Recent Articles

Anna and Dylan were married at the Corpus Christi Catholic Church in Colorado Springs, on Saturday, October 22nd.

I brought along my friend Sarah of Mirror's Edge Photography, who provides wedding and portrait photography in the central coast of California, to cover this event with me.

Every aspect of the day was wonderful - the ceremony was beautiful, the boquets and floral arrangements were gorgeous. The reception was held at the Cordera Community Center, and the...

My good friend at Mirrors Edge Photography, located in Pismo Beach, California invited me to join her for two wedding shoots in California last month as a second shooter. We've worked together closely before and it's a joy, every time.  I couldn't pass up the opportunity - I absolutely love shooting weddings. We created two custom websites (here on the ShutterForge.com hosting platform) to share our efforts with them, and so they could share the photos with...

The annual Perseid meteor shower will be visible tonight through tomorrow morning. This year is promising twice the rate of meteorites, 2 or more a minute (versus the typical 1 per minute).

The meteors will appear to come from the area of the Perseus constellation, in the north-northwest sky, near the horizon, from two to four “hands” up, but will be visible across the sky. If you have city lights nearby, get as far from them as possible for best viewing.

There are many affordable...

Joe and Jen have a great sense of adventure and love to travel. After they shared some of their amazing engagement photos with me, I knew I had to knock this one out of the park for them.

With all the wonderful places in the country to pick from, they chose the beautiful Garden of the Gods, in Manitou Springs, Colorado for their ceremony.  They were looking for a very natural settings, not man-made, so I suggested the Cathedral Spires, in Cathedral Valley, a natural rock formation that is...

I was as excited as the rest of you when I found out Lightroom was going to add a built-in HDR feature to version 6. I personally upgraded as quickly as possible, only to fiind out the implementation left a lot to be desired.

For the purposes of this test I used 3 brackets shots of Denver, just at sunset looking west towards East High with one of the Pinnacle towers in the foreground.

Lightroom's new Merge to HDR offers very few options aside from very basic de-ghosting features, which...

ShutterForge has gone live!

Village.Photos' custom websites are slowly being re-branded to ShutterForge hosting. Nothing will change on Village.Photos, but our stand-alone website offerings will primarily be served through ShutterForge.com.

ShutterForge offers free custom photography websites, ready to go in minutes! Dozens of beautiful templates, powerful portolio management, e-commerce out of the box and world-class SEO are just the highlights. All backed by knowledgeable support so eager...

• New 'Formal' Theme
  
  A new theme and 2 variants have been added.
• Website Logos
  
  Upload your business logo for the website header! Look in the Content/Global area to set your logo URL.
• Bulk Image Rename
  
  Give your images a name better than "DSC80231.JPG" with Bulk Rename. This is particularly handy with large albums. Specify an image name you want, select the images to rename (or select all), and images will be renamed sequentially (ex., 'My Great Photoshoot 1'). This will ...

Custom site users can now get a QR code for their website, one for each album, and even one for eqch image!  Use these on printed materials to add that big-business, modern dlaie to your flyers and business cards.

Also, Google short URL's are now available for albums, each image and each blog post.

Don't have your own custom Village Photos website?  Sign up at http://Village.Photos and go to your account page for more information. It's free and instant, so...

It's been exciting to watch new members get up and running on their own photography websites.  Here's quick lists of some great sites to check out.

• Mirror's Edge Photography
• LyfIsGrand
• Holland's Horizons
• PixGeek
• Dennis Rose Photography
• Plz Do Photos
• Scott Smith Photography (by yours truly!)

Yet another template has been added for Custom Sites users.  This was created as a request, and more versions of this theme are on the way!  Click the screenshot below for a sample website using this theme.

This theme uses a wonderful watercolor background image by Angie at AngieMakes.com.

If you're looking for a fast and free way to get your own photography website off the ground, sign up Village.Photos and go to your Account Settings page for details on Custom Websites.

A few issues were discovered with SEO tagging today. While we already have great results for some members, and increasing rankings on the site overall, I knew they should have been better.

I've made adjustments to every template, both on the main site on custom sites, which should really improve search engine crawls of album and related image pages.

This was a significant set of changes - please contact me at support@village.photos if you run into any issues or have any questions.

