Tag Archives: BenSpark.com

Conferences, Photo-A-Day

Brand, Brand, Brand!

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Brand, Brand, Brand!
Photo-A-Day #1419

I’m going brand crazy lately because I am so excited about my upcoming new Blog design. Yes, my blog is being redesigned by someone really cool. I don’t have the design to share with you, yet. But, I do have the new logo. I’ve been reading about branding and getting your brand out in front of everyone. So I stopped calling this blog The BenSpark and shortened it to BenSpark.com.

People seem to know me as Ben. When I go to conventions people call me Ben. So I am known as Ben Spark. That works for me, it works for this blog. For the past 5 years I have commented on blogs all over the place under the name BenSpark. So my brand is out there. But I’m still not making it personal enough. I started the branding overhaul by personalizing my Twitter Account. If you are on twitter it is crucial that you create your own background and you brand it. Make it personal and let people know who you are.

I began to think about blog conferences and blogger events. Bloggers like Shoemoney and John Chow have T-shirts that they give away. Other bloggers have their brands out and about as well. So I decided to step it up and put my brand out there too. I already have my “I’m Not A Famous Blogger” T-Shirt and I also decided to buy some baseball hats and have the new logo embroidered onto the hats. I haven’t done that step yet but hopefully they will look as sweet as the mockup I created from these photos that I took with my Xshot today.

I have some other branding related ideas for swag and as they happen I’ll talk about them but I don’t like revealing much about this until I actually have items in hand. But if you are heading to IZEAFest or Affiliate Summit East you may get a chance to pick up some BenSpark.com swag. I’m going to have some good stuff too!

Okay, so what do you think of the hats? I personally like the flames but Allison says they are a bit redneck. However, I don’t care, I like flames, I love em on motorcycles, my Harley shirts and even on Optimus Prime (I’m sure my Transformers lifelong fan status might be revoked just for thinking that). But I’d like to hear that you folks have to say. Let me know what you think of the logo, the hats the colors. Which color is your favorite?

Photography

BenSpark’s Photobooth

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BenSpark's PhotoBooth

One of my 2009 Commitments is to be more creative. The other day I was watching Eva while Allison was at work. She was being her funny self and kept telling me to put on my hat. She would emphatically point to my head and shout “Hat”. I was wearing a hoodie, I was scruffy and probably had not showered (I was working from home. I need more discipline or an office to motivate me to shower when working from home.) Each time I would put my hood on my head Eva would squeal with laughter. She was wearing one too so I flipped her hood up and she laughed. I wanted to get a picture of the two of us.

So I picked up my camera and attached it to my XShot 2.0 then I set the timer for the custom setting. I had previously set my custom setting to take 5 pictures with a 5 second delay between each photo. The settings can be as long as 30 seconds between pictures and you can set the camera to automatically take up to 10 photos. Now I know the traditional PhotoBooth has 4 photos on the strip and I was going to take one off but decided against it. I don’t know what exactly made me think of a Photo Booth. I was just open to the creativity of this little photo shoot. But I then Googled “Photo Strip” and “Photo Booth” and found my inspiration.

I loaded each photo into Photoshop Elements and pulled all the images onto one. Each image was a separate Layer. I then cropped the image to 100 X 125. I created a blank file and then pulled each of the layers onto that file. I added a drop shadow to each one and spaced them evenly on the new file. I then cropped the whole thing to look like a photo strip and there you have it.

I will be at events and conventions all over the country this coming year as a member of the IZEA Insiders and I’ll have my XShot 2.0 and Canon Powershot with me at all of them. I hope that if you meet me you will step into BenSpark’s PhotoBooth.