Away to The East

I'm off to Japan for two weeks tomorrow! Tokyo-Hakone-Kyoto-Tokyo.

It's all very exciting and I'll be taking plenty of pictures.

My little shop will have a somewhat more Eastern flavour in the near future...

Eyeshoot goes Foodie

As much as I love and adore photography, my first love was/is food and cooking. I have a food blog over at Vox but I really don't like having two blog systems on the go. So I have decided to incorporate my old Vox posts into this one here. I also prefer the Blogger platform and feel quite at home here (I do wish that you could reply to comments directly though - Live Journal has the right idea there.)

So from now as well as pretty pictures there will be recipes, cooking stuff and restaurant reviews and pictures of food. I'm going to insert some of my favourite old foodie posts in the correct date order here, so there will be quite a lot of new entries appearing.

I'm looking forward to having all my favourite things in one place!

Bon Appetite.

Another Treasury for today.

Here's my second Treasury appearance for today - Many thanks to Rafya for including me!

Click here to go straight to the real thing.

A Sunday Treasury

I had a Convo today in my Etsy shop today to tell me that I was in a Treasury. I have no idea why the powers at Etsy consider such Convos to be spam, why wouldn't someone want to know that one of their items has been hand selected from a pool of millions to be showcased by another creative person. It's very odd.

Anyway, my Love in a Mist print is in the lovely Some Like it Hot by MissKnits.

Click here to go straight to it!

What's the most expensive liquid in the world?

Vintage Dom Perignon? Tuscan truffle juice? Honey from a remote corner of the world. No, Hewlett Packard printing inks.....

I am a very happy owner of an HP Photosmart Pro B9180 Super A3 printer. It takes eight ink cartridges including three blacks. Petty impressive really and it makes beautiful prints. The machine cost me just under £500 which I thought was a great price. It came with a complete set of ink which I have just found out that to replace from the shop where I bought the printer (Caulmet in Manchester) will cost me £200. That means that the printer itself was only £300!

Inevitably, my first cartridge is running dry, when it told me with impressive accuracy that I had 21% of Matte Black ink left, I thought that it was time to find out where I could get the cheapest replacement. I looked at Calumet and there's was £27 which I thought was pretty steep, I looked at other sites I frequent and there was a bit of variety but it was a pain looking at one site after another. As I moaned to a friend, they said that they swear by DealTimeUK and had in fact just been researching their new digital camera there from the 2,400 listed so that they could find the best deals for exactly what they wanted.

Anyway, I digress.....the price range for the HP38 Matte Black I so desperately needed was from, well nothing to nothing as they didn't have one listed....

I then looked for Epson premium glossy paper which is my favourite when I choose to go glossy rather than my usual matt and got a much better result with prices ranging from £19-£25 which I thought was pretty impressive really. The shops were all sites I'd never heard of before and I plan to check them out over the weekend as I'm down to my last three sheets!

The hunt for the ink goes on, but it's nice to have a one stop shop for searching for all sorts of things without it taking over my life (not just geekery, there's also wine, flowers, clothes and various female requisites too) !

My canvas prints!

My canvas prints!
Originally uploaded by multum in parvo

Twenty 14" canvas prints waiting in my dining room. Ten will be put up in Thyme Out Deli tonight. I still need to think about the pricing and how I'll actually get paid. I wouldn't want to miss out on that!

Once I've made those decisions, I'll offer the prints from my Etsy shop if I'm allowed to do so as I'm not actually making the frames myself, but they are handmade and hand stapled by a third party. I'll have to find out about that. Also, I hope the postage won't be too prohibitive.

Dandelion Puff

Dandelion Puff
Originally uploaded by multum in parvo

One of my new prints - may it sell many copies!

Awash with canvas prints

My twenty canvas prints are done and they look wonderful, I'm really pleased!

They are to be put up at Thyme Out Deli tomorrow night.

We've still a lot to think about for the ordering and so on, but at least they'll be up and I have a full set as stock for if (when) sales start!

Photos to follow later!

Earn money from blogging. Nice!

When I read about the opportunities to earn some extra cash through payperpost from the ever informative message boards at Etsy I thought that it would be right up my street. I’ve been blogging about one thing or another forever and felt confident enough to forward my ramblings to a third party for appraisal. I duly signed up my Blogger blog as you have to start off by submitting one blog and once you have, I think it’s ten approved posts, you can add further blogs. I plan to add my food blog over at Vox in due course, it’s been rather abandoned lately, but I do love writing about food, cooking and eating out and really should start it up again.

Anyway I digress.

The deal with PayPerPost is that once your beloved blog has been approved you go to the page with the ‘available opportunities’ and see which you qualify for. The various types of offer are colour coded – grey for opportunities which are no longer available, pink for the ones that aren’t available to you for a variety of reasons (you’ve not enough PPP posts under your belt, wrong Blog format, wrong country etc) and finally the ones you want, the green ones. You can click on any of these to see some more information about the company you’ll be writing about and see what you have to include in your post. There’s always a link, sometimes an invisible image which is just a line of code to insert at the end of the post which no doubt does something clever.

So you choose your opportunity, check out the company you’ll be writing about and get typing, remembering to add any links, images and disclosures which are necessary. You submit the blog entry to PPP via their website and voilla, you’re done. An email comes to you telling you if you post has been accepted and if it’s not, there’s a reason why and you may have an opportunity to change what’s wrong. For example I forgot to add my disclosure line on one post, and after I’d corrected that, the post was accepted.

