Allchorn Blog

I found out how to do this and thought it would be nice to share. So simple, if you didn’t know you’ll kick yourself

Untitled from Ross Allchorn on Vimeo.

You might already know, but I’ve taken up office space in Durban with SA Web Design. Things are great so far, and it’s nice to be working from such a professional environment.

Gone are the dogs barkling in the background, although I admit, I do miss working from home in some respects. Well, here are the photographs I took today with some captions.

Waiting room on the left and the corridor into the engine rooms on the right.

The glass meeting room.

Inside the glass meeting room. Acoustics sound like you’re talking in a tunnel.

Another photograph of the inside of the glass room left, and some Dynamo portfolio work adorning the corridor wall on the right.

My desk.

The open plan space I’m sharing with 4 others.

Chess anyone?

Sharona, one of the head developers for SA Web Design.

Fancy boardroom showing the pretty side on the left, and the business side on the right.

I found the first one interesting and the second one hilarious!

Dove Evolution

Slob Evolution

6:45am at the 3 Sisters Guest Farm. Literally seconds before the sun poked over the peak and flared out the lens.

Well, for those that care, it seems like things are on the mend. Some pretty major adjustments to what I’m used to, but things are starting to look good.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about; We’ve (Wife, 2 dogs and I) relocated 1000 miles across the country to the land of curry, bananas and Zulu warriors. Also known as Durban.

Two and a half days on the road driving between 65 and 90km/hr was quite an interesting experience. Anything faster and the 3m long trailer started to get into a bit of a speed wobble. Anti nausea tablets for the normally motion sickness prone dog worked fine. Unfortunately Bobby the 4 month old puppy also suffers from motion sickness. He puked twice.

Well, we’re here now. Thats behind us. I make it sound worse than it was. The 3 sisters guest farm was beautiful, and the 4 star B&B in Bethlehem was nice and relaxing with a great breakfast. Once the trailer was off, I spun my tyres a bit and did a bit of speeding and I felt normal again.

Already in an office

Less than a week and I’ve already set up offices in Musgrave Road through a kind offer by Kevin at SA Web Design. It’s a great help and so far they seem to be a very talented and experienced bunch. They work exclusively in ASP.net, but I’ve already done some design work for them. I’ll keep it off the portfolio until I have their permission to publish it. Some fun work though.

Some exciting prospects

Since arriving here (and in some cases even before) I’ve had some truly remarkable offers.

There is a chance I could be heading up a website design course for Hirt & Carter in their training dept. in the new year which is something I’m quite seriously considering. I think it would be truly great to introduce web standards based design to a country that is void of this as far as I’m aware. A bit more usability and semantics, and a bit less “learn Dreamweaver” mentality is just what this industry needs.

I’ve received a couple of other offers that all look great. There is one that particularly strikes my interest and they’re a company I’ve had a lot of dealings with in the past. I’ll hold back on mentioning who they are for now, but if you know me, you’ll probably already have guessed who they are.

Well, it’s good to finally have the time to write something in here, and this post pretty much sums up where I currently stand. Things are looking up.

I watched a movie the other day (Office Space) in which two guys were discussing what they wanted to do with their lives. The one said that if you want to know what you should be doing, think about what you’d do if you had enough money not to ever have to worry about it.

That thing, be it skiing, writing a book, climbing a mountain, designing the next Facebook or cooking & eating every exotic meat in the world, thats what you should be basing your life on. I must admit, it makes sense.

There was the counter argument that it’s an invalid concept as the world would suffer a shortage of janitors, street sweepers and whatever other job you couldn’t imagine anybody ever “wanting” to do. Valid point, but if you want to live the life you want to live, you should be able to get your foot in the right door if you’re passionate about something!

Living the dream

I am an absolute motorsport nut! I love screaming engines, and the thrill of the race. I’d wanted to swing my leg over a race bike and put my skills to the test against equally as tenacious competitors ever since I first went on the back of my father in law’s Yamaha FZR750.

