Revamping the Mannequin Reject Image

I need to start advertising my Etsy shop. I'm already on places like Indiepublic, Plumdrop, and others, but I don't use important things like banners, pictures, etc. I don't have any graphic ads on any site at all.

8 years ago, when I first got into photoshop and HTML, I couldn't get enough of doing my own graphics and getting out there and advertising myself. People used to come from all over the world to my fan site...which had a bunch of focuses and 5 different portal/entrances...ME, Dark Shadows , Pokemon, I Dream of Jeannie, and Final Fantasy 3 (or 6...depending on where you are). I never really understood why or how they found my site, but just used common sense to get them to keep coming back. I didn't know it, but I was using awesome SEO (search engine optimization) techniques to keep my site at the top, and all that. It was kind of an accident. I made a website for every school project to try to get some extra credit since even the teachers had no idea how to code. I had found a lot of webhosting space free and decided to use as much as I could, but 50mB was hard to fill back then! The site just kept growing. When I posted pics of my high school's junior prom, the site got 500 views from the students in a day. That was unexpected. 2000-2001 saw the most visitors ever.

Once I got my license, I was never much at home. Too busy driving everywhere and stealing traffic cones with blinking lights. Then I went to college and decided to HELL with my site and deleted the entire thing off the internet in January 2003 and put up a tiny picture saying the site was gone till I felt like caring again. I was sick of it and didn't feel like trying to keep up with much of anything. Besides, I had LiveJournal! I didn't really need to code anymore and I could always make LJ icons !

...And then I tried to bring it back in October 2003 with a whole new look and bring back the Dark Shadows page (Known as Reverend Trask's Hole in the Wall (if you visit, please collapse the stupid geocities banner on the right or else the page displays funny) and other pages under a uniform style. I tried adding a section for all my urban exploration photos and some other things that never made any sense. Then...my free webhosting site up and crapped out in late 2004 (it hadn't actually been updated since before I joined in 2001!)...so I scrambled to get the abandoned house photos back up since Insane Bunkers had just given me a link. And then Facebook and Myspace happened, and Geocities decided to frell good website design 50 ways till Friday by adding their banner on the side. In 2000, we could choose to put a banner on the top or bottom of the page. We had control over where Geocities put their ad. Now we don't, and my site looks like hell.

In 2005 I decided to leave Geocities. You may have noticed that never happened. Instead, I got a full time web design job for The Yankee Retail Company. During my time there I actually learned something about html and website design, marketing, seo, and some other stuff. A full website design went underway in 2006 and I was going to pay for hosting from my friend Josh and get my own domain and try to sell zines. Then Insane Bunkers offered free photo hosting for urban exploration photos and you could have albums and all that fun stuff. I still had dialup...so I spent literal weeks uploading 1300 photos of abandoned houses. IB gave me moderating and publishing privledges so I could post articles. My modem burned up that September.

And Insane Bunkers burned up in February 2007 in a massive site wide crash that brought it down till March of this year. They never brought back the photo galleries. During that time I attempted to start a blog similar to The Caldor Rainbow called The Indie Historian to make up for the absence of IB...but I never got far with that. I got a freewebs account but was extremely dismayed to learn that you could only upload 1 file at a time. Oh noooo. Not when I'm used to uploading via FTP or at least 5-20 files at a time! The freewebs page still exists, but it's just the design only and almost none of the links work.

Eventually I left Yankee Retail to start working for a startup called ITema, where I finally learned CSS and started to Twitter. But ITema went out of business and I learned I really hate office jobs and burned out on web design, especially when they wanted you to churn out a web template that looked entirely different from the one you just did every 3-4 hours or so. When I got out of there I wanted nothing to do with web design ever again and I haven't opened Aptana (web editor) since January. Incidentally, I opened the Mannequin Reject Emporium on Etsy the day before ITema let me go. I started this blog around the same time I started another blog called Is This Your License Plate? during boredom at ITema days.

I've realized while writing this post that I'm spread too thin all over the internet, especially since joining Etsy. I have accounts on YouTube, tumblr, JPGmag, Last.FM, flickr, deviantart, ebay, artfire, dawanda, and linkedin. Some I'm on a lot more than others. I lurk on the Antique Bottles Forum and used to be active on VisaJourney when I was doing immigration paperwork for X.

To succeed on Etsy I have to spread out MORE? There aren't enough hours in a day!

Nevertheless, I need to revise some strategies. My website redesign needs to happen and it's would be easier if I used joomla or modx or some kind of content management system, especially with all the photos. I need to get off Geocities. I want shopping cart functionality...maybe. Paypal buttons would also work just fine, I think. I had one for my zine when I first started selling it directly off livejournal back in 2005.

I need to start some kind of off-etsy marketing. Locally just isn't enough. The question is where to begin, since it seems there's an awful lot of cleaning up to do. I don't know what aspect of my shop to focus on when I make ads. Maybe some jewelry with a handful of buttons tossed around to advertise that I sell both jewelry and supplies?

