Here’s a great series of articles on pricing considerations for the professional photographer (and amateurs, too).  Check it out on the Professional Photographer Profit Center page.

Where do Photo Construx readers come from?  We get most of our hits from referring sites (Thank you thinking highly enough of my work to make a link to my humble site).  I was surprised to see a link to Lake Olathe Photographs on the list still.  The biggest surprise of all was to my internet friend’s blog Tomst3k.

Here’s a quick glimpse at Photo Construx’s top 5 traffic sources.  Drop me a line if you got questions on how to get this report for your web site and I’ll point you to Google Analytics.

In the process of trying to set a price list, all the details of processing must be accounted for in order to get accurate perspective of the time commitment.  Once the amount of time to process photos is determined, one step in calculating the cost of creating images is also understood.

Initial timings for 102 (1.22GB) images:

• Copying from media card to server 8 minutes
• Tagged with basic information in 4 minutes

There are more steps to finding out the actual cost of an image, and this is the beginning…

If it sits still long enough, I’ll take a picture of it!

- Mike Reynolds yesterday at a ball game while taking pictures of a flower my daughter thought was neat.  I’m sure someone else has said this in the past, but I haven’t found the source yet!

Family heirlooms provide insight into generations gone by.  This is Mary Jung’s vase given to my wife.  She loves this ceramic vase, especially the Lord’s Prayer written on it.

I took this shot with my homemade straw grid on a 285HV on a black acrylic sheet.  If you find this page and were lucky enough to know Mary, then you’ll know how much this heirloom means to my wife.

I’ve been thinking about this project for quite awhile, and finally got some time to make the photo part of the project materialize.  The kids performed well and giggled while I wrote on their hands.  Now, I have to figure out how to make the card part of the project.  We have tons of materials, just need to figure out size and embellishments.  I could see several projects like this in the future! 

There’s a crop on this photo, color desaturation, and the toned down brightness create this effect.

OK, the boy made a Nissan Dealership for his school project.  Everyone in the class had to pick a different building in a city and make it out of shoe boxes and other materials lying around the house.  I’m really proud of him, because the only piece I did was cut the foam board, while he did all the hot gluing and assembly.

Ok, there’s another wish list item to along with my recent tripod entry…  I like the idea of having a solid head, though the reviews say this one is HEAVY I still want it.  Might even use it on a hike.

Here’s the first item on my equipment wish list.  I’ll still need to pick a head to put on it :)

“For the Kingdom of Heaven” is my first hand picture.  With a single 285HV flash behind a small softbox 45 degrees to the left at 7ft high this shot has some great contrast.  Of course, I’m using the 50mm still.

I was busy playing with my garage sale gear from last weekend (wishing I had bought more) and took this self portrait.  There’s three 285HV flashes triggered by Cactus v4s in this shot plus an obnoxious hair light.  Even with a 9 foot ceiling that hair light is really overbearing.  I rarely call Chris in to view my photos, but I did on this one.  She like’s the wedding ring in this photo the best! 

I can always count on someone re-arranging my gear into the various backpacks and boxes I have laying around.  Doesn’t matter if it’s my computer equipment or my photo gear, this little gremlin is going to have his way with it.  And when I’m on location and can’t find what I’m looking for you’ll hear me yell, “Son of a Geek”!

If David Hobby uses a light meter I haven’t heard as much as I should about it on his blog, http://strobist.blogspot.com/.  Bobbi Lane rocks with a light meter in this introductory video.

The brand of light meter is Sekonic