Category Archives: NEWS!

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Amazon.com’s new Wag Reflex blog

July 30, 2008 – 2:04 pm

A few of you may have been confused by one of the last lines in my Fergie post where I mentioned that you can see more shots of Fergie this week on the Wag Reflex blog. “What is it?” you say?

It’s Amazon’s cool new pet blog! From the blog:

“Wag Reflex is a collaborative effort to bring you informative, heartwarming, and fun pet-focused stories and pictures. Our contributors include veterinarians, trainers, major pet magazines, top pet-product manufacturers, pro pet photographers, and various other pet lovers. We’re obsessed with pets and we want to share our passion.

Come back and visit our blog frequently to get the latest pet news, training tips, product reviews, veterinary recommendations, and, of course, cute pictures of dogs and cats.

Because this is a collaborative effort, we invite you, the loyal reader, to actively participate in this blog. Feel free to submit questions for our veterinarians; e-mail us your pet’s bio to be featured in our Pet Profiles; and add your cutest pet pictures to the Wag Reflex Flickr pool. (http://www.flickr.com/groups/wagreflex)”

I was contacted several weeks ago by Amazon about getting on board as a weekly contributor and I said “absolutely yes!”. This week is my first week on the blog, starting with Dozer’s post. Fergie is next up. Who is next after that? You’ll just have to bookmark it and see. FYI: all of the photos I submit to the Wag Reflex blog will be different than the ones posted here, so if you need a bigger Cowbelly fix, head on over! 

http://www.wagreflex.com

It looks to be a terrific resource for pet owners and lovers alike, and I am thrilled to be involved. Yay. :-)

By Jamie 'Cowbelly' | Also posted in miscellaneous randomness | Tagged , , | Comments (1)

Cowbelly + CityDog Magazine Summer 2008 issue = Love

June 11, 2008 – 9:00 am

 

I’m positively bubbling over with excitement. That’s Seymour- left and Charlie- right (aka Trouble and Chaos) on the cover of the summer issue of CityDog Magazine, photographed by yours-truly, yay! The summer issue will be hitting newsstands near you toute-suite but you guys get the sneak peek here and on the CityDog blog. Also, look for my photography in the ‘Dog’s Eye View’ Neighborhood feature. I’ll post photos from that but first there’s a little contest I’ve gotta take care of (see below).

BTW: The images on the homepage of my newly updated website are a couple of ‘outtakes’ from one of our cover shoots. I’ll interview Charlie and Seymour in an upcoming post to get THEIR take on the whole experience. And what an experience it was!

Thanks Brandie for asking me to photograph the cover (and for being excited when I said yes!), thanks Victoria for saying yes and being as happy as I hoped you would be to participate and for being so patient with the process, and thank you Mother Nature for finally cooperating with us! And of course thank you boys, I love you both dearly!! (even if you do eat my greeting cards and stand on the coffee table and bark in princess fergermeister’s face, heh heh).

For those of you who haven’t seen this magazine, you simply must subscribe; it’s rad. 

More backstory on the cover shoot(s) soon!

Yay, magazine covers yay!

Oh also, I’ll be announcing the winner of the ‘slice of life‘ photo contest very shortly! I already know who wins, but don’t tell anyone, shhhh….

By Jamie 'Cowbelly' | Also posted in editorial, sneak-peek | Tagged , , , , | Comments (12)

project #2 backstory

June 7, 2008 – 4:42 pm

Only a handful of people have known what I have been up to for the last handful of months, and now everyone knows!

Since the first week in January I have been meeting with a team of people, doing marketing research, developing excel spreadsheets and crazy matrixes, drawing up legal documents, consulting with expert business and legal professionals in the community, doing web design, troubleshooting microsoft word issues, locating space, researching vendors, meeting with guest speakers, creating contracts for them, researching lodging and transportation, and oh, about a million other things that go into planning a workshop.

It has been such a massive amount of work and has become such a large part of my daily business life for so long that it feels very strange to have the bulk of the preparatory work now done. Officially as of about 3:45am last night! (Or I guess I should say this morning).

