Black and White Photography Blog, Vol. I

The motion blur is my fault… I had been shooting something where I wanted a lot of DOF - and didn’t switch back to my usual street mode where I’m usually at 1/500th or 1/1000th. In the old days, they’d shoot with 50 ASA film and you’d see quite a lot of motion blur which was perfectly fine (in those days).

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On a different note, I’ve been doing so many large prints lately, that I just looked at a 16 x 24 that’s drying and it seems small to me. I was able to do one print that I shot at 1600 ASA with the 40D that was 36 inches long. And you know what - perfectly fine. Yes, there’s “noise / grain” but it wasn’t distracting at all. I printed it at 180 dpi after doing some extrapolation with PowerZoom II. I do wonder what MP the 45D will have? 12mp? 14mp? more…?

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Business has been very good lately; with a lot more overseas orders.  (Guess that’s ’cause of the drop in the dollar?)  The price point of prints on the web is a very tricky thing.  Right now it’s about right in terms of getting orders, but it keeps me very busy with printing and packaging.  Raise the prices, and sales drop off too much, maybe in half.  If you’re running or thinking of selling photos on the web, the single biggest factor in sales is the cost.  (Assuming that anyone wants and can find your photos in the first place).  It’s especially tricky because you’re not selling toasters.  How is anyone supposed to know what the worth of your art is unless you tell them with the price.  So if you go too low - gulp - the buyer figures it’s junk.  If you go too high - well they’re not looking at the actual work so how do they know if it’s worth it.

In short, my advice (not that you asked) is to be able to easily change prices in a batch and see what happens.

The other thing (and it took me a long time to figure this out) is to spend the money so that you have an impressive catalog / portfolio.  For me, this has paid for itself very quickly with an increase in orders from art buyers.  The only bit there that’s tricky is that although the art buyer wants to show the potential client the catalog, they don’t want to tell the client where the prints came from - because then their potential client might just buy the print directly.  So I wouldn’t do something like print the web address at the bottom of every page (like I did in one early catalog until the buyer told me that wasn’t a good idea.)