One of the tenets of customer service is to always deliver more than what is expected. I’ve been shooting some volunteer work with a group called “Operation Love Reunited” and part of the deal is I send out an “album” to the deploying service member at no cost. While thats nice, the folks left at home always want to see the images. Sometimes they want to buy a few but the reality is that many of the families are young, on a very limited budget and are not in the position to pay for more than a few prints at a very substantial discount even for that.
The rules say a small album like a slip cover album and that just bugged me. As a professional, I wanted the work even as pro-bono to reflect my standards or at least, better than snapshots. I always shoot the mini-session as well as I would for any paying customer. I use the same gear, I behave the same and I treat them as a “real” client which in my mind, they are. I touch up the images and apply treatments to some here and there and it offended me to just use a slip cover album. I’ve settled on using MyPublisher.com and their soft side 5×7 books. It’s a nice compromise between the Little Kisses and a slip cover album.
I still wanted something nicer for the family to share other than a gallery. I bought Proshow Producer not long ago for a project but I had really not worked with it much up to now. I decided that a nice slide show would be a nice touch to the shoot and if I did it right, it would not take too much time to set it up. It would be a very nice vehicle to show off my images and skills to someone who might want to hire me for something else. And it would give the family a really nice memento of the shoot.
So with that thought, I used the final images for my last OpLove shoot and spent about 10 minutes setting up fast slide show with some music that Tara and her husband feel is special to them. I paid attention to the lyrics and tweaked the order of images to better reflect the spirit of the images with the lyrics.
In the end, it took about 20 minutes to build the slide show, add the music and send it on it’s way. Thats as much of a testament to the software’s design as it is my skills 
ProShow is very easy to use but very powerful when you need it to be. And the extra book on using it is available on the Kindle so I have it on my iPad now for some light reading. I plan to make alot more use of this app in the near future. Also, since it’s a Windows app, I use VMware’s Fusion to run a virtual XP session on my Mac to run this app. Works like a charm and did not miss a beat.
So without further ado, here is Tara’s new OpLove video.
Related articles
- Share your holiday photos privately (macworld.com)
- 4 Awesome Photo Sharing Alternatives to Flickr and Facebook (mashable.com)
- The Best Web Apps of 2010 (appreaders.com)
- Facebook: High Resolution Photo Galleries (appreaders.com)
- Customer service mistakes that go bump in the night (customerthink.com)
- Customer service is the new marketing (fredzimny.wordpress.com)
- Image via Wikipedia
Paper is the bane of my office. I have magazines that I want to keep articles from, torn sheets from magazines that have ideas for shoots, bills, reference paperwork such as maps from travels and more. All this information, no way to search it, no way to catalog it and no up to now, no way to digitize it quickly or easily.
Change is upon me in the form of a new scanner from Fujitsu called the Snapscan S1500M. This scanner comes in two flavors, Windows or Mac. And unlike many shops that claim Mac compatibility, this really IS compatible with the Mac. The software installs easily and has been absolutely reliable, not a single crash or hicup. The scanner is not cheap compared to others but 400 dollars for a scanner that does double sided scanning of 100 pages in less than five minutes is pretty cheap. The processing that takes the scan and makes it a searchable PDF only adds another five minutes to the time of scanning 100 pages.
So I have this PDf now on my computer, just what can I do with it? Well, what I do is what I had told to me by XXX. I got a premium membership with Evernote and I sync this folder and files up with Evernote so now everything is in the “cloud” and available to all my devices. This includes:
- iPhone/iPad/iTouch
- Windows
- OSX
- Windows Mobil
- Palm Pre
- Blackberry
- Android
It’s searchable so I can run a search on a topic and get just those matches. I do not have to thumb through old magazines guessing where I saw that article at. Or look for the sticky hanging off the outside with a scribble on it.
Here is the user interface for the OSX application. Clean and to the point.
Evernote OSX Application
And Evernote is not just for scanners, you can clip from the web or use your webcam to snap a picture. I love SOHO Notes but this might just replace it for me. You owe it to yourself to check it out even if you dont want to scan anything.
Now I can either chop the spine of the magazine off and scan it all then clean it up with Acrobat or I can just razor out the pages I want and scan those. In the past day, I’ve cleaned out one year of Photoshop User magazines and a pile of razored clippings. I clean up my scans by deleting all the ads and stuff I dont want since there is a monthly limit to the uploading at Evernote of 500 meg. This sounds small but the typical razored article is about 3 pages cleaned and under a meg in size or a tad over if I keep the color images.
I just put the scanned files into one directory and I have that sync automatically with Evernote’s website and I’m good to go.
So in short:
- Razor articles
- Toss remains
- Scan articles
- Clean up ads
- Sync
So far so good, I can access my new files on my iPhone or iPad without any issues at all no matter where I am. I have copies locally on my MacPro and I have them in the cloud. I have pulled about 50lbs of magazines out of my office and more on the way. I can even find things now with Spotlight. This is a win all the way around as far as I’m concerned even more so at the modest cost involved.
- Scanner = 450.00 from Amazon
- Evernote = 50 dollars a year for the premium account, the entry level account is free
- Supply of razors = 10 dollars
Optional cost would be a real nice guillotine cutter that can handle 200 pages at a whack to take care of the magazines but so far, the razor works fine.
Related articles
- Review: Nifty scanner eases farewell to paper (sfgate.com)
- Review: Nifty scanner eases farewell to paper (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
- High Roller Scanners – The Fujitsu ScanSnap Scanners are Lavish & Luxe (trendhunter.com)
- Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500 (kk.org)
- ScanDrop Sends Scanned Documents Directly to Google Docs or Evernote [Downloads] (lifehacker.com)
- The Mobile Mac Office – Part I: Going Paperless | The Apple Press (theapplepress.com)
- Image via Wikipedia
Oh yeah.. baby loves video So I finally bite the bullet and bought ProShow Producer by Photodex. I used some images from the Westcott photoshoot at Photoshopworld as a test for a quick and dirty slide show. I tossed this together without reading ANY docs, just ran the wizard, clicked around a bite and off we go. In less than an hour I had pretty much made this show which included finding music on the internet.
Now I need to really dig into the software. It can do so much like layers and masking on the slides. It’s a lot easier than Premier and I like the end results more than Animoto. A cool part is that it has a kick butt “create” menu panel. Anything you would like to export the show into is there. BlueRay, DVD, self contained EXE, Flash, Youtube, Facebook and more. Way cool and one of the best export panels I’ve seen for video like this. Right now I have it running in Fusion on my MacPro in a Windows XP image and it works just fine. It would be nice to have an OSX version but this is very workable for now.
Related articles
- 10 Steps to Successful Video Blogging (socialmediaexaminer.com)
- The Best Geotagging Cameras (brighthub.com)
- Animoto gives your photos the Hollywood treatment (building43.com)
- Creating Free Online Slideshows with Animoto in the Classroom (brighthub.com)
- New Animoto Lightroom plug-in ships (blogs.adobe.com)
- A Conversation with Animoto’s CEO (freetech4teachers.com)
