Allison and I decided to pick two album styles—a modern album with photos flush with the paper and a more traditional matte-mount album. Almost everyone does flush-mount albums (I like to call them yearbook style), but the company that wowed us the most was KISS Wedding Books. Every album is handmade with the best leathers and come in an array of colors and sizes ranging from the tiny 4×4 Lil’ Kisses up to 12-inch square.

The albums feature super-thick photo paper and a lay-flat spine guarantees that two-page photo spreads will be fully visible. These are stunning heirloom pieces that will last generations, and are backed by KISS’s lifetime guarantee. While we went with Forbidden Green for our sample, KISS has a number of other colors available including: Virgin White, Sultry Blue, Smoldering Brown, Passion Pink, Voluptuous Black, and Redlight Red

Every album that we sell will be custom designed by me to your specifications. Check out the photos below for a more detailed look and shoot us an email to get your album designed today.

After searching dozens of design sites, I stumbled across BluDomain and was really excited to find a bevy of stunning photography templates at a really affordable cost. The team set it up in three days and I had most of my content uploaded and ready to “go live” two days after that. The trade off is that the search engine traffic to the main site has crashed significantly. I knew this was going to happen, which is why we are going to do our best to make this blog a seamless part of the site and try to generate SEO between the main site and the blog.

Truth be told, most of my traffic comes from referrals and networking. As great as keyword traffic is, the chance that I’m going to stand out from the pack using “New Jersey” “Event” “Photographer” is slim to none. I might as well cut my losses and have an awesome site to send customers to rather than hope they land on it. I might eat my words in a year, but right now I’m really excited with both the design and feel of the new GLKcreative, and the support from BluDomain. Check them out.

In the near future, we plan on implementing a working shopping cart for easy proofing and print purchasing, as well as a video player to show off some of the multimedia projects I’m working on. Stay tuned.

This is a hybrid business/tech article, as I’m not about to tell you how to go about investing or actually managing what you do with your money. What I do want to talk about is the basic process of balancing your checkbook and just keeping good records of where your money is. I know this sounds ridiculously juvenile, but so many of my fellow freelancers – be they writers, designers, or photographers – to a piss poor job of keeping tabs of where their dollars and cents go. I think in this day and age, when online billpay and electronic financial records are getting more and more sophisticated, there’s no excuse for not knowing how to balance a budget or invoice properly.

Here are my current favorite online and electronic tools for managing GLK Creative. Keep in mind, I have yet to find the perfect solution – the one slam dunk tool that can handle all my financial needs. But the programs listed below have allowed me toss the checkbook and go 100% digital.

Here we go:

1. Microsoft Money Home & Business Edition: MS Money has been my go-to money solution for the past seven years or so. I balance my check book on it, catch up on investments, and keep tabs of my credit cards. On the business side, it allows me to send text invoices and track what I can and can’t write off. The big problem is that it’s PC-only and I’m a MAC. In order to run it, I have to load it onto Parallels and then back it up to my main machine through a virtual network. It’s not a huge deal, but it can get annoying, especially if Parallels crashes.

2. So I decided to try Quicken for MAC. Not a good idea – the interface is clunky, the software is hideous, and everything just look so corporate. Compared to MS Money’s stunning reports and colorful design, Quicken might as well be a DOS program. I did give the free Quicken Online a shot, but it didn’t support most of my financial institutions, and I was too lazy import everything manually.

3. Which leads me to Mint.com. The online-only financial service is basically MS Money online, but better. It downloads all your financial information upon sign in, knows every single account I have (including all my store credit cards), and automatically categorizes all my purchases. Additionally, the budgeting tool is slick, the reports are as good as those in MS Money, and best of all, it’s free. However, the site has two big deal breaking downsides. First, you can’t manually add transactions. So, if I write a check that doesn’t clear for weeks, I have no way of noting it. If I forget it, I risk going below my balance and bouncing bills all over the place. The second problem isn’t as severe. I wish it had a bill calendar so I can track when to send out payments. That’s not the biggest woe, but those two together are the only components keeping Mint.com from besting MS Money.

