Often customers wonder how I choose to crop their photos or how their photos will look at each size. Most cameras (including mine) produce photos that are a 2:3 ratio (equivalent to a 4×6 or 20×30). This means that when you want an image of a different ratio (ex. 4:5 or 8×10), some of the image must be cropped away. As a photographer, I try to take into account for this and leave extra room within an image to allow for an appealing crop that doesn’t lose important parts of the image. Even then not all images will look good at all crop sizes. To help compensate for these differences, I proof my images at a 5×7 size so that it is a pleasing crop somewhere between the more rectangular 2:3 (think 8×12) and the nearly square 4:5 (think 8×10). When you order your prints at a different crop ratio than your proof shows you need to remember there will be a difference between your proof and your final print. I will use my artistic judgement when I crop at these ratios to ensure that all important elements are included and that the image is still appealing. If I feel that a certain crop will not work for an image, I will let you know so that we can make a decision together for the best choice of the display of your portraits.

Here is a visual to help you see the differences a crop will make on one image.

Please keep this in mind when you order prints from our session.

If this doesn’t answer all your questions on the topic please feel free to contact me and I will do my best to help. If you have any ideas for future posts please let me know!
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It happened to me yesterday. And it was awful timing, if there is such a thing as good timing for these things. Recently we rebuilt my dinosaur of a computer and the hard drive we bought was DOA, it would not format. I finally got around to sending it in and the replacement arrived Tuesday. My husband (in house IT ) installed it that night and I was going to spend Wednesday transferring files onto it so my External Hard Drive could go back to being the back up. As I went to move files, a horrible thing happened-nothing. It froze, it crashed. I tried again-it tried to transfer but the same thing happened.

I have an on-line back up so I checked there to see if everything was backed up before the crash. Everything up until November 18th, about the time I thought I noticed it act funny but then it seemed fine. Luckily those items are mostly not important although I don’t remember what all I lost so I could be wrong. Also luckily, my external hard drive is under warranty and will be sent back asap, hopefully all I have to pay is the shipping cost and will receive a new one, but everything on there is pretty much lost.

I thought I was prepared, but I was wrong. I’m lucky that after listening to other horror stories of hard drives crashing that I invested in an online back-up but I still failed. I never bothered to make physical backups on CD/DVD just in case-what if that had failed too? I will be spending a lot of time downloading all my files and burning CDs before I send the drive back just in case I need to try to have someone recover files.

So this is my PSA-Backup all your files! In at least two (2) locations (one on-site and one off-site). It doesn’t matter whether it’s just your personal pictures, resume, school work, tax returns, etc or you are a business person with client information as well. You can lose them all in an instant. What if the unthinkable happened and your computer is stolen? What if even worse happens and your house burns down? You won’t get those files back. You can’t recreate those memories or all the hours that went into creating whatever was on there. Can you imagine losing the first pictures of your babies? Or the thesis you’ve been working on for months? You NEED to have an off-site backup as well. Exchange CDs with a friend-you keep theirs and they keep yours. Get a safety deposit box. A fire-proof safe may not be temperature resistant enough for electronic devices and optical storage (CD/DVD, thumb drives, etc). Online storage is a great option as well. Most will backup your data as often as you like-continuously, daily, when your computer is idle, etc. If your hard drive fails you sign in to your account and either download everything you need or for a fee they can send it to you. There are several companies out there that provide a great service, just do your research. I won’t publicly announce who I use just in case some meanie out there wanted to try to do something bad to my backup.

No matter what you choose, do your research to decide what best fits your needs and please backup your data in two (2) places!

Here are a few articles about the subject:
What hard drive/disk failure is
Rate of failure
Signs of immenent failure

And a photo I would be devastated to lose

This is my oldest as a baby, 3 weeks old. The photo I took that inspired me to start this journey.

The first thing I discovered was that I could not use a Word Doc as my attachment for my signature, not even saved as an .rtf (can’t use a PDF either). To get an image included you need to use a .HTM (or html) and use a code to tell it to include it. Now I’m not an expert by any means so it took me a little bit to get it just right (especially sizing my image which I will still tweak a bit) even after my much more technology savvy husband found a great resource for me at http://www.freeemailtutorials.com/mozillaThunderbird/emailSignature.cwd, if you use Outlook there are also tutorials on there for that. I found I had to modify the code they used to make it work but it was a good starting point. This is the coding I ended up using that worked for me :
http://kaylarenckly.com/EmailSignatureTemplate.txt
Click on my link and when you get there right click and Save As to use as your own template. I use Notepad or Wordpad to edit in code. When you are done save it as an .htm . You will need to either have the image saved to your hard drive and type in the exact location it is located or upload the image to your website and use the different piece of code for that on the tutorial site I linked to. I can not guarantee the code will work for you as is, you may need to change the code a little bit especially the last part that tells your email to include the image if you don’t use Thunderbird.

Hopefully this saves somebody having to send themselves as many emails as I did to see if it works right !

Here’s what mine looks like:
Kayla Renckly
Kayla Renckly Photography
Phone: (602) 790-5330
kayla {at} kaylarenckly.com (changed to protect against spam, normally hyperlinked)
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