Niloak was a brand of pottery manufactured between 1909 and 1946.  Their early Missionware style is enjoying a surge in popularity and prices have increased a lot.  We have collected a few of their pieces, although not much Missionware, and wanted to build a site where we could display our own collection, possibly sell some of ours, and help visitors identify & value pieces they have.

This is obviously a tiny niche and will never have a lot of visits.  In other words, there will never be an justification for spending a lot of time and money building a website for this subject.

Enter Weebly.  Weebly offers a drag and drop website builder that lets me build simple sites quickly.  I went to work on Niloak.net and the result seems good enough to me.  You can follow the link and see what you think.  It will open in a new window which you can just close to return to this page.

The Niloak site didn't go together all that quickly because I used it to develop a workflow for handling all the images via Amazon's S3 cloud storage system.  I think storage in the cloud is where the future is, and it is worth spending some time learning to incorporate it into my work.  More about that in another post.

In a previous post I suggested the new 18 megapixel camera would change the value of stock photography and offered a way for a newcomer to get into the stock photography business.  I am pleased that I was able to purchase one of the first of these and will be taking it on a trip to photograph Arizona Wildflowers.  Today I built 18MegaPixels.com as a blog where I can talk about my experiences with the Rebel T2i and using it to build up my royalty free stock photography business.

I will also building out many of the photography related domains names I have accumulated and advertising them as 18 megapixel stock photography sites.  I will publish links to them here as soon as I have a few pictures published on all of them.

The Canon T2i will also make videos.  I have never worked with video but the more I think about it the more I see places where video would add to my websites.  I like to tie my pictures into the natural history of their locations.  With video I can show the panoramic view of an area and then emphasize specific features with still photos.  Together it will make a great teaching tool as well as a way to display the photographs I have for sale.

Stock photographs are now a product of the computer and they will rapidly loose value as a result.

Moore's Law refers to the graph Gordon Moore from Intel published years ago, which shows the power of computer chips has been doubling ever eighteen months for many years.  The conclusion is you can buy twice the power for the same money or the same power for half the cost, every eighteen months.

What does that have to do with stock photography?

As I write this, Canon has announced they will begin selling a new 18 megapixel digital SLR camera at the end of March, 2010.  They suggest you will be able to store about 40 images per gigabit.  In other words cameras are really computers and thinking of them in that way reveals future trends.  What does this mean to stock photography?

Every eighteen months to two years the image size for consumer level cameras is going to double.  I currently have an eight migapixel Canon which has been fine for most things.  However, we occasionally do have situation where I would like to crop a small area and print it larger.  Various Photoshop plugins will help with this, but a larger original would be better.

It seems to me the lower resolution contents of stock photography archives will have less an less value.  Every 18 months many of the photos in a stock photography collection will become worth less.  Certainly not everyone needs an eighteen megapixel image, but starting with one certainly improves your opportunities to crop the image into exactly what you want while still retaining enough pixel density to maintain quality.

I have been having fun building a few websites where the pictures and text actually tell a story.  Usually our online business sites are collections of pictures with a central theme, but no "story".

I recently had the opportunity to photograph a partially woven Navajo Rug which was still on the loom.  Since we collected Navajo rugs for many years I know something about their weaving process.  It was fun to have a story to tell with the pictures to "jog" my memory as I wrote.

Years ago we purchased a Navajo rug weaver doll of the kind made for tourists.  Comparing the doll to the photos of the actual Navajo rug on it's loom made it easy to illustrate how true to life the doll actually is.

We took our grandkids to the state fair this year and one of the highlights for me (still a kid at heart I guess) is the mother pig with piglets which is always featured.  This year I had my camera with me so when one of the piglets got lost and had trouble finding where she was supposed to go for dinner I could take pictures of her frantic search.  Pig Pictures is the result. In the picture below you can see her trying to get help from Mom.

Someday I might get adventuresome and try recording these kinds of events with a movie camera.  However, I find still pictures show much more detail and are easier to edit.  They also allow visitors to spend as much or as little time as they want with each pictures.  In my experience movies either go by to fast for subjects I am really interested in, and to slowly for topics of general interest.

