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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Because this month’s picture was created, rather than just photographed, I thought it would be fun to show you how it came together. I’ve done several pirate photoshoots both in the studio and on location, but this time I wanted to create something more theatrical.

The pirate was played by Michelle, who I met last year photographing her for her senior portrait. I shot Michelle against a blue backdrop that I new would be close to the shade of blue I’d want for the night sky. This made it easier to drop out the background and not leave a tell-tale fringe. The hardest part of lighting Michelle was getting the right balance of backlighting so that it would look like the moonlight was shining through her blouse. The color temperature for this shot was cooled way down to give it a blueish cast so it would look like a night shot.

A few days later I photographed the pirate ship against the same blue background. The pirate ship is a model that Andy Doerner built for Lori and I in 1999. It was lit in the studio to make it appear as the light was coming from the moon. I used one snooted strobe up on a boom to approximate the moonlight.

The sky and ocean came from a shot I took on a vacation in Mexico. Different treatments were done to both the sky and the water to get it to look like night. It seemed a waste to use such a colorful sunset, but I liked the highlights on the water and the clouds in the sky.

The moon was added from a public domain image shot by NASA. For the finishing touch, the stars in the sky were added on a separate layer in Photoshop.

I was pleasantly surprised when she called me up a few weeks ago and inquired about having a large family portrait made on their dairy. I met with Nicole at the studio and went over some basic ideas but I wanted to see the ranch first so we scheduled a pre-shoot visit, during which I met Nicole’s grandfather, Albert. On meeting Albert I instantly thought that with his full beard and 80+ years of character, that he would be an interesting subject to photograph.

Nicole and I walked around their ranch and we selected an area that would provide a nice view of the hills behind the cows in the field.

Two weeks later I returned for the portrait and was surprised to find a clean shaven Albert! Seems his family didn’t like his beard as much as I did. Oh well, it’ll grow back and then I can take another portrait of him.

Ghidinelli Family

We first started out in the field with a group shot of Albert, his three children, Tom, Marjorie and Mike and all the spouses and grandkids. That was followed with different subgroup portraits. While photographing the different groups, I loved listening to the banter going back and forth. The cows also provided a lot of entertainment, and it appears that even cow communities have divas.

Albert Ghidinelli

After we finished with those portraits I wanted to get some photos of Albert over by the barn. There are things you can do photographing a man in his eighties that you can’t do with a woman of any age, such as accentuating every wrinkle. Albert was a fun subject and even with the serious expression I asked for there was still that twinkle in his eyes that revealed his pleasant nature. I’m not sure if living on Pleasant Point makes you pleasant, or if it got that name because pleasant people live there, but I can say I had a pleasant morning at the Ghidinelli dairy.

Back in 2006, when I still had my studio on Main Street, Tracy Tucker came in one day and asked if I’d like to have an intern for the summer, as his 17 year old daughter was going to be staying with him and she had an interest in photography. I told him sure, as when I was learning I had asked a local photographer if I could intern for him and was disappointed when I was turned down.

A week later Ayrica stopped by the studio and I found out not only was she cute and very petite, but she was a ballet dancer. So before she went back to Illinois she did some modeling for me, showing her grace in Leap of Faith. Ayrica decided to go to college in Humboldt county so she’s modeled for me several times over the last few years. Then her boyfriend came out west also, and he soon turned into her fiance.

So it was with great pleasure that I photographed this couple on their very special wedding day on Moonstone Beach. This shot of Jeremy swirling Ayrica in the surf was my favorite, as it was a spontaneous moment that really showed how much fun they have with each other.

When I went back Friday night to take photos for the production, I was pleasantly surprised that even though I was busy taking the photos, I enjoyed the production quite a bit.

Of course the best part was the costumes, since Lori was the designer for several of the women’s outfits.