The last 2 and a half years have given me that opportunity and through a channel most people might not have considered a viable route… I became a motorsport photographer. Did I mention I love photography too?

I won’t go into the whole wheeling and dealing I had to pull to get onto the track with my camera, and the great expense of the equipment, but suffice to say, I got there. Published in some top motoring magazines to boot.

After some marketing my name and using my website circuitchaser.com as a conduit for selling photos online, I soon had a medium in which I could offer advertising space. I cashed that in as money, or goods that went into racing. It effectively paid for my bike, suspension, leathers, helmet, boots, back protector and a lot of consumables like tyres, brake pads, race entry, fuel and oil.

Keeping things realistic

I have no delusions of grandeur. My name is Ross Allchorn, and although I race with the number 46, I am not Valentino Rossi, nor will I ever be. I’ve done the better part of a full season already, already won a race and claimed two second overall placings for the day. I hope things grow from here, but I’m a happy man.

I’m not making a living as a racer (far from it) as it’s a hellishly expensive sport, but it does provide some pocket money, and just taking pictures (as unprofitable as it is) has been great fun.

One day, in some way, I hope I can mix my passion for motorsport, photography and computers into one thing, or share them all equally with some form of synergy at least.

Since everything’s been a bit of a blur lately, I haven’t had the time to brag shamelessly about some recent work of which I am particularly proud.

The all new BMW X6

I received another photography commission for BMW SA to shoot the Cape Town launch of the brand spanking new X6. A hybrid SUV/Coupe, that has technological advancements in the industry that would make even Montoya proud to have been affiliated.

As is the nature of a BMW shoot, they treated everyone like true professionals and as usual, they supplied me with a showroom car to use for the duration. Not many people would argue with a BMW 530i for a day’s comfortable driving, shooting, driving…

Another great job for an awesome client, and I’m looking forward to seeing my pictures published all over the country.

Initial steps for a Durban Web seminar

I’ve decided to head up a bit of a web designer/developer/marketer meetup in Durban for all those in the area that wish to do a bit of networking and self promotion. It’s really early days, but as word spreads and I find out how many people we’re looking at accommodating, more details will be published here, and maybe on a little stand-alone website.

The idea is to facilitate professional freelancers and companies that do the following:

• Creatives (design, animation, 3D, writing, photography etc.)
• Developers (PHP, SQL, Javascript etc.)
• Online Marketers (SEO, SEM, link builders, writers etc.)

We can all sit and chat and pass cards, stories, clients, projects and tidbits of information back and forth. It works well in Cape Town, and no reason it can’t here in KZN.

Call me slow, or whatever. I have finally decided to give Flickr a serious chance. I’ve always known about it and had a profile on there for as long as I can remember. For some reason I always just saw it as another one of those “photo sharing” tools that were okay to post pictures of your last vacation or new toys, but not the kind of thing you want to use to promote yourself as a serious professional photographer.

Times they are a changing. Social media has grown so much over the years that things are actually turning back on themselves… in a good way. At first there was apprehension and a lot of people had the same attitude as mine on the use of things like Flickr.

Surely it devalues the industry? Yes and no. If you’re not educated enough on the topics of copyrights and image usage rights, then you could easily be taken for a ride. If you do your homework however, you have a brilliant medium to showcase your work and you can pick and choose commissions or photo sales from enquirers at your discretion. Just as you would in the world outside of social networking.

Surely you’re mixing it in amongst the amateurs and hobbyists? Yes, but is that a bad thing when you stand out like a diamond in the rough? If Sally and Bob are posting images of their doggies and kitties and trips to the dentist, and you’re posting your high quality images showing a distinct theme or pattern of your strengths… who is someone looking for a photographer likely to call?

Microstock sites are an entirely different discussion, but play a part in so far as the fact that they are slowly feeling the pinch of the professionals coming back with a vengeance on systems like Flickr.

