photography
Why does Amazon punish mobile users?
Sitting on my sofa this evening, reading through some tips and tricks for selling photos for use in magazines, calendars, postcards and the like, my Photos That Sell book made a number of references to the Freelance Photographer's Market Handbook which gives details of publishers and publications that are on the lookout for photos to use.
Curious to find out more about the different ways to crack into the freelance photography market, I reached for my iPod touch and tapped out the address for Amazon into its Safari browser. Amazon had detected I was on an iPod (well, it thought it was an iPhone) and gave me a nice mobile interface to work with.
I found the book with ease and added it to my basket. Wondering what the minimum order was for free shipping, I went into their help section to try and find out. It was then that I noticed that they punish people for using their new mobile interface, stating 'All items ordered from your mobile device will be shipped standard shipping, unless you are an Amazon Prime customer.'
Why make it easier for customers to buy products from you but then not give them the shipping option that must have attracted them so more customers over the years? Admittedly, they do give the option to use their full site instead, but it's not as convenient on a mobile device.
In the end I resorted to using the laptop, so Amazon didn't lose the custom, but it would be nice if they'd give the free shipping option as part of their iPhone/iPod beta site.
Art Auction for Age Concern Isle of Man
A group of Applied Business students from St. Ninian's High School in the Isle of Man is holding an art auction on 29th January in aid of Age Concern. Over 40 local artists have donated artwork for sale in the auction which will hopefully produce a nice donation to charity as well as a great thing to put on the organisers' CVs.
The organisation of this event significantly trumps my involvement in a Young Enterprise group as part of a similar scheme when I was at school. We managed to make some novelty items and Christmas decorations as well as coming out with a slight profit for members of the group, but nothing quite on the scale of this.
If you're going to be on the Isle of Man next Tuesday, go and put a bid in for a piece of local artwork, perhaps a photo of the Point of Ayre Lighthouse ;)
Stuttgart Flickr Meetup
On Friday 26th October there is going to be a Flickr meetup here in Stuttgart. We'll be meeting at 6pm in the Calwer Eck pub in downtown Stuttgart. All are welcome to come along, just leave a comment or add yourself to the event on upcoming.org if you're interested.
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Am Freitag 26. Oktober kommt ein Flickr treffen in Stuttgart. Treffen wir uns um 18h in Calwer Eck. Jeder ist wilkommen! Kommst du auch? Bitte hier Kommentar einlegen oder unter upcoming.org anmelden.
Flickr adds support for geocoding
The popular photo sharing website Flickr introduced native support for geotagging photos on Monday.
Because of the flexibility of the system, there have been a number of options around for a while that have allowed users to geotag their photos. None of them have been quite as simple as Flickr have just made it though. And it's great to see that the guy that built the first geotagging mashup of Flickr and Google Maps - Rev Dan Catt - was actually the person that Yahoo recruited to build up the geotagging functionality within the site itself.
The new geotagging system is really easy to use, it's functional and it's pretty at the same time. It also has a geotagging API that developers can plug into if they wish.
The thing that surprises me is the lack of support for GeoRSS in their feeds. With all this location information flying around (1.2 million photos geotagged within the first day) it would make sense to include that geodata in the RSS feeds from the site. I'd really like to be able to pull geotagged photos from my Flickr stream into my geoblog and photos section over at geodan.org and have their location information automatically assigned based on the information stored against them in Flickr.
You can also see my map of photos on Flickr.
Where to print photos online in Germany?
When I was putting up some photos in my room recently, I realised that I didn't have prints of many recents photos that I've taken. When I was in the UK I tended to use Photobox for printing my shots (and still do when I need to print shots to send to people), but for me to order from a British company and pay higher postage costs to get it delivered to me in Germany seems crazy, when I can presumably do it all through a German company for less money.
A quick Google search tonight for 'foto drucken' (photo printing) came back with a list of a couple of different sites that looked to be useful: Bildpartner, Pixaco and Foto.com. My problem is that I don't know how reliable any of them are. To me, the look of a site gives me an initial impression of the quality of the service and I don't look favourably on sites like Foto.com that don't look right in my Safari browser.
For reference, I'm going to compare pricing of the different sites below.
| Site | 7x5" (18x12.5cm) |
10x8" (25x20cm) |
A4 (30x20cm) |
Postage to Germany |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bildpartner | €0.29 | €1.29 | €2.65 | |
| Pixaco | €0.16 | €0.58 | €2.85 | |
| Foto.com | €0.18 | €0.50 | €0.50 | €2.49 |
| Photobox Ireland | €0.29 | €2.99 | €3.65 | €2.50 |
It seems like I've been paying too much in recent years for printing my photos at Photobox. Out of the others, Foto.com comes top pricewise, but if anybody has experience of any of the companies, please leave a comment to let me know. In the meantime, I should just try sending some photos to be printed at Foto.com and see how well they come out.
