Every once in awhile I’ll go back and kind of overhaul my sites, and this weekend it was my photo site’s turn. I went and added some new photos [mostly to the headshot section, the rest is later] and cleaned everything else up. It’s also the last site to be moved over from Dreamhost to Media Temple, which I’m pretty pleased I did rather seamlessly. I’m pretty happy with the new update and it’s work a look if you’re pretty bored or at work, or both.

Folks, we’ve now upgraded to a full domain…the day has come. For all your blogging goodness you can now read it here at iangrantphotography.com.

Hey everyone, Sorry I haven’t been posting a whole lot of actual text content lately- Here’s what’s been going on.

- Been having tons of wedding photo meetings, booked some really great venues. People seem to be hiring me for really scenic locations so that is awesome for me.

- Sold a Salton Sea photo twice today to the same company via Alamy. It looks like its going in some college textbook and they bought both a two-page spread as well as a 1/8 page size. REALLY COOL!

- Been editing Ireland photos as lightspeed pace. They are far better than expected which makes me really happy. I’m trashing off many of the old 2005 ones on iTravelStockPhoto.com which also makes me happy.

- This weekend we are traveling to Torrey Pines down by San Diego to do a little shooting.

- Over break I managed to get Tanya and I bumped off our flight home from Philly so now we both have $300 travel vouchers on American. I’m thinking I’m going to travel to Denver in April/May for a long weekend. If I had more time off I found a flight to Alaska for like $450 in July…god it’s so tempting.

- I figured I needed to do something with my domain iTravelogue.com, so I’m making it a photoblog. I found a great new wordpress theme for it, and have been posting up Ireland photos as a test. Check it out!

- I bought a Pantone Huey Pro monitor profiler and am really impressed with it so far. Looks like my Apple Cinema Display had a strange green hue to it, now I just have to get used to the monitor colors again.

With the new wedding photography business picking up, I needed new business cards. Here’s my newly designed cards, minus the rounded corners that I paid extra for. They feature the latest wedding images I shoot at Brian and Veronica Roof’s wedding in the Bahamas:

If you knew me from back in the day, you knew running my website Cheapfree.com was one of the big things I did. I started it back in 1996 and it got some really good press in Mademoiselle, Netguide, MSNBC and a bunch of other magazines- it also got up to around 1.1 million hits on it before I canned the project. Now that the wonderful Wordpress is out and I’ve resurrected the project and decided to give it a second go.

If you like free samples, deals, and that sort of thing- feel free to check out my free stuff site. It’s pretty fun and you can get samples of Dove soap, make money for filling out surveys, get free diaper bags, etc.

LOS ANGELES — A ground squirrel in the Stoneyvale Picnic Area of the Angeles National Forest tested positive for plague, Los Angeles County health and U.S. Forestry Service officials said Thursday.

The squirrel was one of a dozen captured in traps on July 10. The picnic area, located five miles north of La Canada-Flintridge, is expected to remain closed for at least 10 days as crews dust for fleas and monitor other squirrels.

“Plague is a bacterial infection that could be transmitted to humans through the bites of infected fleas. However, it is very important for the public to know that there have only been four cases of human plague in Los Angeles County residents since 1984, none of which were fatal,” said Dr. Jonathan Fielding, the county’s public health director.

Two ground squirrels found in the same picnic area tested positive for plague in 1996, as did a squirrel found in an adjacent campground in 1995.

read more…
[img by flickr user: chrysophylax]

Just got this in from Dreamhost, my host of distinctphoto, itravelstockphoto, etc.
If you’re looking for a new web host, you should totally give them a whirl- I’ve been with them for the last 5 or so years and love them.

We’ve calculated the impact of everything that DreamHost uses and leaves behind in the course of our daily work. All of the resources that we use - paper in the office, electricity for our servers, even the gas in our cars that bring us to the office - leaves behind some kind of soul-sucking residue in the world.

When we learned that running DreamHost generated as much carbon dioxide as 545 average-size homes we realized we had to do something.

Renewable Energy Credits
Putting a price on carbon output is just one way to help make the world a better place. It’s a first step towards true energy sustainability. Organizations large and small are constantly working on reducing their environmental emissions. When they do so a neutral third party then steps in to verify the reduction and issues what are known as “Renewable Energy Credits”.

We’ve purchased enough of these credits - which are retired after purchase and not resellable - to account for our energy usage. The proceeds of these credit purchases are then put toward funding further emission reduction and renewable energy projects. We are not currently able to actually power our servers with the wind or the sun, but this is the next best thing! Our Renewable Energy Credits (RECs) have been certified by Green-e.

Carbon Credits
We’ve also purchased carbon credits from The Gold Standard. These credits come directly from reductions that meet standards established by the Kyoto Protocol and offset emissions from projects that would otherwise not exist.

What else can we do?
We’re always looking for more ways to reduce our resource usage around the office and the data center. We use coffee cups made from fully renewable resources. In the last couple of years we’ve also been deploying many more servers with notoriously power-efficient AMD processors. As processor and server technology continues to evolve we’ll follow the path of power efficiency. It just makes sense!

I’ve been working on getting my distinctphoto.com site back up and running. Tanya is taking over the money aspect of the photo business so she’s having me update the whole site [which was pretty outdated]. So for the last few days I updated the fine-art section + the headshot section, both making the process easier to buy or sign up for services. The wedding section is going to get a pretty big makeover courtesy of Tanya’s writing so that should happen hopefully next week. I also posted a few new images from the Big Sur trip a week ago on there if you want a sneak peak. I’m pretty fond of the seagull photo.

Now you can get your daily / weekly / hourly fix of ‘Broken Camera’ on everyone’s favorite rss blog readers such as Bloglines, Google Reader, My Yahoo, etc by clicking one of the fancy buttons on the right bar of the blog. It took me all day to get these damn things up, mostly because my cache was in overdrive but nevertheless it’s up. Enjoy!

-ian

Just finished going through the few thousand photos I took on the France trip, that was a real nightmare but somehow fun to get them all down to a manageable number and then edit by hand the ones I like. I’ll release them all on the site slowly but surely, some fun ones to post up. I think you’ll like them.

I’ve been trying to get Tanya to finish the damn travelogue up, but she’s taking her time and not getting it done. If you would like to remind her for me, message her blog here. Lots of good stories from France, so far that haven’t seen the light of day.

I also broke down and upgraded my PC/Mac transitional computer MacMini to a much more robust and capable MacPro tower. I am very excited about this arriving and got it for a decent price after $150 rebate. To afford this fine piece of work I’m using the money from selling my AlienBees strobes [which regrettably I’m selling after not using them nearly as much as I had hoped] and the deposit from a July wedding photo-shoot in the Bahamas. Cool Beans!

more fun news! this holiday season if you watch the home and garden network [HGTV] keep an eye out for a christmas themed mastercard commercial- a couple of my photographs [at least one from venice] are making a guest appearance!

you can now comment without logging in, we’ll see how bad spam gets before this changes. if you want to see private posts, ala livejournal you will need a free account- since posting files is so easy with this thing, maybe i’ll post up some raw files and you all can have your way with them…we’ll see.