Today I shot around 100 photo’s in a nearby nature reserve. I used my newly bought Olympus E500 SLR camera. Normally I use a 400D when it’s available from work. I still wanted to have one myself though and this week I found a bargain of the old Olympus SLR line. It works wonderful! I added the nicest photo’s to RGBStock and Picasa. Take a look and tell me if you like them!

Van Stockphoto’s

When shooting my Photo’s I always use RAW for the simple reason that RAW is easily editable. Recently I came across a tutorial from Scott Kelby. He explains how to get a really nice HDR like effect on your photo’s, only by editing your RAW files in Photoshop and / or Lightroom! Bookmark this one, it’s really one of the fastest ways to get this result other then paying for a plugin.

The tutorial in a nutshell, I’ve qouted the simple list from it below:

Recovery = 100

Fill Light = 100

Blacks = Drag this slider to the right until photo looks balanced again, because setting the Fill Light at 100 will wash the photo out big time. In our example, I dragged it to 24

Contrast = 100

Clarity = 100

Vibrance = 100

Saturation = -81 (basically what I do here is drag the saturation all the way to the left, to -100 (which removes all color, making it a black and white image), and then I slowly drag back to the right until some of the color starts to return to the image.

As a designer I made my share of mindmaps throughout the years. In both studies they let me mindmap for almost every project, so yes I was getting tired of it. Because of that I almost never used it in my daily job. This changed the last year however.

Last year I started a new study and came in contact with mindmapping again. Of course my first reaction was: “Screw this, I’m not going through all this again” and: “I’m don’t use this technique at all when working”. But this changed when making the first few mindmaps again.

I found out, that a mindmap gets me to an idea faster then a normal brainstorming process. In a normal brainstorm session I always have the problem that I run out of idea’s very quicykl. With a mindmap that doesn’t happen. This is because you are writing it down in a tree like manor. When you run out of keywords you just start over with another section of your mindmap. Even words that aren’t related with the eventual project are allowed to be written down, everything is allowed.

When done you’ll see the bigger picture and all relation within your projects subject. This gives ton’s of inspiration for new idea’s. No stressing involved!

This weekend I found some nice video tutorials about photography. The first one is about studio lightning techniques. It shows what can be accomplished by simply getting the lightning just right!

Fashion Photography Lighting Tutorial from Rod Evans

The second one features an easy technique to get a high fashion look in Photoshop.

Caslys Editorial High Fashion Photoshop Technique

I already applied both tutorials when fooling around with my own small studio and it seems to work perfectly well!

Okay, as a Graphic Designer I’m always looking to get the best response out of my designs. When people see my designs they have to take action and call, buy or just look on one of the websites that features on the design. There are a lot of things I didn’t know however. You’ll find them below.

1. Did you know the color red takes the users attention?

When you use red in designs that particular spot will get the most attention. I wrote an article where it already came to mind. Test for yourself, divide your mailings in two and use a red color on one half. You’ll probably get more response with the mailing that features the color red.

2. Did you know that animations on a page get attention but are poorly read?

Everybody knows that an animation gets a lot of attention on your pages. But did you know that messages and text in an animation almost never get read correctly? It seems that people get attracted to the animation, but are having trouble reading the text. So keep that in mind when creating animation and it’s wise to use as little text as possible in it!

3. Did you know that arrows pointing upwards give you a better response?

If you use arrows in your design, make sure they point upwards. People see it as a positive thing. Downward arrows are getting negative associations. Test it yourself! Design a mailing with features an arrow pointing to the sky and one pointing towards the ground. You’ll probably discover that the one with the arrow pointing to the sky is getting you more responses.

A social psychologist, Garner, researched the behavior of post-it notes attached to a advert. So how do you get more response by using a post-it? I’ll explain…

Of course you want to measure the responses of you marketing campaign. You don’t only want to get results from your loyal customers. No, also from your customers that aren’t that dedicated to your company. Especially this last group will respond far lesser then your loyal customers.

Social Psychologist Garner did some tests on how to get the largest percentage of your customers to respond to an marketing advert. He conducted three different mailings. One of them had a personal message written on a letter that was added to the mailing. The other one didn’t have a personal message at all and one of them had a post-it on it with a personal message.

This last one had a great impact. More then 75% of the customers responded it to that mailing. The mailing which had a personal message in the letter scored 48% and the mailing without a personal message at all got only 36% response.

Garner wasn’t convinced and did a second test. Again he did three mailings. One with a post-it and a hand written message on it, one with a blank post-it and one with no post-it at all. Again the hand written, personalized post-it mailing got the most response! 69% responded to that mailing. Only 43% responded on the mailing with the blank post-it. The mailing with no post-it at all just got 34% response.

And there were more positive effects. People responded faster then normal and did a lot of more work to even get to respond. This will work not only for mailings, but also for brochures, flyer’s and questionnaires. Try it yourself and find out the result yourself!