Jared E. Bendis

What to do with all those photos?

I recently was on Applause with Dee Perry (link coming soon) talking about what to do with all those photos you took over the holidays.
This is a quick recap with some helpful links.

Edit Your Photos!

First, you have too many photos – it’s great that you took so many but now its time to separate the good from the bad.
If they are blurry they are garbage – you aren’t going to unblur them – just get over it and move on.
You don’t need expensive software to edit the individual photos – there are plenty of free online photo editors out there like http://pixlr.com/.

A few pointers:
Rotate! With a little practice you can straighten most photos.
Crop!  I always tell people that inside of every photo is a better photo and its your job to find it.
Also, special FX does not equal art.  Yeah it can be fun but is it really making something good or just something “different”.

Digital Picture Frames

Digital picture frames are more than just good presents!  Get one for yourself to display your own photos!

Post Them Online

Don’t email your photos, instead create a gallery or a slideshow on a site like Flickr.

Create Prints and Canvas

ImageKind is a great service where you can have your pictures printed on canvas or art paper and even matted and framed. They are not the cheapest service but they create real quality results.

Create Stuff

CafePress allows you to turn any picture into – well almost anything – clothes – mugs – clocks – iPhone cases – you won’t believe all the stuff they let you turn your pictures into!

Create Photo Books

Photo Books are a lot of fun – and much easier to create than you might imagine! All you need to do is upload the pictures to the website and make a few choices.  I am listing three different book making companies. SnapFish is good for short photo books (and other things too).  If you want very large photo books you can use  Blurb – they are a great company if you want more pages, larger format, or high end paper.  LuLu is another company for making Photo Books but also cookbooks and even that novel you are secretly writing.

My Cappadocia Examples

Throughout the episode I showed various samples from my day in Cappadocia (and you don’t have to purchase anything I am just showing you my examples in context).

This is my Cappadocia Flickr Slideshow

This is my ImageKind store for my Cappadocia images on print or canvas

This is my CafePress store with stuff that can be made with my photo of Uchisar Castle

While I showed a book made by SnapFish I have a much larger format version of my Cappadocia book sold at Blurb

If you like my photos you can see more of them on Etsy

I hope this gives you some ideas – go out there and have fun taking your photos to the next level!

Jared