What to do when you are asked to sell a picture on Flickr

Not too long ago, I have been approached to sell a picture of mine that was on my Flickr site. I was just as excited about the request as I was nervous. Some actually thought my picture was good enough they wanted not only ask for my permission to use it, but actually pay me money for doing so. Needless to say, I did not know how to go about making that transaction at all or what should I ask for the image the interested party wanted to buy from me. I did not want to be scammed either, so I as a bit afraid to pursue the whole thing too. You hear about those things happening on the web all the time…. You never know who is approaching you to buy/use your image and for what purpose, so it pays off to be extra cautious. In the end, my initial suspicions turned out to be false, and I have sold my first picture off of Flickr. The buyer and I agreed on the price and we have drafted a formal contract which was signed by both of us outlining the terms of purchase and use of the image. I have also created a Paypal account, as there was no way I was going to give them my bank account number or accept a check. Paypal worked out great for me for this specific purpose. I sent the prospective buyer an invoice outlining the picture specifications and the price which I have created right on the Paypal site. Upon receiving the payment from the buyer in my Paypal account, I have emailed the buyer a copy of the image and in the format they have requested. The whole experience has been a good one, alas a bit stressful.

One of my friends at the time was a bit critical of me that I have accepted a payment for may image. She said - Why would you want to do that? You are not a professional photographer and you are not taking and posting the pictures for the pure reason to make a few bucks". Yes, that was and still is true. My pictures are all taken because I enjoy doing them. However, at the same time, I figured if the company or an individual is going to use my pictures for making profit, I did not see the reason why I should not get a credit and compensation for my work. After all, all the equipment I use, and plan to acquire in the future, does cost significant amount of money to produce in the first place.

So recently, when I saw the DPS blog article on What to do when you are asked to sell a picture on Flickr I was glad that my opinion and ultimately, the decision to sell my picture rather than give it away was such as it was. I wished too I had an access to this information before I have sold my first image on Flickr. It might have saved me some of the anxiety I've experienced during this selling process and answered some of the most general questions I had about the process.

If you are reading this and you are a Flickr user, you should read the article (full link is provided below). You never know, when you will be approached to sell your first picture on Flickr and if you are, how are you going to approach it?

Here's the full link to this interesting post on DPS site: http://digital-photography-school.com/what-to-do-when-asked-to-sell-a-picture-on-flickr

Overexposed effect

DSC_2584-edited-3
Originally uploaded by [Anna.W]

@ 2009 Anna Wrobel Photography. All Rights Reserved.



I have been experimenting with the technique of overexposing my images to achieve this milky, washed out effect with soft focus and a foggy feel to it. In this image (original was properly exposed and taken in the RAW format) I have tweaked the exposure slider in the Camera Raw app by moving it way over to the right and then adjusted the Temperature and the Tint sliders to get the colors I wanted.

For the original shot I have used the following settings:
I used Nikkor 1.4D 50mm lens for the entire series which you can see on my flickr site

Exposure: 1/100
Aperture: f/4.5
Exposure: +3.15
ISO: 100
Exposure program: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 50mm

Adobe Updater Crashes on Mac OS X

I have been trying to fix a problem with Adobe Updater after installing Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 for Mac on my new MacBook Pro.  Every time I opened Elements (same thing happened when I used evaluation version of Photoshop CS4 and Lightroom) or invoked Adobe Updater from inside the application, I would get the error message "Application Adobe Updater quit unexpectedly."

Today I finally came across the fix on a Aric's Tech Blog.  Turns out, this is a permission issue with Adobe Updater not able to modify files it does not have enough access too. 

To resolve, open Terminal application (under Applications>Utilities>Terminal) and issue the following command:

sudo /Applications/Utilities/Adobe\ Utilities.localized/Adobe\ Updater5/Adobe\ Updater.app/Contents/MacOS/Adobe \Updater

After issuing the command aboce, I was asked for admin password before the command could execute. 

Adobe Updater works like a charm now. 

Paris, Musee du Louvre

Paris, Musee du Louvre, originally uploaded by [Anna.W].

I'm still in the process of going through all of my pictures from the recent vacation trip to Paris, France and Gdansk, Poland (the latter being my hometown). I had only one lens with me thought the trip, Nikkor 16-85mm. My uncle and I were taking photos of this beautifully lit Louvre way past midnight. Most of my night shots unfortunately are still not very good but I do enjoy taking them enormously. I think I am slowly getting better at taking them, or at least I think I am improving. Shooting at night forces me to think about all the settings and often it is a hit or miss effort that takes a lot more time to achieve satisfactory exposure. It's a lot of fun but requires a good sturdy tripod and remote shutter release.

For this long exposure shot, I used my uncle's tripod.

ISO Speed: 200
Exposure: 15 sec
Exposure Program: Manual
Aperture: f/16.0
Focal Length: 16 mm

Adding pages to your blogger site

As I am trying to develop my blog on blogger.com, I wanted to add additional static pages such as About and Contact Me which could be accessed from the top navigation bar. Although blogger.com does not provide an option for adding any static pages , I have found this nifty post from a fellow blogger Nischal Shetty on how to accomplish this using a simple yet effective 'will do' workaround.

Here are the steps to accomplish this task as provided by Nischal Shetty (his original post can be found here):

Note: Backup your template before making any changes

1. Click on “New Post” on Blogger.com
2. Write whatever you want your static page to display in this new post.
3. In the page where you write your new post, you will see a link ‘Post Options‘. Click on it.
4. Click on ‘Don’t Allow‘ . Do this only if you do not want comments on the static page.
5. You will also see that you can change the post date and time. Now this is really important. If you are going to have a static page in Blogger.com then you should see to it that it doesn’t end up in your subscribers feed readers. So, the best thing to do is to go to your very first post and see the date (by the way do you remember the day when you wrote your very first post?). Change the date of this new post to something before the date of your first post.
6. When you’re all done click the ‘Publish Post‘ button.
The steps below will guide you on how to prevent the post date from appearing in the post that you just published. (Do this only if you feel that a page shouldn’t have a post date)
1. In your blogger blog, click the Layout tab.
2. Click the Edit HTML link.
3. Click on the Expand Widget Templates checkbox.
4. Search for data:post.dateHeader
5. Before the above code, add the following : b:if cond=’data:post.allowComments
6. After data:post.dateHeader include the following: b:if
The above steps tell Blogger not to display the date for posts that have comments disabled. Since we have disabled the comments for our static page, the page won’t display the post date as well.

Once you have created a post in the above mentioned way, you can start placing links to the static page from anywhere you feel appropriate in your blog.