The Taste of Salt Lake - Cystic Fibrosis Foundation

On Saturday November 8th we photographed at the Annual Cystic Fibrosis Taste of Salt Lake. This is a charity event where several fantastic local restaurants bring their food to share with the attendees of the event. While the food is being served there are silent auctions and socializing, after there is a live auction. This night was amazing and there where more people there than I personally expected. It was great! The best part is that 90 cents of every dollar raised will be used for research of CF.

Photos Coming SOON! They will be posted on my website www.deepfocusstudios.com sometime Wednesday this week.

Utah's Finest

Recently Katy and me were able to photograph at an important event that recognizes people who've helped raise a significant amount of money for Cystic Fibrosis research. The event is called Utah's Finest, held at La Caille on August 22, 2008. Here are a few photos from this event:

La Caille Planted a "Sixty-five Roses" Garden for CF.

I've been offering special discounts since the beginning of the year to anyone who donates to CFF.org. If you need any type of services that I provide please make a donation so that you can help find a cure. Details can be found here.

Moab Moonlight Series

Seven photos in in a series "Moab Moonlight",

All photographs were taken in Moab, Utah. In or around Arches National Park. Although the series is "Moab Moonlight" there are two photographs that are actually sun sets, the rest that are Moons and stars.


Blue Desert Moonrise
(Blue Moon of June 30, 2007)


Twilight Moonrise at Arches National Park

Stars and Silhouettes

Starlight, Starbright...

Peeking Light

Desert Blue

Moonlit Skies


Seven photos in in a series "Moab Moonlight", See or purchase them at www.jprasmussen.com

Buy Prints Online!

New to www.jprasmussen.com is a shopping cart. You can now purchase selected prints in the store.

Check it out here: http://jprasmussen.com/shop/index.php

Fireworks Celebration at the Canyons Resort, Park City

$25 Portrait Sittings!

During the entire month of July regular portrait sittings of up to 6 people are only $25! Contact Deep Focus Studios for more information.

City Weekly Recreation Festival

Yesterday I participated in the City Weekly Rec Fest in downtown Salt Lake. I was lucky enough to get a booth through one of the festival sponsors, Buy Local First.

I took advantage of the booth and decided to try and sell my personal photography. Since I've never done a show of this kind I had to scramble to put this together. Fortunately I found an artist and framer that was willing to help me out. We put together a nice collection of images.

It went very well. At the show I got a lot of fed back on "the public's" favorite photos and here they are for you to see.

"Lighting Out West"
Loc: Salt Lake's West Bench

"Hummingbird"
Loc: Red Butte Gardens, SLC, UT

"Moon Rise over Arches"
Loc: Arches National Park, Moab, Utah

"Night Sky at Starvation"

Loc, Near Starvation Reservoir, Duchesne, UT

"Tabasco"
Loc: Salt Lake City, UT

Cystic Fibrosis Awareness

This month is Cystic Fibrosis Awareness Month. Cystic fibrosis is an inherited life-threatening disease that currently does not have a cure. In the United States alone there are approximately 30,000 people who have CF and are lucky to live to their mid-thirties.

Cystic fibrosis research is definitely a team effort. Scientists across the world are working to understand and better combat this complex disease, with the hope that one or more of the many approaches to therapies will lead to a cure.Donate to Save!

People can help advance the research by making a donation to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.

This month Deep Focus Studios is offering half off or free regular portrait sittings for those people who donate $25 or more directly to the Cystic Fibroses Foundation. All you need to redeem this offer is show a recent copy of your donation receipt.

To donate go to www.CFF.org and click on the "Make a Donation" link at the bottom of the Quick Links list OR click this link: https://www.cff.org/GetInvolved/ManyWaysToGive/Donate/

After you make the donation print an extra copy of your donation receipt to present to Deep Focus Studios.

Remember you can make a donation the the foundation even if you don't need any portraits

We Have a Puppy!

Last Friday we adopted a 2 month old puppy from the Humane Society of Utah. We Love him so much... he's a Labrador Australian Shepherd Mix.

Fairy Photos!

Part of a new series of photos that I'm working on. I'm also looking for fresh models who want to take a crack at being a fairy! Contact me at www.jprasmussen.com, www.deepfocusstudios.com OR www.modelmayhem.com/jprasmussen.

Model: Kenzie Ahlstrom

New Website Design!

It's been some time since I've paid any sort of attention to my personal website (www.jprasmussen.com) but I have just created a new design using some of my own images. This website still displays mostly my own personal work from pet projects and road trips. The redesign was motived from a recent decision to change the direction of business. Deep Focus will continue as is however the more creative and "fun" projects will be done under my personal name. Anyway, enough reading... go look now www.JPRasmussen.com

More is better?

Lately I've been getting a number of inquiries from brides looking for a CD with all their images. Which in the outward appearance might sound like a great idea, however there are a number of things that people don't consider when they demand for a product like this.

Let me explain what you generally get from a photographer when you ask for a CD like this. Often what you get on the CD will be all the images straight off the camera, there will not be any touch ups, color corrections or editing of any kind. The photographer simple does not have the time to correct several hundred to thousands from your celebration.

