Today marks another landmark for this website – It’s the grand opening of the JWNPhoto.com online store! There is a new link entitled “Store” in the menu bar of this site.

I’ve selected sixteen photographs that I would hang on my wall (in fact, a few of them already do). I’m very excited to share these with you as I have put my heart and soul into this craft and without you as an audience it has little meaning.

A professionally printed photograph is a lot more than the stuff you get at the local CVS or WalMart. These are printed on premium papers using state-of-the-art processes, as well as good old fashioned human skill. Each photo is color corrected to give you a precise representation of my vision for the medium you choose. All prints are inspected by a photo lab technician who is skillfully trained before they are shipped out, not some guy who rings up your milk and cigarettes and is pining for the next coffee break. The shipping rates are very reasonable and the turnaround time is amazingly fast. I can’t stress enough the night and day difference a good photo lab makes in printing photos. I’m proud to say that the photo lab I have chosen is Mpix, which is the online division of Miller’s Professional Imaging. The shopping cart is powered by Zenfolio, who is a trusted and secure e-commerce platform that makes ordering and customizing the art in a way that works for you a breeze.

I believe I’m pricing these prints at very reasonable rates. I have also limited the sizes to only 3:2 aspect ratios to keep the original integrity of the images. Because of this, it would be wise to purchase a frame (which I’m offering with absolutely no mark-up above my cost) directly from the store as they can be difficult to find in your local stores. I have also noted on each photo my suggestions for the type of paper to use, and I urge you to add the “Lustre Coating” option at checkout to all of your prints. It’s a small fee to protect your purchase and will not change the aesthetic of the print. I am a big fan of the standouts – they are amazing products and I believe they are worth every penny. I recently displayed some at the Kulture Klash Arts Festival and I think they compliment my style of photography.

You will notice that there are watermarks on the photos in the gallery – they will not be printed, they are just there to protect me from theft. I’m not usually a watermark kind of guy, but the whole reason I put this store up is to make sure that the printed product is up to my standards, and if someone were to reproduce one in a half-assed way, it takes away from vision I’m trying to convey. Therefore, watermarks it is.

I really hope you can find something that fits in your home or office, or maybe as a gift for a loved one!

On a completely separate note, when my wife came home from dropping my daughter off at her Girl Scout meeting this evening, she spotted a tiny little tree frog on the front porch. I took that as my cue to slap on my 100mm f/2.8 Tokina Macro Lens, mount my camera on a tripod, and start clicking in the quickly fading light.

Tree Frog

Instead of using a remote, I used the timer and set it to take 3 shots in a row. The exposures were a little long as I set the ISO to 200 to keep the image as clean as possible, but I also wanted to make sure I got it as sharp as possible. The depth of field was quite shallow, but I didn’t want the exposure to be too long as the frog is breathing, and that might look blurry over a very long exposure, so I kept the aperture pretty open at f/4 which called for a 2 second exposure time.

I noticed that I’ve taken a good number of shots around my home lately – I think it’s great to explore your own backyard for possible images. Have you found something interesting to shoot near home lately?