Mosaic Photo | Blog

Make sure the prints you order are perfect.

For any portrait session, we upload the photos to our sharing gallery. Now, we’ll review each order before sending them to our lab. This way, you’ll be sure to be happy when your prints arrive at your door.

Once you place your order, we’ll be notified. From there, we will check things like cropping, color, and paper types to ensure that you get the highest quality and satisfaction out of your prints.  A while back, we had a client’s relative order some prints through our sharing gallery. One of the images they ordered was an amazingly cute picture of a toddler. Unfortunately, the auto-crop feature cut off the little guy’s feet. Needless to say, that wasn’t up to our standards. We corrected the issue and made the cropping easier/more apparent, but knew we needed to have a permanent solution.

So now we can review, replace, and correct the images on orders.  As photographers, we want our clients to receive the best possible prints when you order them through us. The photos you get are the physical presentation of your wedding, family, or stage of life. They are also a reflection of our work. But most importantly, we want you to be happy with your photos, and we think that this process provides the best solution.

If you’re worried this will delay you getting your prints, we can turn it off. But do know that we check our email and ordering statuses often. A lot. Almost to the point of obsessive compulsive behavior. Don’t worry, we can stop at any time. We just don’t want to. We’re in control.

“Your prints are cheap. Are they as high of quality as other photographer studio prints?”

That is the most frequent question I get about any service Mosaic Photo offers. This is an understandable question. Our prints are much cheaper than one would expect to pay, especially from a professional photographer. In case you were wondering, our prints start at $.60 for a 4×6 and $5.50 for an 8×10.

Our print prices are decidedly low. One of the reasons we started Mosaic Photo was a response to hearing the frustration from friends about the availability and price of prints.  After paying the sitting fee, actually getting prints can be a lot extra.

So, it is a fair rationalization. “If their prints are so much more, the quality must be better.” Makes sense. And that’s what most studios these days want you to think, but that’s not the case at all.  Our lab uses a chemical process to produce the highest quality on the best paper.

Allow me to get a little geeky. There are two main ways of photographic printing: ink-jet and chemical. Ink-jet prints are similar to your home printer, and produce the image by laying down very small dots of color. Sometimes, the dots are visible, leading to poor image quality. Another problem is banding, which are large streaks across an ink-jet print. Humidity and other environmental conditions can degrade the quality over time with an ink-jet print. We don’t use ink-jet printers. Our labs use chemical processing. Chemical printing is similar to traditional prints from film negatives. The result is a rich, clear, and smooth image.

All of that means that we use the highest quality process, on some great Kodak paper – either a traditional luster finish or some amazingly glossy metallic paper. (Yeah, I get excited about paper…) In essence, you get the same or better quality through us as the expensive prints. 

A lot of pros make their profit on prints. We don’t. Instead, our sharing gallery is a service to our clients to make it easy to get high quality prints. 

One of our core values at Mosaic Photo is to provide full service delivery of a great product. And to do that, we believe that you should be able to afford as many prints as you’d like – so we keep the cost of getting photos as low as possible. It’s a new way of doing business. We like it. We hope you do too.

Check out our sharing gallery in action for senior portraits, weddings, or VeggieTales.

Last Saturday, we got the opportunity to shoot pictures at a really fun wedding.

It really was a fun day of taking photos.  Great music, happy people. It was the perfect atmosphere for some really cool images.

At the reception, I used one of my favorite lighting styles for events and dances.  I put a strobe at opposite corners of the dance floor. This way, we get some nice, dramatic, dimensional lighting while making sure we keep things well defined.

Here are a few images from the wedding/reception.

More to come. Probably.

Things come together. We photograph them when they do.

It’s more than a tag-line, more than just a clever saying. It’s really our philosophy and the way we see photography. One of our goals is to break down the view of a photographer that makes a photo-shoot all about him.  While we’re confident of our skills as photographers and our ability to create strong images, we firmly believe that the focus should be on you. The subject.

Everything adds to a photo, starting with the foundation – the subject. Going into a project or portrait session, we bring our skills and creativity. Composition, lighting, concepts, and post processing all come together to make a memorable image.  These elements are essential, as each one makes the image that much better.

So be it wedding day coverage, senior photos, family portraits, or editorial/commercial work, we’ll make it about capturing your mood, personality, or goals. Our technical and creative skills work together with you to create something beautiful: a vivid image that’s both you and memorable.

Oatmeal olympics. It’s exactly what it sounds like.

Recently, I got a chance to design an event mailer for a local church. The event: Oatmeal Olympics. There were several oatmeal related competitions. And truly more oatmeal than I could imagine. The goal of this design project was to provide the youth of the church with some fliers that they could hand out to their friends.

I grabbed a tub of Quaker’s Oatmeal out of my mom’s cupboard and set up a quick picture for the background. (In retrospect, I would have cooked the oatmeal to really capture the messy, gooey-ness of the day…) Also, I decided that there needed a wooden spoon. You know, the kind the lunch lady with the hair net used to stir the oatmeal before she plopped it on your tray.

Design is fun. We’ve done design for wedding invitations, save the date cards, Christmas cards, and websites. A lot of our design is photo-driven (and a lot of our photography, great for design). So keep us in mind and we’ll make something you-driven for your event, celebration, or just something to share with people you care about.

Here’s the result: