So, you’ve decided you don’t want anyone pinning images from your website or blog.  Maybe it’s due to personal opinions, or fear that some Pinterest pinners will violate the copyrights of the work or content that your website hosts. How do you make it harder for people to pin your stuff?  You can actually ban or block people from pinning any pictures on your website.  This was released recently from Pinterest:

We have a small piece of code you can add to the head of any page on your site:

<meta name=”pinterest” content=”nopin” />

When a user tries to pin from your site, they will see this message:
“This site doesn’t allow pinning to Pinterest. Please contact the owner with any questions. Thanks for visiting!”

This might be of note to those that don’t want anything on their personal websites to be pinned on pinterest via the web browser bookmarklet.  Of course, this isn’t going to stop people from right click save as, or screenshotting, and then uploading the images to pinterest directly… but I don’t think Pinterest users are going to want to go through all of that trouble.  The fact of the matter is, if you don’t want images from your blog being pinned, you should use this code on your personal blogs and websites.  Will larger corporations begin using this code?  I guess only time will tell.  I highly doubt many of them are anti-Pinterest, as it drives a lot of new traffic.  It will be interesting to see if a website as large as Flickr or maybe even Twitpic will begin implementing these anti-Pinterest measures.

We’re all for Pinterest – we have nothing against it, and actually love using it as a great promotional tool.  We do think that it’s very fair of them that they are giving webmasters and web content hosts the option of disabling pinterest on a per site basis.

Here’s a slideshow I wanted to share from a recent Spring time engagement session photoshoot with some friends of mine.  The location was a country New England orchard, and made for great scenery.  These images will soon be available for royalty-free stock photo licensing.

One of my favorite selects from the shoot is the photo of the diamond engagement ring wrapped around the wild onion grass.  I love it when you are working with a couple who is willing to add their own creative ideas and suggestions.  It’s easy to get lost in the photo shoot and to forgot certain details that you wanted to capture, so when I’m able to work with people who are also creatively minded, it helps us to push the shoot to an even higher level or variety.  We also were able to hang the ring on some apple flower buds, that was just starting to turn into tiny baby apples.  I really enjoy photographing engagement sessions, because there is a wide variety of things to capture – from the location and environment, the couple doing certain activities (such as tossing a frisbee, or riding a motorcycle), down to the very tiny details.

You can see a few more stills from this shoot here on our facebook page.

We love our reality television shows, but there’s a new tv show that will be right up the alley of all creative professionals.  If you’re a fan of Donald Trump’s The Apprentice or Celebrity Apprentice, then you will definitely like the new AMC TV series The Pitch even more.  Here you can watch the first episode, S01E01 of The Pitch for free (also viewable on Netflix through May 28th in HD). The Pitch gives us a real life look into the lives of creative professional and process behind landing the next huge marketing campaigns for Fortune 500 companies.

Another Reality Series?
Yeah, it’s another reality series, but we don’t have that many relating to the creative fields.  Sure there are cooking shows, bakery series like Cake Boss, and custom motorcycle documentaries like American Chopper; but it’s not often that we actually get a show relating to our field of marketing and advertising.  That’s what makes The Pitch so exciting!  In the first episode, we see two competing advertising agencies travel to Milford, CT to pitch their ideas to Subway on their next breakfast sandwich marketing campaign.  The two agencies literally are working head to head just to win the job.

What’s Cool
Celebrity Apprentice and The Apprentice are a little similar, because we get to see an entire marketing campaign from brainstorming sessions through the final branding and execution. With the The Pitch, these advertising pitches aren’t made up for the sake of a TV show.  This is the real thing – the big leagues in the marketing and advertising world.  We get to see the agencies’ branstorming sessions, the good ideas, the bad ideas, and even their creative processes. You get to see how they interact with one another.  We even see how some of the creatives’ ideas become things they are personally attached to, while other members of the team don’t always see the value in them.  You also see how hard these advertising professionals have to work, and travel.  It even gives us a glimpse into the private home life for some of them.  Let’s just say it’s not the type of job we’d all like to have.  Unless you like to work to live; working long hours, lots of travel, and