Sorry for the braindump, bless your heart if you read the whole thing and bless you 50 million more times if you actually found it interesting! At least check out some of the links I posted, there's some cool websites out there :).

Back to the beach!

So...sea glass is starting to show up again on some favorite beaches of mine after their annual replenishment of sand starts to go away.

I had a wonderful time at Bluff Point in Groton, during which I found all this including another marble and a green blown crowntop bottle mouth (1/2). The marble is a real beauty too, especially since I hadn't found much that wasn't common and suddenly kicked this out of a pile of pebbles. A lovely aqua shard washed up at my feet too :). I hadn't been to Bluff Point since a field trip I took in the 5th grade and brought home a dead horseshoe crab...which sat around in our computer room for about 2 years and suddenly it started to stink really bad...so I sent it on its merry way in the stream that ran through our property. I'll bet that's going to throw some archaeologists off in about 30000000 years when they find its fossil among trout and dead deer. lol

So...sea glass!





And of course, last week I returned to my beach that never fails to show treasures (EXCEPT it actually did back in September...but I figured I just showed up too early and the annual supply of sand dumped on that beach hadn't been depleted enough yet and replaced by pebbles. Sure enough...another 3 weeks went by and that beach had changed quite a bit...)

Check these out...my first coins found on the beach! It's fascinating to see what the sea does to them. Only one has a readable date (1989).




Another thing I did was finally get around to organizing urban exploration photos I've taken since Insane Bunkers crashed in Feb. 2007. I just kind of left them in folders and realized that I kind of forgot certain photos, especially some cemetery photos because my camera couldn't seem to orient itself. This was about a month before the electronics went all wonky and buttons stopped working or stopped doing what they were supposed to do. (IE: Press review...and the camera takes a picture! And the menu button just doesn't work at all...so I can't delete photos off the camera without hooking up my camera to my computer and doing it there....but enough about my camera woes.)

So...speaking of pictures forgotten...here's an interesting photo.

This is a street sign embedded in a tree, as seen in 2004. As far as I know, it's still there, and I'm pretty sure I have better pictures of it but I have no idea where they are. lol

Recovering lost moments...

This was originally a journal entry I have on my livejournal from October 17, 2005. My friends liked it a bit so I would like to share it with the artsy Etsy following I have, as well as any friends who missed the original :). I added in some notes.

Have you ever been curious and looked at the negatives when you had pictures developed, only to find half of a picture no one bothered to print?

Obviously with the advent of digital cameras, this doesn't happen at all...so moments like these are going to fade.

Anyway, when Nick was over on Friday, we were going through pictures of mine to add to his collage, and I spotted something odd on one of my pictures that looked like a ghost face in one of my windows. I went off in desperate search of the negative and instead found this picture that I've never seen before!



So I tried scanning the negative, and nothing worked, so I got the brilliant idea to take pictures of the negative with my awesome camera--which can take semi-clear close-ups, provided I hold the damn thing still.

After messing in photoshop, here's what I got!




Peter and Mom, at Lyndhurst, Tarrytown, New York, November 1, 1998

I turned this overnight obsession into a project! Results include shots of Norwich circa 1978, Glenn's apartment, Ford Theater in Washington D.C., Hollywood Broadway Review, and other pictures.


Bookcase at the Lockwood Matthews Mansion, Norwalk, CT.





What's this?


It's my backyard haha. around March 16, 2001


I don't know what this is, except that it was taken at the first EWS gathering.
Norwich Ten Pin, July 21, 2001


This was in the set of pictures of my bedroom taken for my journalism final project. June 16, 2001


Washington DC trip, October 1997

Smithsonian




Ford Theater


Christmas Tree


Flowers near the picture window in Sterling, September 8, 1998


Barbie from Barbie and the Rockers! in a crochet dress, summer 1989.


Birdhouse out the picture window, 1987


I honestly have no idea why there's a beer can hanging in front of my picture window. Note, I found out much later that the beer can was a weight for the hummingbird feeder, which hung on a thin wire. The wire would curl up out of reach without the weight when the feeder was being changed. April 1998


Mr. D! April 1998
Mr. D retired this year...omg...that makes me feel old (but probably makes him feel even older! LOL)


Glenn's apartment, July 17, 2002


Sterling Memorial graduation, June 18, 1998


1978


numbers on the negative


At the Miss Preteen Connecticut Pageant, May 27, 1995


Salem, Massachusetts, August 18, 1998


I have no idea who this is, 1977



This wasn't a lost moment, but my cat rocks my socks (like it's 1987).


This picture was apparently printed, but I've never seen it in my life. And it's me with a dog, which you would almost never see now. The dog's name was Saina and she was put to sleep the next day; she was 14 at the time. 1989


No, it's not Indigo, it's my mom's cat (that I should know the name of, but don't remember...) 1978 aww...and my Indigo died in March 2007. I miss that cat!


