Mini Moo Cards

Just to say got our mini moo buisness cards the other day and happy they have turned out quite well IMHO.

Not meant to replace full business card but these smaller thinner version have their own usefulness.

For example for including as a tag with print orders, can be placed inside wedding order of service so clients have ready contact for viewing on-line galleries., or placed on tables without being too much of a distraction from the table decorations.   They come in a neat box so could easily be placed alongside a wedding guest book – the options are endless!  I love how you can have different designs on them – not stuck to the same image for each order so it can show  a range of photographic styles and products.  Plenty of room on the reverse for contact details etc…  Really neat, hope you like them!

The old faithful cube PC, my pride and joy for many a year, had a long lingering death…although it nearly got thrown threw the window on several occassions.  It has been overthrown by a shiny new destop, up to date model with intels latest chip, Core i7, a whopping 6GB Ram and a huge hard drive (twice the size of the external  one now) so plenty of room for all those pictures. OK there are higher spec machines out there but its by far and away a big step up from its predecessor.  The cube didn’t give up lightly though, the new Dell machine, a Studio XPS 8100 for some reason wasn’t compatible with my monitor, so had to get a new widescreen 20 inch LCD  and I must admit the pictures look so much better on it.  Then  after a day or so the internet connection was dropping every time the pc was re-booted and had to repair a network driver.  The Dell support was great though and the other night they took remote control of the pc and tried loads of fixes – its really weird seeing the cursor on screen move when you haven’t touched anything!  Took longer than supposed to  bu really shouldn’t complaian at service recieved and so far so good and internet connection has stayed on with no further problems.

Loving windows 7 too, what with the pc spec everything is running so much faster.  No more lock ups and window freezes when trying to run two applications simultaneously.  Pictures import and render so much quicker in Lightroom now, its a joy to processs the Raw files in this now and really sppeeds up workflow.  This weekend I will be enjoying a Stu Little live screencast, as he dmonstrates tips and techniques with the latest version of Lightroom 3 – one of the topics will be on Noise Reduction.  Stu is a great photographer and Photoshop educator, so why not joing him this Sunday 20th June at 6pm BST.  He will laso be availble on Twitter for a question and answer session.   Its going to be so much better watching this on the new large monitor and pc – it will be much more entertaining than the England game was tonight !

Dell Studio XPS 8100

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

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

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.

Via our flickr account have recently discovered this great blog site, COFFEESHOP, which is loaded with free goodies for photoshop and lightroom, such as page templates, textures – ideal for scrap-booking and photoshop actions and tutorials. A real handy site, one to dip into on a frequent basis to discover the latest goodies.

Well done to Rita for sharing her passion with everyone and making them available.