I know this isn't really Photography related, but I just wanted to post this RAVE I have about Garmin's customer service.
I've been a loyal Garmin customer since the days of the Garmin V. That thing was a beast, no color screen, no touch screen, heck it didn't even connect to the computer via USB, it was a serial connection back then. It didn't even come preloaded with the US Maps, it had Interstates and major highways pre-loaded on the device, but you had to select which areas you wanted detailed data of. And it took forever to upload that data thanks to the serial cable, think 2-3 hours to upload 25MB of maps to the device. Still an awesome GPS.
Anyway I've owned various Garmin GPSs since then, even a few other brands, had the iPhone with it's GPS, but every time I'd compare them to Garmin and my old Garmin V. So in June I purchased a Garmin nuvi 885T, at the time Garmin's best model, you could talk to the device and it would work off of voice commands ie "Navigate to McDonalds" and it'd direct you to the nearest McDs.
Well on vacation in Colorado, I noticed the device was no longer charging. Lucky for me I got the 4 year service plan with Best Buy when I bought the Garmin. I bring it in and Best Buy was like we don't carry this model anymore. Ok no biggie, I have the Service plan, not the Replacement plan, so send it in for service. Didn't even get that far, Best Buy is like no we're gonna give you a brand new different unit today. Well score, that's pretty awesome, no waiting until my 885T gets back from service.
The customer service rep initially got me the 1390T, the downside was none of Garmin's current models carried the voice recognition, I was a little bummed. I guess Garmin discontinued that feature because it was really buggy about working or not. I didn't seem to notice too many problems unless I had a lot of background noise. Anyway so the 1390T looked nice, seemed a lot more responsive and quicker to respond than my 885T. They do the exchange and I take a lap around the store. I head up to car/audio/gps and see the next model up 1490T with it's huge 5" screen for the same price as the 1390T they just switched me to. After a little bit of coaxing the manager agrees to give me the 1490T instead :)
So where does Garmin come into play? Well earlier in November I purchased the lifetime map upgrade for my 885T since it was a nice model I planned on keeping it for a while, little did I know it would be replaced in two months. No biggie. So I get home after giving the 1490T a little test drive and pull up Garmin's website. A little bit of searching later and I found out it's not possible to transfer my lifetime map updates :( Well it's not like I just bought a new unit on the whim, hopefully they'll be able to make an exception.
Eventually I email Garmin, explain the situation and about 2 days later the Rep says, sure sounds good just get me a copy of the receipt via email or fax and we'll be good to go. It takes me a couple days to respond, I couldn't find the receipt so I had to goto Best Buy and get another hard copy. I do, take pictures and email that back to Garmin. Now I'm expecting it to be another couple of days before they get back to me, not a problem at all. Well about an hour later I get a new email alert, I think it's Garmin's automated response, saying yes we got your email, standby before a normal human reads it and replies. But sure enough it was from a real human being, and they had already switched the lifetime maps to my new GPS.
Pretty awesome customer service there, other companies take note. I'm definitely a technology junkie, always looking at the latest and greatest out there, but to have a company that has great customer service, treats you like a human being, is willing to make the exception to keep a customer happy, is one that will stay successful, and more importantly, keep my fickle techno obsessed self loyal to their company. :)
Hooray to Garmin, keep up the awesome work (and quality products too) :D
Aaron Brown
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Tuesday, January 05, 2010
Saturday, December 26, 2009
Animoto & Smugmug & Me
I was reading a Blog today about Animoto and how they've created a partnership with SmugMug (the site I use for hosting my pictures) and thought, hey that sounds Awesome!
So I decided just to play around and create a short (ie free) video of the images I have in my Wedding Porfolio Gallery. Their integration is so easy with SmugMug, I went to my gallery, clicked Buy, then Create a Video with Animoto. It automatically selected the images from that gallery, I shuffled the order of the photos, picked the Music, then clicked Compile.
The process took no more than 5-7 minutes, and most of that was Animoto doing their magic behind the scenes. So without further ado, my first (hopefully of many more to come) Animoto & Photography by Aaron P. Brown joint ventures :)
By the way their pricing is awesome, it's free for a 30 second video, $3 for a full length (non-commercial video) or $30 for unlimited videos for a year :)
Catcha soon!
Aaron
So I decided just to play around and create a short (ie free) video of the images I have in my Wedding Porfolio Gallery. Their integration is so easy with SmugMug, I went to my gallery, clicked Buy, then Create a Video with Animoto. It automatically selected the images from that gallery, I shuffled the order of the photos, picked the Music, then clicked Compile.
The process took no more than 5-7 minutes, and most of that was Animoto doing their magic behind the scenes. So without further ado, my first (hopefully of many more to come) Animoto & Photography by Aaron P. Brown joint ventures :)
By the way their pricing is awesome, it's free for a 30 second video, $3 for a full length (non-commercial video) or $30 for unlimited videos for a year :)
Catcha soon!
Aaron
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Friday, December 11, 2009
New Changes to Website
Hey all,
A new year is coming, I'm on vacation, and with all this free time I decided to make some fun changes to my Photography website. The first change you might notice is my Photography by Aaron P Brown logo is no longer centered, it's aligned left, and the toolbars instead of being centered and below the logo are now on the same level and aligned right. This will change to depending on the browser window size, the reason I did that was to make more screen room available for this next change...
