What do you think - would anyone buy this on a card?

Told you I was having too much fun with those little Japanese dolls ...

So that's what I saved them for.

I was cleaning out the basement last week and found some little paper weeble-wobble dolls we bought when we lived in Japan.  

My first thought upon finding them?  Grab the camera, I bet I can sell pics of those!

Even my crusty FIL approved

The new GSees planning calendar met with approval from all and sundry at my in-laws' house this weekend, so it will be up in the shop early this week.  Mark your calendars (once you buy them from me, of course!)

Finding inspiration everywhere

I hate it when I'm on vacation and don't remember until we're halfway through an attraction that I'm supposed to be looking for material for my GSees shop.  Oops.  At least I found a couple things while we were at Hagley Museum ...

inspired by textures

We spent yesterday at the San Diego Zoo, and I ended up filling up my camera's SD card with shot after shot of the textures you see on all the animals.  I've got zebra zigzags, rhino rumples, giraffe globs, and llama lashes.  I've got hibiscus flowers ad nauseum.  And I have approximately 400 shots of a mother flamingo feeding her chick, thanks to the other birds who would not move their butts out of the frame so I could get a clean shot.

Be on the lookout for new Gsees photos soon, as I am chock full of good material (once I get it edited and color corrected).

That sound you hear is me pounding my head on the desk

As I think I've mentioned before, I have opened a second shop on etsy to sell my photos and related products. If you're not reading this through a feed reader, you can check out some of my new items over there <-- on the sidebar of the blog.

Getting this sucker ready to go has taken way more time and effort than I expected. After all, I already took the pictures - how hard could it be to get them listed? I didn't want to bother just listing one or two photos - nothing looks sadder than a store that's practically empty - so I wanted to be ready to populate it quickly when I was ready to go. That means that for the past few months, I've been going back through every digital photo I can locate, copying the ones I thought might be worthy of selling, and then winnowing the selection down to something reasonable.

I've been researching other etsy sellers to determine pricing, and shipping costs, and what sizes and products I might want to carry. I've been playing around with some different ways to present the photos, things that might set me apart from the 14 million other people shilling photos on etsy.

I've been editing the photos, cropping and color correcting and adding watermarks to keep the deadbeats from stealing my stuff.

And I've been procrastinating. The period of uncertainty at the beginning of any project is the worst for me ... I hate not knowing what I'm doing, I hate having to make decision after decision relating to things I know little about. If I could wave a magic wand and it could be DONE, that would be so much less stress-inducing. But that, of course, isn't possible, so instead I've just been ignoring it. I've been getting lots of knitting done, and cooking, and the house has been pretty clean for the past couple of months.

Until last week, when I realized that the two hours each week that I'm stuck sitting at the nature center while my daughter takes a science class is the perfect time for me and my laptop to have some quality time together. Two hours each week when I can focus, without any phones ringing or kids calling or wash that needs to be done.

I've been getting lots done, but my god, is it tedious.

open picture

edit to 5x7

correct color

save file

add watermark

shrink file

resave file

open etsy listing

copy and paste most of the description

manually select pretty much all the same options for the rest of the listing where I can't cut and paste

import pictures

save listing

repeat.

I just took a bathroom break to relieve the monotony - that's how boring it is.

But at the same time, it's really cool to go back through the files, picking the best of the best, seeing all the places we've been and things we've seen. Even if I never sell a single print, I've got some damn fine photos, and that makes me proud.