So I got feedback from the first round of critiques. One suggestion was to change my avatar to something indicating the kind of work I'm selling. So I changed it from a picture of me (what I'd read in another critique thread: show yourself) to an aerial. Following some of the KAP threads, I used a straight-down shot from Kekaha Kai with a palm tree shadow. Hope that indicates aerial. Given that avatars are 75x75 thumbnails, it was actually tough to find one that held enough detail at that size. The palm tree shadow works, though.
Another suggestion was to show what my pictures would look like matted and framed. The person offering this critique acknowledged I was only selling raw prints without matting or framing, but said including an image like that would help the buyer to imagine what the artwork would look like on the wall.
Ok, ok, to be fair they said I should photograph matted and framed artwork on my wall so the buyer could see what it would look like. Considering I've never printed my stuff this large before, it was a little hard to do. But hey, I've been a framer so I remember the sizes of the materials. Mat boards are 0.052" to 0.060" thick, or about 1/16". Check. Nielsen metal frames are roughly 9/16" at the face. Check. I know the print size of my pictures and a good rule of thumb for mat width (about 1/5 of the longest axis on the print is a good starting point), so I know about how big things will be.
Time for Imagemagick!
In case you haven't run across this utility yet, it's a set of tools, typically for UNIX, that allows you to manipulate images using command line pipes. Best danged idea anyone in image processing ever came up with. Once you find a formula that works, it's trivial to apply it to a whole string of images. Interestingly enough, digital darkroom tools have finally caught up with this idea. Adobe Lightroom lets you work out a whole set of manipulations for a single image on a given shoot, and then apply those changes to the remaining images from the shoot. Magic! Well, except that Imagemagick has been doing this for a long long time now.
So I made a script that would frame a picture. It checks if it's color or black and white, and sets the mat tonality based on that. (I really want it to pick the one, two, or three most prominent colors and do a single, double, or triple layer mat using standard Crescent color choices, but...) Next it takes what you tell it to be the largest dimension, in inches, and generates a scaling factor for all the remaining steps. Finally it cranks out a mat using the 1/5 rule, generates a frame border to scale, and saves it.
You can see what it looks like in the two pictures I've included. Right now it's a one-run-per-image script, but I plan to set it up for wildcards next. It shouldn't be too hard.
So I went back, added a quick paragraph indicating the second picture for each listing was an example of what each shot would look like, framed and matted, and then added the frame&mat shot.
Aaaaaand... we'll see. I hope the second round of critiques hit my listings after these changes were made. I'd like to get feedback on them.
Tom
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