4. Everyone needs an invoicing tool, and while the one in MS Money is capable, there nicer ones to be had. I started out using the free version of Blinksale.com, which gives you a limited amount of easy-to-use invoices to send out each month via email. It tracks said invoices and allows you to mark when payment has been received. Every, the site resets, so you get another three or four invoices. You could upgrade to a paid account if you start getting more and more clients, but I decided to move to the Intuit invoicing program that gives me an unlimited number of forms and does basically the same thing as Blinksale, albeit in a not as pretty package.

5. While not a financial tool, I have to mention MobileMe. Apple’s replacement for Mac.com had its bugs at the beginning, but I find the online syncing tool to be a blessing for keeping all my calenders, notes, tasks, and client contacts in sync between three computers and a Blackberry (via Missing Sync). In addition, I use Google Docs for all my spreadsheets and Word documents. That’s probably the best cloud service on the market right now.

So there you go. Five tools to keep your business in order and mostly stress free. While Mint.com is my favorite program right now, its two blemishes are all that’s keeping me from leaving MS Money for good. Until they solve them, it looks like I’ll be juggling software and hosted applications for a little bit longer. Do you have a free or cheap business solution that you use? Please feel free to mention it in the comments section.

That’s what a ton of people in the blogosphere are saying about the photo networking site’s recent deal with Getty that will allow the stock giant access to Flickr photos. From what I understand, Getty will hand select the best photos on Flickr and then offer the photographers the option to license the photos for sale through Getty. The photographer gets paid on a sliding pay scale and Getty gets a ton of rights to the photos.

I personally don’t see it as a bum deal. Amateur photographers that would normally just have their work sitting on Flickr can now make some cash for their work, and pros that have never entered the world of stock photography can have an added revenue stream. If you don’t want Getty to own your work, don’t sign the agreement.

I realize that this deal sucks for professionals that have relied on Getty for years to make their living, but sadly, with microstock sites proliferating like bad weeds, it is bound to happen anyway.

The fact is, photo editors are already scouring Flickr for stock and news photos. I’ve sold hundreds of dollars worth of pictures that would be collecting digital dust on my hard drives if they weren’t on the site. I’ve always used Flickr as a place to dump photos that are either personal or I can’t sell to magazines. I upload them at low res with watermarks and have had very few images stolen. Sure, I’ve received the occasional lame email from an editor asking to use my photo in exchange for some useless photo credit, but just as often, I’ve had a legitimate offer to buy a photo.

What I’m more surprised about, is why Flickr–and its parent company Yahoo–never tried to turn the site into a microstock site similar to iStock or Shutterstock. They could have cut out the middle man and reaped most of the benefits. As of now, Flickr is mum about what they are getting out of this. It’s also interesting that Flickr’s founders quit the company just a month before this thing was announced. Only time will tell. Getty says that nothing has been decided on yet, and they will be selecting photos over the next six months or so.

I just realized that I never posted a final review of my ScanCafe experience. Well, after nearly three months of waiting, I received a nice little box from ScanCafe with a fancy DVD (full-size case with custom art) and my original photos in the shoddy packaging I had originally sent them in.

After dropping all the photos from the DVD into Lightroom, it’s safe to say that ScanCafe did a stellar job scanning and cleaning these 28 year old snapshots. The color restoration is better than the test scans I tried on my Epson scanner (which took nearly 20 minutes a photo) and the level of grain is as good (or bad) as one would expect from aging photos.
I printed up one of the photos as a 4″x6″ on my HP inkjet printer and it came out a touch soft, but way better than the original photo. The only problem I have is on my end. The original photographs that my mother took three decades ago were printed on what looks like 3.25″x4.25″ Kodak paper with rounded corners. Trying to crop these shots for modern paper is a bear.

