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Showing posts from March, 2015

New Web Site

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I have been getting good feedback from my black and white photos that have been at Scooter's Coffee at College and Antioch for a few weeks. Then last Sunday, we went to Waldo Pizza in Lees Summit and hung a number of large color photos with musical themes. They will be there for two months. Be sure to go in for some great pizza and see my photos. If you have a business or public space that would be available for an art display, let me know. We can talk about it.    My photo of the old "Texas Top Hands" Flexible bus that I made while in Austin a few years ago was on the cover of the March issue of Johnson County Lifestyle magazine. This was their "arts" issue, so there was a feature about me and various arts organization in the area. The article about the Shawnee Mission Strolling Strings also featured my photographs.    I have been planning to update my primary web site for sometime now. I finally got it up and running this week. I wi

Marketing 101

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Marketing 101  Stanley Marcus of Nieman-Marcus once said, "Half of advertising is wasted, I just don't know which half." It turns out that a lot of advertising is not only wasted, but is very harmful as well. For example, I have owned about half a dozen Oldsmobiles including the gorgeous 1977 Ninety-eight above. GM came out with an ad campaigning declaring, "This is not your father's Oldsmobile," implying that the millions of Oldsmobile owners were all a bunch of old fogeys. They got the message and quit buying Oldsmobiles and a century old brand died, or more correctly, was killed by poor management and worse marketing. An even worse marketing technique is rewarding new customers while punishing your current customers. We are seeing several nationally known companies offering huge discounts to new customers while insisting that their long established loyal customers pay full price. They result is that the loyal customers are not coming

Nikon and Consumer Reports

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Nikon In the 1960’s and early ‘70s, Nikon ruled. Nikon claimed that 98% of all photographs in newspapers and magazines were made with Nikon cameras and few people contested that claim. Many camera repairmen only worked on Nikons, considering other makes not worth fixing. Additionally, Nikon encouraged people who shot more than 500 rolls of film per year to have their cameras cleaned and adjusted annually. It was against this background that a major consumer magazine decided to run a test of 35mm cameras. They surveyed camera repair shops and compared the types of cameras they serviced against production numbers and concluded that Nikons were extremely unreliable and therefore unacceptable. I first heard about this when a man came into the camera shop where I was working and said he didn’t care what kind of camera he bought as long as it wasn’t a Nikon because they were the worst. We all started laughing because we thought he was kidding. (We were the largest Nikon