For the last few years I had been using ImageFolio Commerce software to display and allow ordering of my fine art photography. However it recently broke and the company doesn’t seem to be actively supporting it any more, not that their service was very stellar to begin with.

So I started looking around for replacements and decided to go with ZenFolio. Rather than being a CGI script running on my server like ImageFolio was, ZenFolio is run through their web site. There are many advantages to ZenFolio, but for my customers one of the biggest advantages is that you can now order products with my images in addition to ordering prints. So if you’ve ever wanted a Fernbridge coffee cup, or a Ferndale mouse pad take a look at the new gallery. There are lots of other products available too.

The gallery can be reached either through the links on our web site, or directly at http://gallery.aestheticdesign.com. Those of you that miss watching the slide show in the window of our Main Street gallery will find an ever growing slide show of Matt’s work on the gallery home page.

We’re still in the process of reloading all of the images so keep checking back for new images.

Since recovering from our surgeries, Lori and I have been trying to go on more walks around Ferndale to get back our stamina. It’s been hard because the weather has been so cold and wet, but on the days that it hasn’t been pouring we’ve tried to get out for at least a short walk.

On these walks I never fail to realize just how lucky we are to live in this beautiful town. I also usually curse myself because I don’t bring a camera. I need to get back in the habit of always carrying a camera with me, even if it’s just my little point and shoot Pentax.

Today’s walk I grabbed the D80 on the way out the door and took a few pictures of two of my favorite local barns.

The first one is the Becker’s barn, which is still in use. It is very distinctive for it’s roof (which sorry to say, I don’t know the architectural term for this style of roof) and of course the barn red color makes it stand out from the green of the pasture and forested hills.

This second barn sits across the road from the Catholic cemetery. It’s using the latest technology, green roofing.

Over ten years ago I first came across the technique of painting with light when one of my web design clients, Scott Lewis, used it for some of the photos featured on his web site. Light painting is done using flashlights or other portable light sources to illuminate the subject and/or background of a photo. Typically it is done with a long exposure so that you have time to render the scene.

The light can either be used to illuminate the foreground subject, or it can be used to create the background by pointing the light towards the camera. Using colored gels on the lights provides you with a full palette of saturated colors to work with.

Over the last year I’ve been working with Katy in the studio, teaching her about photographic lighting. Last night we decided to play with light painting. I set up my Nikon D80 so it was tethered to my MacBook and using the free Sofortbild software we were able to instantly review each photo. The great fun of light painting is that you don’t know what you’re going to get. A digital camera makes light painting a lot more fun and certainly less expensive as there are a lot of throwaways. I can’t imagine trying the technique using film.

The anticipation of seeing each new creation show up on the screen was the best part of the process. Here are 5 of my favorites.

After last Sunday’s performance I took the archive photos for the Ferndale Repertory Theatre’s production of Man of La Mancha. The set, designed by Daniel C. Nyiri, is one of the best that I’ve seen at the Rep, and makes great use of the limited space on their stage.

The costumes, some of which were designed and constructed by my wife Lori, were also excellent. (Yep, totally unbiased review)

You have one more weekend to catch this entertaining musical. The songs brought back a lot of memories of my dad singing them. Man of La Mancha was one of my parents favorite musicals, and I grew up listening to my dad dreaming the impossible dream.

Photos from Man of La Mancha can be ordered from our web site.

The last shoot I did before Lori and I left for our surgery was a maternity session with Becki. Now that I’m back to work, the first shoot I did was with her 5 week old baby, Kaden.

I love photographing babies because they are so expressive but you have to be quick. Talk about mood swings. You also have to be ready for the unexpected, especially when the diapers come off. Becki was a great sport even though Kaden used every opportunity to soil her clothing.

But the best thing about photographing babies, is that you don’t have to worry about retouching double chins, and winkles.

Email has become one of the most important communication tools the world has seen. It has replaced the FAX machine as the way to correspond quickly, and for many people it is preferred over having phone conversations, especially when working with people in different time zones.

So given email’s importance to business communications, I’m surprised when I still see business people using email addresses provided by their ISP such as AOL, or by companies that provide them for free such as Yahoo and Hotmail. It’s especially hard to understand when these companies already own their own domain.

