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August 2007 - Posts
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From time to time we get feedback from first-time customers that we love sharing with potential customers. Our relentless pursuit of 100% customer satisfaction is something we take pride in. Our humanity unfortunately keeps us from ever meeting our goal. The comments below, however, are the type of motivation we thrive on. They certainly remind us that we are doing the right things most of the time.
Please share your comments on your experience with Mpix. We would love to hear from you.
I might add, too, that the comments below were not solicited.
Chris Vienna, VA
I just received my first order of prints from you; 10x13's and a 10x20. I tried out your "regular" paper, and the metallic coating paper, so I could compare, for future ordering. I love the print quality on both, but that metallic paper is simply spectacular! Also, the prints arrived so well packaged, and pretty darned fast for the shipping that I chose. I'm thrilled with my first mpix experience, and look forward to many more. Add my voice to the chorus of mpix converts!
Mike Bel Aire, KS
Hi, just wanted to let you know how pleased I am with my first order. Received the order today and was impressed by the way the prints were packaged. I thought it a very good sign that the prints were packaged so they stayed flat. I've not been as fortunate with other online companies. The prints looked great except a little on the red side. This has been a problem in the past and I'll crank out a little more red on my next order. The prints are printed on the metallic paper. Sounded interesting so I thought I'd give it a try...you may have ruined me for other papers now. Very impressive paper. I like how it pops off the page without being over the top. I...really...like... the...metallic...paper! Very pleased and thank you for a job well done.
Jennifer Independence, MO
I have a photography business out of my home and have been using Shutterfly for over a year now for my digital prints. A friend introduced me to your website and I just got my first order back...WOW!!!!!!! I cannot believe how much more professional these look! I wish I had started using your services a long time ago. Your prices are very comparable to shutterfly, but your quality far exceeds theirs. Just wanted to let you know how impressed I was! Thanks, your new devoted customer.
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I love learning about new technology, even if it is not available for me to use yet. I especially like it if it challenges the way I traditionally think about solving a problem. The tool I am about to share fits both categories: it is not available for the public and it certainly changed the way I think about resizing images. Whether working on the Web or preparing images for printing, we are constantly working to get our images to be the right size. The typical ways we do this are through cropping and scaling. Each of these methods, however, can have their own drawbacks. For instance, scaling an image larger than it was intended can result in either pixilation (when making it larger) or in trivializing the subject (when making it smaller). Cropping can overcome this by giving you the power to select the subject to focus on, but when there are multiple subjects in the picture, your choices are again limited.
Here is a proposed solution that allows for images to be resized dynamically while allowing the subjects to retain their integrity and relationship to one another. The creators, Dr. Ariel Shamir and Dr. Shai Avidan, refer to this as "content aware resizing of images" or "retargeting." Their technique "allows resizing while adapting the image content and layout." My words here will not do the technique justice so check out the video below to get an idea of what is going on. This just confirms to me that we are only on the cusp of the digital image revolution!
Here's the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qadw0BRKeMk
If you are interested in more information in this project, you can read the related paper.
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Today is Mpix's 4th birthday. Camron Mitchell, our production coordinator, will never forget August 22nd. Camron's son, Cade, was born the day before Miller's launched the Mpix division. It must have been crazy around Camron's house that week just 4 short years ago.
 I still remember the excitement in the lab that day. John Rank was our sole customer service person, Camron was taking on his new production position, Todd Coleman was overseeing another significant 'first' in the business, Samae Claspill and I were anxious to see if our marketing efforts were going to be successful, and the 5 production people were prepared for the onslaught of orders. We turned on the web site with the excitement of a kindergartener on their first day of school. We all knew that we were on the ground floor of something big…little did we know how big.
All of us associated with Mpix definitely had an advantage over other start ups because of our affiliation with Miller's-the largest professional imaging lab in the country. We inherited the quality and delivery standards that are unparalleled in the photographic industry, and the winner is our customers…all 235,000 that have signed on with Mpix over the past 4 years. It's been a great ride, and the future is bright.
Happy birthday Cade, and happy birthday Mpix!
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Let’s continue our exploration of seeing the light.
Watch the Foreground
That’s right! We also have to pay attention to how the light is falling on foreground subjects in a scene. Both of these pictures were taken in Mexico at the site of the annual monarch butterfly migration. In the horizontal image, the foreground is overexposed, because that part of the tree was in brighter light than the top of the tree. On site, to the untrained eye, it may not appear that way. In the vertical shot, the exposure is even because the illumination on the tree is even.
Now let’s take a look at seeing another important part of exposure: shadows.
Shadows Add Depth
 Shadows add a sense of depth and dimension to a photograph. Without them, pictures tend to look flat – which is not always a bad thing, as illustrated by some of the preceding pictures in this blog, including one of my all-time favorite shots, the image of the Tariano woman.
The pictures here – taken in Upper Antelope Canyon, Arizona; Ponderosa Ranch, Oregon; Old Havana, Cuba; and Croton-on-Hudson, NY – have strong shadow areas that add to the interest of the images.
To record strong shadows without the highlights being washed out, you need to set your exposure for the highlights in the scene, the brightest area of the scene, which you can do with your camera’s exposure lock function.
Rick Sammon
www.ricksammon.com
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These days, everyone is bringing their own compact digital cameras to weddings to capture the action from their own perspective. Many of these photos, of course, are going to include some cut-off heads and less-than spectacular lighting and angles. In other words, these are not always the type of photos you would want to have printed. However, since there is often so much going on at any given time, the bride and groom often enjoy seeing photos would have been impossible for any one person to capture on his or her own. So how might these photos fit with the photos that you, the photographer, are taking at the event?
