I mentioned earlier that we would be trying some new marketing ideas.  The slideshow above is our first attempt at this.  We have heard a bit about Animoto’s web-based slideshow generation service, but never were really inspired by it.  Saw it again and the seminar yesterday and it looked a bit more interesting, so I signed up (the ‘All-Access’ account is only $30 for a year and that seemed like a good place to start) and threw a few low res photos of our daughter Katherine into the hopper… I was blown away!  Naturally, this led to me exported higher res versions (for an extra $5) from Lightroom and generating another video, and then another one with even more pictures until I had what you see above.  (actually, above is the low-res version for web – so the full screen option will show you a pretty blurry version – but I have a high-res version on our Apple TV and they even spit out an ISO version for me to burn directly onto a DVD so I can mail it to any family members who don’t check this blog…wait, do we have any family members NOT checking this site??) After that, I selected one of the royalty-free music tracks on Animoto’s website and hit ‘GO’.  I went a little nuts with the higher res version, so this took about 30 minutes to generate, but the one you see above was done in about half the time.  Too cool, huh?

I know, I know.  You want one too, now, right?  Well, if you do click the button below and you can save $5 off your signup fee.  That’s like getting a free HD version!

One more bit of marketing related news – Hewett Photography is now on Facebook!  Why, you ask?  Well, Facebook has over 350 million active users. According to these stats on Wikipedia, that means that it has a larger population that the United States and if Facebook were a country, it would be the third most populous country on the planet!  If you’re on Facebook, why not head on over and check us out?