibitions, collaborations and such may come out of it.

More later

My recent experiences and experimentations in photography have led me to reflect on photography as an avocation.
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Last night I went to one of my standard camera test locations, a bridge that gives me an uninterrupted view of our central business district testing the Panasonic FZ50.

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A Series of Articles About the Development of a Photography Business
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It seems certain that any lexicon covering new terminologies introduced within the era of the personal computer would include the word ‘photoshopped’. And I’d estimate that a large proportion of the general public would feel comfortable using it, in order to categorize a photographic image which has been extensively and digitally edited using a PC. It’s often, for example, taken to describe either the inclusion or deletion of an extra figure or subject within a group portrait. While Adobe Systems’ Photoshop® software can indeed be used alone for such image reconstructions, there are nowadays other, alternative digital toolkits which can be applied equally well to such a task.

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A Series of Articles About the Development of a Photography Business
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It’s pretty self-evident I guess that to be a new entrant in the business of selling photographic prints online, then a reliable and high quality printer is a fully primary requirement. I’ve long been a fan of the Epson Stylus Photo line of digital inkjet products – not just the printers themselves, but also of the media available directly from Epson as well as selected products from third-party suppliers.

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A Series of Articles About the Development of a Photography Business
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Since posting the introduction to this series, I’ve been busy completing a detailed configuration and design for the PhotoArtCanvas website. Part of that effort has involved actually producing some fully finished products – completed, full-size and mounted prints – such that photography of these can be completed for an online gallery and catalog. Below I’ve included samples from this pre-production exercise, allowing directly for “before-and after” comparisons. Lady before gentleman.

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A Series of Articles About the Development of a Photography Business

To introduce myself first, I’m John Stevenson, of Colorado Springs in the fine state of Colorado in the U.S.A. And Wayne has very kindly decided to let me write some invited contributions to his blog for a while. I’m in the process of going into business, as PhotoArtCanvas (actually – legally – as Photoscena LLC d/b/a PhotoArtCanvas) and that will be what I’ll be writing about here, at weekly intervals or so.

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Below is the latest photomedia piece I have created, called Splintering of Personality, and a series of detail views of small sections of it. The original is quite dark and very large, sized for 2 metre by 2 metre square. It is part of my Road to Elysium series and explores the concept that traumatic events cause the death or splintering off of parts of our selves or souls.

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Coming out of a discussion on the dfa Yahoo list I put out a very rough list of features for what I saw as the ideal inkjet printer for digital artists. So I have decided to flesh that rough idea out here.
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