If you have ever lived in Norwich, you should know where this is!
Near the Laurel Hill Bridge, 1979.


Mom as Rachel Drummond at the Dark Shadows Festival, 1997.
We knew about this picture too because we saw it on the negative when Mom wondered why there weren't any pictures of the costume contest. Well, there's one!


Zack walking to a payphone at the Norwich Walmart, May 17, 2002. Note that we used payphones back then, because none of us had cell phones LOL! (Well, we did, like Heather, because we went to the Crystal Mall that night and played phone tag (literally) with Mike, which wasn't possible without cell phones, BUT ANYWAY ZACK AND I DIDN'T HAVE THEM THEN SO THERE!)


A table on Memere's patio, summer 2000


Whipple's Chapel, December 1999.


No one I know remembers my kitchen in Sterling looking like this, because we gutted it just after this picture was taken. For those of you who remember my old house...you may or may not remember the huge hole in the wall window thingy between the living room and the kitchen. That hole in the wall is where the fridge is in this pic, taken in 1987.
So 70's!



Swans on the Shetucket River, 1979.

If you would like to attempt this project yourself, here's how!
This was done in Photoshop 5 so the menu paths are quite outdated (but if you're familiar with photoshop then it shouldn't be much of a problem).What I did was hold the negatives against a white piece of paper that had a bright light shining on it, and took a picture. It's a little hard to explain, and some of them came out blurry so I'll have to re-take them. Use the same macro settings you would use for closeups on your etsy photos. :)

Then I put the pictures into photoshop, and inverted the colors (Image\Adjust\Invert).

Because the colors were off (the negative has that sepia tint), the inverted colors look very blue and washed out. So I messed around with the color balance. (Image\Adjust\Color Balance. Color levels= +100, 0, -100 on midtones only, don't mess with shadows and highlights) Basically I upped the red and yellow to balance the cyan.

Then I cropped the photo (Some I didn't, but others I had to otherwise the negative images and other stuff like my thumb would mess with the image a little)

Then I did auto levels. (Image\Adjust\Auto Levels)

Overall it comes out very close to an actual photo! Colors wise it's right on (because I did a couple actual photos that I had prints of for comparison). It's obviously not as clear because I can't hold the camera or negative 100% still, but you get the idea.

The media says the sky is falling but I look out my window and see a beautiful day!

Renita from VintageMomCreations suggested we all take a step back from OMGfinancialcrisisDOOMDOOMDOOM and say a little bit about ourselves. My blog lately has been a bit too Etsy oriented. So...if you're just starting to read now, who am I? I'm Megan, I run Mannequin Reject Emporium on Etsy, work for the United States Postal Service on the side (read: Saturdays and Mondays and some days in between).

I like to wear crazy socks, because I haven't owned a white pair of socks since 1999. I do that on purpose, because I think white socks are boring. My obsession with crazy footwear spread to shoes instead of black and white converses in 2006. And this is my latest pair of crazy shoes, which are wicked comfy.

I go to the beach in the winter to collect sea glass and dig bottles in the summer. I make jewelry, zines, all kinds of art but two of my bigger passions are writing (since 1996) and photography (since 2002).

This is what the economy looked like the second-to-last time I went to the beach.
And this is what it looked like on my way back from Canada earlier in September.
These are a Jeep Grand Cherokee, a Dodge Viper, a Saab, and a Porsche. The Jeep was mine so I parked next to these cars (all from Ontario) to feel special. Come to find out, the 3 owners of these cars were all friends on a roadtrip through New York state ...who knows where they were going. I thought it was funny that one of them drove a Saab, because I do too.

It's a bit older. But more special. HA.

It was nice to see windmills in NY! It's about darn time the US embraces alternative energies.

I also love to explore abandoned houses.
This house in particular is one of my favorites.

Problem is, it's somewhere in New York that I've only seen 3 times in my life, because I don't go to that part of NY all that often. I first spotted it in May 1998 and took these pictures with our family camera when I was 14 (made my mother pull the car over on I-90 so I could get it.)...but as you can see, the quality was terrible because the house was so far away. I last saw it in 1999 and wondered if it was still standing today.10 years later, it's STILL THERE! I think it's a shame it's gone to waste, but it's still beautiful.

So...that's a little about me. Yes, I think the economy is just as bad as everyone else does, but I do think we all suffer from the spin the media has put on it. I love to find beauty in everything and no financial crisis will make me think the sun won't come out tomorrow or that I'll wake up on the wrong side of the grass. This winter will be cold, no doubt, but we have a roof over our heads. Maybe we'll resort to a diet of Ramen Noodles and cut out meat because we may not be able to afford it. And I picked up two free badminton rackets and a birdie, which my mom and I had a blast with last night. We don't play right (net? who cares?) but we have a great time :).