A professional stock photographer has to sell one image hundreds or thousands of times to make the same amount of money a traditional professional photographer can make in the sale of one. Given, the systems are all set up and it’s a different business model targeting a different market segment, but rather than throwing breadcrumbs to the pigeons, I’d prefer to set up a professional shop front and entice the serious buyers in.

I’ll be integrating my photostream into this site in due course, but while I do that, please check it out on Flickr.

No rest for the wicked, or should that be “no rest for the industrious”. I’m hoping the latter is the case as I don’t feel particularly wicked. With a slow start to 2008, things have thankfully picked up quite considerably around here.

From the inception of a new professional photography service called From the Camera with my photography partner Jason Wilkinson, to the creation of Sitepress, for affordable yet professional content managed website design and the every day running of the constantly growing motorsport photography blog, Circuitchaser.com.

Yeah, I’d guess you could say I’ve been busy. Working during the week sorting and editing humungous batches of images, writing newsletters and blog posts, while setting up Sitepress and From the Camera from a business, legal and financial standpoint. No small task, and I hope it doesn’t all go unrewarded.

From the Camera – Professional Photography Service

As briefly mentioned above, Jason and I have officially teamed up in a 50/50 effort to provide a professional photography service specialising in functions, sports, weddings and food. With our experience combined, we have a considerable amount of expertise in all of those fields of photography.

I’ll be the first to admit that Jason is a more experienced photographer than me, and I am constantly learning from him and new things just about every time I go out in the field. My most recent shoot at Killarney providing me with one of my most prized collections of images thus far.

Sitepress – Affordable Content Managed Websites

Not everyone can afford to cough up the initial R10 – R15,000 required to get a custom designed website with an elegant, easy to use content management system to edit their own content. I thought it would be a good idea to offer this service including…

• a free initial consultation
• domain name registration
• web hosting with email
• custom design
• configuration
• training and support

…all on a slightly different payment model. Based on the cellphone industry’s contract system, I’ve introduced Sitepress to accommodate budgets with 4 options. You can get the site on a 24, 12 or 6 month contract, or go the whole hog with a 50% deposit and balance on completion. Pricing is all on the website, so check it out if you’re interested.

Circuitchaser.com – Motorsport Photography Blog

My baby for the last few years. Circuitchaser has grown and matured since I started it in the beginning of 2006. My grand plans of hitching a ride to the world’s MotoGP’s a little humbled by my realisation of what it costs both in time and money to get to that level, but as things progress, I know I’ll get there one day.

Concentrating mainly on local events like the Boland Bikes/RST track schools, as well as the Mike Cameron Track days, the WPMC regional racing and the occasional national or international events that come our way.

With a newsletter that now goes out weekly(ish) I’m keeping people in touch with whats happening on the coming weekend, as well as what galleries are up from the previous one. The unique gripes of HTML emails rearing their ugly heads and giving me a headache, but nothing that cannot be countered.

Well, for what it’s worth, thats what I’ve been busy with lately, and with what it all entails, I’m likely to be good and busy well into 2008. I thought it would be nice to share with you all what is on the cards, and keep you up to speed.

I’m working at the Realm Digital offices at the moment since they needed some of my skills on certain of their UK clients. A nice change of scene, and it’s always good to meet new people. The guys here all seem pretty friendly and professional.

From The Camera

Our new professional photography business is coming along strongly, with requests starting to come in and a few shoots under the new banner already under our belts. We have a likely shoot for BMW South Africa next week, which will be great and right up our alley (CircuitChaser.com). We did the M3 launch last year for them, and it all went off really well. Holding thumbs.

Every Day Cooking in South Africa

On another topic all together, my fiancee and I have started a blog site revolving around every day cooking in South Africa. The idea being to document our culinary adventures and eventually (once we have enough content) move it onto a properly hosted platform, categorise everything and possibly even publish an eBook or printed publication. If you don’t try, you’ll never know. We eat every day after all… if not why not?

