Everyone out there who has kids knows the pain of dealing with Senior Portraits.  

Here’s a few tips from a buddy of mine over at Zone13 Photographics. 

First things first… get your exposures right.  Separate the main focus of the picture from the background (Photoshop is my preferred tool – but these tips apply to most tools). 

Next – reduce the saturation levels in the back – and boost them in the front.  We don’t want to wash out the picture – we just want it to have a nice over all tone to it. 

You’ll note my daughters a bit dark in the pic, and as with everyone (including most name actresses) her skin has some blemishes.  A touch of blur here, a bit of dodging tool there… now we can actually see her face, and the hives from holding an animal in the picture they took earlier are now… gone. 

When retouching it’s important to remember that you’re not there to make them perfect.  As much work as this may seem it’s mostly a bit of lighting.  Where I did over do it – I cut out the section as a layer, and then used Opacity to let her natural skin to actually show through the blurs.  And this is the difference between a retouched photo and an “accurate” retouched photo.  Yes, my daughter no longer has the eyes of a raccoon, and her skin is clearer.  Even though this does give her a very different appearance – it’s actually what she looks like when she’s not standing under a tree that casts shadows and uneven lighting.

Then we went through and did contrast and saturation adjustments on the fore image and the back image.  Play around – and make sure you work on a copy of the original image.  It’s easy to make a mistake and not all software will let you go back and fix things.

Now, if you’re time strapped – there are if you have Photoshop (and some other tools which also accept these plug-ins) some very nice plug-ins from a great company called Topaz.  These can do a lot of the work for you, and my personal favorite is one called “Topaz Vivacity”.   I’m a huge fan of these for the cost.  I’ve probably spent enough on plug-ins for AE, Photoshop, etc., over the years to buy a small car – and hands down I go to the stuff from Topaz over and over for almost everything. 

If you’re tight on time – and tight on cash they really make you look like a rock star.  So – if you have Photoshop, and you have Senior Portraits coming – ask for a copy of the pics in raw format if possible from the photographer.  I understand a lot of photographers now just include them as they did back in the days of “negatives”, so they shouldn’t look at you too funny if you ask. 

It’s a lot cheaper for you – if you have a little artist in you – to do photo retouchings than having them do it.  But try to remember these simple rules when you do photo retouching for people:

1) It’s not about cool.  It’s about making someone look good. 
2) Never make it too obvious it’s been retouched.  Always leave a little imperfection to it. 
3) Color, Contrast, details are important.  Try to keep these at all costs on the main subject.
4) Remember it’s for them – not you.  If they want something you really don’t like… tell them why you don’t like it nicely, but always yield to the person who has to live with the end product.

When you’re done… you may want to try several looks – each only slightly different to see what plays well with people.  Each of the images below is slightly different – I’m going to let my daughter choose which one we go with.  That is always the telling sign for any Accurate Retouching – if the person you’re doing the retouching for likes it. 

Ever wonder why a Consultant charges double what a Contractor does and doesn’t even hint at looking guilty for it?

A friend of mine asked me why I had different rates for one and why they were so … out of whack.  Here’s a tid bit most people do not know.  If you have a family and you’re a “Consultant” you actually have to double your rate if you want to make the same as a Contractor, and it’s – believe it or not – almost 2 1/2 times to get the same benefits as a Full Time Employee. 

The short answer is a Consultant has to pay for everything themselves.  This includes a 19% (or higher) Federal Income Tax, a 6.5% Social Security Tax, and another 1.54% tax for Medicare.  If you live in some states (like I do) there’s actually a tax you have to pay for doing business as a consultant (.0754 on every dollar), and other local taxes and business fees (add another 1.5%).  So … right off the bat – your costs are waaay hirer than a contractor. 

