Finding the First Gallery

Since I have moved to Kenosha, I haven't really been able to find much of the art scene. However, a single search and Kenosha changed all together. Kenosha actually has a huge art community that is not only greatly adverse, but really close and connected. Events all over are always being held and hundreds, if not thousands, are gathering to be part of them.

One of the galleries in Kenosha as been established for 15 years, and it also happens to be a non-profit. Yes, a non-profit art gallery! This really blew my mind, and this one caught my interests big time. So to take what I learned, I decided to adventure to this gallery and see what the gallery was like. I decided I was going to go in and purchase a low dollar piece of art to see how the sales went, knowledge of the person that works there, and just get an over all feel of the gallery.

My first impression as I drove up to it, I was slightly put off. The neighborhood doesn't seem to be the art style, and it seemed to be very small. As I looked for a place to park, there wasn't even a parking space. I then remembered that this was a non-profit and that it wont have a budget for aesthetics that a for profit is able to do. Finding a parking spot on a side road, I then stepped into the gallery.

My second impression; Wow. The inside was so different than the world inside. The lighting was great, everything was well spaced and displayed, and was almost right away greeted by lady. I tried to hold my excitement back and was able to peel away from her just so I could walk around. She caught me lingering near some art longer than I was before and before I knew it we were talking. She was very sincere about the artwork, knew the artists as if they were relatives, and was able to explain the piece in a way the price no longer really mattered. That last part was the key. This was a $400 dollar piece that I really wanted, and I actually only wanted to spend up to $50, and if she was able to make me want to by that piece for $400 I was sure she would have no problem to do that for my work. Luckily, I didn't have enough money to buy it at that time, though, I have a feeling I will end up buying it in the future if it remains there for to long.

After talking, I finally broke into that I was a photographer looking to break into the gallery world and have also just recently moved to Kenosha. She was more than happy to discuss what is happening in Kenosha, how the gallery works, and gave me the grand tour. There was so much more than what you can see from the outside, it was incredible. She explained what the dues covered, what was expected, and what being a member to the gallery means. Before she was even through, I was eager to get home and fill out the application to have my prints reviewed to see if I would fit their gallery.

I then continued to walk through the gallery and see what type of art was there. There were about five or six other photographers that displayed their work there, however, none of them were close to my style. I also had a unique medium used for my prints; metal and glass. None of the other photographers used those and felt this gallery could benefit from my prints as much as I would benefit with joining them

Today, I dropped off my application and prints and now sit until I receive an e-mail on the decision. I have a feeling it will be approved as one of the artists there was willing by purchase the metal panorama print on the spot (the director said, "Wait until he's a member before you buy" and than laughed). Also, she was able to point me to a local framer which I now have doing a custom frame for the Milwaukee Skyline panorama. We are also working on a unique frame for the metal prints that are normally not framed!

milwaukee skyline art

Into the Gallery

This will be a short and sweet blog, as I have just started the next adventure in my photography; Getting into an art gallery!

I now have 5 pieces at home that I feel are strong images and are ready to be put up into a gallery. After a bit of internet searching the last few days, I have found pretty much nothing beyond of:

• Visit the gallery before you offer your images to be displayed in it
• Learn how much the staff knows about art
• Talk to other local artists on their experience with the gallery

Most of the articles found are all about setting up your online gallery, setting prices, and getting the word out. Last year I reached out to one local (Milwaukee area) retail shop that also sold photographs, and ended up getting the cold shoulder after one e-mail of them expressing they would be happy to sell my images. So now my photography concentration will be finding out how to get into a gallery and getting it set-up (and the special image requests). . 

I also found the following recommendation about the artwork when you submit it to be entered into a gallery:

• Have the image framed or displayed the way they would be sold to the customer
• Have your information and sale price already on the piece
• Remember the gallery gets a cut out of the sale, so adjust the price to make sure the profit you desire is there
• Don't sell a piece for $100 if the cost to make it is $80 (paper, time, frame, ect..) and the gallery's cut is 20%.  It only covers the cost to make it, leaving you with $0 for yourself and unable to move forward with additional product.

