What’s the best marketing tool for small business?

I asked this question of Bizniche2Bizniches‘s @kendamorrison, her answer:

YOU!

She responded in a blog post that covers how you can use your heart, eyes, hands, and feet to market yourself in your community. Don’t take my word for it, go check it out for yourself here: http://www.bizniche2bizniche.com/?p=392 These are thing we all probably already know, but it seems we always need to hear them again!

In this post I will cover a few things that you can re-purpose into great continuous lighting tools. These are things that anyone can do, there is no special talents required, and most of the components are very inexpensive. I will specify sources in the U.S., and I hope most of this stuff is available wherever in the world you’re viewing this from.

Brooder lamps

These are some of the most versatile, inexpensive, and usable items you can buy for your continuous kit, 4 of these with 100 watt equivalent CFLs is enough to make GREAT portraits. In the U.S. you can find these brooder lamps in Home Depot or Lowes. Their lightweight clamp design makes for easy mounting, just clamp and go. The aluminum reflectors can be a bit harsh alone, so I covered mine with a lightweight nylon “kitemaking” fabric. This drops the output slightly, but creates a beautiful, large emitter for the light, making incredibly soft shadows perfect for portraits. I sewed what resembled shower caps with the nylon and and elastic around the edge, making socks that I can just slip on when needed, however, a big rubberband is all that’s needed to secure the nylon on the dish.PVC pipe is a cheap support system, you can build a framework that can be broken down into modular components.

Halogen Worklamps

If you need a LOT of light, and don’t care about heat or color temperature, halogen worklamps provide lots and lots of light on the cheap. With most bulbs being 500W and >90% of that going to heat, these things do get hot, and should not be used around children, or anything else flammable! I was able to pick up locally at a discount hardware store a single 500W fixture with bulb for $10, that’s cheap! 500 Watt Halogen Work Light – Amazon.com The nice thing about this light is that it can be thrown for a pretty good distance, but it does radiate at a pretty wide angle. I used a light just like this, mounted to a ceiling for an ambient light at a concert. I used an amber gel to make it blend in with the rest of the accent lights, but still put a lot more light on the subject.

These are just a few of the readily available quick and dirty continuous lighting hacks, my next post will deal with putting together studio lighting equipment.

The next task is to actually Geo-tag the images, I shoot in raw, and use Adobe Lightroom, so this has been an issue in the past; Lightroom 2.x has no native geographic data capabilities, and most software that come with GPS’s have no support for RAW files, or have limited support. This problem has been COMPLETELY mitigated by Jeffrey Friedl. Jeffrey writes GREAT plug-ins for Lightroom, I’ve used his SmugMug export plugin for ages, and I love it! The GPS-Support plug-in exceeds my expectations of Jeffrey’s work. I’ll sidetrack here to talk about a great GPL licensed open sourced tool that Jeffrey leverages to really make his plug-in powerful. GPS Babel is a project that aims to make all GPS data types interchangeable, GPS-Support for Lightroom uses GPS-Babel to provide support for pretty much ANY GPS log file. It was a simple matter to point GPS-Support to the GPS Babel executable and set up the data type my device exports. GPS-Support allows you to set a time offset, which corrects for time zone differences between your camera and the GMT time that the GPS logs, this ensures the images match the correct positions in the log. One of the great features of GPS-Support is that as you export from your Lightroom catalog, its “Shadow Export” module can be set to write the geo tags to whatever filetype you’re exporting to, this works perfectly with all of Jeffrey’s export & upload plug-ins, geo-tagging the files, as they’re uploaded.
Thank you Jeffrey for making this process so simple!

To get the map you see here, I had to combine the KML feed output from Smugmug’s KML feed engine with a KML file hosted on my server with the track of our trip. I did this using Adam Franco’s excellent little KML Joiner PHP Script, it allows me to specify 2 KML files and dynamically merge them into a single overlay on Google Maps, giving us the map you see above.

Now for the frustration:

I REALLY like this shot, but it has been the source of endless frustration for me since the first time I saw it! It’s shot with my 400mm lens on a bluff overlooking the city, the long focal length compresses the highway into a delightful ‘S’ shape, indiscernible to the naked eye. The first time I captured it, I had all kinds of trouble with motion blur, as the mountain channels a ton of wind over the face of that bluff most of the time, but especially on the nice clear, low-haze nights that you need for a shot at that distance! I tried a couple of solutions to keep the camera steady with the crazy wind, finally settling on a bag of lead ballast attached to the tripod and a sock full of lead shot draped across the camera and lens to dampen any motion. That worked pretty well, but so far I have not gotten a good exposure of the rocket, it’s just never lit up enough. Tonight though, as we were crossing the mountain on the way home from the farm, I noticed that they had East side of the rocket illuminated, something I had not noticed since trying for this shot back in winter. Being that the lower atmosphere was exceptionally clear tonight, we drove up the mountain to try one more time. When we got to the spot, I was amazed looking out over the city and seeing just how clear the night was! I got my gear out of the car, got the tripod setup, got the camera and lens mounted, attached the ballast, applied the top weight, turned on the camera, framed the shot, started to focus, but couldn’t find the rocket, I looked up and wouldn’t you know it, they’d turned the lights out. Maybe next time.