I was browsing around this morning, and frankly don’t even remember what site I was on, but I noticed that the ads were showing camera stuff I had looked at recently.  I wasn’t even on a photography site but I was getting a widget ad showing view cameras, and the Rollei TLR.

I was curious about how this was being done and clicked on the link to the ad supplier:  Criteo.

They re-target visitors that have been on one site and use that info to display stuff they looked at on other sites they visit.  Now from a marketing point-of-view, wow – what a great idea.  One of my hats is, after all, sales person for Dave Beckerman.

Considering that most viewers leave your site without buying anything, in fact the average for sites is about 90% leave without a buy.  My site is probably about 99% leave without a buy (and I kid you not).  So imagine that you came to my site.  Looked at all the pictures (which a lot of people do).  Caught up on the  blog.  And then went on to your next morning activity.  And sure enough, you are reading your newspaper of choice, when images of my prints appear in the panel.  Not only images, but the very images you’ve looked at.

Would you wonder how that happened?  Would it be a good thing, or a bad thing?

Eeks.

For me, as your friendly sales person, it would be great.

For me, as your average consumer, I don’t know that I like this too much.

B&H is giving my viewing information to a third company that is feeding my own browsing habits back at me.

Eeks.

But is there anything new about this?  I run my supermarket card through to get bonus points, and they know that I’ve been buying Indian food lately; and have given up on the frozen White Castle Cheeseburgers.

Has this guy gone vegetarian?  Is it a trend?

Google doesn’t know my name, but they know just about everything I’m doing, not as an individual, but as part of a group of some sort.  Or as a data point.  If your suspicious, you might think that they’re even reading your mail, personally – though if this ever got out – it’d be such a scandal that they’d lose billions.  But as a part of a group, their machines are reading your mail (assuming you are using gmail, like I am) and feeding you back ads that are context related, i.e. related to what you write and read about.

Is that really so bad?  It just not the same as having the exact products that I just viewed, show up on another site that doesn’t even have anything to do with photography.

True.  I can opt out of this.  I can get rid of the cookie that’s been set (probably by B&H).

But guess is that most people are simply not going to notice this recycling of viewing habits, and it is going to really do the job.

Sales guy Dave wonders if he has enough money (it’s mostly pay-per-click) to wage such a campaign.

Browser Dave, wants to make sure that he opts out of this program so that his viewing habits aren’t passed along to a third entity, though he’s not entirely sure why.

At some point in the life of every Epson printer (and others as well) you get some sort of ink smudge that you can’t get rid of.  There are all sorts of smudge patterns, but one pattern is a sort of smudge line on the left side of the print (facing the printer).

You will go through agony cleaning every bit of the machines innards, from changing the box that collects ink excess, to running paper towels soaked with Windex through it, to whatever tricks you’ve learned.  Some of these tricks will work – eventually.

But you, like me – are in the business of churning out prints for customers and you don’t have time to wait for the thing to dry out and come back to it’s senses.  This little trick will fix this one particular issue.

Suppose your print is an 8 x 12 inch image and you are printing on 13 x 19 inch paper (this is just for demonstration purposes).  Open the print in Photoshop and change the canvas size so that there is room (now this is looking at the image on the monitor) so that you have a good wide margin on the right side of the image.  (You can click that relative button in the canvas setting so that the image remains on the left and margin width increases on the right).

Create a second layer to draw on.  And here’s the big finale: draw a straight gray line on the right side, close to the paper margin, but not so far that you get the dreaded: this is larger than what will fit, some clipping will occur, message.

And so, what you do is fake the print head into dropping down to draw that vertical gray line (actually any light color will work) and whatever smudging you’ll get will be on the right side of the smudge (looking at image on screen) or left side, looking at the print.

And so – no smudge for client.  And it also gives all the stuff you’ve done to diagnose and fix the smudge to go into effect.

If you are printing in Lightroom – there is no way I’ve found to duplicate this.  You’d think there would be a way to use one of those guidelines, or crop marks even, or something to print, but I haven’t found a way and so I have to put the file into Photoshop to use this bit of trickery.

I had wanted to do this for a long time – given the quality of your comments.  I made changes (it was pretty easy) to blog so that your comments show up on the main page, and are more a part of the blog.

So you don’t have to go to a separate comment page anymore, and I can read your words of wisdom (speaking words of wisdom, let it be) without any additional clicking.  You deserve it.

Wanna do the same with your blog?  Here’s the wonderful link with explanation:

http://clifgriffin.com/2008/10/28/display-comment-form-on-main-index-in-wordpress/

That blue / pink (guy / gal) theme got tired pretty fast… so I went back at it again.  This time I tried to give it more of a city feel.  And guess what I came up with for the background header image?