Fortunately, by now most companies setting up a web site understand the point of having your own domain. But when it comes to email, some people still seem reluctant to make use of what they’re already paying for. Here are some reasons why you should use your own domain.

Portability

How successful would your business be if you kept changing your phone number? If you’re using someone else’s email service you’re at their mercy. If they get bought out (think Pacific Bell -> SBC -> AT&T), go out of business, or their service just gets so terrible that you decide to change providers, then you have to go through the process of notifying everyone that you have a new email address. Add in the expense of printing new business cards, and any other materials that have your email address on it. You also have to update any online directories where your email contact might be listed.

If you use your own domain, your email address stays the same for as long as you keep renewing your domain. You can change ISPs at will and never have to worry that you’ll lose business because your email address can be moved to the new ISP.

Branding

When you send an email, do you want to promote your business or Yahoo’s? You spend money and time trying to get people to your web site, why not make it easy for them to find you by using your own domain every time you send an email?

Professionalism

Using a free email service like Yahoo or Hotmail tells the world you’re cheap. To many people, an AOL address identifies that user as someone who can’t figure out the ‘real’ internet. Clueless and cheap are not traits you want to broadcast to your clients and customers.

Control

With an email address through a service like Yahoo, you’re stuck with what they give you both in features, and with how they handle spam. Yahoo, AOL, and Comcast are very prone to labeling valid emails as spam. Can your business afford to lose sales because customers’ emails end up in a spam folder?

It’s also true that mail coming from a free account is more likely to end up in someone else’s spam folder.

My first shoot after getting back from surgery was one I was looking forward to. Kaline, who has modeled for me since 2002 ( and is featured in two of my all time favorite photographs, Mountain Peek, and Lady of the Lake) had her second child and three days after Cecilia’s birth I visited the newly expanded family at their home.

Her husband, Ben, works for the Post Office so I figured if you work for the company that does more deliveries than anyone else, why would you trust your most important delivery to a stork?

Unfortunately, the Post Office doesn’t make Priority One boxes large enough to ship a 7 pound newborn. So Photoshop came to the rescue. We photographed Cecilia at their home in a generic box filled with pink peanuts. Then back at the studio I photographed the Priority One box with the pink backdrop. A few minutes of Photoshop work blended the two photographs.

As we were photographing Cecilia, we had to rescue her a couple of times as she would gradually sink into the packing peanuts as she wiggled around. But she looked entirely comfortable sleeping in her box. However the shoot came to an end when little Cecilia burped up. Well that is an understatement. Think Mt. Vesuvious. I didn’t realize a baby could drink that much. It pretty much made a mess of her and the peanuts, but fortunately by then I had the photos I needed.

Becki has modeled for me several times over the last few years, posing variously as a sexy Ms. Claus, a sexy firefighter, and a 1920s flapper dancer. But this time Becki came into the studio as her self. Becki’s always been fun to photograph and she’s got one of the greatest smiles, especially when she’s cracking up, which is often.

But for maternity portraits I usually go with a more reflective expression. For this pose we wrapped Becki in some white fabric and went with very high key lighting and then processed it further to give the whole photo a soft, angelic look to it.

We squeezed this shoot in as my last shoot for the year before Lori and I took off for our transplant surgery. I should be back to work just in time to photograph Becki and Mick with their new addition to the family.

For the last two weeks I have been tracking down why all of the sudden, with no changes on my part, the Akismet plug-in for one of my clients stopped working. I noticed it right away because without the plug-in working, I was getting inundated with lots of spam comments on the WordPress blog.

I logged into their WordPress blog and noticed a banner at the top of the page that read:

Akismet has detected a problem. A server or network problem is preventing Akismet from working correctly. Click here for more information about how to fix the problem.

So I clicked there and got another page where this was listed.

Unable to reach any Akismet servers.

A network problem or firewall is blocking all connections from your web server to Akismet.com. Akismet cannot work correctly until this is fixed. Please contact your web host or firewall administrator and give them this information about Akismet and firewalls.

This particular client is not hosted on one of my servers, but is instead hosted by CBeyond. So I opened up a trouble ticket with CBeyond. I inquired if they were doing any blocking and they said no. They also said there weren’t any changes made to the server recently. But something obviously changed because it had been working and in fact it had to have worked at some point because the API key had been validated.