I will be keeping my blog updated as soon as I have learned something new, or have successfully put my photographs into a gallery.

Photograph taken on vacation while in South Carolina in early July 2014.

kenosha wisconsin art

Tamron SP 150-600mm F/5-6.3 Di VC USD

Photo Examples:

Tamron SP 150-600mm F/5-6.3 Di VC USD

Today I received the ever elusive lens; Tamron SP 150-600mm F/5-6.3 Di VC USD for Nikon. I have watched video after video, and read review after review and found that there is a lack of photo examples using this lens. I have created a photo album on my Flickr page dedicated to pictures taken with this lens and will be updated as images are posted. Here is the link: Link to Tamron 150-600mm Album on Flickr

First off, I want to mention that I used this on a Nikon D7000 and a cheap shoulder strap that I purchased from Best Buy (I can't find my Black Rapid strap). I decided to not go out with a tripod this time around and later will go through how that went. So on this trial run I had the following equipment:

• Nikon D7000
• Tamron SP 150-600mm F/5-6.3 Di VC USD
• Generic Shoulder Strap

Jumping right into the lens...it's pretty big. My previous lens was a 70-300mm lens and was easily a handheld lens, and jumping to this lens was a challenge on the field. To date this will be my biggest lens weighing in at 4.3 lbs (68.8 oz) with the tripod mount attached. It is 10.1 inches long and about 14 inches fully zoomed in at 600mm. What does this all mean? It's still be shot being just hand held and is a 4x zoom lens. 

With Lens Hood

This image shows you the scale of the lens with the lens hood on, next to a double AA battery. It extends about another 4 inches when you zoom out to 600mm, so the lens hood is a great thing to always use so you don't hit the glass when you zoom in. 

Lens Hood and Ring Mount Off

Due to the size I will be purchasing a bag for it to be stored in since it did not come with one. 

The other image shows the lens hood, and ring mount, removed. 

To prep for shooting wildlife, I set my camera to manual and set to auto ISO with a max setting of 800. This allows the camera to adjust the ISO without me needing to change the shutter or f stop on the fly, helping me to not miss the photograph. My default shutter speed was set to 1/1000 due to the crop sensor making the 600mm actually act as 900mm. I didn't want to play with the VC right away, so I disabled that on the lens right away. 

Right away, I could only feel a slight increase of weight on the shoulder with this lens, but not as bad as I thought I would. Again, it's only 4.3 lbs so it's not as heavy as the large 600mm f/4 lenses. Within seconds I was able to snap a shot. 

1/1000 sec at f / 6.3, ISO 800 @ 600mm cropped

 As you might be able to see, it is a bit soft but it still was able to get great detail. Look at the foot, you can see the water coming off of his foot. I had numerous other shots of song birds as I walked out to a stationary blind, but nothing to interesting. A few minutes in the blind an opportunity came.

1/1000 sec at f / 6.3, ISO 320 @ 600mm cropped

1/1000 sec at f / 6.3, ISO 200 @ 600mm cropped

There wasn't to much action near the small lake, it was also a heavy overcast, so I decided to call it the day. As I drove out of the park I looked at one of their ponds and noticed a lot of dead cattails with a few birds on them. So I hopped out and was able to get close enough for some great images. The first image came out of the camera very close to the way it is shown here, I only added some slight reverse vignette and of course color saturation (since I shoot in RAW).

1/1000 sec at f / 6.3, ISO 800 @ 600mm No cropping done

1/1000 sec at f / 6.3, ISO 800 @ 600mm No cropping done

 Summary, I really enjoyed this lens. The images were a bit soft all around but it was an overcast day and wasn't able to shoot at a great ISO, so after the slight cropping and noise reduction the images got even softer. The bottom two images are the only non-cropped images and as you can see they are pretty sharp on the bird. Also, my arm never got tired and there was a few times that I held up the lens for 1-2 minutes. There was also some times that I felt I could have gotten better images if I had VC and/or a tripod. So please continue to return to my blog or check out my Flickr page to see updates.

