Amazing Red Bubble Greeting Cards!

I've been meaning to post this for a couple of weeks now, but lesson prep and client work (yay!) have taken up all of my time lately.

So, a while back, I ordered some cards from RedBubble (RB), the place I sell my fine art prints and cards. It was a long wait to get the RB greeting cards that I ordered. I wanted to check the quality of the work before highly promoting the place, as I had never seen it before.

Well for any doubters or newcomers out there, I was very impressed with the quality of the printing, and I've done a lot of printing using various digital and photo processes over the years. The cards are on Kodak Endura paper, basically photographic paper, so the best reproduction you can get. Not laser or digital printing, but real photos. The colour also matched my own colour managed workflow.

The card stock is thick, over 1/2 mm. The photo is adhered to a writable surface. All the image info is on the back page, so people who receive the cards will know how to get more, or to see more of your work. I was wondering about that, so am happy the info is included.

So great job on the printing! The only downside is that it took so long. I ordered the cards August 16, and received them September 8. So that's over 3 weeks. If you have to order something for a special occasion, then you'll need to plan ahead or use the expedited shipping option.

Something About Flowers

This past week I took a short trip to Vancouver for a little break between my busy summer and upcoming busy fall schedules. I don't usually take my big camera on vacations, as it feels like I'm working, but I was hoping to capture some stock images as well as collect some new photos to use as teaching examples.

On one of my many walks I visited an inner city community garden. The sunflowers were in full bloom and the sky was a nice deep blue. The colour combination was just gorgeous. I know that flowers can seem like such common subjects, but I still love photographing them. They are easily accessible and naturally beautiful. Flowers make great cards and larger prints will brighten up any room.

The biggest challenge in photographing flowers is being able to capture and retain the full colour depth and saturation of the petals. This is best achieved by shooting in raw file format and post processing with those parameters in mind. In the shot above, the yellow was showing highlight clipping warnings. I had to use the recovery slider in Adobe Camera Raw to pull back the blown out areas in the red channel.