Series installment roll call! Part 1! Part 2! Part 3! Part 4! Part 5! Part 6! Haven’t read ‘em? You might want to! Since, you know, this is a series an’ all.
Note: if you want to skip my explanatory ramblings and get straight to the pictures, head on down to the bottom of the post (past the cut) for a veritable bonanza of photographs.
Okay, I have to admit something to you guys: by this point in the shirt birthing process, the shirts have already technically been birthed. Assuming the printers have done their jobs, the shirts should be… well, printed. Ergo, they have been birthed, right? So why are we still doing these ‘Birth of a T-Shirt’ posts?
Why, because there’s the ever-important final task of getting the newborn shirts from us to you, of course! And we can’t very well put our shirts up for sale unless we have some good pictures of them to show to prospective buyers, now can we? That would be madness! And not the good kind of madness, either. The bad kind. The very bad kind. So, to take an already-overworked analogy and snap it in two, think of this part of the process as getting the shirts to take their first few steps. Or something like that.
Since we didn’t really have immediate access to an indoor studio or anything like that, we decided to conduct our photoshoot at nearby Gilson Park. It’s a pleasant beachside park in our hometown of Wilmette situated on the shores of beautiful Lake Michigan, with plenty of good spots to take photos. In fact, it’s where we took the product shots for our first line of shirts and where we had that piñata festival that was featured on the rotating image gallery on the front page of our old store.
The best time to take pictures is probably early morning or late afternoon—this way, you can avoid the bad shadows that get cast when the sun is directly overhead. We went with a morning photo shoot, hoping that the diffuse morning light would make for easier exposures.
We had two cameras—Joe’s and mine—and we used Joe’s almost exclusively for roughly the first half of the shoot. Big mistake. Upon returning from the shoot, we discovered that all those pictures were practically unusable!
Why? Well, it turns out that Joe’s camera had been set to take pictures at a resolution of only 640×480 pixels, which meant that the photos we took with it were too small and blurry for us to use. As a result, we had to toss out practically every picture of one of the models, our good friend Elyse. And that’s a cryin’ shame. Sorry, Elyse!
Fortunately, we used my camera for the second half of the shoot, so we still got plenty of good pictures of the other models—that’d be the three of us and Becca, another friend of the Bonanziers.
What’s the lesson here? If you’re taking photos, and you have more than one camera, use both of them! The whole time! You’ll be glad you had those backups and supplemental photos. Also, check and double-check the settings on your camera. Use the highest-quality settings you can. It might take up more memory, but remember—there’s no point in being able to take a whole ton of pictures if none of them are any good. Even though web resolution is 72dpi, you’ll find that you’ll be taking advantage of as much resolution on your photos you can, so the bigger, the better!
Okay, enough of my yakking. The rest of this post will primarily be photos, interspersed with a little commentary on my part. When you see a thumbnail image, click on it for a bigger photo. Continue reading ‘The Birth of a T-Shirt (I’m Ready For My Close-Up!)’
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