Sometimes it’s difficult to understand what exactly the photographer does to the images before they are printed until they are compared side by side. So I have done that exactly for you below, the image on the left is just off the camera and the image to the right has gone through my normal editing process (aka touched up).

Okay so you see the difference but maybe that’s not enough. Let me tell you what I’ve found to be the motivation for getting the CD. I find it varies from person to person, but most reasons seem to fall into one of the three following:

• The want to own the copyright of the images
• Don’t want to pay the photographer's print prices
• Freedom to print the images anytime, for archival purposes

First let’s talk about the copyright... Federal copyright law indicates that by the act of a person capturing an image to some type of medium (film or digitally) they are the owner of that image. The owner of the image is free to sell the copyright of the image to someone else however most photographers will not do that. It’s more likely that you are actually getting a “license” to use the images for personal use. What a license does is grants you permission from the owner of the work to do certain things with the images, in my case my license given with every CD grants the client permission to make reproductions of the images for their own personal use for the life of the CD. There is no ownership of the images given there.

Second some people feel that they can save money by buying the CD and then going to the supermarket where they can have their photos printed for low price. The thing is, they will end up paying about the same amount or more to get a CD and print them on their own then they would picking the favorite images and having the photographer deliver the photo as a finished product. Often the photographer will price the CD at about the same amount of money you’d normally spend on getting printed products. If that doesn’t make sense think of it this way… We will make the same amount of money off you either way. Yes, that's right... us photographers are in business to make money, just like every other business… mostly because we still have to pay the rent, loans, gas and of course for our daily meals just like everyone else. If we gave away our work there would be no way to pay the bills.

The last reason I’ve found to make the most sense and can relate to more than the others. Some people are just interested in holding onto the images for archival purposes. If this is the case then talk to your photographer because there might be a better solution to this then just buying a mess of un-edited photos on a CD. Because of this reason I’ve started to offer a CD for a reasonable price of only the images the client orders in prints. By doing it this way, they get a finished image and they get their CD with the touched up image on it. Everyone is happy.

So the point of this post is to hopefully educate people about this. Of course I’d like for you to purchase finished products in the future instead of the CD however you should consider yourself in the know and can make your own decision.

Happy Groundhog Day!

MSN Live Search is a Joke...

As a lot of my friends know I geek out about this whole internet thing and recently have been perfecting the search engine optimization for my websites.

One site that I have been working on was actually designed by someone else. I just do the monthly house keeping on it. The owner of the site was concerned about how certain keywords weren't bringing her site up in MSN's Live Search results which is her preferred search tool. **Let me interrupt here and say that I've never used MSN search, I've almost always relied on Google.** Well, after a little hesitation I agreed to see what I can do to fix the problem, after all I bill hourly so what's the problem...

So after a short little search I find a place that you can submit a site to Live Search and of course you would think that would do something... after submitting it and watching the site logs for about a week I saw no hits from the MSNBot crawling the site. So a I did some tidy work to the Keywords and page content to see if that helped any but nothing...

Finally I came across this link at the bottom of the Live Search page that says "For Webmasters" I clicked the link and followed the instructions of setting up a tool that is supposed to help improve your site listing with Live. And you know, after a week or more you would expect that something would happen but nothing did. Which shocked me because of course I was comparing everything to Google and how fast a site gets indexed by them. Well after looking through the links inside the webmaster's tools site I noticed some information that wasn't there before. It indicated that the last crawl to the site was back in November 2007, yes... over two months ago and when it crawled it only indexed one page. This was frustrating, so I submitted the url and a new sitemap and waited a few days, still nothing.

Well after not knowing what else to do I continued searching the internet for help with this thinking that maybe I had done something wrong until today. I found a forum hosted on Microsoft's website specifically regarding MSNBot and the webmaster tool I have been using and the first page of forum topics nearly every single post was someone having the same problem that I have been experiencing. Checking in most of the threads for an answer to to this problem it turns out that NO ONE knows what's wrong with it and there has been no official response from Microsoft about it, at least none that I can find. Go Microsoft, yet another successful waste of corporate money! It's as if there is no real logic to what sites it indexes and what sites it excludes, all I know is that I'm not the only one who can't get them to index this site.

As a result, I emailed my client explaining this situation and notified her that I will no longer optimize for Live Search. I also suggested that she start using a different search tool like Google or Yahoo... which is the whole point of this post today, to tell all you people out there in internet land to STOP USING LIVE SEARCH! It sucks!

Please use Google or even Yahoo but for the love of Peter Paul and some guy named Mike NOT LIVE.

Long time no post....

Yeah, so I've really been slacking off on keeping up with the new posts... Around Christmas time I started getting busy with various things which kept me distracted most of the month. Then come January I found myself thinking, "I've got time, I should post something." but I never did.

Well, the last few weeks have been out of laziness but before that I had a real excuse. I was actually working. As you might already know in addition to Photography I do design, specifically web design. I ended up with three new projects toward the end of last month that turned out great! Now I tentatively have two more that will happen soon, just waiting on the clients.

Here are a few screen shots of some of the recent ones.... and a couple side projects also.