So off to the internet for the answer and I found lots of people that had experienced this problem, with only a few answers. A big problem was that in one version, the Akismet plug-in had a problem where it would intermittently fail to connect. But since I had the latest version this didn’t apply, and my problem certainly wasn’t intermittent.

Akismet’s FAQ mentions that the connectivity problem could either be system related or firewall related, so I started out checking each item one by one. First there are two PHP functions that need to be enabled. fsockopen and gethostbynamel.

To check the output of these two functions, I have written a simple script which you can download as a zip file. Just unpack the script, FTP it to your server (preferably into your WordPress directory) and then run it.

Download akismet-test.zip

In my case it ended up that the gethostbynamel function wasn’t working although it was enabled. It was returning an IP address of 0.0.0.0 and CBeyond’s tech support couldn’t figure out why this started happening. I’m not very impressed with CBeyond’s tech support as it appears to be out-sourced with the usual language barries and form replies that have nothing to do with the question being asked. Their final advice was to move the account to one of their newer servers which should fix the problem, but it going to be a disruption to the client and more work for me.

Humboldt County is a wonderful place to live, with its natural beauty and relaxed lifestyle, but as the traditional industries such as logging and fishing are disappearing, many people wonder how they can continue living here. The Internet offers one solution, as it is now possible to sell your products or services through a web site to a national or even international clientele, while enjoying the lower cost of living in Humboldt County. Web design itself is what allowed my wife and I to relocate to Ferndale in 2000.

If you are a business owner in Eureka, Fortuna, Arcata, Ferndale, or any other area of Humboldt County and you’re looking for someone to design your web site, you of course have many options even in this mostly rural area. The introduction of easy to use web site building tools has made it easy for almost anyone to design a web site, and sometimes it’s tempting for business owners to take the DIY approach. But just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. There is so much more to creating a successful web site than just mastering HTML.

First, there’s aesthetics. Yes, there’s a reason I named my web design company Aesthetic Design & Photography. The web is a visual product, and the choice of colors, fonts, and other design elements must merge harmoniously, while effectively conveying the image that the client wishes to portray. The web design chosen must also work well with any number of different browsers, computer operating systems, and personal settings. Before the web came along, my background was in programming, graphic arts and photography, and a successful web site design is a combination of those three skills.

As important as it is for the site to look like it was professionally crafted, it’s even more important that your site can be found by your potential customers both in and out of Humboldt County. Too often, people starting a web based business take the approach, “Build it and they will come.” Unless your business is selling a product or service that is unique and highly in demand, you’re probably like the rest of us and you have competitors. Unless you can stand out above your competitors, your customers have no reason to choose you. So you really need to target your site to attract your best potential customer. This is where hiring a professional web designer really pays off, because Search Engine Optimization should be designed into the site from the beginning.

My goal in offering my web design services for Humboldt County businesses is to provide true value for the small business owner. Most of the web sites that I design are in the $800 to $1500 range. Customers that have their sites hosted on my server enjoy having their small updates performed in a timely manner, at no additional charge.

Not every client is going to be the perfect fit for every web designer in Humboldt County. Web designers all have their own strengths and weaknesses. If you come to me feeling that your site needs to be built in Flash, I’ll try to talk you out of it, but if it really makes sense for your business, I’ll refer you to someone better able to meet your needs.

If you are a small business owner in Humboldt Countly looking for a web designer, here are some of the most important reasons you should consider hiring me:

Value – I’m not the cheapest web designer out there, nor am I the most expensive. I’m not going to try competing with the kid fresh out of high school who knows how to use a template. I have won jobs though where the competition’s bid was 2-5 times higher than mine. Because of the way I run my business and the principles I use in my web sites, I am able to offer great affordability for a quality product.

Experience – I’ve been designing web sites in Humboldt County since 1996. I have clients throughout California and the rest of the United States.

Principles

• I believe in educating the customer. The web and the Internet (and computers in general) are filled with all kinds of jargon. I talk to my customers in plain english and I take the time to explain why I am doing something or not doing something.
• I keep it simple. It’s frustrating when things don’t work, and the more complex you make something, the less likely it is to be fail safe.