I posted 5 photos on Facebook in the album “Fall foliage by Isabelle”.  Her mom showed me an album of her work as I’m a “Pro” and supposed to know art… I tried to let her know that Art is in the eye of the beholder..  But I can tell when a picture is well crafted…

While she isn’t ready to go to New York or the cover of Vogue, I did see that she has a good eye and if she pursues this she may do well…  My practice is to give encouragement but not flatter to the point their egos get inflated… Here is a shot from her album on Facebook.

I moderate the Yankee magazine fan page for foliage and also the page for New England Photography. If you want to see and talk fall foliage head to the Yankee Foliage page and for those who have pictures of New England and want to show off their work, please visit the New England Photography fan page.

Jeff Folger
Salem Photographer
Wedding photography
Artwork
Salem MA wedding photography

I first purchased a HP flatbed scanner in “02″ and although it was supposed to do negatives I was very disappointed and gave up bringing my film negatives into the digital light.

I continued to use this scanner until last week when I realized that I needed the performance that my 8yr old scanner couldn’t provide any more. (The manual talks about installing under Windows “ME”!!! If that gives you an idea of how old it was…

Anyway I read reviews and purchased the Epson Perfection V600 at B&H imaging. Since I like my toys… I mean tools to multi-task it had to do negatives as well as normal flat bed scanning.

I found that the document scanning is plenty fast enough and I had a preview in 5+ second and it scanned the B&H receipt and spit out a PDF to me in less than 8 seconds.

Color negatives are not nearly as fast but I don’t have a library of thousands either so I’m not too worried.  I set it to film and hit preview and I was overjoyed by the preview thumbnails (remembering what I had seven years ago) and now I had in @12 seconds 8 thumbnails that I could  get a pretty good idea if I wanted to even scan that negative or just skip it.

I had 8 images  in two strips and it took 25 seconds to preview them and I then scanned them at 24bit and 1200DPI which produces a 1659x 1051 jpg image and weighs in a 1MB each (or a little under). The whole scan process took 16 minutes and I find I can work on other computer items (like this article or get a cup of coffee) and the overhead wasn’t even noticeable as to computer responsiveness.

I examined the resulting files and rescanned one picture at 48 bit color depth and 32DPI and the single file took @4 minutes to scan and resulted in a 4382x2794px file and 6.16MB in weight (how much space it takes up).  It will depend on the image how good your results are.. I found even with grain reduction on and Digital Ice and color restoration the image wasn’t any good to me except as a memory of 30 yrs ago… (Oh yes, I’ve become a much better New England photographer in the last 30+ yrs…)

Well at $227.00, I judge this scanner to be well worth your looking over.  Whether you are a pro or a home hobbyist, I think it will satisfy all but the most demanding Pro’s out there.  Here is a shot from 1977…  (Hey I was 17…)

Jeff Folger
Vistaphotography
My online art gallery
My website
My Blog on Yankee Magazine (Foliage)

I started shooting  Bar Mitzvahs (Google it if you aren’t up on them) a few years back and they were an unknown quantity for me.  Why? because I’m not Jewish so I set about to learn from a fellow photographer and friend, Herb Goldberg in Marblehead who does dozens of them a year.

Herb taught me the basics so I wouldn’t make mistakes (at least too many).  This brings me up to current day where I photographed Jessica I had photographed her brother a couple of years before so the family was happy with my work.

To me a Mitzvah isn’t too much different in structure to a wedding and in some ways it’s easier. You shoot the family members all coming together on a joyous occasion (not hard) and then you photograph the boy or girl on the Bima and these shots are almost always the same. I’ve fond a few angles that I don’t usually see and Herb even gave me a compliment by saying I came up with a shot that he had never thought of so he now shoots that one also.

Here are some of the days shots…

Well that’s enough for now please feel free to check out my online gallery of work.

Jeff Folger
Online gallery
Find me on Facebook
Yankee Magazine blog
Yankee’s foliage Facebook
New England Photography on Facebook

I’ve been forwarding all traffic from Vistaphotography.com to Vistaphotography.net which is my wedding website.
I also have vistaphotos.net which is my first site from a template that I purchased several years back. I have been sending wedding clients to Vistaphotography.net from there also.

I wanted something really nice looking but didn’t have the time/inclination to buy/create it now. So I started looking around to see what was out there…

I found several plugins over on Adobe’s website that enhance the functionality of Lightroom. One that caught my attention was one written by Sean McCormack in Ireland. His LightRoom blog details the attributes of the plugin.

What this plugin does is instead of just creating a very nice web gallery which both Lightroom and Bridge do very nicely, it creates an entire website!
I know that I probably need better than this down the road but for now it works pretty well. I mean I’ve had several photographers check this out and if you already have your domain hosted and own a copy of Lightroom 2.0 or greater, you only need to spend 10EUR.
That 10EUR converted to $12.95 for me last week so I was like, “what do I have to lose”? I did spend 2-3 hours between reading his online PDF (answered most all questions I had) and then setting up the collection in Lightroom. Then I went into the webmodule (after downloading it and putting it in the correct preset folder) and selected the LRB portfolio.

You then start to fill in all the info which takes the most time. As you proceed down the column in the module you set the colors and gallery names and external links to your blog (mine brings you here). I also have an external page take you to my sales gallery on Zenfolio in case someone wants to buy one of my wonderful pieces of photographic art… (Really they are wonderful!!) then you preview it and you have a very functional and I think good looking website. I didn’t have to code anything… Note one piece of Html anywhere! (by me..)

All I had to do was follow down the webmodule step by step and when you hit the bottom, you either upload it to your server or export it to your desktop and FTP it up to the correct directory on your server… Your method will be determined by what you are comfortable with.

What I would like is if you could go to my site and test it out (Vistaphotography.com) and let me know what you think? I mean do you think this is cool, or should I just call up a web designer and spend $300 – $1000 or more to have a really great site?
Or, does this meet my needs? I’m dying to hear what you think?

Jeff Folger
Vistaphotography
Vistaphotos
My sales galleries