Fly me to the moon...

Just a quick blog post today, with two subjects: business cards and the moon!

Business Cards
As I mentioned last time, I have a dealer account that allows me to access wholesale pricing for business cards. They are rather excellent, and very cheap! So I thought I'd help out by offering my blog readers a deal on full-colour cards.

This is my new card, front and back.

Believe it or not, you can get 1000 cards printed in full colour on both sides of heavy glossy stock, for about $20. How incredible is that? Here's what you have to do:

• You can provide complete artwork in a variety of formats,
• You can supply a couple of pictures and tell me what the type should say and look like, or
• You can use my images as the background for your cards.

If you supply everything, all ready for the press, it's $20. Plus taxes and shipping if applicable, of course. If you want me to do the layout and tweak things to look good, we can talk about how much my time on the computer is worth. If you want to use my images, that would also be included in the hourly fee.

I did this card for John. This is a great picture he took in Yellowstone and no, 555-1212 is NOT his phone number! That is his photo gallery, though: go have a look and enjoy! Took me less than an hour to set this up, including the back of the card (which I didn't show here).

This is next-to-nothing, folks. You could have cards showing that you're a camera club member, or a motorcycle group denizen, or for your work or just to tell people how to find you online... possibilities are endless at this price.

If  you're interested, I'll supply more information. I don't want to go on too long here, and bore half my readers to death! Email me.

The moon
There was an awful lot of hype about the "Super Moon" this Saturday. The full moon coincided with it being at perihelion — it's closest distance from the Earth, so it was bigger and brighter than normal. Big deal. I have lots of pictures of the moon and I'll bet you do to.

But as someone else wrote in his blog or on Google+ today (might have been NAPP's RC Concepcion), the moon is a magnet for photographers. Everyone likes taking pictures of it and if it's up there, we do our damnest to include it in our shots.

But hey, I'm a photographer, and the moon was full and the sky was clear (at least for a while) and... I was out for dinner and missed moonrise and it was cloudy at 5am (I think. I rolled over and went back to sleep!) so I didn'tget those shots. I did get a few, though. But I tried to be different.

All of the illumination in this image was from the moon. Well except for a bit of that light green at lower right which was from a light in the parking lot next door.

Again, all the light was from the moon. I thought the cloud formations were more interesting than the usual man-in-the-moon type photo. OK, OK, I cheated and comp'd in the turkey vulture which I had shot earlier in the day. I did do a comp of the full moon, properly exposed, with the bird flying across it; just like a million other moon shots I've seen.

Here's one that's just a little bit different:

Photomicrograph of the ebola virus. OK, This is actually the moon. One of those regular telephoto shots. Then I started playing in Photoshop and used the 3D Repoussé function and then made a layer on which I used the liquify filter, and the smudge tool and... just for fun! Originally I started making it out of green cheese, but I liked the orange so I left it that way.

I should be shooting some different stuff for me this weekend, but I'll leave you hanging!

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