BUT, I am excited. SUPER excited!! Every time I think about it it fills me with an overwhelming sense of joy. I love to teach, and I love to help others, and have always felt frustrated and sad that I can’t give more because my business keeps me so busy. But now I can!

A few of you may remember that last summer I tried my hand at consulting, which was generally by email. I did a phone consult with my clients first, and then sent them an email full of information tailored to them. I stopped doing it because I felt like I wanted to give so much more, and a quick hour long email wasn’t nearly enough. So the workshops were the next best thing (only better!). And really, to give credit where credit is due, it was Ron from North Carolina who contacted me asking to be put on a list should I ever offer workshops that helped me make the final decision. The deal was sealed baybee. 

After doing a massive amount of research my team and I came to the conclusion that there aren’t any intensive workshops for location pet photographers, at least, none taught by full time professional pet photographers whose sole income comes from the business of photographing animals. At least, not in the documentary-style that is so popular among pet owners. 

I am thrilled to be the first person offering this type of workshop resource, and although I have a lot to learn myself, I feel I have a lot to offer those who are early on in their businesses. Did I mention I was excited?! :-)

Now, to all of my clients and friends that this special project doesn’t affect, I’m trying to come up with something nice I can do for you, since so many of you have asked me “when do we get to find out the big surprise?!”. 

How about a fun open house party at my new studio next month? Yes, that’s right, it looks like I found space, at the one place I had my heart most set on. The place I mentioned on my blog a couple of months ago. I’m still pinching myself and won’t believe it until I move in, but to say I am happy would be a huge understatement. Wait till you guys see this place. It’s uh-may-zing. 

OH- and if anyone likes to paint walls let me know! I may need a helper or two to paint my office in the new studio (Christina’s got that yoga thing). Sometime this month, whenever, I’m flexible. I’ll bring the drinks and pizza, you bring the scrubs!

So many changes, and all oh so good. To those of you who follow my little business, I can’t express enough how much your support means to me. I feel humbled every day at how many really wonderful, loving people are out there, and feel so lucky to be a part of such a great community online and off. Not a day goes by that I don’t feel deeply grateful for everything I have- and you my dear blog readers never cease to bring me joy, as I hope I do for you. 

Hope you are all having a great weekend!

After hundreds of hours sitting in front of the computer lately, I am off tonight for dinner + the Sex in the City movie downtown with my sis! Can’t wait to relax. I need a vacation. :-)

By Jamie 'Cowbelly' | Also posted in Behind-the-Scenes, Studio Stuff, Workshops | Tagged , | Comments (6)

NEW BLOG!!

May 29, 2008 – 6:58 am

We have moved our little blog on over to a new server, with a new domain name, and a totally new look!

Go check it out here, and please be sure to bookmark it!

http://www.cowbellyblog.com/

We moved over to wordpress, after dealing with issue after issue trying to publish a blogger blog to an external server. (ok, actually I moved the blog over to wordpress, Christina just watched as I let out a big sigh of relief). Publishing with blogger was just getting worse and worse, and it had to stop.

I’m thrilled with the changes and I hope everyone who follows this blog is too. Now I can save much more time in posting to do what I really enjoy: take pictures! Plus I can show y’all the images in fullscreen mode. No more hassling with trying to get the perfect image size in the 3-column design without breaking things. This new blog design is getting very popular with photographers, for reasons you will see shortly.

For those of you who are interested in reading the full (boring) story about why I switched, and how I chose the platform, and what the template is, and where I bought it, please see the ‘new name, new look, new blog’ post on the new blog. For my photographer friends, if you purchase the template (which you totally should!) and have any questions about it please ask me! I can give you all the hints on tweaking the template to totally fit ‘you’.

I am still very much tweaking my blog design and haven’t yet added links or a menu (still debating on that one), so you will continue to see changes made, but the new cowbellyblog.com address will remain the same.

I still want to be able to link to all of my virtual friends so I will figure out how to do that soon. I may even have a dedicated page for links, and put little images next to each link- samples of each person’s work or business.

Fun times!

Thanks for making the move with me. Your support is appreciated more than you could ever know. :-)

Jamie ‘Cowbelly’

By doggirlseattle | Also posted in Behind-the-Scenes | Tagged , | Comments (0)

new name, new look, new blog

May 28, 2008 – 1:38 am

After beating my head against a wall trying to publish a blogger blog to my own server I decided about a week ago that I’d had it.