The next cost you’re hit with is health care (you can verify these numbers on the links provided if you’d like).  For a married man, with 2 kids you can expect to pay anywhere from $975 to $265 a month for insurance … depending on if you actually want to be covered or just like paying $275 a month for a policy that you probably can’t use. (www.ehealthinsurance.com)  This by the way … does not include dental – or vision coverage under any of the plans (nope – not even the $975 a month plan).   So there’s another huge of your check there.

Most consultants have to provide their own phones, and equipment too.  And there’s no “auto upgrade every 3 years” as when you’re working for a corporation.  So you need to set aside at budget to replace your stuff every year or so.  You should – if you’re smart, put aside 10% of every check to cover equipment, phones, and misc. expenses like unexpected travel. 

All of these – you get when you work for someone, and they add up quickly.  A consultant who’s expected to travel needs to be able to travel on short notice, so you have to have that ability.  The job won’t wait for a re-imbursement check.  Which, btw, you’ll probably want to have a lawyer look over your contracts if they’re long term.  A lot of times you will find that a Consultant signs away rights to a lot of things and locks himself into very expensive situations because they’re not a lawyer.  (Case in point – know of one guy who signed a consulting agreement that said he’d be paid $40 a day for travel… fine when he was in the Bay area.  Then they stated sending him to London twice a month…. and yes… they expected him to pay the air fare and room in England.)  

So … read the fine print or get someone to do it for you – you no longer have a legal team or group travel planner to help you.  And in order to keep track of all this with the IRS – you need to (if you have half a brain) hire an accountant… so 10% from every check… goes to all of that goodness.

So – here’s some fun math… a Consultant who expects to make $100,000 a year vs. a Contractor who makes $100,000 a year.  Below is a an actual table of how I’d have to calculate my rate – and this is a very basic table.  It doesn’t include quite a few expenses you’d usually have to do business.

This of course brings up a couple more points for the lowly consultant to consider… “Billable Hours”.

Consultants start out with about 2080 hours in the year they can bill.  From that you subtract Holidays (which though they can work, most of their clients don’t – so no billing there.).  Next subtract any Sick Days you’re going to have.  What you don’t think Consultants don’t get sick?  Try flying on a plane packed with 150 potential flu carriers twice a week and NOT get sick. 

It’ll happen – trust me, and no client wants you infecting their staff and bringing down an entire team’s worth of work for 3 days.  Sick means you don’t work – it has nothing to do with “you could work” – it has to do with the client doesn’t want you there.   

Next – are what I like to call “soft hours”.  This is where you, have to do what every business does – determine how much time is lost to locating new clients, going to training, conferences, and the like – which are where you find the lions share of your work often. Better plan for that. 

Finally – you need to consider how long it will be between assignments – and if you’re first starting out that might be a while.  Every business has this as a cost.  As a Consultant you’re no different than anyone else – you have to figure this as an expense of doing business.  You can’t bill a client for soft time – but it’s still an expense to you.  So you need to calculate that into your rate.

Here’s a rough idea of what “Billable Hours” for a year would look like for you:

Now if I was still young and single and wasn’t picky about health care, and I didn’t need a house with enough room for 3 more people … well you get the idea, I could eat many of these costs – work more hours, etc., and so on.  Single people have a real advantage in being able to be consultants.  Which is why you see that more than married people.

But enough soap boxing… you asked for what the difference in rate fees was between a Consultant and a Contractor?  That’s it pretty much.  It’s a question of working for yourself vs. working for someone else.

By and large – I prefer to work for someone else.  Consulting pays well – and as you can see, if you want to be very successful at it you have to charge a pretty penny.  Most businesses will pay that pretty penny because they have no attachment to you, to the job you’re doing.  Once it’s completed – it’s done you go away and they would have had to pay those costs anyway if they’d hired someone.  But if they hired someone for it – they’d have had to go through the headache of finding you more work. 

