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Roberts Online Photo Lab Now Powered By Life Pics

So, perhaps you’ve already noticed, but recently our Online Photo Lab switched service providers. Our online uploader and album service is now provided through a lovely company called Life Pics. Ddon’t worry, as always all the photos are printed by us, but thanks to a partnership with Life Pics we can offer you even more things, more on that in a bit.

So, this new service has a lot of exciting new things to offer, and a few nice changes in addition. How about a quick overview?

  1. Not Silverlight. It’s not that Microsoft’s Silverlight technology is bad, per se, but it’s still a new technology and very much a Windows-oriented one. Our new uploader and management system is powered by Java, which is much more universal, and means that Mac and Linux users should now get the same experience as everyone else.
  2. Apps. This is truly the age of apps, and we’re ready for you. Life Pics has apps for both iPhone and Android where you can log into your account, manage and add and share pictures, and order prints from us without ever booting up a computer. Prefer a computer? They provide plug-ins for Picasa, Lightroom, Kodak EasyShare, and Microsoft Photo Gallery (in Vista/7). Upload pictures direct to your account and order prints without having to leave your favorite photo manager. You can check out all those apps here: http://www.lifepics.com/apps/
  3. More Printable Things. Sure, pictures are excellent. They’re flat and easy to store. But, sometimes what you really need is a mug. Or a mousepad. Or a dog food bowl. Or a keychain. Or a gift bag. Or lots of things. We can now make that happen for you, and you’ll find there’s not a whole lot we can’t get your photos printed onto for you. There’s so many, in fact, we’ll just point you here to see them all: http://robertsimaging.lifepics.com/net/Gifts/
  4. Multiple Upload Speeds. Only ever intend to print 4x6s and don’t want to wait a jillion years while your full-size pictures upload? Our new system offers three upload speeds, and what sizes they’re good for, so you don’t have to wait around forever to get printing.
  5. Picture Editing. Picture need rotated? Cropped maybe? No worries, you can do all that once uploaded. You can also remove red eye, adjust gamma, brightness, contrast, saturation, hue, or even make it black-and-white or sepia toned. All online, no software needed.

So, as you can see, we’re still working hard to be the best online lab you can come to, and we hope you’ll all find our new system much more friendly and feature-packed. I believe the lab dudes mentioned that your accounts have been moved over (mine was) for you, so you should be able to just keep moving along. Just in case anything’s missing, we’re running the old service still until October 1st (and you can find that here).

Haven’t tried our lab before? Now’s a good time to start. Just hit the link below to get started.



December’s Photo Contest Winner Official

Congratulations go out to Greg Neubauer, winner of last month’s photo contest theme, “By Candlelight.” For winning, Greg will receive a 16×20″ color print from our Online Photo Lab gratis, as it were.

The theme for this month is “Best of the Decade,” we want your best shot on any topic taken between January 1st, 2000 and December 31st, 2009. The best, most original and technically achieved shot will win this month and be our best of the decade.

And, to make getting us your submissions easier, we’re introducing our new Magic Photo Upload Widget, which you can find on our Monthly Photo Contest Page. No more complicated emailing procedures, just click, upload, and we do the rest. Maybe it isn’t really magic, but it sure is easy.



Tonsho Offers Best Service Ever For Start-Up Photographers

tonshoTonsho has announced a new service for photographers that we think some of our customers, most particularly you younger or newer ones looking to eke out a living in something like senior portraits, weddings, or any other ‘consumer’ level client-driven branch, might appreciate.

Their idea is simple enough: running a website with client-specific galleries for clients to view (and only the right clients to view) and make selections and order prints from is a lot of work, and setting that sort of site up is probably outside the budgets and time-restraints of a lot of working photogs.

Their solution is also nice, and we’ll just use their own wording for it:

You have a collection of photographs from a shoot – a family portrait session for example – and you want to email them to all family members so that they can choose the photos they want to buy from you.

