15 July 2012

The Mourning of a Lioness in the Masai Mara

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It was on a morning game drive in the Masai Mara when we spotted a lioness lying on the grass and holding something between her paws. It looked like a small animal and we thought it might be a hare or other small animal she was feeding on. But she was not feeding. She was holding it and looking around as in despair. As we came closer we saw that she was holding a little cup between her paws and the cub was not moving, it was obviously dead, only a few weeks old. The lioness started licking the cub, moving it with her paws, trying to revive the little body, but it wouldn’t come to life. Between her attempts to revive her cub she was looking up, opening her mouth as if she wanted to scream, but no sound was to be heard, it were silent screams of sadness and pain of the mother of a lion cub.
After a while she stood up, grabbed her cub with her mouth and carried it into higher grass. There she put her cub down and stood there looking at it until she moved away to a nearby tree. The lioness lay down under the tree, closed her eyes and rested. She stayed there for hours. In the late afternoon she got up and walked back to her dead cub. Then started eating her cub, maybe in some attempt to make sure that it goes back to where it was safe. After this final act of mourning the lioness left the site and walked back to the rest of the pride that had been waiting for her on a close by clearing. They had respected her need to mourn and she had taken the time she needed.

Nature will bring her straight away into estrus and she will have new cubs with hopefully a happier ending.

Ute Sonnenberg for www.rohyachui.com

How to Create an all Senses Photo Experience

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In earlier blog posts was explained how an image captures a moment with all what’s in the moment. It allows us at any given time even years later to recap what we saw, felt, smelled and thought. We can immediately tell where the photo was taken, who the people in the photo are, how we felt when we took the photo and a lot more what happened at that time. How would it be to intensify this memory by enhancing the aspects of the image with real smells and touches?
Print the photo from the holiday in the Provence, put some lavender in the room, play music from the region, make yourself comfortable on the sofa and have a glass of rosé while feeling that holiday again, 10 years later at any given place.

Sense photography with all your senses and enjoy travelling back in time to the moments you enjoyed.

Happy sensing.

Ute Sonnenberg for www.rohoyachui.com

Real Photos vs. Digital Photos, What Do We Want to Feel?

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Not that long ago we usually came back from a holiday with a couple of film rolls, carrying them to the photo shop and wondering what would be on them. It was an exciting moment when we went back to collect our printed photos, leafing through them quickly; looking for that one image we definitely wanted to be a good one and being surprised what we all had photographed, because there was some time between taking the photo and holding the print in your hand. That has all changed. Nowadays we take a digital photo and look immediately on the screen of our camera how it looks like and quickly erase it when we think it’s not good enough to be seen by anyone else. Then we get home (or to the hotel), upload the images to the computer and some of them make it to be printed or even become part of a photo book, but most of them remain digital files.
Will some day the printing disappear completely? I don’t think so. Even Instagram images can be printed as stickers, small art prints and little books. The service is called
Prinstagram and booming. It is just such a completely different feeling holding the print in your hand, putting the sticker with your own artwork on the fridge, giving a birthday card with an image you took to a friend than grabbing the smart phone and looking at the digital file. With a digital file only our eyes are feeling, with a print also our hands feel and the image becomes a multi dimensional sensual experience.

Happy feeling.

Ute Sonnenberg for www.rohoyachui.com

How to Show and Sell Your Photos and Artwork on the Internet

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We all know about the obvious photo sharing options like facebook, Flickr, other social media and portfolio sites, but what if you want to sell your images as posters, postcards or other products? Maybe we need only to wait long enough and facebook will do that as well, but maybe not. There are websites that offer this service already and here are 2 of them.

The first is
PhotoShelter. Photoshelter is as its name says a shelter for photographers. Not only can images be sold as prints and products, you can also have your own stock photo gallery and sell digital image files. The clients go to your website, browse the images and buy directly online. Photoshelter takes care of the financial part of the transaction and the copyright safety of your images. The services of Photoshelter are not for free. You pay a monthly or annual fee depending on the storage size you choose. Their services are open for professional photographers.

The second service provider is
Artflakes. Artflakes is open to all artists and photographers. They are based in Berlin and offer great print services in good quality for deliveries all over the world. As a photographer you can sign up for free, upload images and set the price you wish for prints and products yourself (also in photoshelter you can set the price yourself). Artflakes is also a kind of artists network with following options and likes, but you don’t need to go around and like if you don’t like, but there are interesting artworks to discover.

Maybe these two websites can open new fields of activities for you. Have a look.

Happy discovering!

Ute Sonnenberg for www.rohoyachui.com

How to Make a Photo eBook that Looks Like Made by Apple

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About 6 years ago Apple started offering the photo book feature in Aperture, that enabled users to create their own photo book, looking like a real coffee table book. It was like a revolution. All photo lovers could make their own book instead of the traditional photo album. It looked like a professionally published book, yet for an affordable price.


aperture


Only about 4 years later the iPad came out and its beautiful ebooks stole our hearts. Ebooks were nothing new, but these iPad ebooks were of a differnet kind. One could leafe through them like through real paper books and they would even make the sound of paper pages being turned. How great would it be to make your own Apple alike looking photo ebooks for a much lower price than the real photo books or even for free. With how many people could you share them simply on the digital way and on the go on their mobile devices. The developers were not sleeping and there are great websites that provide exaclty that service, creating your own beautiful photo ebook and of course also any other book you wish to create.

It all starts like any other book creating process with the book idea, writing what you want to write and choosing the images you want to publish. From there you can take different roads to the finished photo ebook through differnet online publishing services.

One of them is
Blurb. Blurb allows you to make real paper books and iPad ebooks simply with templates, InDesign plugin or other bookmaking tools Blurb offers. Until now their iPad ebook service works like that. When you have already created and printed a paper book with Blurb they convert your book for free into an iPad ebook and you can even sell it via their book store. If you don’t have yet a paper book made with them, they request that you print one copy and the conversion into an iPad ebook is also for free. Check out their website. They are doing great things.

blurb


Another service provider is
issuu. Create your book in word or as a power point presentation and save it as a pdf file. Then upload the pdf and issuu will create a beautiful online Apple lookalike readable ebook. The eBooks can be downloaded, if you alow that and the person who wants to download the eBook has to sign up with issuu. Signing up is for free and so is the eBook publishing service from issuu. You can use issuu to publish your photo books, amnuals, papers and other sorts of documents you wish to present in a beautiful way. Here some examples from my own website where I use issuu for itineraries and other documents.

issu

A third option is
überflip. Uberflip makes great eBooks from your pdfs of all kinds of books including photo eBooks, which work on all digital devices, even with the page turning sound from the iPad. They offer a 60-days free trial and after that the service is not for free anymore. The basic subscription is $29.95 per month for a monthly upload of 5 eBooks. Here an example for an uberflip eBook. Readers of the book can download it as pdf without having to sign up before. Sharing tools for the most popular networks are integrated in the book-viewing page.

uberflip screen shot

Have a look. Maybe you will find some inspiration for publishing your own creative work and sharing it with more people.

Happy eBooking!

Ute Sonnenberg for www.rohoyachui.com