Yes – it’s the cropped part (the stoop) from the building where I lived on University Avenue (1636) until I was 13.  How’s that for a touchstone?  Now of course I’m supposed to be leaving all this alone as I do have a nice stack of orders waiting for me, and some prospective clients that are waiting to see samples.

But I keep futzing with the storefront anyway.  The cat absolutely can’t stand seeing me sit down at the computer because it means he’s going to be neglected for a few hours.  Well – I tell him – I’ve got to make things look right so we have food in the cupboard.  This doesn’t appease him at all.

Yeah, I suppose this 1250px shot is going to blow out over the sidebar but c’est la vie.

Actually, the house was two adjoining buildings, 1636 and 1640.  What happened to 1638 was always a mystery.  I still remember the phone number (TR8-2369).  Yes, I was born at a time when you still had those prefixes which stood for something.  In this case, Tremont, though Tremont Avenue wasn’t really close to University Avenue.  Why was it even called University Avenue?  Because an annex of Fordham University was nearby.

University Avenue was a smaller version of The Grand Concourse which was a pale copy of the Avenue des Champs-Élysées which was my favorite spot to stroll when I visited Paris.  The Champs never did go through the crack epidemic that destroyed the Grand Concourse.  But in my day – the Grand Concourse was where the rich folks lived.

Yes – when I was living in the Bronx – it was still a beautiful place to grow up.  Up until about 1960 or so.  It was around that time that we saw our first dead addict in a hallway on Nelson Avenue with the needle still in his arm.  And what was called “white flight” started.

It’s true – that it brought out the worst – in terms of racism among the whites; but it was also true that there was a correlation between crime and the influx of poor blacks.  Ignorant people decided that all blacks were like this.  Those of us, who were brought up differently got to know many blacks who were just as good or bad as anyone else.  But the fact was that as blacks moved into the projects – the crime wave (an old phrase for sure, but one that was used then) went up.  And soon, what had been a fairly mixed neighborhood turned into a ghetto.

We moved near Montifoire Hospital.  My father believed that neighborhoods that were near large well-paying institutions would remain stable; and for a while it did.  But within a few years you could watch drug deals going down from my third floor window.

My father lived in that big, pre-war apartment until he was in his sixties, and for many years, after my mother died.  Eventually, he met a woman, and moved out to her place in Great Neck.

Great Neck.  Culture shock.  My dad is really, at heart, a guy from the streets of New York and Cleveland.  And here he was with stock brokers, and lawyers, and people with money.  His woman constantly was after him to wear better clothes.  The people that he met were almost all well-off.  And he constantly called just to tell me how much the price of a can of tuna fish was in the local store.

A long way from University Avenue.

I feel the same way sometimes on the Upper East Side.  I don’t really belong here.  But, well – it was near Walker Evan’s house (I knew that when I moved here) and I sort of thought that if he could manage to live here I could too.  But the main reason was to be close to my favorite sister, Nancy, and her family.  And for that – it was worth it.

for the blog is in flux.  I’m working on changes so I can use the same layout from the store for the blog.

The print store is in really good shape now.  And I learned a lot about writing in PHP and wordpress.  For example, these pages with thumbs and showing all images, was written by me, without plugins.  I could never have done that a few years ago.  The thumbs are created with a script called TimThumb – but it takes it one step further and can show thumbs without having to crop them into squares anymore.

http://www.beckermanphoto.com/limited-edition-numbers

I used this for all the category pages.  It also includes realtime – the limited edition numbers.

If the thumb exists in the cache, it pulls it (this is how TimThumb works) and if not – than it creates it on the fly according to the parameters you pass it.

The code for the page numbers – that’s mine too.  I used to have this from a plugin – but when you roll your own – there’s more flexibility (in this example I also strip the ID from the title) and also keep the testimonials out of the pages.

For testimonials, I wrote another page that shows excerpts from all the testimonials on one page.

http://www.beckermanphoto.com/category/testimonials

Well – that’s the sort of stuff I’ve been working on.

man, I did a lot of redesign (what again?) on the storefront.

You’ll see the obvious stuff like blue and pink colors – but under the hood, made major changes that will make it easier to change in the future; loads faster; and got rid of the overhead of a lot of widgets.  Means nothing to you probably, but actually made the sidebar into a non-widget aware bar because WP was adding a bunch of CSS that was getting in my way.

Also did away with the whole numbering of images thing – which is to say – have gotten rid of a lot of stuff that the BIG G. has been seeing as duplicate content – which it hates.  And so you have your thumbnails on the category page – which link to the permalink pages, and that’s it.  You don’t have the same content in two places as I did before.