You write an email to all the family members and attach the photos as normal, then send the email through our servers. The photos are removed from the email and stored on our password-protected website. A gallery of thumbnail images is created, with links to reduced-size preview images, each protected by a watermark. The family members receive your email with the large photo attachments replaced by a link and a password to the web page containing the photo gallery.

The customer selects which photos they want from the gallery and the size and fills in some contact details, which we then email to you. You fulfill the order direct with the customer, further strengthening the client relationship.

There’s a one month free trial right now, so grab that up if it sounds like something you could be down with. And, don’t forget our <a href=”http://robertsimaging.com/photolab.jsp”>Online Photo Lab</a> when it comes time to actually fill those print orders, we’re still offering pro-level quality at all sizes for consumer prices. And we ship, too.



The Prints and the Pauper.

Someday your Prints may come, if you ordered online and wanted images larger than 8×10 you may have a long wait. You might get yor prints in a tube that need to be flattened before you can use them, or worse they might damaged in transit.
Okay, enough of the doom and gloom scenario’s, you don’t have to stay up nights pacing the floors hoping the custom lab you sent your images off to doesn’t mess up the colors and the crop and then send them back in tissue paper package that begs to be bent, folded, spindled and mutlitated.
Why, don’t you? Because Epson is rebating several of its most popular larger format consumer photo paper printers right now.  Even better your Roberts Imaging team has them, and so can you.
The Epson Stylus Photo 1400 Wide Format Printer can print high quality photo paper from 4″x6″ all the way up to 13″x19″ size, and there is an instant rebate of $50 on this printer, no need to mail-in and wait. At 249.97 carry it home pricing you can recoup your large print budget with just a few high quality photographic treasures.

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Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On

While there’ll likely be a slew of nex-gen point-and-shoot cameras hitting my desk in the coming months, there’s a bit of an announcement lull going on right now. But, don’t let that fool you into thinking nothing is going on. At least not in the ol’ Circle City.

Those of you not in the habit of poking around our site might have missed the following things going on in Indy soon:

Under “Upcoming Events” we have several seminars coming up, including Amanda Arrick (last seen in this Raw Footage video) giving a seminar on the 40D and 50D Canon digital SLR cameras, and Nikon’s Jason Stewart giving two sessions of his seminar on the D300 and D700 Nikon digital SLR cameras.

Anyone in attending any of these seminars can find more details on the Upcoming Events page, and can reserve seats by calling 1-800-726-5544 and asking for “Classes and Events.”

And, don’t forget about our new Indianapolis Photo Calendar, which is starting to fill up with weekly club meetings, special seminars, and events. Check those out over here.

Still not enough to keep you busy this winter? Why not grab your camera (be it a Sony CyberShot camera or an Olympus digital camera like the E-410), and give our new monthly photo contest a go? Anyone can enter, and the prize every month is a 16×20″ print courtesy of our Online Photo Lab. The current theme is “Winter Wonderland,” so get out there and get shooting.



Photo Contest Update

While everyone in the US is waiting to see how this election turns out, Roberts has been busy finishing up our first ever photo contest, and I now have the winners.

Yup. Winners. We’ve decided our customers gave us so many great shots we couldn’t hold it to one.

by David Heithaus
Our main winner this time is David Heithaus, who will be receiving a 16″x20″ print of his shot (pictured) on premium photo paper from our own Online Photo Lab.

A Special Category (focusing on artistic interpretations) prize is being awarded to Dario Impini, who’ll be receiving an 11″x14″ print. Also, four honorable mentions were selected and we’ll be thanking them with complimentary flash memory card holders, to make sure their cards are safe and at-hand while they’re out shooting for future contests.

Online Photo Lab
And, while you’re saving up the pennies for your own Epson wide format ink jet printer, don’t forget that Roberts Online Photo Lab can give you professional quality with far less hassel for very friendly prices.