The values of posts vary from $5 up to a rather more generous $100+. When you’re starting out it seems that the opportunities are rather limited if you want them to even vaguely fit in with your creative and craft based blog, but I’ve done two which I managed to tie in without them looking too conspicuous (I hope!). I am assuming that the more posts you do, that the range of opportunities available becomes wider and more varied. There are some seriously impressive earnings quoted on the front page of up to $20,000. I’m not quite sure how that’s possible, but I’d like to stick around for long enough to find out!

This is going to earn me $20 which is better than a poke in the eye with a stick.

So come and join in, it’s fun to be asked to write about something you wouldn’t normally and more fun to earn money doing it!

It seems to be my day for Treasury appearances!

My third Treasury appearance today.

If I had a Million Dollars:

In another Treasury

One of my most popular pics is in a Treasury called Rusty, Distressed and Beautiful. Click here to have a look on the Etsy page!

Just Cool Stuff!

I'm in a Treasury on Etsy today, cliicky here to go straight to it!

Mine's in the bottom left corner.

On the Road

In my general day to day life I don't do a lot of driving. I live about fifteen minutes from my mother's house where I've worked for the last few years. Obviously I'm delighted not to have the terrible drag into the city which I see every morning coming towards me as I zoom out to the south (obviously obeying all speed limits!). So that's nice. But I love driving and seeing the bizarre stuff on the roadside which I love to photograph.

Two of my favourite photography projects which have been on the go for a while are road based. The first is my Birthday Banners series. These are quite rare sightings and actually seem to be getting less and less for some reason. If you don't know what I'm talking about, here's a couple of examples:

It's amazing how much work goes into some of them and others are no more than a daub of paint. I often wonder what it would feel like to come across a banner directed at you on your way to work on your birthday morning!

The other roadside project on the go at the moment is the Roadside Cafes. This is in some ways easier and harder. Easier as I know the type of location where I'll find my quarry, harder because they are really quite tricky to photograph. Tricky because first you have to see the cafe before you shoot past the layby, then there has to be enough distance infront of the cafe to fit it all in frame. Even with a wide angle lens that isn't always the case if there's a dip or a rise. Then there's the shade cast by the flap opening which means I have to use a flash so that there's enough light inside to even see what's going on. Then you actually have to engage with people. Ask permission, get them to pose, ask questions and finally, get them to sign a model release form. Actually I've decided against the release form now as I'm only representing the people as themselves so there shouldn't be a problem and when I start to talk to them I tell them that the pictures are destined for a book and will be on my website. So they do know how their images will be used.

All of this is hard if you don't really drive anywhere. I've got the majority of these shots while I've been out with my mother doing work related journeys, we cover hundreds of miles and our journey is often broken up by me leaping out of the car, buying a bad cup of tea and snapping away for a few minutes. I won't be working with mum for much longer as she's retiring, so I'll be taking to the road all on my own to search out my subjects. I won't be making any money and it has occurred to me to be concerned about the cost of petrol which seems to be rising up and up and up here in the UK. I appreciate that I have a tiny and economical car, but it would be nice to save on the expense, and, drum roll please, I have found a way to do just this. The very kind and thoughtful people over at Get Free Petrol are offering you a handy £30 off petrol from Sainsbury's. That amount would fill my little tank. All you need to do is register on the site and pick one of the deals on the site and get two friends to do the same. How easy is that. You can do it as many times as you like. Or until you've run out of friends.

So for me to carry on with my road-based quest, I'll certainly sign up and do some free driving.

On display

There's rather a nice deli down the road from home which sprung up less than a year ago and despite all good intentions we never quite managed to pop in as it was always closed when we walked past. Eventually we did pop in for lunch one day and were pleasantly surprised. Mum had mushroom soup which was as good as you'd get in a restaurant, my lentily soup wasn't as good as that, but still a good lunch. We had some chunks of fantastic wholemeal bread which was cut especially for us. Peter had something vegetably and cheesy which was delicious. While we were there I noticed that they had alarmingly empty walls and feeling full of beans (literally) I very bravely (or so I thought) asked them if they would be interested in displaying some rather nice foodie photography. Basically they said "yes" and after showing them some samples of my work as paper prints we've agreed on ten 12" square canvas prints. The very first one is being printed as a test tonight and I'll be heading off to the printers very soon to have a look at his range of materials etc. I've had nothing to do with canvas prints at all, and haven't really even given them much attention in shops and so on, but they are much less expensive to produce than lovely framed pieces and much easier to cart around and less likely to break as I am a bit of a klutz!

Obviously I plan to sell the pictures to the general deli visiting public, I haven't decided on the prices yet, or how exactly it will work, but I'm really hoping that it could be a good way to make some money and to start to get my name around a bit.

I've chosen five foodie pictures and five non-foodie as I appreciate that not everyone wants to have pictures of grub, however pretty on their living room walls. I'll also get some cards made to sell either as sets or individually.

The owners seemed very positive about the venture and they have a florist shop not to far away and suggested that I take photos there and make a display. I haven't really thought any more about that yet, but I love floral photography so once I get my mind round to it, I'm sure I'll think of a nice angle for that opportunity too.

These are some of the images I'll be showing at the deli

Big Ideas Need Big Spaces

., originally uploaded by multum in parvo.

Could this stencil graffiti have been amongst a more perfect arrangement of elements.

I think I'll turn it into a print.

Print Club and the power of Tags

Etsy Finds has featured shops with subscriptions. Now I have a subscription offer too, but it didn't get a mention as my Tags were lousy. It may have been because they thought it wasn't a good enough item to feature, but I reckon it's just because they didn't know it exists! I've gone an edited my Tags and left a comment in the Finds section with a link hoping that they might add it in, or at lease someone might read the comments.

Here's the deal, it's $100 a year for a print of my choice for a month. Sounds pretty good to me.

Clicky here to see the listing.