Saw this poster for Post-It Super Sticky notes at Office Depot:

Seems like a reasonable advertisement, tasteful, with examples, etc. But look closer at one of them:

“Sherri, Let’s team up for the civics report!” Since when is teaming up allowed? It would make high school and college so much easier for me.

I think this poster represents a general lost of respect for the education system… because it’s generally less deserving of respect. My Dad taught me at home, but if I went to public school I would’ve been home-schooled too. No real learning goes on at school; the teachers just say “go home and learn this.” Also, you’re forced to spend time on a lot of garbage when you should be focusing on just three things: reading, writing, and arithmetic. Everything else will flow from that. And no, arithmetic is NOT mixing numbers and letters. It’s practical stuff.

In the past six hours, I’ve released 53 of my photos as royalty-free stock. Check out the stock gallery to see them all. This means that every photo I’ve published is free for anyone to use. Quite a milestone, I must admit.

All the photos in the portfolio (about page 2 of the stock gallery at the moment) have source images now. I’ve linked to them in each post. So you can get right to the source of things, be it a JPEG (stuff with my older cameras) or .cr2 RAW (from my Canon Rebel XTi). This is great for digital artists. I can’t think of anyone who is doing what I do: putting countless hours into crafting beautiful and artistic photos (hopefully), and then releasing both the edited and original versions for free to all. Even if you just want to see what kinds of files the cameras I use produce, it’s a great resource.

Anyway, I didn’t post source images for the 53 photos I just posted… because my FTP client keeps timing out on the uploads. Maybe it’s SYN Hosting’s fault; I’m not sure. But I’ll come back to that. The source files should roll in at about 400MB, because RAW files are big. Update: I uploaded them overnight and added links to each post. Every stock photo that’s edited has a source image now!

I’ve already noticed that traffic, particularly bandwidth usage, has spiked. Check out these stats:

That’s how much bandwidth Thripp.com has been using in megabytes per day over the past week. That’s a tenfold increase on the 15th compared to the 14th. Granted, this isn’t drilled down to this particular blog, but I’ve been the most visited one on the Thripp.com network as of late, so it’s safe …

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The shop is back. It’s a bit different now. If you can recall from a month ago, I gave up on yak because it doesn’t work with Wordpress MU. I found a plugin that does: Quick-Shop. It’s less fancy, but a lot easier to maintain. When you click “Add to Cart” on any page, you get redirected to the shopping cart, with that item added. To go back, press back in your browser (the old-fashioned way). To buy, click the PayPal button; you’ll be redirected to them so you can enter your payment info. Here’s the cart in action:

You can change quantities; just press enter to update. The red X’s remove items, and more shipping policies and such are below the form.

Since this new software has no database and keeps no inventory or shipping logic, shipping is USA only now. You can email me if you really want some prints and can’t move to my country, though. Also, you can order like 500 of a print, because there’s no stock tracking. If you do this, it’ll take me a week extra to have the copies printed.

I’ve released all of my portfolio in the shop, to start. The price is $0.95 plus $0.42 shipping per print, and the size is 4*6 for them all. I like the new software because I can put multiple items to a post, unlike with yak, and I don’t have to do tedious updating of custom fields; it’s really quick for me to add an Add to Cart button.

Unfortunately, the plugin has security issues. I tried commenting about them on the author’s site, but just got a blank screen. Here is that comment:

I’m liking this plugin a lot and am using it

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I made a custom Internal Server Error page for the Thripp.com network, with all the photos from my portfolio. Error pages are fun again.

I put a lot of ads there too, so I can monetize the outages. Plus, the links are to the photos on my jpgmag.com gallery, and all the thumbnails are on Photobucket, so the page is light-weight, won’t chew up bandwidth, and makes my photos accessible when the database is down. It’s only 10KB!

I posted this to digg too:

Check out this HTTP 500 page; instead of being rudely interrupted with a cryptic error message and an accusation that you broke the server, on Thripp.com, you’re greeted by beautiful photography (and plenty of ads to boot).

Enjoy.

Hello again. I’m back from my exciting four-day vacation. I stayed around Palm Beach for three days with my aunt, uncle, cousin, and grandma. It was 200 miles down there. We had a lot of fun, my aunt cooked great food, there was a cool storm, and we played volleyball in the pool. Afterward, I stayed with my Grandma for Sunday and part of Monday, and my Dad brought me home three hours ago. I’ve been unpacking and clearing out emails.

Here’s some photos. I won’t show family because they don’t want to be shown.

The portrait is me. I’ll be cooking up some edited versions which you’ll see over the next few days. It was hard not having Internet for four days; no computers or Wi-Fi with the family, and all the neighbors had passwords on their networks. I’m glad to be back working on the mission here. I wrote two photography articles I’ll be polishing up tomorrow.

This site and the thripp.com network chugged along fine while I was gone. 2000 unique visitors across both. The HTML caching + gzip compression is working great. I had about 60 new users, but 30 were blatant spam by the same person, which I deleted on the spot. Two-thirds of the rest are non-blatant spam, but I don’t mind that.

