Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: All is well that end's well with Spam

This is topic All is well that end's well with Spam in forum Film-Yak at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.

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Posted by Claude S. Ayakawa (Member # 1401) on 06-13-2003, 12:06 PM:

A few weeks ago, some of you were surprised and a few were upset that I had responded to a Spam offer and bought the product or in this case, service.

For some time now, I have not been happy with my previous business website because I was not getting the kind of response I was expecting from it and was planning to make some major changes. One possibility was to scrap the site and find a new web designer to create a new one for me. As it turned out, many designers I had contacted wanted too much money that was way beyond my budget and I had to pass. Just when I had thought I had to either shut it down or pay the extra amount of money for a newly designed site, I received this email offer from a woman in Nova Scotia, Canada with an offer for a six page website for $200.00. At first I thought it was too good to be true but after talking with Lucie, I had the feeling that I can trust her. The relantionship I had with Lucie during the past week and a half as we worked together with our emails and telephone conversations has been wonderful and it paid off yesterday when my new website went on line for the very first time. Athough the site is now up, it will take at least another week before it will be finished to my satisfaction because there are a few things I wanted changed and Lucie told me that she will be more than happy to do it. Because I wanted more than a six page website, Lucie was good enough to oblige by charging me an extra hundred dollars for the extra pages which I thought was more than fair. If you are interested in seeing my new site, here is the link--
http://www.claudesphoto.com

As I had mentioned on the other thread regarding Spam, I usually ignore and discard the majority of Spams I receive every day but there have been a few that had interested me and I did respond like the website offer and to this date, I have always received satisfaction and was never taken advantage. Although I have had no problems with some Spam offers, do not get me started with Telemarketers who have got me out of taking a shower or out of bed in the middle of the night to try to sell me land on the big island of Hawaii in the middle of a lava field. Grrrr.

-Claude

Posted by Paul Mayer (Member # 355) on 06-13-2003, 01:50 PM:

And here I thought this was going to be a thread about Hawaiian cuisine featuring Spam. Or at least some dimly remembered Monty Python sketch... [Big Grin]

Spam musubi no ka oi! [beer]

Posted by Claude S. Ayakawa (Member # 1401) on 06-13-2003, 02:15 PM:

Now that you mention it , I think I will have a Spam Musubi for lunch today, Paul. Yum Yum! [Smile]

-Claude

Posted by Gerard S. Cohen (Member # 994) on 06-13-2003, 05:44 PM:

Dear Claude,
Congratulations on your exquisite new website!
I like its clean, uncluttered and modern look. I perused all of your varied categories, which each reveal superb artistry and marketing skill.
I was momentarily confused by the title "Seniors", expecting portraits of elderly savants, until I realized the word was used in a school (HS? College?) sense.
Your art is far above the commercial portrait and wedding photography I am used to seeing.
I see complete studio control combined with the most beautiful natural settings. I have never seen fitness/bodybuilding studies made with such naturalness of pose and background. Or abstract nature studies with colors like that of the lava flow mountains.
The site was easy to navigate, though without the usual "Home" button. I didn't need one, as the progression from shot to shot kept me mesmerized to the last.
--Gerard

Posted by Claude S. Ayakawa (Member # 1401) on 06-13-2003, 11:29 PM:

Hi Gerard,

Thank you very much for your very kind comments about my new website. I have already started to receive positive results and I know the site should help me with my business much more than my previous website. Even Paul, my friend who created my original site free of charge as a favor to me was also impressed when he saw the site.

-Claude

Posted by Per Hauberg (Member # 529) on 06-14-2003, 03:45 AM:

-Photography done right meets Website done right !

Worth every cent.

As before, i'm especially impressed by Your Nature photos - they are simply stunning.

And i do smile a bit by one of Your restoration pics: I don't know, if this is the same in America, but in Denmark there is great difference between taking a wife to the right or the left hand [Wink]

Once again, Claude: Thanks for sharing !

Per

Posted by Carl Martin (Member # 1146) on 06-14-2003, 05:39 AM:

and i am very pleased with my inkjet cartridges and my new penis.

i can't believe i wrote that.

carl

Posted by Per Hauberg (Member # 529) on 06-14-2003, 06:30 AM:

Carl the Spammer:

Mind the fan !
[Big Grin]

Per

Posted by Gerard S. Cohen (Member # 994) on 06-15-2003, 09:06 PM:

quote:
And i do smile a bit by one of Your restoration pics: I don't know, if this is the same in America, but in Denmark there is great difference between taking a wife to the right or the left hand

Per, could you please explain the difference? I think there must be some protocols, especially for wedding and other formal pictures, and of course in paintings or photos of royal families,
but I haven't any notion of how to photograph groups of two or more so that the conventions are observed, and the symbolism
is correct.

I read a book once on the psychology of photograph analysis,
based on amateur snapshots, where relationships of family members could sometimes be discerned through such study. But how does a studio photographer know how to group his subjects for the culturally proper effect?

I asked a friend, a retired commercial photographer, who said the traditional pose was the wife seated, and the husband
(usually the taller one) standing behind her. That removes the left--right problem. But perhaps you [and Claude] could reveal more?

(When you use the terms left and right, please indicate whether you mean from the subject's or the photographer's point of view.)

Thanks--Gerard

Posted by Claude S. Ayakawa (Member # 1401) on 06-17-2003, 12:04 AM:

Hi Gerard,

Sorry for not responding to your post sooner. Ever since I can remember after learning from my peers that a woman must always be to the man's right when photographing couples. I think this rule has to do with established western etiquette procedures. I have never questioned it and have always posed my couples that way except for some rare occasion when I had to put the man to the right of the woman such as the portrait of the Japanese bride and groom in their kimono on the Wedding page at my website.

