Extra eyes and ‘the fear’

April 17th, 2009 in Photography & Design by Johannes van Kan

Tags: Albums, Clients, Customer Service, Lab, Photojunction Remix, Production

I remember ordering my first album. I also remember the fear that maybe I had made a mistake somewhere.

I remember ordering my second. I remember that the fear didn’t change.

A couple of times over the years I’ve made significant spelling errors. That didn’t help with ‘the fear’! The albums had to be repaired or replaced … and I ended up with a wonderful studio sample. Not the end of the world.

The truth is that there are quite a few checkpoints in the making of an album using PJ Remix, as well as during production, so the chances of making mistakes are significantly reduced from what they used to be. I appreciate the extra eyes at Queensberry looking at what we do.

Last week we had an album in production. In one image there was a problem with banding that we hadn’t noticed. The lab, however, did notice and contacted us about correcting it.

The album arrived today. It was fantastic.

In the end it is all about ‘trust’.

Cheers, Johannes

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Before they invented pixels …

February 28th, 2009 in Photography & Design by Johannes van Kan

2 Comments »

Tags: Digital, Photography, Production, Revolution

Before they invented pixels much of the stuff that we do in post production happened to the image as it was taken.

There used to be a vignette you could apply ‘on camera’, there were wonderful things that you could do using a softar filter.

There also was attention to detail. Details of composition, lighting, expression and, dare I use the word, posing.

We now shoot a ridiculous number of frames as we become more opportunist and somehow more reckless.

Certainly from this reckless/prolific behavior we get some true gems, but we often create more work than is necessary.

I just wanted to give a plug to doing it right in camera over fixing it in post production.

Know your light, know your composition, and start with well exposed images.

I am aware of a move to learning more about the craft of photography, and I fully support that as the new era of photography … another case of the latest ‘new thing’ being the old thing but better.

Why does it matter? It matters because it costs us … It costs us in time and quality to deal with these things in post production … Join the revolution! The revolution for photographs shot right in the first instance.

Cheers, Johannes

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If you change an order

November 13th, 2008 in Products & Services by Ian Baugh

1 Comment »

Tags: Extra Charges, Order Processing, Production, Smooth Sailing

If you want your order to sail smoothly through our ordering process, please make sure it’s ready to go before you send it. Hopefully this post will give you some insight into why that’s so important – why even minor changes to an order can cause a lot of work at our end.

For example, suppose you request design or layout changes, or send us new versions of image files or album plans. First we have to call up your original order and work out exactly what you want done to it – not easy when we have hundreds of albums working their way through production at any one time. We may need to, for example:

Update the order itself (album format, cover style etc).
Update notes or special instructions about the order.
Redesign or realign page layouts in Photojunction.
Redesign cover layouts.
Process new image files to match the layouts.
Locate and update the files on our Bindery and Lab servers.
Recalculate prices and charge or credit you the difference.

That’s why we’ve introduced a new time-based charge to cover the costs (page 10).

We don’t like charges like this, but the alternative (increasing our prices) seems worse.

To avoid it completely just hold on to your order (or the associated print files) until you’re sure that everything is ready for production. You’ll get your album faster too.

Smooth sailing, Ian