Loving the results I got from this batch, I decided to take the plunge and sent a ton of negatives over for scanning. The only problem I had was that I couldn’t tell some of the black and white negatives from the color negatives. ScanCafe charges a premium for B&W scanning and I didn’t want to gyp them. I called to find out what I should do, and the customer service rep told me to just guess and that it would all be averaged out in the end.
I also mentioned some of my complaints, the biggest being the long transit time between shipping from their SF office to India. The guy on the other end explained that shipping to India includes time that the package sits at the office and is opened and inspected, which takes longer than transit. However, they have no way to note that. I understood, but mentioned that some customers (including myself) might worry that the package is lost. I mean three weeks to ship to India is crazy. He said they were working on updating the system.

This time, transit from SF to India only took a few time. The package is now sitting in queue waiting for scanning. I’m much happier knowing it’s there and hope for great results.

So, nearly two months after I placed my order, ScanCafe sent me the email I had been waiting for. My photos were ready for review. Just about 170 snapshots dating back to 1979 were available online for me to peruse, reject, and order. Just as Pop Photo stated in their review a few months back, the scans were excellent and the restoration quality is top notch. Sure, the quality on some is grainy and far from crisp, but the source material wasn’t exactly pro-shot.

In the end, I rejected seven photos (you can reject up to 50% of the order), paid for the rest and checked out. The only problem was that whenever I tried to share the photos with anyone (including myself), I would get a failure notice. For nearly a week, no one could see the photos, and they didn’t appear for me when I logged in. After a few calls to ScanCafe, I got through to Matt who personally walked through the problem, gave me his email so I could show him what was wrong, and fixed it within 24-hours. Again, great support if you can get someone on the phone.

I also mentioned that it sucked that it took over a month for the photos to arrive in India for scanning. ScanCafe informed me that it didn’t actually take that long, rather the unboxing, unloading, sorting, and queuing process was included in the whole delivery time. I told them that it would be nice if they could at least let us know when the package arrived in India so we don’t have to worry that our precious shots are lost. They said they were trying to work it out. Again, great support.

Within an hour I had reviewed everything and placed my order. ScanCafe is now burning the high res photos to disc and mailing them back to me with the original photos. Let’s see how long this takes.

Around the same time, my mom gave me a few photo albums of me as a baby that was in pretty sad shape. The shots were yellow, the pages tathered. I put them through my scanner, using the color restore setting and the results weren’t much better than the negatives. Stray hairs, color streaking, grain–it was sad.

So I did some searching and stumbled across ScanCafe, a photo digitizing center in San Francisco that outsources photo and negative scanning duties to India. They got rave reviews in Pop Photo and the prices are extremely reasonable.

I decided to give them a shot. First the baby photos, which ScanCafe claims they can scan at 600 dpi and color restore. I carefully removed the photos from the decades old album, destroying the book in the process and tearing a few photos. I taped them as best as I could, packaged the whole thing and prepped it for shipment to SF.

ScanCafe asks that you pay for half the processing in advance. Out of 166 photos, I ended up paying $32 to scan the first batch at 27 cents a scan. After they all get scanned, the photos will be placed online where I can select the which ones I want. I can also reject up to 50 percent of them, and just pay for the ones I keep. Obviously, this is a major body of baby photos and I doubt I’m going to be rejecting too many.

The first big hiccup I faced was when I placed the order. I purchased them the Sunday before New Years and for some reason their pop-up that prints the UPS form wouldn’t come up. It took a week to get someone to answer the phone at ScanCafe. When they answered, they were super friendly and fixed the glitch. However, I had now lost close to two weeks from the order date of Dec. 30. After an endless UPS ground transport from NJ to San Francisco, the package got their on Jan. 21 and has been in transit to their outsourcing plant since then.

According to the Web site, the photos will be scanned and online by March 19, two and a half months after placing the order. Here’s hoping the scans are awesome, because this is quite a wait. I’ll keep everyone updated on the process as it happens. If these come out well, I’m going to send all my negatives.