I also did get one image out of the day that I posted on my web gallery for sale. Check it out!

http://www.stevensantamourphotography.com/Main-Page/Products/Nature/Animals/i-32KV9cc

whitetail deer art

A New Chapter: Nature

Not sure if you have noticed or not, but 2014 is almost 25% done already! April is here, which means rainy days, warming up weather, and animals return back and become more active. For the past 4 months you may have noticed that I haven't been posting many blogs or pictures. I have actually been looking at my photography plan and decided it was time to switch over.

Quick History:

I started out doing photography of landscapes and it quickly grew into friends and family wanting portraits done. Shortly after that, I was requested to shoot a wedding. Excited about the opportunity, I purchased a pro level lens for portrait/wedding shots; Tamron 20-70mm f/2.8 with VC. It was an amazing lens and my research showed that it was a staple for any wedding. So I spent the money and purchased it with credit with a new camera that offered low light ability; Nikon D7000. At the time, I couldn't afford a full frame camera like a Nikon D600 (and still can't afford one). I decided I was going to really dig into portrait photography. I ended up doing dozen of photo sessions and ended up doing two weddings, pretty much breaking even with all my expenses the first year!


When I started this, I told myself I would only do weddings/events/portraits until I can afford a super telephoto lens (over 500mm). Well, the time is now! Last January, a new lens was introduced to the market that raddled the professional world and extreme nature hobbyists like myself.  Tamron released the SP 150-600mm F/5-6.3 Di VC USD (Tamron's Official Page for this lens), at a very low price for this length of a lens. It's not as good as glass as the Nikon AF-S NIKKOR 200-400mm f/4G ED VR II Lens, but from the reviews and looking at the $5,000 price difference, you can see why my interest was captured. 

I've been following reviews for this lens for months. Watching YouTube channels for people's reviews; both professional and non-professional. Across the board, everyone was impressed. I could see some difference in the quality and not to mention the f stop is only 5 at the 150mm and the fastest the lens fully zoomed is only 6.3. This requires a relatively good day to get images and also the lens isn't weather sealed. However, the price again reflects all of this.

I was expecting to wait 5-6 years to get to this point to have a super telephoto zoom lens, but because of this release I'm ready to do it now. To start this process I listed my portrait lens on Craigslist for 900, taking a small hit on the retail price of the lens (about $500) with only a year worth of use. However, remember that I paid that lens off already last year. So I looked at this as selling old equipment and upgrading, so this lens will only end up costing me $200 dollars. With only a few contacts and a few no-shows, I decided to post on my personal Facebook page and was able to sell it in a week.

Now, up to that time I was in a slight chaos mode with my photography. I'm going to take a huge hit in sales because I am not able to do portraits anymore and I no longer have a wide angle lens to take landscapes! But, my real dream is to do nature photography. Capture animals in their element.

I will be making a new blog either this weekend or next weekend, on what I'm hoping this year will result in. I don't plan on making nearly as much as I did last year, or even half of it. But, I do plan on having much more fun!  Also, this lens is on back order for another few weeks. So I wont be able to shoot to much until then. 

This bird above was taken out of my double pane glass door and a screen door using my 70-300mm lens. That is why the image is a bit soft but I am hoping to get more of these type of shots, but much more sharp obviously, of many different types wildlife. 

Imagine the type of images with double the zoom!

2013 Year Review - The Good & Bad

I was able to think on this for a very long time and I felt it was worthwhile to share with those who read my blog. Part of this blog is to give those who want to start on the same trail as I did; make your hobby of photographing into something more.

Now that it is 2014, I can look back and go over the good and bad things that I ran into. I'll start with the bad.

