Mastercolor

You know I have always heard how life can imitate art.  Never meant much too me since in my mind as an average photographer, any art I created through my favorite hobby of photography was created from real life events or things that I had captured with my camera.  Well my opinion changed this week.  As I was hustling around trying to prepare our August 1st online news letter (sign up for it on the front page of our site), trying to pay all bills that will become due next week, trying to end and reward the winners of our "Sunset" photo contest all my mind could think of was vacation!  Yep, I am outta here for 5 days to visit my aunt & uncle and their generous offer to share the old family house at on of the most beautiful places on this earth, MARTHA'S VINEYARD!  The place where I captured my favorite image of my children to date, where I proposed to my wife at Gay Head , the place where I learned to fear the water like no other, the place where I saw them film JAWS. Yes life is imitating art.  Shortly after telling a friend of mine that I was headed to the Vineyard, he said with a sly grin, "You have heard about the shark warnings in the area, haven't you?"  I realized (with that  sudden rush over my body like the one Chief Brody felt when relaxing on State Beach and the first cries of a shark attack whizzed through the air) that yes I was taking my family to the same spot where I watched the movie JAWS being filmed. In 1974 I was pulled around by my grandmother to watch as many scenes being filmed as possible, including "the boy on the raft".

Yesterday I had a good friend of mine stop by our location to pick up a nice order he had placed for Canvas Gallery Wraps of his children. My friend had ordered 29 16x20 or larger to decorate his house with, and after my many grateful thanks, we talked about the pictures he had captured and some of the problems we had in printing them.  When he initially emailed his files to me, many were low resolution, so we had to track them back to the original files.

It is the single most common mistake we see when new photo editors start playing with their images.  Let me start by saying " I don't blame them", whenever you bump up the contrast is makes your image burst of the monitor.  The adjustments to your new file will also "burst" off the page, literally.  One of the biggest short comings in this digital photo world we live in is that your printed matter will never match your monitor perfectly.

"Charles, I am thinking of getting a new digital camera."  I hear this a lot from friends.  Other times  I have the chance to print an order that they have sent to us and I tell them " You need to get a new digital camera".  I guess since I am on the processing side of the photo industry some of my closest friends think I am a Camera expert, well the Camera experts are gone.  You can thank everyone's thrifty nickel for that.  You now are pretty much stuck buying it from a part time clerk at Walmart, or Costco, or trusting what you read from the discount houses online.

One of my favorite parts of owning a small business is having the chance to work with Friends.  I love having the chance to buy from my friends and I love the opportunity to supply to my friends.  A friendly face can make a difficult business decision that much easier.  My friend Joe Michel built this website 13 years ago.  Well at least he built the original, and since has reconstructed it many times to update our technology through his company, www.itworxonline.com.

Well Mastercolor and it's 33 year old body is moving in with the new generation.  We recently signed up on Twitter, and joined Facebbok a few months back.  It's hard to see & track where this is helping our business, but we do have people from time to time say the found us through these internet networks.  On Facebook we have run a number of Internet specials on Canvas Gallery Wraps, and we will be offering more on assorted digital prints, so sign up to follow Mastercolor on both Twitter and Facebook.  Let us know your thoughts and what you would like to see as specials.

It seems whatever digital camera you buy, there will be an editing software included.  Many of these softwares will also point you on the direction to where you can host your images, or have them printed.  Wonder why they give this away free?????  Because, if you chose the easy route of locking into their software, you have done exactly that, locked yourself in unless you save your files on your computer or external storage.

Most us these storage sites or printing houses store your files for free, but then only let you access the images in a much smaller format UNLESS you are buying from th