A thousand words worth

The downtown labThe Downtown Brain Center of the Photo Processing Operation.
Any photo processing expert and a recent commercial will tell you that it’s not a picture until it’s printed. Here at Roberts Imaging we have our fair share of photo processing experts. We have a full service photo-lab. Let me repeat, we have a full service photo-lab at both locations of Roberts Imaging. Sure you can stumble into any number of grocery store/one stop convenience/drug stores/hyper-retailer and find a freestanding ‘kiosk’ card reader with a “photo-center”, but they won’t have a full service photo-lab.
At both Roberts Imaging locations we have a professional staff, with dedicated lab employees who just make images from your film or digital files, not one of them also works in the garden center, or stocking greeting cards. If you have a non-digital SLR camera and you are shooting film our downtown store can process C-41 negatives or E-6 slides within 24 hours. Our Carmel location can do the C-41 film in house and can turn over slides within 4 or 5 days depending on when you drop it off (the slides come downtown and are returned via our own company vehicle).
randys cameras
Randy “The Gnome” Cox, our downtown lab manager has a collection of antique cameras, and has been working in the photo-processing arena since the days of George Eastman. In fact if you ask nicely he might even show you his flash powder burns from his days following with Matthew Brady. Nobody knows how old the Gnome is except the Gnome, The Gnome knows. So why would you trust your timeless memories and images to anyone but the timeless one himself.  O.K., I have to admit, Ivan, Jeff and Scott are pretty good too, and John Cornwell’s lab staff in Carmel are also more than competent.
Whether you still shoot film or are (like) totally digital, whether you use available light, on camera flash or use professional studio lighting you will get your best printed results from a true photo-lab with imaging professionals.  We also have two ‘kiosk’ style self serve machines downtown and one in our satellite Carmel store where you can still select some editing and crop features as wells as quantities; the difference here is that our lab techs go through each image for color and contrast accuracy at the printing stage after your requests are sent to the lab. You should see Randy hitting the color, brightness and contrast buttons on the printer console, his fingers fly like an virtuoso on a favorite photo lab logopiece of music. Of course the ‘kiosk’ machines take all types of memory cards, the popular SD memory cards and compact flash cards from all makers including Kingston,  Sandisk Cards and Lexar Cards as well as the proprietary Sony Digital camera Memory Stick and Memory Stick Duo, and the xD cards from Fuji and Olympus Digital cameras as well. Even Mini and Micro SD’s, if you have SD card adapter. These machines will also read your files from a CD and our lab experts can print from flash drives and DVD files as well if you can give them the file names (you cannot preview them here). If you can’t make the trip to downtown or Carmel because the excellent pricing on our cameras is too tempting you can even sign up on-line and FTP your images over the ether, and we will package and ship them back when finished via UPS Priority mail. Be sure to take advantage of our on-line specials, and save even more. A good picture is worth a thousand words, a bad one may only elicit the four letter variety!


Panasonic DMC-LX3

The new Panasonic digital camera flagship is the DMC-LX3.  It sports a new Leica Vario-Summicron lens with a 24-60mm (35mm equivalent) F2.0-2.8.  It has a big 1/1.63-inch CCD, 10.1 MP, and the color and the detail out of the camera show it.

Panasonic LX3
Randy Cox, our photo lab manager, has a wide collection of Leica; and Panasonic with Leica glass, cameras that he has aquired over the years.  He says that this is the best one he has used so far.  Razor sharp, bright colors, and a ton of user controls not available on even the most popular high end point and shoot digital cameras.

The screen on the back is a huge 3.0 inch, 16×9 panel.  You can shoot in three aspect ratios on the fly; 16:9, 3:2, and 4:3.  Check it out:

Panasonic LX3 back

The camera uses SD memory cards of any capacity.  Below are some examples from the camera.  The last one was shot using the optional wide angle lens adapter giving the camera an 18mm equivalent.  All pictures were shot by Randy Cox, the Roberts Imaging lab manager.

Panasonic LX3 test shot

Panasonic LX3 test shot wide angle




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