Photo Project:
Most of my photos come direct from suppliers and since they tend to be pretty good I have always neglected photo taking. However there are times when I need to take photos of my own. This is usually because the supplier does not provide one, the photo is of a similar but not quite of the same item, or it is the same item but a different color. I believe I have managed to take some Ok photos but even the good ones (see here and here) are too dark.
Since I really don't have the room to setup a proper photo taking area, I decided to post a listing to photograph 5 products on Elance to see how much it would cost to have someone take photos for me.
I was a little disappointed that there were only two bids on the listing but the requirement that the photographer be in the United States (since the products would have to be shipped back and forth) probably limited the potential bidders. One bidder shot a sample photo for me using a cable had around the house. The sample was quite good but the price he wanted ($25 per product) was too high, at that price I would have to shelve the idea completely so I went with the lower bid ($10 per product, about $12.42 per product after shipping charges).
One of the reason I wanted to run a small test project was to work out the kinks and to make sure a larger project would actually work. Some of the issues that came up:
- Full res photos are not needed (they were almost 6MB each). The photographer will instead provide slightly compressed images (about 600Kb each) that I will crop, size and compress to my liking.
- I do not need the photographer to watermark the images. Since I had to to crop and resize the images the watermark the photographer was adding was getting cut off so in the future I will just add it myself.
- Have the photographer provide the images in a zip file, downloading them from Elance is a real pain (you have to do it one by one).
- This could get quite expensive so only products I have a steady supply of and that do not change their look often are worth paying having photographed. This can be a bit of a problem since I usually don't find out about a change until I get a shipment in and inspect it.
- At best this is just a temporary solution until I have the room implement a proper photo taking setup due to the expense.
Overall I think the results of the test were quite good and I have listed another project for the photographer to take pictures of 21 products. This covers most of the products that I absolutely need pictures for (either because I am currently using my own dark pictures or because the photo is a different color than the actual product). The cost of this second project should run about $7.25 per product after shipping back and forth so the price is more reasonable than the test project but still too high to jusity having all my products photographed.
You can view the five photos from the first project here, here, here, here and here.
Logo Project:
Something else I have neglected for some time is a proper logo for use on my website, with my eBay store and on business cards so I posted another listing requesting a logo with my website name in it, a logo with my website name but without the .com (since I can't use it on eBay) and a banner that incorporated the logo for the header on my new website.
The bids on this rolled in pretty quick (a total of 19) and ranged from $55 to $200 dollars. I looked over each bidders profile to view their portfolio and get a sense of their general style. After a couple of days I narrowed it down to two bidders who sent me sample logos I liked.
One bidder was simply going to repurpose a existing logo he did for a company that went out of business. Aside from the potential copyright issues here I also thought he wanted to charge too much for changing a few colors and text on a logo (I do however give him credit for telling me what he planned to do up front) .
The other bidder had sent me a few samples that included a logo with a s-video connector in it that caught my attention (none of the portfolios I looked at had anything like it).Within a few hours of selecting him as the winner I was sent several samples to choose from and request revisions on. I ended of asking several questions and requesting 3 revisions and the project was complete in about 5 days.
I like the end result but I think I probably overpaid but the final logo it is far better than anything I could come up with (i.e. just some generic 3d text with my eBay name). You can see the final logo below.
