Wedding Planning Headaches?

Planning a wedding is wonderful and stressful all at the same time. It takes a huge amount of organisation and expense and chances are you’ll have files and pieces of paper all over the place. Keeping track of what neeeds planning and who needs to be be paid when can be a major headache. If relatives are coming from afar they may require accomodation and directions for the church and or venues. Then there is the seating plan, oh those family politics! The list seems endless and the phone constantly ringing.

Why not invest some  time and energyin a free wedding planning site to help with the organisation. One such site is weddingpath.
Its full of useful tools to help create a memorable day. Just some of the features include

• A free website with several templates to choose from  -  why not an image of yourselves from your Pre-wedding shoot on your front page.  Add a welcome message and how guests can use the site.
• An on-line RSVP to invites – send out the website details with your invations. Guests can also request any special dietary needs.
• Wedding maps – so your guests don’t get lost
• Message board if guests have any questions
• Wedding diary to keep track of appointments and reminders
• .Budget planner – so you can see where all the money has gone!
• On the day schedules – very useful to give to your photographer
• Seating plan – avoid the family feuds
• To do lists

Useful information pages can be added, such as…….

• Guests can upload photos to a gallery
• Suggestions for wedding presents
• Accomodation suggestion
• Travel and transport info
• Things to do and see in the local area

Also lots of advice and wedding tips and ideas and a resources for wedding venors. It  fun to put together and can serves as a momento of your special day afterwards.

It could just save your sanity too so check out the site and start getting organised.

Wirral Winds

This Sunday we had a brief meet up with Wirral Winds as they practised for thier Summer Serenades at the Williamson Art Gallery in Birkenhead – always a well attended event. We were there to take some photographs for a new website for the musical group led by Valerie Warr. We got some shots but plan to get a group photo at a more convenient time as we had to leave before the end of the conert. Wirral Winds are a well accomplished smalll wind ensemble and they are available to play at wedding venues and receptions as well as many concerts and events – hence the need for a website to enhance their promotion and details of events. Pixsmiths hope to be of assistance with their forthcoming website and hope that it will give Wirral Winds a wider audience and clientelle.

Wirral Winds Collage

New WordPress Site & Lessons Learnt

Pixsmiths have updated to a new looking site using a wordpress theme to integrate a site  with blog that’s user-friendly to i-phones  etc…  Pixsmiths old flash site was still visible whilst a wordpress database was added at a subdirectory level – pixsmiths.co.uk/wordpress.  It was a bit of a headache trying to work out how to move up the new site to the root domain – deleting the old files was not  a problem.

So the web host that pixsmiths use – Evohosting – were contacted for advice, they have a 24/7 support link.  Well they didn’t need to offer advice as they went the extra mile and sorted it all out and kept us informed  and updated all the way.  How’s that for customer service!  It really felt like getting prsonal attention and prompt solutions, nothing was too much trouble.  The small fees involved for hosting packages – start as low as £2.50/month are more than worth it for the customer support experienced.   They also helped with initial set up with wordpress, handholding total novices in this field without making you feel stupid or inadequate. Pixsmiths can really recommend Evohosting as a web host solution, you may also get a free domain for life with some packages/payment set ups.

May be useful to share some lessons learnt from trials with WordPress:

Ok installation of wordpress was easy with Evohosting’s control panel with installatron function – just a few clicks and done in less than 2 minutes.

Ok may be obvious to most but as a newbie to wordpress didn’t realise that had to login to wordpress to build pages and posts etc… I knew it was a content management system (CMS) and combined blog with web pages but thought it was a case of building in a test editor and uploading as with a html site – see didn’t comprehend the basics at first.  When the tutorials said login to dashboard – didn’t have a clue what they meant or where to log in!!  How I laugh now, I really needed the idiot proof guide.

Templates – there are so many out there, spent far too long looking, but the beauty of wordpress is that a new template is easy to override the current one. Its good to have an idea of style and layout required, how many columns etc…. Often templates can be searched for on such criteria

Always, always always back up files before trying out new plugins, upgrading of wordpress or themes.  When things have gone wrong you’ll be glad to be able to restore that backup and revert to normality again.  Says pulling your hair out!

Make use of all the wordpress tutorials – read the forums for any problems with theme, plugins etc…before installing…but then you have a back up, right?

Any thoughts on the site, we’d love to know :-0

Polaroid Photoshop Actions

Tried out a couple of polaroid actions in photoshop this week.
First is an effective single polaroid fx action from the litlephotoshop - try it yourself its a free download. For this shot I combined with a skin softening action – also from littlephotoshop.

Secondly is a multiple polaroid action which I came across in one of the flickr posts, and originates from the digitaldarkroom.com

This action takes seconds to perform an action set which must have taken ages to set up originally. Again its a free download so have fun with this too. Simply load the action into actions folder of photoshop, click on the action, open the template psd which is provided and then open the image you want to use for this effect. Works best with larger file sizes.

Simply Electronics

Good service hardly ever gets mentioned but a bad experience is posted everywhere it seems, so though it would be good to relate good ones:

Where possible I google about a companies service and reputation before buying products from them on-line. I did see some negative comments about Simply Electronics but also good ones so was a little nervous about ordering – a tamron 17-50 F2.8 lens, a handy fast lens.

I needn’t have worried: Ordered at the weekend, dispatched on Monday and received Tuesday – complete with e-mails informing of progress of order and tracking facility.
Certainly no complaints and a good price s currently have 15% off tamron lens
Have tested the lens last night and will be using at a wedding very soon.

Wedding World

A montage I love to do is a globe of wedding pictures -coined “Wedding World”.
Its a simple but different effect. Here’s how its done:
I used picasa to collage 49 pictures to give a 7 x7 square (you could use Photoshop for this if you wish. In photoshop then use the spherize filter, merged layers>duplicated layer>eliptical marquee to create the globe shape> feathered (1)> Select>Inverse>Eyedropper – Chose White>large brush>brushed over corners.
There done!

Nikon ‘s Nifty Fifty

Been trying out the Nikon 50mm F1.8 lens – popularly known as the “nifty fifty”. It was a bit weird using legs to move backwards and forwards as opposed to zooming in and out of a telephoto lens but the lens is pin sharp and the depth of field it can achieve is great – combined with the D90 with its low noise at high ISO it was terrific for inside churches where flash cannot be used. Loving this lens, it will be great for portrait and close up detail shots. It will be interesting to compare with another lens due for delivery – a sigma 17-50mmm F2.8 which will be great for the wedding work.

Domain Name

Well we are just re-launching our new photography website and have been through the process of re-branding with new domain name. Its taken a few days deciding on a name – an important decision. Had to be something snappy and memorable – not easy with a popular name like Smith!

After much searching and being disappointed with many favourite options already taken we next decided on picsmiths but then soon changed to the more modern spelling of PIXSMITHS. Its a sort of play on words, pixels being the tool of our trade in digital photography and also we hope you will pick us for your wedding or travel photography requirements. So our new upcoming site is pixsmiths.co.uk