I woke up this morning all set to really blast into the day and get the last three orders matted and packaged today. Then I could have the next few days to work on a few other projects that are floating around. One I’ll just call project x for now; another one is a small film I’m trying to make in iMovie about street shooting; and when I say small, I should say short. But it involves learning some clunky things in iMovie, after I had been used to Adobe Premiere.
Only problem with Premiere which I was using on a PC was that it would crash all the time.
iMovie doesn’t crash, but there are a few very basic things that I can’t figure out. I was almost thinking of buying one of those books: iMovie for morons.
Then there’s the idea I have (after a very quick sale yesterday) of keeping popular prints in stock and letting people know that these can be shipped or picked up quickly in given sizes.
And then I also wanted to try and set up pages that would show how prints could be arranged together. People seem to need the most help with that.
Then there are tasks that involve the Helen Levitt documentary… just getting together some images to send to the editor for the demo reel…
And wouldn’t it really be nice to brush up the Zazzle store? That’s died badly since I stopped adding things to it. It’s always like that since new things will pop up at the top of various categories, and if you aren’t constantly working and updating your material – you sink – or at least I sink to the bottom. I had the same experience with my eBay store.
Looks like another project having to do with shooting stills for a New York play is on the horizon. I did stills for the authors last New York play a few years ago and he said they were the best images anyone has ever taken of his work; and now he’s opening a new play, a bigger venue then the last, off-broadway though you’d know the name of the theater if you were into the New York play scene.
Then there are just a ton of errands that have built up over the last few months. And I begin to worry about money again as Buddy is going to be on this medication for a fairly long time for his thyroid, and then there will be blood tests again. In other words, results of last blood work are good, and vet wants to keep Buddy on the thyroid medication. I don’t know how much it costs because I’m afraid to open the bill from the vet.
But I ran out of steam in the afternoon after getting two orders out; and matting the third order (which goes out tomorrow). It seems like there were also a bunch of phone calls and emails with questions about possible buys… or phonesters (I know there’s no word like that but I like it) – phonesters that were promising to get me to the top of Google for phrases that I was already at the top for… or that if I had thought of I could have done myself… In fact, the phrase, “black and white photography for sale” was suggested by the phonester, and after getting off the phone with her I added that phrase to a few key places in the store… such as the description meta tag, and the home page title… good idea I think… and she said she liked my photographs very much. So there’s a fair trade. Art for tips.
Yes – alot of the todo list is related to money. However, if money weren’t an issue I would still do the following: film on street shooting from p.o.v. of photographer; still shoot of the off-broadway play; stuff for the Levitt film… maybe it’s not all related to money. Half of one and half of the other or however the phrase is supposed to go.
One thing to remember from this post: phonester (definition: person who uses a phone to sell you something, usually from a boiler room).
“6 of 1, half a dozen of another” – Hard to say off the tip of your tongue, trips me up all the time.
Will be very interested in the short film on street shooting, do that first haha.
haha is exactly right because it is the most difficult, and the most fun. And I’m working with crappy footage (my own fault). Basically, I just walked from my house to the bagel place with the movie mode on, looking through the eyepiece (mostly) and clicking when I thought I had a possible.
But there are no “great shots” and the thing is shaking a lot, and I don’t like the post-process stabilization (though I may not be doing it right); but most of all I just need to get some basic iMovie techniques under my belt which takes time.
Apple has a dozen or so iMovie tutorials here:
http://www.apple.com/ilife/tutorials/#imovie
The history of iMovie is that Apple rewrote the thing from the ground up around 24 months ago to make it easier to use for the YouTubers, but they pulled out the timeline and other useful, more sophisticated options. (Which many people found to be too complex, hence the rewrite.) For a period of about a year Apple let people download the older iMovie ’06 for free while including the new version, but that’s no longer available.
Yeah, the current incarnation of iMovie is terrible, and I hate using it, and am glad that I kept their much preferred iMovie HD (v.6) from my old Mac and transferred it to the new Mac.
The current is really ridiculously counterintuitive to Apple consumer software programs of being extremely user friendly and easy to use. Or, maybe it’s the fact that it was dumbed down entirely so much, for those YouTube kids crowd, that those of us who enjoyed the ability to fine tune edit our projects with minor difficulty in iMovie HD, and can’t for the life of us find how to do so in v.8, consider it to be not as friendly and easy to use… and/or that Apple made a less of a workhorse program than it’s predecessor.
I ended up getting Final Cut Express… though now my learning curve has now gone the other way, and now need to follow your suit and find a ‘FCE For The Not-So-Bright’ book!
And it’s exactly that “timeline” that I felt was missing. A videographer told me the same story about iMovie – but he kept and uses the previous version for short pieces. Spent another two hours with iMovie tonight – and seem to make progress but it is frustrating. Final Cut – from what I’ve read and seen – is what I was used to… i.e. based on the timeline and more similar to Adobe Premiere and other media software I’ve worked with in the past (i.e. music editing software).
Final Cut Express sells for $150, has the timeline and other goodies, but it requires some delving into the manual and ‘play time’ to get to know it. Not worth my time, or probably yours if your movie is only a couple of minutes.
Google ‘imovie tutorial’ then click google’s ‘More’ drop-down to restrict searches to the last year. You’ll find some good stuff that will help.