DIMW - Digital ImageMaker World

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

Steve Ingraham’s Point and Shoot Landscape is a new photography blog that is focused on the value of point and shoot cameras as a creative choice for photographers.

Steve has set himself an active publishing schedule and the content on the site already offers some stimulating articles on how to get the ost out of your point and shoot cameras and why to chose to use a point and shoot.

Whilst my preference is to use an SLR for various reasons, I also use point and shoot cameras frequently and see their value. In fact in many circumstances they are easier to get great images from. For example, many offer amazing macro capabilities and the live preview and tiltable LCDs of many models make low level shooting painless on the knees and back.

So Steve’s site is definitely worth a regular look.

Recently Joe Nalven asked me to contribute some words and images to a piece on infrared photography. The resulting article, with several other IR photographer’s thoughts as well as mine, makes a good read and is a useful document. You can find it on Joe’s Digital Art Guild website.

Photography can be a solitary avocation, giving you time along, just you, your camera and your subject. In such a way, photography can be a highly meditative and contemplative hobby or job, depending on the type of photography you do, obviously.

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Life has been very busy recently, and my output on DIMI and here has suffered. But I’ve still been shooting.

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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
- continued

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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Following on from the last post, John Stevenson, who is writing a series of articles on this blog, pointed me to http://www.photoattorney.com/, which contains great information. A blog by a lawyer, Carolyn Wright, there is great information here for those with questions about the various laws and how they apply to photography. Note that it does cover things from a US perspective.

On one of the lists I am on someone posted a link to a great website in response to a discussion of people being stopped from taking photos when there is no legal right to do so.

The link is here to Bert P. Krages web site. He is a lawyer who is also a photographer and has prepared a PDF document of your rights to photograph that you can carry with you incase of problems. It is for the US but a link to one for the UK is on his site.

Worth a look in this age of extreme paranoia and tendency to deny anything.

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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