The Bad:

Starting up is the second hardest thing with moving your photography from a simply hobby to something more. The amount of money to become a legitimate name to sell items was crazy. That alone took  7% of my earnings the first year. Getting an EIN, getting the tax number, application fees, license fees, fees, fees, and more fees. I started of not thinking this was a great idea, but it was. Make it your first year goal to make double your fee's, cover any cost through the year, and you can call it a successful year because you didn't spend one dime on photography (if you don't purchase any gear).

Time is the hardest thing for me. I work a full time job that can take 40-60+ hours a week of my time, all during the day hours. Since I like to take wildlife and landscape photos, this is the peek time for me to do that. So that narrowed my time to days off and weekends. Weekends I had to balance with family and friends, and last year they got the tail-end of the deal. I did two weddings, over a dozen portrait sessions, and some volunteer work. One wedding was about a total of 50 hours for all of the editing and live coverage, so you put that on top of the 40 I already work there isn't much time for a social life. I decided weddings are not something that will be in my 2014 goal, unless it is for a direct friend.

Selling photos was the third hardest part. Pricing things is one of the trickiest things. You don't want to be to cheap to not be taken serious, and you don't want to be to expensive to not get the sale. Pricing your prints to where if someone really wants it they will buy it is the goal. I think I found the price point mid year through, but it had very little profit in it for me. This made me re-think of what I wanted to do with my photos, which is covered in the Good part!

The Good:

The portrait lens I purchased; paid off. Quarter of my camera body; paid off. Web hosting, licensing fees, and operation costs; paid off. Extra gear I purchased this year; half paid off. I made more money on this the first year than I thought I would. I was almost able to come off this year as even, and I probably could have if I didn't turn down as many gigs as I did. Look above at the time paragraph in the Bad Section above.

I had fun. Once past the bad part of getting everything started up, I had a lot of fun. I met a lot of fun people, learned more than I thought a was available, and really found something I enjoy doing. This first year was simply a test for me to see if this was something I wanted to get into, and at the end of the year to see if my interest is the same as it was a year ago. To my surprise it was not, it is actually more than what I started out with. I'm looking into buying hunting blinds, camo gear, booking cruises/tours to get out of Wisconsin photographs, and doing youtube videos on how I edit my photos. This is something I really want to do and for the longest time it was hard for me to concentrate on anything but work.

A New Year. I'm continuing to go through with selling my photographs but at a different level. I sold over a 150 prints, ranging from 4x6 all the way up to 24"x36". Those large photos are extra special to me as I know they are being hung up where more than just the family can see them. They found that photograph to be something special that they wanted on their wall to make them feel happier and anyone else that walks by and looks at it. So instead of just selling prints, I have now decided to sell this more as an art instead of as a product to get out. The smallest print will now be 8:x12" and the largest is 40"x60" and also removed a lot of the "just have it on there as an option because it's cheap".

So hopefully the above gave you an insight of what I had to go through last year and helps you decide if you are ready to take the next step in your photography. I can already see the first question; "How much time total last year did you spend on photography". Well, I was always on my computer looking at my past images and playing with them. If we put that to the side and count the actual time photography for money and for product; less than 1000 hours. Which ends up being just over 40 days out of the year, so if we round that out to actual days worked; about quarter of the year was spent on photography.


If you have any questions or comments feel free to leave them here, or visit my facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/StevenSantamourPhotography

I hope you had a great 2013 and hope you take 2014 by the grip and get your photographs you dream of! My New Years resolution is to get more wild life photos, which requires blinds and traveling.

wisconsin photos

Backing Up With Carbonite

I have come up to my 18th post, and my 1st product review! The product I am going to review ties in with my previous blog about backing up your computer. There are already tons of reviews on how to backup with Windows Backup or the Mac Time machine, so I will just cover the software I use. My choice of cloud storage and online backup; Carbonite. 