The biggest and most noticeable change was done to the slideshow on my homepage. I found out some SmugMug users had improved the code on the slideshow to also make it "stretchy" so on real high resolutions you'll see more detail on my pictures, which is especially awesome for the panoramas I have in the slideshow. So no matter what resolution you're running the javascript will resize the slideshow to be optimal for your browser, pretty awesome eh?
I also randomized the order of the images in the slideshow. I edited my blog to match the new arrangement as well. At the bottom of my homepage and blog are now clickable links to email me, instead of the 1988 method of having to either copy and paste it, remove the spaces and change [at] to @, etc. Plus on my webpage it's spam bot proof, mouse over the code to see, on the blog I couldn't figure out to get that javascript to work, so it's just an old fashioned a href="mailto:"...
While messing with all the code, I noticed some of the pictures in my slideshow were just web uploads 800x533, etc. So I'm in the process of uploading full versions to replace the web ones.
Last but not least I uploaded the "Keepers" batch from my December 2004 McKinney, TX Tiger Shoot. A few of these were already in my portfolio, but while looking for the originals to replace the web versions I had uploaded, I noticed some awesome shots that weren't on my site, so I did a quick run through, proccessed the keepers and uploaded to a new gallery: Tigers @ McKinney, TX - December 2004
And now it's 5:43am Mountain time so I'm probably going to pass out here in the next couple of minutes :)
Thanks for reading/swinging on by, and catcha later,
Aaron
A new year is coming, I'm on vacation, and with all this free time I decided to make some fun changes to my Photography website. The first change you might notice is my Photography by Aaron P Brown logo is no longer centered, it's aligned left, and the toolbars instead of being centered and below the logo are now on the same level and aligned right. This will change to depending on the browser window size, the reason I did that was to make more screen room available for this next change...
The biggest and most noticeable change was done to the slideshow on my homepage. I found out some SmugMug users had improved the code on the slideshow to also make it "stretchy" so on real high resolutions you'll see more detail on my pictures, which is especially awesome for the panoramas I have in the slideshow. So no matter what resolution you're running the javascript will resize the slideshow to be optimal for your browser, pretty awesome eh?
I also randomized the order of the images in the slideshow. I edited my blog to match the new arrangement as well. At the bottom of my homepage and blog are now clickable links to email me, instead of the 1988 method of having to either copy and paste it, remove the spaces and change [at] to @, etc. Plus on my webpage it's spam bot proof, mouse over the code to see, on the blog I couldn't figure out to get that javascript to work, so it's just an old fashioned a href="mailto:"...
While messing with all the code, I noticed some of the pictures in my slideshow were just web uploads 800x533, etc. So I'm in the process of uploading full versions to replace the web ones.
Last but not least I uploaded the "Keepers" batch from my December 2004 McKinney, TX Tiger Shoot. A few of these were already in my portfolio, but while looking for the originals to replace the web versions I had uploaded, I noticed some awesome shots that weren't on my site, so I did a quick run through, proccessed the keepers and uploaded to a new gallery: Tigers @ McKinney, TX - December 2004
And now it's 5:43am Mountain time so I'm probably going to pass out here in the next couple of minutes :)
Thanks for reading/swinging on by, and catcha later,
Aaron
Thursday, December 10, 2009
Thursday, December 03, 2009
New Hawaii Shots, Round Top Drive, Diamond Head (Taken Dec 2nd)
Hey all, I'm still alive and still taking pictures! In fact I have some really good ones from today. Been working on them since I got back from shooting in fact. I stayed downtown too long and was stuck in traffic for an hour plus, but these shots were definitely worth the hassle.
As some of you may know I just got a new lens (EF 17-40L f/4) off of craigslist for a steal and a half, and today was the first day I really put it to use. I've had this lens before, Rocky Mountain National Park - October 2004 so I know it's an awesome lens to have, and I'd already tested the lens out indoors and was very impressed with the quality inside at ISO 1600 wide open (ie f/4), so I couldn't wait to get some real shots out of it. Anyway I'm sure you're thinking Aaron quit blabbing and show me the money, err pictures :)
Take a look!
I think the clouds really make this picture, they're the only reason I posted this one image in addition to the 2 panos I did from Round Top Drive.
View of Diamond Head Crater, downtown Honolulu and Manoa Valley (in the foreground) taken from Round Top Drive in Puu Ualakea State Wayside located in the Round Top Forest Reserve.
--
This is the second panoramic shot I took from this location. This one I used just a UV filter instead of a polarizing filter. It's another hand-held (no tripod) panoramic and I'm very impressed with the results. Yeah I can nitpick and say the horizon bows instead of being a straight line, but this is light years better than my attempts and hand holding panos in RMNP circa 2003-2004 :)
Panoramic shot of Diamond Head Crater, downtown Honolulu and Manoa Valley (in the foreground) taken from Round Top Drive in Puu Ualakea State Wayside located in the Round Top Forest Reserve.