Advertising in a Show About Advertising
Not surprisingly, you have to remember that the point of all television shows and movies are created to also bring in advertising dollars. At one point in the Subway pitch episode you will see them browsing for stock images on the Getty Images website.  Getty is obviously of a traditional stock agency (non-microstock pricing) where iStockphoto is their microstock collection.  Not surprisingly enough, at the end credits, you’ll note that it says “promotional consideration by Getty Images and iStockphoto”.  Talk about a great advertising opportunity, because ever single advertising/marketing/graphic designing creative type (at least that I know) is going to be watching this show. Getty is smart to have added this paid product placement, but it would be nice to see if we could also see behind the curtain to when the ad agencies actually purchase from microstock agencies, as well.  We probably won’t, because that is what the promotional consideration Getty has paid for will mask.

Let us know what you think about The Pitch.  Leave a comment below, and please share this post!

Did you ever scan a photo or some film negatives on a flatbed or film scanner, only to realize that the image is covered in pieces of dust, pet hair, or lint?  Or maybe you photographed a closeup of an object only to find a bunch of obvious dust or scratches that were not very noticeable to the eye beforehand?  This Photoshop tutorial by the late Bob Mizerek will show you how to Photoshop out dust and scratches in a jiffy using this simple technique.

While the standard dust and scratches removal feature in Photoshop may be enough, you might find that many times that it takes away too much quality from the original image.  Using Bob’s method (as seen in the youtube video above) you will learn that dust removal can be a lot more selective using layers and masking; therefore preserving the important parts of the image, and all of its important details.

“There is a problem parsing the package” is the error message you might get when trying to sideload apps on your new, shiny Kindle Fire.  Here’s why I think it happened to us, and this is what we did to fix it.  This post is for Kindle Fire users; the rest of you can move along (unless you want to be bored, or if you enjoy absorbing useless tech knowledge).

First of all, for those that might not be aware, you can sideload apps from the Android Market on your Kindle Fire.  Just about every app will work, due to the fact that the Kindle Fire tablet runs on the Android OS.  The problem is, the Amazon Kindle Fire app store doesn’t support all of the Android apps found in the Android Market.  I don’t know why they do this.  Maybe it’s due to the fact that the Kindle Fire’s hardware is slightly different, but it’s pretty annoying.  We wanted to put dropbox on my wife’s Kindle, just like we can run the app on our Android phones.  Back to the story.

We backed up a copy of the apps we wanted to transfer over, by using Astro file manager (a free app in the Android Market).  This placed a copy of the .apk files (from the programs we wanted) on the SD card, in a folder named backup/apps.  That’s how to get the .apk files for your Android apps.  Don’t trust downloading them off some shifty website on the web.  Copy them from your Android phone using this method I just described.  So next, we just had to plug the phone into the computer with the cable, copy the files to the PC, and then over to the kindle (via data cable).  Another method, which is a bit easier, is simple emailing the files as attachments to an email account you can access on your Kindle.

The first .apk files we tried, we copied over from the Droid X.  No beans… it didn’t work at all.  We got the dreaded Parse error “There is a problem parsing the package”.  The first thing that popped in my head is, “I bet the Kindle runs on an older version of Android than the Droid X does.  Let me try copying the .apk files from my own phone, the LG Optimus V.”  So, I did exactly that, and the rest is history.

When you get the dreaded parse error on your kindle fire or nook, try copying .apk files from an older Android phone or device.  That’s what worked for us, so maybe it will also work for you.

My super brief mini review of The Kindle Fire:  It’s a pretty reasonably priced tablet, for all that you get.  Priced around $200 USD, it’s a little smaller than the iPads, and yet big enough to read on.  They made it to be book sized.  It’s reasonably fast, and the battery lasts a really long time.  Although you have to jump through a few hoops to get almost any Android app to run on it, it’s no more than a 5 minute process to do so. Don’t worry – you don’t have to root your Kindle Fire, to sideload apps. I’m not personally a tablet person (give me a solid laptop any day) but my wife really does enjoy the thing.  I’ve used it a handful of times, and can tell you it’s very user friendly, and easy to learn how to navigate.