This is what I would go through every time I posted:

FTP images to my server. (This is because long ago their image upload system stopped working for me. It apparently rarely works for those whose blogs live on their own servers, or ‘FTP’d blogs as they are called.)

Compose post in html mode. Insert image src lines pointing to images.

Write text.

Review for errors.

Click ‘publish’.

Wait.

And wait.

And sometimes, wait some more.

Get the ‘your post is taking longer to publish than normal. click to continue.” Which soon looked to me like it said “your post is taking forever to publish. would you like to continue?”

So I would click continue. Frequently 5 or 6 times, occasionally for 30 minutes. On bad days for an hour.

So then the post would publish, but invariably once it was online I would find errors that needed fixing. So I would go in and make the changes, and then try and publish again and you’d think I was asking blogger to wire me a billion dollars. It just wouldn’t go. At all. Those sweet little errors got to live on my blog. Frustrating would be a major understatement.

Recently it has been fine, and publishing quite quickly, except for one little problem. Sometime during the publishing phase it started inserting these weird little characters in the text. Characters that aren’t visible in the html code. Like a capitol A with a symbol over it.

Last week I was in front of the computer trying to get a very simple post up to no avail. “ARgggggghhhhhh” I said, scaring Fergie.

“Having blogger issues again?” Christina asked without even looking my way.

“YES”… sigh. I slumped in my chair.

“What are you going to do?”.

“I don’t know”. I said sullenly. sigh…

Instead of being sullen and morose I decided to do something about it. Last week was the last straw with publishing my blog through blogger. “There just has to be a better way” I thought.

So I did some research on blogs that you can publish to your own server. And wordpress was hands-down the winner on so many levels.

Then I got an email link to my talented friend Robin’s new blog (PawPrints Photography in Washington DC- who by the way I had coffee with on Sunday night because she was in Seattle- LOVE Robin!), and saw that it looks similar to the (also very talented) Stephen Bobb’s blog (Fidojournalism, also in the Maryland/DC area). I have been ooohing over Stephen’s blog since he launched the new one recently, and I discovered through the handy little bit of code at the bottom of their blogs that they are both designed by the same company: ProPhoto. The template was designed for a photographer by her husband Jared (quite the hubby that guy!), and after they launched it everyone and anyone demanded to know where she got it, so being the smart guy that he is, he decided to sell it. Lucky for us! It’s popularity has soared since inception earlier this year, and this is easy to see when you do a google search for the bit of code at the bottom of each blog’s homepage. I did a search for ‘ProPhoto Photography Template by NetRivet Design‘ and there were so many pages of photographers using the ProPhoto wordpress template there was no way I could possibly look at them all. I stopped on page 4 I think.

Anyhoo, these templates are so fantastic because they are fully customizable. The header can be changed- either a flash file or static, background colors and images, layout, menu designs, all in the colors and design of your choice. You can either fuss with the css code yourself or hire a web designer to fully change things around for you. There is one gal (Simply Splash) who specializes in customizing code for photographers. She has made some very cool sites and resells the ProPhoto template, customizing the header and other elements to your liking. Check out her impressive portfolio. The custom headers are gorgeous.

I think it’s really great that photographers have an option like this and can customize it so that their blogs truly represent them and their branding, and not look exactly like everyone else’s. Sure the overall design and layout is the same, but every blog I looked at last weekend looked different to me. I also know Jared at ProPhoto plans to come out with a new template soon, and has listened to all of the special requests from his buyers. I’m excited to see what he comes up with. I’m sure a lot of others are too. 

I can’t wait to keep messing with the code for this blog, it’s something I really enjoy.

If you have any problems with commenting or something not displaying right please let me know. Or if you’d like to see the menu at the top and not the bottom let me know. I am still in the tweaking stage but I hope you enjoy nonetheless! Also, good and bad feedback on the new design are welcome!! You tell me and I will listen. :-)

Thanks so much and welcome to my new blog!

By Jamie 'Cowbelly' | Tagged , , , , | Comments (5)