I spent many months researching online storage, doing a trial if they allowed me. Anything that didn't offer a trial I simply skipped over. These days, the best products normally have a free trial time and online storage and backups are no different. After months of comparing prices, storage size, and backup capability I ended up with Carbonite.

Overall, this is a very simple set-up and forget backup solution. To use Carbonite you must install the software used to do their backups. The program that is installed is Carbonite InfoCenter, and is the main way you will interact with it (yes there are others, which will be covered later). The installation and initial setup took under 5 minutes, and you then get to the main screen:

As you can see from the main screen, it is currently backed up 85k+ files totaling in 567GB (0.5TB) in size. It also shows that it is currently backing up 873 files that are 157 GB of total size. There is also an easy switch to turn on or off the backups. You are also constantly able to see how long your subscription lasts in the top right corner of the program.

The next screen I am going to cover is the settings screen:

Here is where you are able to control, as a "master" setting, what is being backed up and how how often. On the right of the screen you can see what it automatically backs up; Desktop, Documents, Music, Pictures, and other files that you have created.  You are also able to right-click on any file, or folder, and tell Carbonite to back it up. 

The next screen is the bread and butter of the program, the Restore. 

This is going to be the overall window that you will be using with the program as this is the section you are able to restore your files. You have three options; search, browse, and full system restore. 

Search and Restore:

This is the main screen of the search and restore section. You can simply type in the name of the file you wish to restore, explore recently deleted files, or explore previous version of files. Overall, this is very simple of running a search on your computer. For example, If i wanted to recover one of my panorama photos I could simply search for Pano:

There are many results as I have had many different versions, and for this demo I actually deleted some of the files prior to the screenshots. The files in red are those, and it shows that I have a few months to restore them if I want before Carbonite deletes it from their servers. 

Browse Your Backup:

As you can see, this view is very similar to you navigating through your computer. You would navigate to where the file was located, and you will then be able to right-click on it and either choose to restore it (puts it back to the same location) or restore it to a different location.

The last screen is exactly what it sounds, it restores all your files. 

You are also able to access your files on your phone via a free app as well as from a web browser. This allows you to download files to your phone or share images via a private link you control. This didn't sway for or against the product, but it is a nice plus to have.

Lastly, they do have some pretty good videos and how to's on their site. This software is very simple, does exactly what it says. It did take about a week and a half to backup my whole computer initially, but only took 3 minutes to restore a 5GB folder of files.  I also have an unlimited storage limit and the price is very low for this.

Make sure you look at the difference between the plans and think about what it offers. Is the extra 40-60 dollars worth the courier service? If your computer goes down, can you wait days without your computer or do you want them to ship you the recovery?  

Want to check it out, here is a link that will benefit you as well as me (refer a friend link, and we both get something out of it). 

Check out Carbonite

Backing It Up....Your Files

**Warning, Long Blog Ahead**

Photographs, accounting files, other documents, bookmarks, favorites, and saved game files. What would happen if you lost everything right this very moment? What would it do to you personally and financially if your computer was stolen, or if the hard drive failed?

These were the questions I was asking myself when I took my first wedding gig. What would happen if my computer would crash while I was editing the photos? Could I financially handle this type of a loss? What is the cost of getting a backup? Should I have multiple back-ups, onsite and offsite? How do I get started?

Well this blog is going to help you understand the importance of backing up your computer and/or your personal files.

Step 1:

Understanding what a backup is. Generally, backups have only two purposes. Recover data from accidental happenings (example: deleting the wrong file), or if your hard drive becomes corrupt, and the other is to recover data from a point earlier in time (example: if you made changes to a document and you clicked save, you could go back before the change).  Another thing to understand, backups generally (some can) do not restore your complete computer (such as the Operating system and program files) functionality.

Be sure you understand the language of your backup software. Backups that can fully restore your computer tend to reference this backup as a "Drive Image Backup". If the software only states it does file backups, assume it will only save your files and not the Operating System or programs on the computer. This also affect how much storage is needed for backups; Drive Image backups will result in much larger storage needs.