There are many answers to this question, and one answer might simply be "They don't." However, for those who would like to venture into tying together all the loose ends of the event, one answer might be to use Flickr tags. Here's how:
Step 1: For each wedding (or any event, for that matter), you could decide on a certain tag (a tag is just like a keyword that you can use to describe a photo) that you would like to use. For example, you might use the tag "reith-jones-2007" for the Reith-Jones wedding.
Step 2: Encourage guests to use this same tag when posting their pics to their Flickr account (this assumes they use a Flickr account, of course...not always the case, but at least it's free if they don't already). You could do this by leaving small cards on each table with this information or by posting a slide on the screen in the event that there is a slide show at the reception.
Step 3: View all the photos of the wedding by going to that tag on Flickr: http://flickr.com/photos/tags/[your tag] For example, here are all the photos tagged with WPPI: http://flickr.com/photos/tags/wppi
So where does this get you? For most, this could serve as a simple tip for you to give brides and grooms as a way for them to capture additional photos from their guests. If you want to go an extra step, then you could include information on how you would prefer them to license their photos through the various Creative Commons licenses so that you could include them in photo books or other products that you then sell to the client.
This might not be for everyone, but this is one way that all the photos of an event could be aggregated in one place instead of the bride and groom having to hunt them down over the next year. :)
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Let’s continue our exploration of seeing the light.
Background Light
Here we see a red parrot with a bad background and a toucan with nice background. In the parrot photo, taken with my zoom lens set at 50mm and f/8, the white light coming through the leaves is distracting – because our eyes usually go to the brightest part of a picture first. In the toucan shot, I used a 300mm lens and a wide aperture to totally blur the background and any highlights that may have detracted from the beauty of the subject.
Our Eyes Can Be Fooled
Sometimes, even if the background looks properly exposed to our eyes, it may be overexposed in a photograph. Here’s an example.
I photographed this girl in the Maldives. She was standing in the shade and the beautiful blue water filled the background of the frame. However, because I set the exposure for her face, using the Spot Meter mode in my camera, the much brighter background was overexposed in my picture.
The quick fix was to make a picture, rather than just taking a picture. I asked her to move just a few feet into a position where the background was much darker than the water.
Reducing Flash Shadows
In flash photography, we need to pay attention to where and how the light from the flash is falling on and around a subject. See how the light from my flash casts a harsh shadow behind the holy man that I photographed in Nepal.
With a little effort, shadows can be greatly reduced and even avoided. For the picture of a performer at the Peking Opera, I balanced the light from the flash to the natural light. For the picture of the young clown, I bounced the light from the flash off the ceiling for a diffused light effect.
Rick Sammon
www.ricksammon.com
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We are excited to announce the addition of 2 new square sized hard cover books. The new book sizes are 5x5", and 10x10". Both sizes are available in blue and black. The 5x5" book is $20 and the 10x10" is $30.
In addition to new sizes, the book software has improved handling for backgrounds and movements of backgrounds, improved pre-flighting functionality, a new fast track wizard interface and more.
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Dark and Light Subjects  Here you see two subjects: a leopard seal, I photographed in Antarctica, and a polar bear, photographed in the sub-Arctic. If you simply set your camera on an automatic exposure mode, the seal would be pictured lighter and the polar bear would be pictured darker. That’s because very dark and very light subjects can fool a camera’s exposure meter (which measures reflected light) into thinking the scene is darker/lighter than it is, resulting in an incorrectly exposed picture. The remedy in these situations is to use your camera’s +/- exposure compensation feature. With dark subjects, a –1 exposure compensation setting is recommended as a starting point for a good exposure. With light subjects, a +1 setting is recommended as a starting point for a good exposure. I know that sounds backward, but it’s true. Note that exposure compensation is usually necessary when most of the frame is filled with a dark or light subject. Warm Light vs. Cool Light  In addition to seeing the brightness level of a subject and the direction of light, we need to see the color of light. Pictures taken in the late afternoon and early morning, such as this picture of a model that I took near Lake Powell, Arizona, have warm tones: deep shades of red, orange and yellow. Pictures taken around midday, such as this ocean picture, look cool, having a blue tint. Seeing the color of light can help us make exposure decisions, such as photographing at or near sunrise and sunset to get pictures with warm tones, and vice versa. Seeing the color of light can also help us make white balance decisions, either in camera or in Photoshop or in Camera Raw – all of which let us change the color of light by changing the white balance. Now we are going to spend some time seeing the light behind a subject, because that affects exposure, too. Background Color  Check out these two pictures, taken with my camera set on the Program mode, of a man I photographed in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. In the picture with the white wall background, the man’s face is dark. In the picture with the yellow/orange background the man’s face is properly exposed. What happened in the first picture? Well, the camera sees a white wall the same way it sees a polar bear, resulting in an underexposed picture when shooting in an automatic mode. So for a good exposure, I asked the man to pose against a neutral background. Rick Sammon www.ricksammon.com
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Check out John Owen's editorial in the August 2007 issue of Popular Photography (page 13). In the article the editor talks about his favorable experience with ordering a photo book from Mpix.
The article talks about Owen's mantra: photo quality. When he heard Mpix was now producing books with the Kodak Nexpress, he did not hesitate to give us a try. He references the May 2006 article "Click to Print" where Mpix earned Popular Photography's highest rating in print quality and turnaround time.
The press guys have experienced a tremendous increase in the book orders since the article has run. Obviously, many photographers rely on these types of endorsements. However, the very best exposure for Mpix continues to be photographers’ word of mouth. Thanks to all of our customers that 'tell a friend' about Mpix…we do appreciate it!
To view the Popular Photography article online go to http://www.popphoto.com/blogsandcolumns/4386/editorial-diy-publishing-with-mpix.html
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