Baseball Cards?!
My friend, Leslie is a photographer, too. He specializes in sports photography over at Actionography. He called me up with an interesting project he wanted my help with.
The idea was to create and ‘end of the season’ poster for the Tassajara Giants. Apparently, the trophy the kids get is kind of generic and the team wanted something a little more personal. So, the poster would be a series of baseball cards laid out with some graphic elements, team name, etc..
Leslie already had the photography done. I would have to design the individual baseball cards of each player and fit them nicely into a poster. I found a major league baseball card and ‘borrowed’ the design. I integrated the that into Adobe Illustrator and made the various ovals you see here. All of the color and type was done in Adobe Photoshop. I added the team colors, a drop shadow as an inner glow and we were ready to go.
With the template now made, I could just drop in the original photo, change the player’s name appropriately, and it was done. So, now I had a bunch of players and coaches as baseball cards. Cool.
Next, I created a 20″x24″ document in Adobe InDesign. I made the background black and added the type elements and thought it looked pretty good. Leslie’s client wanted to add a baseball graphic and the actual SF Giants logo to the poster. This presented a few more challenges.
I found a nice graphic of a baseball on iStockPhoto that worked great. It was vector are so I could make it any size. I found a SF Giants logo online but it was very low resolution and would have looked pretty bad. I took it into Illustrator and traced it. It turned out nice and sharp. So, after a few rounds with the client, below is the final result.
What’s cool is that now we have a template for other teams. I can just change the colors and images and we’re done. We can also use the card templates for making individual cards or 8″x10″s or whatever.
As I was looking at other baseball cards for ideas, I noticed that most of the ‘classic’ cards used a ton of different typefaces on the same card. This is pretty much a design ‘no-no’. But, to get that classic baseball card look, I guess you have to!
Branding for fun and profit
There are a couple of great posts regarding some of the deeper aspects of branding your business. First, David Ziser has this post on marketing your brand. Excellent point of fact that 80% of the money-making decisions are made by women. Most women are much more attuned to the emotional aspects of images than most men. I believe that. Also, from Digital Photography School, Christina N. Dickson writes about and goes much deeper into the subject of tying the emotions of what you’re selling to your clients.
I can’t say that I’m wholly successful at this yet but the above ideas are a good start for me!
Backup your Mac!!
(Full Disclosure: This happened to me a couple of weeks ago - What an idiot!)
Okay - a show of hands: How many of you take your family photos with a digital camera? Wow, that’s quite a few. How many of you use iTunes to organize and store your digital music at home? Very impressive.
My question to you is: What if? What if your house burns down? What if your computer is stolen? What if…no. Let me rephrase this: What will you do WHEN your hard drive dies? It will, you know. These are just a few scenarios that stand between having your important files and never seeing them again. These days, we have and hold so much stuff electronically that we may take for granted that we could lose all of this important data as fast as lighting strikes and causes a power surge.
That is why we should take this subject very seriously.
Fortunately, backing up your important data at home is not as complicated as it used to be. Here’s a ’super’ easy backup strategy you should (SHOULD) employ for your mac at home:
Buy a FireWire drive at least as large as your home computers’ hard drive. Download and buy a nifty little app called SuperDuper! ($27.95 - think of it as very cheap insurance). Format the drive using Disk Utility (it’s in the /Applications/Utilities/ folder). Choose your new drive from the disks in the left window. Go to the partition tab and click the ‘options’ button. If you Mac is an Intel, choose the ‘GUID’ option. If you have a PowerPC mac, choose the ‘apple partition table’ option and erase the disk.
Launch SuperDuper!. Choose your Mac’s hard drive on the left side and your new disk on the right side. Hit ‘Copy Now’. This may take a while to run. It’s doing a complete clone of your hard drive. Future backups will be relatively short because SuperDuper! will only copy new files from now on if you use its ‘Smart Copy’ feature. After running SuperDuper! you now have a bootable copy of your Mac on your new drive. So, when something happens to your data, you can plug the FireWire drive into almost any mac and boot from it. After booting up, the monitor will show you your old computer just like nothing happened.
You can plug in your FireWire drive once a week, run SuperDuper!, then unplug and throw the FireWire drive in your car. Uh, why your car? The best place for your backup is somewhere physically separate from the location of your computer. Why keep the backup in your house? it could burn down (I hope it doesn’t). Or it gets stolen from your house or (fill in the blank). You get it.
Another option
There are some new, online storage services such as Mozy, CrashPlan, and JungleDisk. These allow you to backup your data over the Internet. But, as you probably imagine, the initial backup might take a long time, but the incremental backups after that shouldn’t take many resources.
My last piece of advice? Backup, please.
(here a some other resources: Scot Kelby’s blog here and here. A funny and, er, to-the-point tutorial for mac users only!
Update: Hey! Everyones getting into the act! Here’s Terry White’s take.
Great business cards from Big Red Trucks
The Soiland Heavy Equipment Repair shoot held some great challenges. First, how do we shoot their big, red trucks? And how can we get these images done to look great on a business card?
Greg Soiland is a good friend. He’s been repairing heavy equipment (caterpillar, bulldozers, and the like) for many years here in Sonoma County. He had run out of business cards and asked if I could help him. I thought this would be a great time to try out some photo ideas. We agreed to make these into ‘photo’ business cards.
The plan was to do the shoot at his shop. The upcoming Saturday was slated to have good weather. As I drove to the shop, it was a glorious, sunny, winter day. Since Greg needed his card pretty quick, I didn’t have time to scout locations so I didn’t know what to expect. As it turns out, his shop is smack-dab in the middle of one of the most idyllic spots on earth - the Alexander Valley. This valley is home to some of the best wine in the world, too.
Arriving at the shop, I found there was a perfect area to shoot: a huge, cement-top area with the vineyards and hills as a background. The downside was that there was a bunch of old equipment at the edge of the cement and the blight of the valley, an ugly casino in the hills. Yes, there would be Photoshop work needed.
We had a great shoot. Greg and his son, Shawn (also his service technician) had fun moving the trucks around for me. We also used a battery-operated lift to shoot with a different perspective.
So, here’s the 2 shots we liked before retouching:
Next, we had to remove the distractions you can see in the backgrounds. Also, I didn’t even see all those tire skid marks when we were shooting! Also, in order to have the trucks appear on the cards correctly, we needed to extend all around the the original image.
So, after a little retouching, here’s what I came up with:
Now that we had the final shots, I added some text and here are the final business cards:
Capture is King!
I was reminded of a podcast from a while back by Derrick Story about ‘capture‘. Derrick was asked to speak to a group about the output of digital photos. But, he thought that in order to talk about output he had to speak about capture. Because without good capture, it is very difficult to get good output.
Back in the ‘film’ days, there were very little post-processing options that were as easy to do as there are now with tools like Photoshop or Lightroom.
In order to get your photos through your workflow efficiently, you need to take the time to get your image as close to ‘right’ as possible when you take the photo. Take the time to do your homework up front. That is, check your exposure, white balance, focus, etc.
But, it is possible to get something from nothing. More to come.