Making Photo Cards II

Well, I wrote about making photo cards and this week I picked up the stamp for the cards with my photography name and Website address (URL), and so I'm packaging them into the clear sleeves and 10 into box sets with a letter of thanks and explanation. It's simple hand intensive and very tedious work, but watching movies helps, especially ones like Walli-E and the like.

I love animated movies like Cars, Ice Age (the series), Monster's Inc, and others. They always sound mindless but they're both children and adult's movies. And it fits pieces of my sense of humor, part Gary Larson, part Robin Williams and part Will Rogers. The reality and truth expressed with and through humor. As I tell folks, one of my favorite responses is by Foghorn Leghorn when things go wrong, "It's a joke, son!"

Not that it changes anything, it just gives it perspective. It wasn't said or meant to be serious, just tongue-in-cheek observations. Anyway, watching them lhelps offset the tedium packaging the cards. But it also allows me to focus on the cards for any bad ones, namely when the heat press dry mount tissue didn't stick and the print peels off the card. So far with just over a third of the nearly 300 packaged, I'm running about a 5% failure of the cards, which are either reheated or mounted again with new tissue.

Anyway, the thought is simply if you decide to produce your own cards, be prepared for the work. In the end though, my cards will be my work, warts and all. They're not bad, even quite good according to my customers, and always personal and handmade. That's what I like in the end. It's just me and my work there. This isn't new. Go to arts and crafts fairs and festivals and you'll see many booths of artist and the occasional photographer.

You can always tell the photographer who printed and produced their own cards and prints and the one who had a staff or a lab do the work. There's a small obvious difference. That's the neat thing about the work, choices, both for the photographer and the customer. And that's all I strive for with my photos and cards. And now it's back to work.