Friday Wrap Up; The Costco Adventure Continues; & Creative Color Test Prints

Good Morning Everybody,

Today is our last day in this very beautiful part of the world, albeit a bit chilly today.  We head back to home sweet home tomorrow about mid-morning arriving after a short layover in Dallas, finally to touch down at the Greater Cincinnati Northern KY airport about 6:00 p.m. tomorrow evening.

It's been a great trip – we’ve enjoyed the colors, sounds, tastes, unusual customs (like the Day of The Dead), blue skies, ocean breezes, and fabulous sunrises and sunsets, shared with great friends.  But it will still be nice to get back home and prepare for the holidays - my favorite time of the year. Hope you're looking forward to it too ;~)

Costco Update: The Printing Adventures Continue

OK gang, here is the latest from our Costco photo adventures.  Sarah and I finessed the portraits we captured last Saturday and had them looking great - now could we get Costco to do the same?

Then it hit me, I had the solution.  Costco needed to see exactly what we wanted but I had no test print available to show them. I opted for the second best thing. I loaded the test print and several of our portraits onto the iPad.  They looked WONDERFUL!  Now I had exactly what I needed to show the Costco photo department - a target print and a sampling of the portraits.  Off to Costco we headed.

Once we arrived we were lucky to connect with Rafael, one of the nicest guys in Mexico and luckily he spoke pretty good English too.  That’s Kent and I with the iPad and the old prints from the other day.

We showed him the prints from our previous visit then pulled up the same images on the iPad along with the test print.  He saw what were talking about immediately.

I asked him to run our 8x10 test target without corrections to see what we would get.  Ten minutes later we hit the jackpot - the test print looked perfect!  I turned the rest of the images over to Rafael - 15 8x10's; 12 5x7's; and 105 4x6's.  As the prints were coming off the Noritsu printer, Rafael placed them on the counter for our approval - they all looked great!

About 20 minutes later we had the completed order in hand and were headed to the check-out. 224 pesos later, or about $17 US, we were on our way. OK, I bet you're really curious about what we paid for the images, right? Prepare to be amazed!

I've shown the cost conversion below:

• 8x10's - $9.00 MX or $ .67 US
• 5x7's -   $1.50 MX or $ .11 US
• 4x6's -   $ .90  MX or $ .07 US

I know, I didn't believe it either - pretty darn inexpensive and still printed on Fuji's Crystal Archive paper - I don't know how they do it.

Today we'll spend a little time getting all the 8x10's and 5x7's framed and deliver the entire "order" to the families in time for the holidays.

DAZNOTE: Getting the test prints on the iPad worked like a charm. You don't have test prints to carry around with you all the time, just upload them to your iPad ;~)

__________________________________________________________

Hey gang, that wraps up our Cabo adventures.  We're going to savor one more day in this wonderful land of paradise.  Hopefully LaDawn and I and all my pixels will make it back home safe and sound so I’ll see everyone again back in a slightly cooler Cincy bright and early Monday morning.  Have a great weekend and I'll see you then!

Adios, David