FocalPower…the blog

This one almost slipped past me.  The Maker Faire is being held this weekend in San Mateo, CA.  How to describe the Maker Faire?   I think their description is best:

 Maker Faire is a two-day, family-friendly event that celebrates the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) mindset. It’s for creative, resourceful people of all ages and backgrounds who like to tinker and love to make things.

Check out their Program Guide for more details…a great event for kids!

There are photo opportunities around every corner at the Maker Faire.  I had something planned this weekend, but trying to see if I can wiggle out of it to head over for the day on Saturday!

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For those who are local to the San Francisco Bay Area, this coming Wednesday (April 9th) a historic event will occur on the streets of San Francisco: the Olympic torch will be making it’s only North American appearance. For Bay Area photographers, this is a wonderful chance to capture both the Olypmic Spirit as well as the protesters who will be present during the torch’s passing.

If you are planning on attending, best advice would be to take public transportation: The Embarcadero BART stop is right near the finish for the route, and the starting point can be reached by taking MUNI to SBC Park. The event is expected to start at 1 p.m. and it should take the torch about an hour and a half to traverse the approximately 6-mile route. Expect large crowds and plan to scout locations for the best shots, as well as routes to get from point to point along the route, well in advance. Due to the nature of the politics and protests around the torch’s appearance, I would expect crowds to start building by 9am or earlier.

Here is a list of sites with more information about the Olympic Torch Relay:

• Official Beijing 2008 Olympics Torch Relay site
• SFGate’s Olympic Torch in San Francisco Portal
• SFGate: San Francisco’s Torchbearers (includes the essays they wrote to earn the honor of being a bearer).

If anyone attends the Torch Bearing, please send us a link to your photos or post a link in the comments. It will be great to see the images that everyone captures of the event!
(Map courtesy of San Francisco Chronicle/SFGate)

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Yesterday I came across an inventive Wedding Photography service that I hadn’t heard of before: The Proposal Shoot. Fort Worth Texas based and FocalPower Quote Widget patron David Kozlowski recently discribed this concept on his blog.

As a wedding photography this is an interesting option to offer to prospective customers and help increase your revenue per client. You would need to advertise this differently than you do your other serices however. As most grooms (statistically the one who does the proposing still) probably don’t think about wedding photography until well into the wedding planning. A focused advertising model would be needed to get the word out to them somehow before they propose.

The Proposal Shoot also has some risk. One of the most interesting parts of being a wedding photographer is that your dealing with one of the most dramatic moments in people’s lives. Human drama can lead to wonderful photographic experiences. During a wedding the drama should all be in a general positive sense (most negative drama occurs during the reception). With a Proposal Shoot, there is a higher risk of negative drama…imagine if she said now or wasn’t as enthusiastic as the he envisioned her to be.

I would always require payment up front for the Proposal Shoot…just in case.

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We fought hard against the urge to post some sort of spoof this morning, we figured we would go in the other direction. It’s April’s Fools Day. But we’re not fooling…

…we’ve expanded our infrastructure and for a limited time we are taking new Alpha Users on board!

For the next 5 days, anyone who wants to get a sneak peak at what FocalPower has been building just has to fill out the Alpha Form (yeah, we know it says application…but don’t worry, everyone who applies will get accepted). Feedback from photo bloggers is that they love the flexibility of the FocalPower platform. Even non photo bloggers have been impressed. And that’s with a system that’s still in alpha…so, come check it out!

We haven’t expanded as much as this guy’s head…after all, we’re still in Alpha. But, if you’re interested you’ll have to hurry because the form will shut down on April 6th…

(Photo by Scott Ableman)

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