I get to practice my food photography too. Does this make you hungry?

Note: This review is intended as a comparison of these two online gallery systems from a business and usability perspective. Not overly technical.

Online photo galleries. Specifically the type that allows you to sell your pictures online. This is a topic which has led me to many sleepless nights and many… many of hours of research and testing. I’ve narrowed things down to two systems, both of which are very capable, but both have their pros and cons. One is a system developed by a very talented individual called Jamie Longstaff and it’s called Pixaria. The other is an open source system quite aptly named Gallery.

I’ve had the pleasure of working on both platforms quite extensively, although admittedly I’ve spent considerably longer on Gallery (over 12,000 pictures on one of my Gallery sites). I did also spend many late nights in the Pixaria system and I’m surely set in my ways to a degree, but once I got my head around things it was business as usual.

Unfortunately my Pixaria installation on Mediatemple’s (gs) offering had a nasty reaction to their one click Wordpress installation and effectively destroyed it. Good thing I keep backups, but it still means a lot of time uploading and re-linking things. Not Pixaria’s fault, but I’ve said it to you as a warning, so be careful in this regard.

Installation

Installing both systems was relatively simple. Pixaria requires a little more technical knowledge, but is documented so well that if you can’t get it up and running using the instructions, you probably shouldn’t be installing software on a web server anyway. Any web dev worth his/her weight in salt can install either without hassle.

Both require a MySQL database and PHP to run. A few other server configurations and plugins like gdLibrary are also required… or enhance your site. Versions of which can be found in the documentation of each system respectively.

Configuration

Making your installation of a gallery system is quite a personal process. Exactly how you want your gallery to look, how many images to show per page, how you want people to order, how you want to track those orders and anything else you want to have working just the way you want it.

Configuring Pixaria is relatively straight forward. The interface is quite intuitive but I sometimes found configurations take a number of steps where in Gallery they are amalgamated into one. I found the pricing setup a bit tricky and in testing the assigning of prices to items when importing them I think I must have gone back and forth and done things a number of times to get things how I wanted them.

It has been considerably longer since I configured Gallery, but I remember it being very straight forward. After installation, you are presented with a site admin navigation on the left (default skin) and from there it just a matter of clicking around and seeing what it does. The themes in Gallery are especially easy to change as well as the plugins, all through the admin interface, which is essentially the site front end with more options.

Both systems work with a templating system with which you can customise things to your liking with the skills of a good HTML/CSS guru. If you’re not one of them, I recommend you hire one or you’ll likely break either system.

The Admin Interface

Pixaria has a separate admin interface that looks slightly different to the default theme. It’s very elegant and user friendly. Gallery has it’s admin integrated into the look of the front end. In other words, once logged into Gallery, you are seeing the same aesthetic as your visitors as well as the options to administer your content.

Personally, I quite like the Gallery method since you can edit items/albums from one location and you are essentially testing things as you work with them. The drawback to this is that you are permanently logged in and see things as an administrator. I sometimes have to log out quickly to see how it looks without the admin dropdown menus etc.

Pixaria’s admin interface has the advantage of you being able to keep two tabs open, one with the admin, and the other with the front end. For testing this is better and removes clutter from an administratory(sic) front end.

Adding Albums of Images

I use the same method of adding images with both systems and that is to first upload via FTP to a designated folder on the server, and then have the software process the files (create thumbnails etc) on the server. Both seem to work equally as well, but in Pixaria, you are limited to I think 100 images per batch. Since I sometimes add up to and over 300 images per set, this posed a problem.

In Gallery, if you set your timeout for server processes high enough (quite techie this, but ask your host/developer), the number of pictures is incredibly high. I have not tested how high it can go, but I’m comfortable with about 350 images at 640×48px.

I’ve got the process of adding albums and images down to an art in Gallery and once I’ve sorted my images and uploaded, it literally takes a couple of minutes to create a new album, give it a name, some keyword tags and import a couple hundred images. I found the process on Pixaria a bit more laborious and the limit of 100 for processing really made things take longer on larger albums.