Step Two:

Understand the storage needs. The most important thing about a backup, is making sure you have the room to store them. If you plan on just doing file backups, not a Drive Image Backup, you can simply right click on the folder where the files are located and add up all of the file sizes. You can also select multiple folders by using pressing ctrl prior to each click, then right click on any of the folders and go to properties. It will give you the total amount of memory it is using.

Step Three:

Decide on storage location(s). This is almost as important as step two, as you can have all the space in the world but if you can't access the backups what good are they? You also need to decide are you going to have multiple locations of your backups and if you are going to have them offsite (different location than your computer, such as not being at your home or office). Generally, I support having both onsite and offsite backups. Online backup solutions are so inexpensive and so are onsite. Also, for onsite storage do you want to use an external hard drive? **Please note, backing up to a different partition is not the same as backing up to a different drive. If you partition a drive into four partitions (think of cutting a pie into 4 pieces), and your hard drive fails (think of your pie being thrown against the wall) all of the partitions will most likely fail with it. So you will want to save your backups to a different hard drive.  You can buy cheap internal hard drives that are easy to install in majority of your computers, use an external hard drive (though the writing speeds are normally slower) that connects directly to the computer, or use a Network Access Storage Device (NAS) that connects to your switch. Then there is also the cloud storage.

Internal Hard drive - You can normally take an old hard drive from one of your older computers and put it into your current computer. You can then use that specifically for backup purposes. Or you can purchase them new for around $65 for 1TB of storage.

External Hard Drives - For simplicity of this, you can purchase external drives for around $85 for 1TB of storage. If you have USB 3 ports on your computer, be sure to get a external drive that supports it. It will reduce your backup/restore time dramatically.

NAS- This is a bit more advanced than the other, and another huge area. For simplicity, they are generally the same as an External hard drive that connect to your switch via an ethernet cable. These generally cost $100 for 1TB of storage

Cloud (internet storage) - There are hundreds of companies that offer online storage, search around or read my blog about Carbonite (which is what I currently recommend for cloud storage).

Step Four:

Decide on your software(s). There are literally millions of titles out on the market to backup your files and computer as a whole. The price ranges can go from free-hundreds (some thousands) of dollars, depending on what you want to do.

In both operating systems, Mac and Windows, have built in back-up software. These are very basic, but very effective backup options. In Windows 7 it is called, "Back Up and Restore" and in Mac (Snow Leopard and up) it is called "Time Machine".

I personally use the Back Up and Restore along with Carbonite.

Step Five:

Put your backup plan into action.


Now that you have your files backed up, don't assume everything is good. Test your backups before trusting them. Understand how to use them before you actually need them. To do this, simply move one of your folders to another location and attempt to restore it. This way if the backups aren't working correctly, you didn't actually lose anything since you can just move the folder back.

My Current Backup set-up:

Currently, My computer is set to run backups every Tuesday and Friday with the windows backup utility. These backups are then saved on my second internal hard drive. Then on Saturday, windows backup utility backs up my second internal hard drive and saves that backup to a third internal hard drive. So, within my finger tips I have 3 locations of where the file can be found; My main hard drive, backups on the second hard drive, and a backup of the backup on my third drive.

I then use Carbonite as my off-site backups. Because the drives are all located in my apartment, you have to think of the worse. If my apartment would catch on fire, most likely all three drives are going to be worthless. To resolve that, I currently have Carbonite backing up all of my files, ALONG WITH doing a Drive Image Backup (or a mirror backup). Because of the way Carbonite works, with my Window Backups, I have 100% certainty that for over 1 month all of my files are safe and fully recoverable. I will be writing a review on Carbonite shortly.

The amount of data that I am backing up; 370 GB or .3TB of information. This does not include my operating system or program files.

Use this this link to Carbonite.