June 21, 2012

Custom business cards made using rubber stamps and heavy mount board. Cost is roughly seven cents each.

These are the new gallery cards I made up for Nathan and I. I’m always trying new card designs, but I’ve been wanting something with a hand made impact that can be produced easily and on demand here in the studio.

They’re made using a heavy 4 ply white mount board and self inking rubber stamps that cost about twenty dollars each. Using our straight mat cutter board, we cut slices about 3.5in x 1.5in from the 32×40 sheets of board that cost less than ten dollars each. The cards are them stamped, our names on the front in brown with lots of open space. The back is stamped with the studio details in black.

The neat thing is we can make thee on demand. They’re beautifully thick and we can change the look at any time with a fresh stamp. Making it far less expensive than order small batches of custom cards of this weight. They’re minimal, but based on the board price and the cost of the stamps, these cards come out costing about .07 each if the stamps are only used for about 1000 cards before being updated. They can be re-inked of course and be used for far larger quantities. Of coarse there’s some labor involved, but they don’t take long and it’s part of the fun.

Just one of the many ways to produce hand worked a card with a bit of impact. So far I’m enjoying them… Gav

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October 30, 2010

Bright lights of Monte Carlo. ISO 400, 2.5 sec. @ f4

by Lawrence Sawyer. First, let me thank Gavin Seim for the invitation to write a piece on my recent experience shooting stock photography in the Mediterranean. This was a dual-purpose trip: anniversary cruise, and a test of my theory that with the right choice, one could actually shoot salable stock with a point-and-shoot pocket camera. Now, a little background…

I’ve been shooting stock photography since my college days in the early 1980’s, and make a living doing it. I have several thousand images on file at four U.S. agencies and dozens of sub-agents worldwide. I have a new book out, entitled  See It, Shoot It, Sell It! -How to Earn a Great Second Income Taking and Shooting Photographs of Virtually Anything. That title embodies the way I work: I shoot “found images” more than anything else. I have learned over the years that there are countless opportunities to shoot highly marketable images all around us, every day… if we just learn to see them.

So when I’m shooting stock, here are the five main criteria I use in evaluating a scene:

1. Is there a message here? There needs to be either a solid piece of information in this shot, or a pure-magic artistic element to something mundane, like beautiful light on a cityscape.

2. Can I pull it off technically? An elk in a shaft of sunlight is killer if it’s 50 yards away and I have 300 f2.8 with me, but pointless if it’s 500 yards out.

3. Does it have enough appeal that it will sell to a broad audience? I worry about this one less and less, because all images are available now to the whole internet-connected world, and somewhere, there is a buyer for darn near anything.

4. Can I shoot it better than it’s likely already been done? If it’s a scenic shot, I’m careful not to be enamored by the place just because it’s my first visit. But if the light is phenomenal, I’ll roll the dice and shoot first, then ask questions later. The more famous the place, the more skeptical I am of my ability to make great stock on my first visit. I try to research how much a place has been shot before I go in with guns a-blazing.

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