19 shot hand-held (no tripod) panoramic composition stitched in Adobe PS CS4.
40D EF 17-40 f/4L USM
Shot @ 40mm ISO 100 f/8 1/400s
RAW conversion done in PS CS4
This PS file is 113MB and a resolution of 13081 x 3739 or 54.5" x 15.6" at 240dpi or a 139.9 megapixel image!
--
This is the third panoramic I took from Round Top Drive, and I call this version "Wider with Less Sky" :) Still a UV filter, and still hand held. I really like this one, extremely happy with the results. And the best part, aka the little easter egg, click on the picture, and the very right hand side you can see an airplane. I purposely waited for one to be in the last frame of the pano, and thankfully it didn't get cropped out when this pano was assembled. I don't know if I had better luck in this one, or since the horizon is higher, but there's almost no bow in the horizon at all.
Panoramic shot of Diamond Head Crater, downtown Honolulu and Manoa Valley (in the foreground) taken from Round Top Drive in Puu Ualakea State Wayside located in the Round Top Forest Reserve.
20 shot hand-held (no tripod) panoramic composition stitched in Adobe PS CS4.
40D EF 17-40 f/4L USM
Shot @ 40mm ISO 100 f/8 1/400s
RAW conversion done in PS CS4
This PS file is 126MB and a resolution of 13529 x 3766 or 56.4" x 15.7" at 240dpi or a 145.8 megapixel image!
--
This is my favorite image I took of the day (Dec 2nd), it's the Diamond Head Light House from the summit of Diamond Head. I took a bunch of shots of that little lighthouse mostly just point and click, but this is the one where I composed the shot, waited for the waves to be just right, etc. :D I'm really glad it turned out as well as I envisioned it. Not to flatter myself but it reminds me of a post card, or a pictures from a lighthouse calendar.
--
I took more pictures from the Diamond Head and Hanauma Bay, but I'm still working on those. Stay Tuned!
Aaron
As some of you may know I just got a new lens (EF 17-40L f/4) off of craigslist for a steal and a half, and today was the first day I really put it to use. I've had this lens before, Rocky Mountain National Park - October 2004 so I know it's an awesome lens to have, and I'd already tested the lens out indoors and was very impressed with the quality inside at ISO 1600 wide open (ie f/4), so I couldn't wait to get some real shots out of it. Anyway I'm sure you're thinking Aaron quit blabbing and show me the money, err pictures :)
Take a look!
I think the clouds really make this picture, they're the only reason I posted this one image in addition to the 2 panos I did from Round Top Drive.
View of Diamond Head Crater, downtown Honolulu and Manoa Valley (in the foreground) taken from Round Top Drive in Puu Ualakea State Wayside located in the Round Top Forest Reserve.
--
This is the second panoramic shot I took from this location. This one I used just a UV filter instead of a polarizing filter. It's another hand-held (no tripod) panoramic and I'm very impressed with the results. Yeah I can nitpick and say the horizon bows instead of being a straight line, but this is light years better than my attempts and hand holding panos in RMNP circa 2003-2004 :)
Panoramic shot of Diamond Head Crater, downtown Honolulu and Manoa Valley (in the foreground) taken from Round Top Drive in Puu Ualakea State Wayside located in the Round Top Forest Reserve.
19 shot hand-held (no tripod) panoramic composition stitched in Adobe PS CS4.
40D EF 17-40 f/4L USM
Shot @ 40mm ISO 100 f/8 1/400s
RAW conversion done in PS CS4
This PS file is 113MB and a resolution of 13081 x 3739 or 54.5" x 15.6" at 240dpi or a 139.9 megapixel image!
--
This is the third panoramic I took from Round Top Drive, and I call this version "Wider with Less Sky" :) Still a UV filter, and still hand held. I really like this one, extremely happy with the results. And the best part, aka the little easter egg, click on the picture, and the very right hand side you can see an airplane. I purposely waited for one to be in the last frame of the pano, and thankfully it didn't get cropped out when this pano was assembled. I don't know if I had better luck in this one, or since the horizon is higher, but there's almost no bow in the horizon at all.
Panoramic shot of Diamond Head Crater, downtown Honolulu and Manoa Valley (in the foreground) taken from Round Top Drive in Puu Ualakea State Wayside located in the Round Top Forest Reserve.
20 shot hand-held (no tripod) panoramic composition stitched in Adobe PS CS4.
40D EF 17-40 f/4L USM
Shot @ 40mm ISO 100 f/8 1/400s
RAW conversion done in PS CS4
This PS file is 126MB and a resolution of 13529 x 3766 or 56.4" x 15.7" at 240dpi or a 145.8 megapixel image!
--
This is my favorite image I took of the day (Dec 2nd), it's the Diamond Head Light House from the summit of Diamond Head. I took a bunch of shots of that little lighthouse mostly just point and click, but this is the one where I composed the shot, waited for the waves to be just right, etc. :D I'm really glad it turned out as well as I envisioned it. Not to flatter myself but it reminds me of a post card, or a pictures from a lighthouse calendar.
--
I took more pictures from the Diamond Head and Hanauma Bay, but I'm still working on those. Stay Tuned!
Aaron
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