Ever been impressed by ‘that guy’ with the shiny chrome business card holder? Ever been shocked by how much they cost? Well check out this collection of business card cases, all at shockingly low wholesale prices. Buy one for yourself or a pallet load to sell on Ebay, either way it’s cheaper than a bog standard case from the high street that could take £20 out of your sky rocket.

Istockphoto.com is becoming the industry’s leading microstock website, with over 3.5 million stock photos, illustrations and videos in it’s archive. I use it daily at work to source stock photography for client’s websites so you can imagine how much money we push through to them. I was overjoyed to find an open discount code that claimed to knock 20% off orders over $60 (£30-ish). I entered it during checkout and it worked! Sweet!

The discount code

Complete checkout and you should get 20% off.

On my last order I got over £40 off, so it’s well worth the punt.

Enjoy!

This week at work was quite exciting with a brand awareness campaign spear-headed by a photo shoot outside our offices. A large 4m squared sign of our logo, in 16 seperate pieces was created prior to the shoot by our sign makers, and would serve as the focus of the campaign. Each member of the team would hold a piece of the puzzle, run around in an unorganised manner then swiftly come together to form the 9xb logo.

This photo shoot was initially setup for a press release shot to welcome a new member to the team. I was asked to come up with an idea for the photo that would fill the following criteria:

• Show the new member of the team
• Show off our new premises
• Show the size of our team
• Show that we’re a local design agency with real creativity
• Portray a fun and friendly company, not afraid of making a fool of ourselves

The standard shot would of been to have the boss (Rob) shaking hands with Gyles (new sales executive) outside the building on a sunny day, with the logo on the wall in the background and two cheesy smiles finishing off the scene. Dull huh?

I thought why not portray our company visually somehow. The boss has always stated it’s the people that underpins the company so why not get them involved? Why not visually represent this somehow in the photo? So, 16 pieces of the logo, 16 members of staff making up the puzzle, with the message being that we believe each member is part of the company and collectively form 9xb as we know it?

In concept it sounded perfect, a massive floating logo hovering around the car park, it’s fun, light hearted, but most of all the key message being thrown out there is our logo and image. Brand awareness gone crazy. Now let’s look at some snap shots I took of the fiasco, with a behind the scenes feel to see what actually happened.

The team gathers

Joanne and Zoe start proceedings

Chris and Dan complete the second row

Logo starts to form

Cool it’s complete – Joanne cheekily peeking through.

And relax!

Looking at what’s actually going on underneath the logo – CHAOS!

Another angle

Ok so the logo looked all over the place, but that was the point, ununiformity adding character and a sense of fun to the shoot, which in turn would hopefully stay in peoples minds.

Recently I have been getting into photography in a big way, it’s something I touched upon at college but I never really progressed with it because I found design to be more satisfying. Black and white photography really appeals to me because it seemed to capture the ‘story’ and ‘passion’ better than conventional colour photos.

Now, I have never been overwhelmed with colour photos before until I stumbled across a style of colour photography that I have never seen before, which to be honest made my creative mind spin and juices seep through my skin. This style of photography is called HDRi (High Dynamic Range imaging), where a series of photos are taken of the same subject, adjusting the EV (exposure value) on each (starting with a minimum range of between -2 and +2 EV), most efficiently with AEB (automatic exposure bracketing) then processed together with ‘Tone Mapping‘ to produce a truely amazing photo, or in more simpler terms, combining a series of seemingly ugly looking photos together to create one outstanding image, with amazing detail, colour and depth of field.

The key to achieving a good HDR effect is in the software you use, rather than the camera gear you have. Anybody with a half decent point-and-click camera which has AEB and/or manual EV settings can achieve this. Now because I’m just getting into photography I challenged myself to see how far I can push my Panasonic Lumix TZ3 and bought some software called Photomatix Pro from HDR Soft.

Like all british folk I like to save some pennies if I can so I Googled for a discount coupon for Photomatix Pro and found two coupons that actually worked. The first offered a 8% discount VPG8 and the second offered a 15% discount beforethecoffee.

• Go to the Photomatix order page
• Click the buy button for the software version you need
• In the box where it says “Coupon Code (Optional)” put in: beforethecoffee
• Click the recalculate button
• It will show you the special discount applied with your new price
• Complete the rest of the order form

So very pleasingly I knocked off £8.13 off the price, making it £46.06 + VAT, result! It’s worth also mentioning that as standard, if you say buy 10 licenses, you automatically get a discount, equivalent to £40.64 a license, but then with this discount coupon you can get it down to £34.55 + VAT each!