If they hire a contracting firm – well the firm essentially has to pay all of those expenses and most businesses assume they do.  What the reality is – is that most Contracting firms offer pretty much useless health care and other benefits.  Often times you have to work 6 months just to get sick days or holiday pay.  (In fact my last contract I was hired in late October, and so had to deal with 3 weeks of vacations for which everyone else got paid … and I didn’t right during the Xmas season.)

In essence – as a Contractor your life pretty much sucks.  But there is the fact that most companies only hire a Consultant if they absolutely need that specific skill or expertise, so it’s hard to get a consistent Consulting gig.  So – Contracting is more popular with companies and provides more work.  Consulting provides better income and benefits – but less work.  Full Time Employees of course – have the benefits of both – but that’s even harder in many cases to find work of equivalent pay. 

That’s my take on it… hope that helps explain a few things.

CNet did a few bits on Windows on the OLPC.  Which is great for those of us who worked on making that happen.  So… without any further adieu… here’s where you can find these gems.

I think Ina’s comments were pretty fair and right on track.  Obviously – Sugar’s something that is very cute.  There are criticisms that its more of a suped leap frog under Sugar – which is also unfair.  Sugar, for what it’s designed for is very good.  But keep in mind Sugar is not meant for taking a child much past a very early learning level.  Constructionist learning is a good starting point.  But to me, it’s really not a long term education solution.  Apparently this concern is matched by a lot of educators and governments. 

For that – you need the ability to have a unit that can allow someone to compete, match the capabilities of other students – not just in the same school but in schools all over the world, and also to provide a growth story.  Okay, so the Windows interface isn’t cute – but as has been shown over and over – it is easy enough for even small kids to work with. 

Larry Dignan, gives us his take on this issue here… in his blog entitled “OLPC meets XP: Does charm matter?”. 

But to be honest I think they need to re-evaluate the statement “The kid-friendly programming tool Scratch is one of the few software pieces that exists in the same form on both Windows and Linux versions of the XO laptop.”.  

There are actually a lot – in fact, almost every software piece you can run on one … you can run on the other.  Any limitations would largely be on the hardware itself.  But… you can check that out for yourself. 

There’s even a full Sugar virtual machine on the OLPC Wiki site that you can download and run on Windows XP.   But check out the stuff on Cnet – and find out more about this for yourself. 

As for me – my last day on the project was yesterday.  So I’m moving on to other things.  It’s been a great project to work on and extremely rewarding.  I look forward to seeing more great things about Windows on this little green box. 

Some points of clarification and updates to this blog:

* I mentioned that there’s an emulator for a virtual machine of the OLPC.  This is for the SUGAR based OLPC – not the Windows version. And the intent was to allow people who wanted to experience the Sugar interface to check it out for themselves. You can find out more about this here:  http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Emulating_the_XO/Quick_Start/Windows 

You can also download the CNET Podcast for this at:
http://podcast-files.cnet.com/podcast/cnet_podcast102408.mp3

Okay … so the last time I blogged… it was to show the differences between Silverlight and Flash for video made a difference even for someone who say … didn’t have the resources of MSNBC or a big name video production. 

I did a high def video – posted it to “free” website and just let the video load into the silverlight player directly from the web.  Very high quality – very low cost – very little time.

David Sayed, from the Microsoft Expression Encoder sent me a very nice ping pointing out that Microsoft actually offers Silverlight developers (and actually anyone) the ability to steam your video also – and it is also free. 

So in the spirit of free (since we all like free) let’s say you’ve created a really cool video, and you want to put this out there for everyone.  Go to silverlight.live.com – and sign up for an account if you don’t have one.  It’ll probably take all of 5 minutes of your life.

Next – click on the handy links – upload your file… (or if you have MS Expression Encoder 2 – use the cool plug in for uploading right to the silverlight.live.com site) and you’re ready to go. 

And… as you can see the results are shown above.    Or you can provide a link to other applications or tools:  http://silverlight.services.live.com/18150/Silverlight%20Downtown%20Demo/video.wmv