In Pixaria’s defense here, the (gs) server was ridiculously slow (not the software, I tested) so my patience was already stressed to the limit.

Copyright & Selling The Pictures

Selling images on the web. Where do I start? Some people think my pictures should be free for them to download. Sorry, I have to eat and as George Bush says “put food on my family” (honestly). As such, the images are watermarked to prevent theft and I offer the ordering of images using a shopping cart, credit card payment facility and other methods of payment. Through bandwidth restrictions in this godforsaken country (Hellkom), I don’t put the full size images on the server as I’d pay through the nose for the privilege, and if I went for international hosting, it would be tooooo sloooow for my market.

Watermarking in Gallery requires me to pre-process the images in something like Acdsee and then upload them. A serious bonus in Pixaria is that the system watermarks the large versions for you. This is great if you want people to be able to download the un-watermarked image. Call it unmonitored sales (no human intervention).

Both systems have the ability for a shopping cart and eCommerce, although in Pixaria it is by default (it is it’s core competency as far as I can make out) and Gallery as a plugin.

Currency options are limited in Pixaria, and I had to change the AUS$ in the code to an R symbol to represent Rands. Not ideal, but it worked. The Gallery plugin that I’ve been using actually uses this method but more generically and doesn’t require a hack. For proper eCommerce, I assume the Pixaria system can face problems here to site owners with odd currencies like mine. Luckily, we do things slightly differently.

I have a “checkout to email” option which leads the customer to our payment page using Gallery and I managed to configure things quite similarly in Pixaria. One thing I like about Gallery is that I edited the email template to show all the details, including thumbnails of the images and instructions for payment. Pixaria is more web based and just sends a brief notification email for most functions of the site. I find it preferable to have the email to print and file like an invoice. Call it a hard-copy.

On mentioning this aspect to Jamie from Pixaria, he said he will look into it and shouldn’t be too large a customisation. Being a one man band, it would be paid work (I assume), and nobody will know the system as well as he. In Gallery you’ll likely find a few people bidding on your project if you post it in rentacoder.com. Beware though. Some of them are charlatans. I won’t get into that now.

Overall, I think the Pixaria pricing structure for your images/products is superior, but with some customisation you can reach your goals with Gallery too.

Price

This will come as a surprise to people who think the freedom in Open Source means you don’t pay for anything, but I think Gallery properly installed, configured and set up will come at a higher price than Pixaria’s minimal $195 (US).

My reasoning is that for you to purchase, install and make some minor tweaks in Pixaria, you should be up and running within a couple of days if you do things methodically and just use your nut. Although Gallery is free and the installation process is simpler, your time configuring, installing plugins, revising the looks to suit what you need and setting up all the shopping cart functionality, your time, or money spent on someone else’s is going to be more.

I would say, the differences will be marginal, and Pixaria’s code does seem to be more elegantly written. I am no programmer, and as such, it’s much of a muchness… if it works, it works.

Conclusion

Who is Pixaria for?
If you’re a professional photographer who wants to sell pictures online. Not for $1 per image, but more in the region of 50 or 100 times that and even needs to have the ability for clients to request a quote for using an image in a publication or ad campaign, then Pixaria is probably your best option. Your ability to customise will be inhibited, but with a built in blog system, if you’re just selling pictures, you should do so very effectively using Pixaria.

Who is Gallery for?
If you’re the person above, but want the ability to change almost anything (for a fee) then you’re possibly better off with Gallery. It integrates with an number of other open source systems (Joomla, Wordpress etc.) and a developer is a bid request away on rentacoder. It has it’s pitfalls, but with the right person/team, you can mold Gallery into what you want.

Both systems are brilliant, and as I mentioned, I am using and intend to likely continue using both of them. This comparison is hastily written and if you spot any errors or oversights, please feel free to let me know in the comments.