Normally don’t talk about excite art here on this blog. However, due to an internet registrar playing funny buggers and trying to extort money for the continued use of our domain name, we have changed domains. http://excite-art.com is the new name and where the site will be found in future.
We have for a long while been home delivering orders to people who found it hard to get to the studio to pickup.
As an extension to this service we hope to be able to offer home delivery for all Sunraysia residents shortly. We will be using a delivery service, to take the work load off Robyn, who has been doing it during her own time off. There will be a charge for the service, but compared with the time and fuel saved it will be well worth the few $ involved. Ill give you the heads up as soon as we have the delivery service up and running.
Evolution rather than revolution I think is the best way to describe our plans for portrait photography over the coming months. I know our discerning clients. Those whose taste in design and fashion are developing quickly will love the coming changes. You have only to walk into the many beautiful homes of those fabulous people who make up the majority of excitations client base to understand what I mean. Our portrait photography styles will better reflect the modern family and their growing needs for more appropriate photography choices. There are some exciting changes also coming to the way we price our portrait photography. Again, I’m sure our modern style savvy clients will embrace these changes with open arms.
As always with change, there will be people who love the directions we’re taking and others not so happy. That is unfortunately life. We have to continue to grow visually to meet the majority of our clients imaging needs. We will however, do our best to accommodate existing clients with more conservative tastes and existing home decors. Like always if we feel our style of portrait photography isn’t going to suit potentially new clients, we won’t hesitate to gently steer then to photographers more in tune with their various needs.
excitations had the pleasure of photographing Bruno recently. Commencing our shoot in excitations barn studio, we created a series of formal, semi formal and casual portraits. Then we moved out to a location shoot. A massive sandpit full of really big boys toys.
One of the many “No Story” news stories doing the rounds of Xmas and New Year, related to Chinese shoppers visiting the UK. Apparently large numbers of cashed up Chinese are visiting London and leaving lots of money behind. I had to smile when I heard what the most sort after items were. Designer labels, yep those high priced exclusive fashion accessories that most people only dream of owning.
The Chinese are best know in the fashion circles for their ability to, shall we say replicate, designer items. Then selling the cheap copies to westerners desperate to have iconic labels. Which I kinda find funny. They copy and make cheap “knock-offs” for us, but buy the real thing for themselves.
We stopped selling these popular frames about 18 months ago. However, to satisfy people who needed to match frames they already had on their walls we have been special ordering them in from time to time. We are unfortunately going to have to discontinue that practice. If anyone really really needs to match a frame then we’ll still try to do this but be warned….. The only supplier is difficult to deal with, changes prices without warning (always up) delivers only when he feels like it and charges freight out at fantasy levels. We will no longer guarantee delivery or price on these frames.
We love em, and so it seems do our clients. In fact we love em to much and have been pricing them out at a very low margin. Problem with that is at the end of the year we actually lost money on doing Face Mounted Acrylics. So we will be adjusting the prices up, At least to the point we break even on these very popular items. Yep, I know we can get cheaper FaceMounted Acrylic Frames from other suppliers. But to be honest I don’t care. Face mounting is a tricky business, and if not done properly can be a disaster. I’ve seem a few of the cheapies, and I’m prepared to bet that in a couple of years they won’t look like they are supposed to.
Almost nobody knows how much work goes on behind the scenes to get high quality photographic images from your photo session to a framed print hanging on your wall, or beautiful album sitting on your coffee table. There is a multitude of highly skilled and trained technicians and artists behind each and every image.
Aside from our own design team and retouchers. Our suppliers are one of the reasons we can continue to offer high quality products to not only look good now. But which will withstand the test of time.
So here goes. Our suppliers who have exceeded all our expectations for quality and service, in no particular order.
Malcom Williams, for paying attention to detail and quality on all the framing jobs we give him leading up to Christmas and throughout the year. Even managing to get the impossible jobs out on time and without fuss. Framing isn’t just sticking a picture into a frame and hoping for the best. It is a highly skilled craft. Thank you Mal for doing your job so well.
Akins Technicolour in Adelaide who not only print the vast majority of our work, but are also a can do company that thrives on challenges. When they’re not printing our work Paul the colour management guru at Atkins spends his time advising much of our industry on colour management and digital processing.
Albums Australia. Not much to say really…. These guys manufacture an impressive range of custom crafted wedding and portrait albums. Probably the best quality albums anywhere in the world. If there are better, I have not found them. Added bonus is all Albums Australia products we use are hand crafted right here in Australia. Awesome service company. Brilliant products. They don’t sell direct to the public and frankly are price way outside the budget photographers range. But you want good, then Albums Australia albums are the ones.
Nulab, supply our big prints and big mount jobs. Another great service company who go that extra bit to help photographers deliver great products.
The Edge Photo, a processing laboratory that we haven’t used in the past. This week stepped up for us when through no fault of ours, a valued clients Christmas gift was damaged beyond repair. Amazing service and help from Steve at The Edge, in pulling off the impossible, allowing us to deliver a pristine product on time. Guess we’ll be talking with The Edge in the new year.
Lots of others, including great bunch of couriers, postal workers and friends who help us throughout the year. Thankyou all.
Simon and Eryn photographed in the barrel room at Trentham Estate Winery. Fabulous light in this room with so many opportunities for great wedding photography. Helped by Eryn and Simon who were really into photo mode and created a special mood anytime we pointed a camera in their direction.
Just had the opportunity to see our very first etched acrylic wedding album cover. Similar to other acrylic covers in name only. The base material is the same but these amazing covers have a beautifully etched photo embedded into the cover. Stunning is the only way I can think of describing the look. I hope to be allowed to show you a photo of the completed album after our bride has had a chance to view it. Be warned though, I sure a web grade photo will not do this cover justice.
Even though we are throttling back on the number of weddings we’ll be shooting each year. We will not be backing off when it comes to find new and exciting ways to present photos from those weddings that we photograph.
Yep its that time of year for sure, All our phones are out, second time this month. A diversion is currently being arranged, so if you need to call that should be available shortly.
If you have called and left messages please call again. We have no message retrieval obviously.
Seems our proofing server has been playing up a little over the last few hours. We’ve been told that it’s all fixed and running the way all good servers should. Fingers crossed.
A couple of jobs from yesterday are still not visible because they didn’t upload correctly. That will be fixed shortly.
Only days to go until that most important day of all. Well it must be, after all the pressure we put ourselves under to achieve perfection and completion for the 25th of December. Here at excitations we have been burning the midnight oil. So much so that we’re concerned about the effect we might be having on global warming.
Most jobs are, or will be out on time for the big day. As usual there have been a few hickups along the way. Really important jobs have become not so important. Unimportant jobs have been elevated to the status code red, catastrophic, must be finished or the world as we know it will end. And as is usual at this time of the year we have been tripped up by the simplest of things. For example this jolly season one of the most inexpensive parts to one of our popular print presentation methods has gone missing in action. A longish length of 20mm white edging used in block mounting. Shorter lengths no problem. Just this one long length, unavailable. Grrrrrrrr.
The young and extremely energetic Sarah just kept on leaping into the air for us on a recent photoshoot.