Blog

Tuesday 20th December 2011

I’ve been working on improving the tour usability over the past couple of weeks, and will be going back and applying to previous tours. You can see a sample of the new controls etc. at our East Midlands Aeropark tour.

The competition was won by a local holiday accommodation owner near Ashbourne and last Friday I went to photograph the properties for the complementary tour. It had threatened snow all week, but Friday morning was clear when I left home, but 5 mile from the cottages and the snow started. By the time I reached the farm it was a total whiteout. The accommodation itself was very photogenic and looked as cosy as it could with the snow outside. It’ll take a week or so to complete the tour, but watch this space for the finished result.

If I don’t catch up before the end of December, may I take this opportunity to wish all my customers and followers a Happy Christmas and Prosperous New Year.

Adrian

 

Monday 21st November 2011

Well, it's been quite a hectic few weeks (hence the lack of blog entries!)

The Photoshop course I booked on at the local adult learning centre is nearing an end. I thought I knew Photoshop before I started the course and would pick up a few tips here and there. We’ll the 10-week course only cost £55 (10 x 2-hour sessions) and I’m cutting my production time quite considerably with the techniques I’ve learnt. They’re running an advance course in the New Year which I will definitely be booked on.

Last week was a trip to London for the Business Start-up and Great British Business Show. Highlight of the day was the “Speed Networking” session. 2 minutes, then move to your left with about 30 other small business owners. Some quality leads from this that I’ll be chasing up in the next week.

Our competition was launched at the end of October and is going quite nicely. All competition entries will automatically receive a discount voucher. The draw is next Monday, so stay tuned for the winner announcement.

The latest tour to be completed was a dental practice nearby. Very friendly people and they are now the proud owners of a tour on their own website. I’m getting more and more enquiries from non-traditional businesses for tours for their websites. It seems everyone is starting to realise they need interactivity on their website to attract new custom and prevent them from becoming a “faceless” internet business.

I now have pages on 360cities and Panoramic Earth. These will eventually show in Google Earth, so look out for our new panoramas there. The Facebook page is also up and running – giving us a new platform to make announcements and updates a lot more quickly than the website – so be sure to follow us.

Finally, the test HD video from the River Trent aerial shoot has been posted on our YouTube channel.

Just planning my own photography for the next month – should have some new panoramas soon – stay tuned!

 

Friday 7th October 2011

Learning how to do partial panoramas today. Took some photographs at Nottingham Goose Fair from the big wheel, stitched together to see how they come out. Results are OK, but more work required to nail this technique.

 

Wednesday 28th September 2011

Well, it’s been quite a couple of weeks – completed a tour for my local dentist (don’t know what it is about dentists but completed the photography in a cold sweat!) and a tour for a very nice B&B in Somerset. Hawk House is the B&B – only 6 rooms, but very well decorated and much more personal than staying in the big chains and breakfast was next door in Wayne’s Bar & Bistro. They were great hosts and pleased with the end result.

The reason for visiting the south west was to collect a mast for taking aerial photographs and aerial panoramas. Not quite ready to offer the service, but had a practice “putting it up” yesterday. It’ll go to 15m fully extended but I ran out of confidence at about 11m (mainly due to the lack of space around for the guy ropes). Have also ordered a second DSLR camera body to use on the mast and act as a backup for normal jobs as I didn’t fancy risking the Canon 60D up there.

I’m also experimenting with the possibility of piggy-backing my Contour HD pen cam onto the DSLR to give the possibility of full-HD aerial video as well.

On the business front I’ve been playing with a free invoice software package that, on the face of it, was ideal for the business. The only problem was outputting pdf invoices had a bug that didn’t print the logo. Many forums and hours later, I gave up and am now trialling two other packages.

I've also started my photoshop course at a local adult learning centre - 2 hours / week for 10 weeks. I've been using photoshop for years, but thought I might pick up a few shortcuts to speed me up a little. Well, after the first week, I realised it was a beginners course but I thought I'd stick with it and, week 2, found out about a very basic function I knew nothing about, so I'll be going back for week 3 this Friday!