-Claude

Posted by Per Hauberg (Member # 529) on 06-17-2003, 04:51 AM:

Gerard:

I will have to come back to You as soon as i have found and translated an official note on this.

In the meantime, i must point out, that my smile was not there because of the kimono wedding picture, Claude is mentioning, where i think the placement of bride and groom must absolutely be a matter of artistic composing of the motive. The Picture is just so beautiful. I was talking about one of those fine restoration-works, where the "before" and the "after" picture let the man and woman shift place... I just couldn't help smiling and mentioning it. Anyway, -as i have already mentioned earlier, i admire Claude's work, as we have been presented to it in these forums as well as in Claude's old and new website, which i have been studying with interest. I once asked Claude here, if he would tell about his experiences, Hasselblad against digital photography --if the digital would stand the distance, when making poster-size blow-ups. -So, Claude, if You are with us here, and i'm not on "ignore", i still hope for a word sometime about this...

Per

Posted by William Leland III (Member # 1400) on 06-17-2003, 09:28 AM:

Claude, very nice web site, very easy, clear and understandable. I too, thought Seniors meant old people. You do very nice work. After looking at you photo's have you ever photographed anybody famous?? Some of those girls are hot, you need more pics of them.... [Big Grin]

Just one problem, when you click on next pic button, if it was a different size the "next" button would move, you would have to move the mouse back and forth, to keep clicking.

Posted by Michael Schaffer (Member # 1204) on 06-17-2003, 01:40 PM:

William III, I found that difficult too. My mouse is so big I can only move it with both hands, so when I visited Claude`s site I constantly had to drag it across the table.

Posted by Claude S. Ayakawa (Member # 1401) on 06-17-2003, 03:32 PM:

Per,

Thank you for your nice comments about my images on my new website. I have used Hassleblad cameras during almost all of my photographic career and at one time owned four of them. The first portrait of the family of four in white in front of the mountain and another one of a family of four all wearing blue denim at my new website were photographed with a Hassleblad camera. Very much like Akira Kurosawa who shot almost all of his movie scenes with a telephoto lens, all of my portraits are photographed with a telephoto lens. The lens I used on the Hassleblaad was the 150mm Zeiss Sonar f4. I started to phase out the Hassleblad around 1999 when I found that I had much better creative control with the 35mm format because of the large selection of lenses I could use plus the availability of excellent film material from Eastman Kodak and Fuji. For my negative work, I favor Kodak's Portra NC and I like Fuji's chrome film such as Velvia and Provia. There was a time when I had owned and used all of Nikon's pro cameras up to the F-4 but now only use a F-100 and a N-90. I used to work with 135mm and 180mm Nikon f 2.8 lenses but they were stolen and I have not replaced them but got in their place a Tamron 28-105 f 2.8 zoom and I am very happy with it and it has become my primary lens now for over a year now. I am very proud to say that all of the images on my senior page was either photographed with a 35mm film camera or a digital camera in a Nikon housing. The first image on my fitness page of my personal trainer at my gym in the ancient Hawaiian attire in red was photographed on 35mm film. I once made a 30 X40 print of this image and it was beautiful although a little grainy. The largest print I made from my digital file shot with my Fuji S-1 Finepix digital camera was a 20 X 24 but I have seen a six foot print but I was not impressed. There will come a time when digital will surpass film but at the moment like motion pictures, film is much better.

William & Michael,

I agree with you about the need to scroll down the pictures with the mouse with varios images at my site but the problem was something I could not avoid without reducing the size of all of my vertical images which I have no intention of doing. Unlike both of you, others I had talked to about the situation had no problem. Beside having a super large mouse Michael, could it be that your right hand is very lazy? [Smile]

-Claude

[ 06-17-2003, 06:00 PM: Message edited by: Claude S. Ayakawa ]

Posted by Scott Norwood (Member # 30) on 06-17-2003, 05:50 PM:

Claude -- I think we'll have to agree to disagree about the spam issue, but I'll agree with the others that your photographs look great. I'll have to visit Hawaii someday...the scenery looks beautiful. For the film-originated pictures, did you scan prints or original negatives/slides? What type of scanner did you use?

Posted by Claude S. Ayakawa (Member # 1401) on 06-17-2003, 11:14 PM:

Yes, Scott

I agree about the Spam issue on another thread and I am very sorry for coming down hard on you.

Almost all of the film originated portraits were scanned from the original negatives and the Nature pictures were scanned mostly from 35mm transparencies. I scanned all of my recent 35mm portrait negatives myself but the older medium format Hassleblad and RB-67 negatives were scanned by my professional color lab because my scanner can only do 35mm. The older 'Nature' images were Kodachrome originals and the more recent pictures were scanned from Fuji RDP. Velvia and Provia slides. I have a excellent film scanner and it is the Kodak Professional 3600. I love this scanner and it has served me very well. All of my scanning was done with a iMac G-4 computer and any corrections was done with Photoshop.

-Claude

Posted by John Pytlak (Member # 331) on 06-18-2003, 07:42 AM:

Kodak Professional Film Scanners:

http://www.kodak.com/global/en/professional/products/scannersIndex.jhtml

BTW, Kodak scanning technology is used for digital mastering and effects for most motion pictures, such as in the Thomson Spirit DataCine:

http://www.kodak.com/country/US/en/motion/products/v2/sehlin04.shtml

http://www.cinesite.com/la/scanrec/filmscan.html