Then installed HEADROOM2 plugin to begin working seriously with having different information on different posts in the title, keywords and description.  Again, I could only do this by doing away with the category / archive pages.  Which again means nothing to you.

At the same time, finished off two HDR PRINTS – both 28 inches long – which turned out great.  Very unusual looking.  The HDR is sort of grainy, but no more than you’d get from 400 film blown up to that size.

And on top of all that – I’ve been shooting again, and happy to do it since the small 500D is just right for taking with me everywhere, and every time I go downstairs to do some errands or whatever, I end up on a corner playing with the live view.  Now if something would actually happen – other than shooting interesting faces – that would be nice.

While at B&H – looked at the 550 (next version) which now has 18mp as opposed to the 15mp on my 500d.  The main thing they changed is has to do with the movie mode; but I wonder if they made any changes to live view; i.e. a shorter blackout while doing auto-focus; quicker to get into the mode; less heat generated; longer time for it work before shutting off; and better battery life for Live View which does eat up the battery.  They prob. did, since it now uses a different battery.

I’ll be going to Markus’ party tomorrow night – he’s taking off on his trip across America to follow in the footsteps (somewhat) of Robert Frank.  Frankly, I’m just going because I think it’ll be a good thing to shoot; and hopefully he’ll have his M9 there – which I haven’t seen – though I can pretty well imagine what it’s like.  Not for me.  I like this technology race between Nikon and Canon – and enjoy the new features.  I can’t see myself walking around – or going cross country on buses for that matter with something like $15K worth of equipment.

I remember how paranoid I was (not without warrent) when I travelled around Europe with my cameras and the fear of leaving them in the hotel room.  The more I traveled, the smaller my pack got to the point where I only brought enough that I could walk around with it and not leave anything valuable in the hotel room.

If I were to do a big trip now, I’d just get a second body in the 500D line, and wouldn’t go nuts if one of the bodies walked away.  I have to admit, that I really enjoyed packing and thinking about equipment for a big trip.  At one point, I must have had 10 different camera bags.  And many different camera systems and I’d set out everything on the floor and play with different ways of arranging the velcro strips in the bags.  I’d fall asleep dreaming about all the great pictures I was going to get.  And worrying about whether I was taking the right camera system.

Eventually, I concluded that I would just take the system that I was using the most and was most comfortable with.  Even if it wasn’t going to do everything – it didn’t make sense to start working with new equipment in a strange land.  And the best results came from the Contax G2 in Paris with about 100 rolls of Tri-x.

Now when I got back – that was dreadful because there were all these rolls to develop – and although I could afford to have them done professionally – I still did them by hand.  The negatives are still sitting in a box – waiting for a careful review.  Crazy, huh?

I used to really enjoy my longer trips – although they were mostly to the same place PARIS / FRANCE etc. Belgium once; San Francisco a few times; Sedona three times.  I haven’t gone anywhere since I began the business. Okay – there were the day trips I did with Lester – and would love to do more of.  But I mean I haven’t lived the adventurers life.  Hey, does the iPhone even work in Europe in terms of wi-fi connections?  I don’t need the phone part – but if I could email and use my Wordpress App… that would be very cool.

I don’t expect this to happen any time soon unless I got some super big order so that I had cash to spare – but right now I’m still paying off the Mac.

Well – I could hold a donation party like Markus.  I’d need to raise a few thousand… just babbling on after a day of programming… day / night dreaming, that’s all.  But better get around to it while I’m still somewhat ambulatory.

I have pretty old SanDisk SD 4GB cards (SDHC #2), but I’d like to get either an 8GB or 16GB card for movies with the 500D.  They recommend using a FAST CARD for movies or the buffer will fill up too quickly.  Also, it might (I don’t know this for sure) make a slight difference in terms of writing when I’m doing continuous shots for HDR in Live View.

Suggestions welcome.  Money no object.  (I’ll bet you never saw me write that before, but I’ve got a credit at B&H) that I’d like to use before it gets lost.

P.S.

There is a difference between Live View on the 500D and the 450D.  Besides the LCD being better on the 500D, it also offers more options along with a dedicated button for Live View.  For example, one of the Live View modes is called Quick Live View.  One thing about this is that you can auto-focus quickly in Quick Mode.  I don’t see anything like that in the custom functions of the 450D.  Now, I’m sure you’ll all scoff at this, but it also has face recognition in Live View mode on the 500D.  No, I haven’t used it – yet.  And finally, the 500D has two grid choices.  It feels like it’s a better thought out system on the 500D and I suspect I’ll continue to learn more about it as I go along.

DLB