~Scott

The season is upon us, that time of year when I start planning a drive or a long weekend on the western slopes of the Colorado Rockies.   The leaves and shrubs  are turning, and the blue bird skies mixed with the dramatic golden and red foliage make for some amazing photo ops.

Why do leaves change color?  As autumn approaches and the days grow shorter, plants don't get as much light for photosynthesis.  The chlorophyll, which is what makes plants green and normally...

We now have working template samples for Custom Sites users online. If you don't have a Custom Site yet, it's easy and free!  Just go to your Account Settings page in the main menu, look for the "Custom Website" section, and enter either a subdomain, or your own custom domain if you have one.

Here's a current list of all the template variations available to Custom Sites.

• Traveller (new!)
• Clean White (new!)
• Cover (new!)
• Elegant Lemon...

Custom sites are live and starting to show up in search results.  If you have a custom site at Village.Photos it's probably because you want to promote and possibly sell your art. You can have the most amazing portfolio and website in the world, but if people can't find you, it's not doing you any good.

We do everything we can to make sure you'll make it onto Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines - but you have to do your part too.

• Link, link, link! Most...

Members using custom sites now have more options for setting up products - instead of manually specifying cropping for various sizes, there is an Auto Product Setup button that will match up your image's aspect ratio with paper sizes and set up the products for you.

You can also set up your own default pricing which will be applied to these auto-created products, and can be applied to existing products as well!

Don't have a custom site yet? Go to the Account Settings page in the main menu ...

Three new templates have been launched - the "Narrow" series. All three are available for Custom Sites users. Visit your Account Settings page on Village.Photos to set up your custom website and to learn more about getting your own stand-alone photography website for free.

Narrow Dark

Narrow Light

Narrow Burnt Orange

Want your own photography website but don't want to fork over the cash, or can't get your current website to appear in Google searches? We've launched stand-alone websites on Village.Photos, which integrate with the existing portfolio management features. Use a subdomain of ours, or your own website address.

Full e-commerce features are enabled, all templates are mobile-friendly and new layouts have been created, full SEO optimization is place and structured markup/microdata is used...

We've introduced two new shipping methods! US Economy, which is up to half the price of our Economy/Trackable method. Orders containing 8"x12" prints or smaller qualify for Economy shipping. We've also added Canadian shipping! Now our members can order and drop ship directly to clients north of the border! The shopping cart and checkout process has had a serious makeover, it's now much more mobile-friendly and shipping prices are displayed along with shipping selections....

We've quietly enabled print ordering features. Members, for any photos you want to sell, read the article prior to this one for tips on getting started. Or, load up the image editing dialog for one of your amazing photo, and hit the "Sell this Photo" button!

Last night my alarm was set for the wee hours of the night, so I could try to capture the lunar eclipse/blood moon. I knew it was going to be a clear night and could miss the opportunity. Check out my astrophotography album right here. This is a collage of a handful of the shots from Saturday morning's eclipse, each frame processed in Lightroom 5.7, and assembled into a single image with Photoshop CS6. After I get some much - needed rest, I'll add some notes on shooting the moon and...

I'm working on a 'theme' engine, which will let users pick entirely new layout for the pages, albums, articles, etc. Watch for this in the next couple of weeks! We'll launch the a standard, simple theme, as shown on the right, but I hope to bring in a dozen, or dozens of additional themes to pick from over the coming months. [Update] The first theme, "Basic Black," is almost ready to go live! I still need to wire up "Favorites," view tracking, and comments -...

"We apologize, but we’re experiencing a Denial of Service attack on our network, which is causing your site to be offline. Our admins are currently working on for the investigation and trouble shooting for this issue.Please check back at status.1and1.com for more...

"A series of DDoS attacks on our DNS system has been rendering domains inaccessible since Tuesday night (December 9th, 2014).

While we have already taken steps to resolve this issue, availability may remain limited.

We apologize for any ...

A few updates for today....

• There's a new menu up there in the corner. It's called a "Hamburger" by web geeks. Just move your mouse over it, click it, or tap it (on touch screen devices) to open the menu. This menu fits much, much better on smart phones, and looks a lot cleaner, especially as we add more features.
• Fixed an issue with the Login dialog that seemed to only appear on Firefox.
• Updated the Private message icon to only appear if there are unread messages.
• Working on clearing notifications ...