Fall-Colors.us is the website where we display our fall pictures to prospective buyers.  We showcase pictures of trees, leaves, fall fruits, and other things that make us think of fall and what it means.

All of these pictures can be purchased with full rights to use them any way you please, without restriction.

On some we have used the free Picasa photo editing tool from Google to add annotations.  Happy Thanksgiving and other messages for example.  This is not hard to do and means you can make your own greeting cards, posters and other products very cheaply.

The price competition in the photo product marketplace is fierce so you can buy one of our images, improve it with your own words, and upload the result to one of the photo product services.  Four by six prints should cost about fifteen cents each and you can use them to make greeting cards and other specialty items for your family and friends.

Your creativity plus a tiny bit of technical experimentation will let you create affordable (cheap) but unique, custom gifts for the peole on you list.

Pilgrim Glass went live today.  It's not totally finished, but includes a full color copy of a recent cranberry glass catalog and pictures of some of our collection.

Our plan is to add more pictures and information that will help visitors identify pieces of Pilgrim Art glass they many have purchased or inherited and then determine what it is worth.  In addition, we expect to add some of our collection to the site with sales prices indicated.  We are still working out the details of how to best arrange payment without setting ourselfs up for to much work.

The site uses our new "Dark" template which we think helps the pictures "pop".

We have been struggling to get sites ready to publish some of our digital pictures for sale.  The issues of payment, shopping carts, and other techno trivia have made this take much longer than we hoped.

ChristmasPictures.us is the first of what we hope are many sites like this.  It needs some polish but once that is completed we will add more pictures and start duplicating the site, with different pictures, on other domains we registered in anticipation.

We think the site looks nice and hope you will check it out if you are looking for Christmas related stock photography which you can use for any purpose, including commercial use.

Snow covered tree against blue New Mexico Sky

In the process of developing Walking Rain Gallery I looked at most of the stock photo websites and forced myself to read through their terms of service and allowable uses.  It was NOT fun and after hours of reading I remain as confused as I had been.

They advertise products in ways that make them seem free or inexpensive.  However, when you start to explore exactly what that means things get very confusing.  Can you take one of their pictures and use it to produce a line of greeting cards?  What exactly is commercial use?

I came away feeling that if I used one of their images for a profit making venture I would always have to plan to pay.

In a world of inexpensive digital cameras and essentially unlimited cloud storage I don't think digital pictures have the same uniqueness images did at one time.  Certainly, there are photographic artists who take pictures worthy to be called art, and they deserve compensation for their work.  However, that seems like a very tiny universe of pictures.

I think there should be a way for a photographer to profit from their work without imposing so many restrictions on buyers.  I will see if I can make that work on Walking Rain Gallery.

I went to set up their system for buying pictures on Walking Rain Gallery and discovered the minimum price for a 4" x 6" print is $2.75!  Since I can buy them at Costco for $0.13 that isn't going to fly.

I understand they handle fulfillment and assorted other services but at those rates I don't think my idea for selling inexpensive, royalty free downloads will work financially.  I will have to find a different way.

PayPal is one option.  They have a "simple" shopping cart system that is fairly easy to add.  However, I have learned that no shopping cart is really easy.

SmugMug also offers a shopping cart for their pro level subscribers and the cost of products is much more reasonable.  Their system is very configurable and can be used to make really pretty sites.  The learning curve for someone like me whose technical skills are weak is steep.  I will have to see.

Fotomoto.com is a new website which is in private Beta at this point.  They offer a new and (hopefully) improved way to sell your pictures, cards and posters online.

We have looked at several of these systems and all have strengths & weaknesses.  One thing we especially like about Fotomoto.com is that you don't have to upload a high quality image until someone actually buys one of your pictures.  This is huge because creating and storing many 4-5 megapixel images takes a lot of time and space.  With their system this is avoided.

We expect to try it out on this site and see how it goes.  One big question will be the quality of their prints and the speed and accuracy of their processing and shipping system.