The total number of thripp.com blogs is 115, and the MySQL database is up to 40MB. Still working fine on SYN shared Hosting, fortunately. I’ve used 4GB of bandwidth in my 10 days with them. I have 120GB/month, so I’m at 10% capacity. Most of the bandwidth is from my …

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I was contemplating how to get the word out about the resource I’m developing here at Brilliant Photography. I decided to send an email to everyone know a.k.a. mass spamming. But it’s not spamming, because it’s relevant. I don’t know where the idea comes that messages that aren’t personalized are spam; do we expect the same from the newspaper, television, or even blog articles? Certainly not. Here’s the message, anyway. It outlines what I’m doing here quite well.

Hello everyone!

This is one of those super automated emails to everyone I’ve known over the past four years. I wanted to let you know the great progress I’ve been making at my website, Brilliant Photography by Richard X. Thripp, at http://richardxthripp.thripp.com/ . I’ve been working hard on my writing and photography, completing a portfolio of my 30 best images: clichés like roses, sunsets, raindrops, bugs, and still life. Mine are different because I always try to be sharp and innovative. I have a nice gallery section showing every photo I’ve ever posted, and I’m writing more informative articles on photography; stuff like How to Always Get the Perfect Shot, How to Use Zooming for Explosive Photos, How to Brand Your Prints, and my 4500-word novel, How to give file names to your photos, which arcs across photography, library science, cataloging theory, and the evils of Daylight Saving Time.

Two days ago, I was thinking "how could I make my website an even more useful resource?" It didn’t take long to think of it; I’ve done the unthinkable by releasing my entire portfolio (my life’s work, if you will) as a free stock resource. If you are a digital artist of any sort, or want a nice photo for a

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I added something new today: posts throughout the site will display a random photography-related product from Amazon.com that I’ve chosen. I pick the products (cameras, lenses, accessories) if they have good reviews, are good quality, and priced reasonably, plus using my own experience in the field. They’re all displayed on the Richard’s Picks page (12 so far), and a random one shows next to the 2nd, 7th, and 10th post on each page. So you won’t see them on an individual post or page like this, but you will be seeing them on the home page, and tag and category listings, like the free stock photos section.

If you buy anything, I get a 4% commission from Amazon.com, which will help me support this site. I’ll get that bonus even for other things, so if you’re looking to make any sort of purchase from Amazon.com, click here to share with me. Thanks.

I was looking around today, thinking “What one thing can I do on my website to make it a highly useful photography resource.” It didn’t take long. I decided and set out on releasing my entire portfolio as royalty-free stock images in their high-resolution glory, all free under the least restrictive Creative Commons license. If you’re any sort of digital artist, this is some awesome news, because I’ve literally put years into this stuff. You can do anything with them; even commercial stuff. All you have to do is credit me as Richard X. Thripp, and link back here at http://richardxthripp.thripp.com. Click here to see the complete gallery, or choose from some of the quick picks below:

Thanks, and enjoy. Click “ShareThis” below and get the word out to your friends.

2008-07-20 Update: They upgraded the site and broke the old URLs! Here’s my new Gawker Artists page.

I have a page on Gawker Artists now. The photo that got me in is The Rebel, one of my favorite portraits, taken for my now-concluded black and white film class. This means the image will appear occasionally on Lifehacker and other exhibitors. Quite cool. Sarah will be proud, if she checks here. She’s representing an entire movement of non-conformity.

I came up with a great summary of my photographic mission for the page:

I’m an experimental photographer who’s been working in the digital medium for four years. I strive to capture nature in inspiring and unusual ways; while I take pretty pictures, they should always make you think. The same effort goes into my portraits and still life; I photograph whatever I like, and am known for forcing people to pose in crazy ways, or for spending hours setting up arrangements of marbles or ketchup bottles. I’m a believer in contributing to the photography community, so I write a lot of behind-the-scenes details and add tips for my fellow photographers to my website.

If you’re a photographer, isn’t that what your mission should be? To make people think. Anyone can do that. Anyone can do what I do. But does that mean you do? For many of you, no. But I’ll do it for you.

In my spare time over the past few days, I’ve been working on the tech side of the site, instead of posting new material (sorry to my viewers). Some advances:

• My Twitter updates are at the …

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2008-06-03 Update: The sale is over. Thanks everyone!

I’ve printed up and framed sixteen of my favorite photos as 8*10’s. You can buy them in the new, special photography shop for the brilliant price of $49.95 each. There is only one of each, so hurry! 2008-06-17 Update: gone now.

Speed, and Sunrays 3 are new here. I’ll have a formal release in a couple weeks, but you can check them out by those links now. 2008-06-17 Update: The shop is gone (read Everything Old is New Again), but check out Speed and Sunrays 3 anyway. and Just one week of school left to go, and then I get a week off, and then six weeks of summer pre-calculus. I’ll be presenting my photography portfolio for my black-and-white film class on May 8th at the college (The Gaze, The Rebel, Wine Bottles, and film versions of Modern Architecture and The Stuccoed House will be included). I’ll throw in a few of the new digital prints.