Part of the business development plan this year is to rebrand the business.  One of the first steps for me was to create a new logo.  The current logo I personally created over a weekend  and didn’t give it a ton of thought.  The new logo has been a work in progress for well over a couple of months.  I also involved the help of a graphic artist Sandy Rafferty Vivian of Evolution Design.  Sandy and I have known each other since the mid 90′s and I helped her with maintaining her computers when she started her own small business well over 10 years ago.  With this project it felt like we had come up with hundreds of iterations on different logo designs.  When I would start narrowing down on an idea I would show some of my friends and colleagues and get a different response from every one of them.  Turns out it is really hard to create a new logo and brand.  Creating this logo was as difficult as naming my two kids because it is something I’m going to have to live with for a while.  In my kids example they have to be happy with the name that we gave them.  Funny thing when you name you kid.  Ever wonder why you have the name you have? The next step in the business development is a secret, however, with any luck will be revealed within the next couple of weeks.

The owner of Cycles Xvelo, Steve, is a friend and co-worker at my day job.  He is big into bikes, like so big into bikes he once owned a bicycling touring company in France, and has now decided to start building his own bikes.  Bike #1 is a steel tube rig and Steve is currently working on making a frame out of Bamboo and Carbon Fiber.  You’ll see that bike on my blog when it’s complete but in the meantime Steve is really good at updating his blog with posts during the build cycle.  Bamboo is a really cool concept for a bike frame and is suppose to be really strong as well.  I can’t wait to see that bike when it is all done.

Steve is working on building a bike stand for future shots so it won’t show up in the images.  This stand makes it look like the bike has training wheels.  Lessons learned!  Setup shots are at the end of the post.

My favorite image from the series.

Technical Ramblings

The shoot was done in my living room on a 9′ wide Savage black seamless paper.  Three AlienBee B800s used with the 2 bees on the sides in large softboxes with grids.  The bee on the boom arm is in a strip box with grid as well.  I used the grids to control the spread of light.  Without the grids then the light goes everywhere and the black background doesn’t go real black. Steve is on the floor to the left helping out.

Another view of the light setup to show how I have the lights to the front of the bike.  I did this to feather the light onto the bike.

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Mark Mortensen
Lakewood Colorado portrait and event photographer.
www.MarkMortensen.com

My iStockPhoto collection has been a tiny little side of the business.  I’ve been adding to my stock portfolio as I have time and have finally reached the 250 downloads and 50% or greater acceptance rating required for exclusivity.  I’m actually at 70% acceptance and iStock has definitely made me a better shooter in terms of composition and quality.  Today I got this email:

Dear Mark:

Congratulations! The iStockphoto administrators have approved your exclusivity

application. We are pleased to begin this new, mutually beneficial and

professional relationship with you.

Thank you for your time and effort.

Best Regards,

iStockphoto LP

Yeah me! So what does this mean?  Well instead of the nickel I make off of a sale of an image I make 5 pennies.  :)  Actually, my royalties do start going up as I start selling more images since I’m exclusive with iStock and their Getty partner sites.  You can check out my stock portfolio here.

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Mark Mortensen
Lakewood Colorado portrait and event photographer.
www.MarkMortensen.com