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If you are looking for a new pose with your youth basketball teams, consider a prop that allows them to appear as if they are palming the ball. Not only will they feel like an NBA player, but the pose is great.

Candid Color Photography has been using one from Palm It for about 12 shoots with youth basketball and they intend to use it with high school players, too. To check it out visit palm-it.com. The cost is $49.95.

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Addition to the Sports Trader Card

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The year had been added to the Sports trader card layouts. This has been a request from several CCS customers. Adding the year dates the product making it more meaningful to the end customer and also hopefully encourages them to purchase this same product from year to year. The year will automatically appear on the trader card if the year is keyed and present on other products offered on that same event.

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New Field Hockey Modifier
A new sports modifier for field hockey has been added based on customer requests and the growing popularity of the sports in many areas.






The CCS Winter Seminar is scheduled for February 26-27 in Miami Beach and we’d like YOU to tell US what YOU would like to see and hear at the meetings and during the presentations. We’ve kicked around a few ideas here but are always looking for suggestions from our customers.

Your ideas can cover the full spectrum of markets, products, and services that CCS provides; or, perhaps you would like to see software-specific training, or a portrait lighting class. Whatever is important to you should be included in your recommendations.

We are looking for any topic suggestions. Here are a few areas of interest you may want to use to stir your imagination:

Sports Special Events Grads Races Weddings Portraits Corporate

Sales Marketing Software and software training Best Business Practices Sales presentations Cameras and photographic equipment Emails

Also, perhaps you’d like to take on a presentation, like the one a CCS customer has already volunteered to do. If that’s the case, then send me a paragraph describing your topic and explain the content that you would like to cover and how this will be accomplished.

If you are only interested in suggesting a topic, then forward it to: Brian Speers. The complete agenda will be released and published prior to Thanksgiving.


A Leap of Faith
by Brian Speers


Radley and Tina Muller, CCS customers from Washington State, are award winning wedding photographers who like to create situations and photographs that are special: not just for them but also for the wedding couples they photograph.

Many of their wedding images have been award winners,


while others are done for fun with plenty of, “How did they do that” comments which follow.

For instance, here’s a nice photo of a laid-back, recently married, West Coast couple sitting on the shores of a Hawaiian island following their ceremony enjoying the weather, the warm Pacific currents lapping against their bare feet, and the fact that their clothes are getting wet and they just don’t give a damn! Ah, but this shot was just the setup, or the “bait”, that was laid in the trap for what was to come a little later.

For many couples marriage is a leap of faith. For this couple,



New Custom Watermarks Available through QP2, QEMS & CORE
by Steve Foisy

You can now create your own custom watermarks that can be applied to your images posted online.

Watermarks can be created in PhotoShop or other image editing programs and should be saved as TIFF files. A horizontal and vertical file is required with the exact pixel dimensions listed below.

Horizontal watermark
324x216 pixels in width and height
Click to view this watermark online
Vertical watermark
216x324 pixels in width and height
Click to view this watermark online
Watermark images must be in grayscale.  Anything that is pure white on the watermark image will appear completely white on the image. Anything that is pure black will be completely transparent. Varying the percentage of gray applied to your watermark text will control how prominent or subtle it will appear. Once created, save the vertical and horizontal files as TIFF’s.

Once created, watermark files should be sent to your Customer Support Rep or to support@candid.com. Watermarks received by 12:00pm CST on Monday will be activated no later than Friday of the same week. The setup fee per watermark is $20. After initial watermark setup, contact Darren Hansen at ext 456 in Support if you need to update your watermark. Watermarks can be updated/altered if we are notified within 3 days of the initial activation and the modified files are received at CCS within that time period. Allow up to two days for the modified files to be uploaded.

It is the photographer’s responsibility to test watermarks online and look at the preview images before using them on multiple events.  Watermarks can only be applied to images transmitted to events that already have the watermark option selected. Once a watermark has been applied to the images by CCS during our processing of your images for web posting, the watermark cannot be removed.

Custom watermarks can be selected in QP2, QEMS and CORE and must be selected prior to FTPing the images to CCS. See examples below.

QP2 Event Setup Page
1. Select to Protect Images with Watermark
2. Select Watermark Style

QEMS Watermark

CORE Watermark Setup

Contact Customer Support with any questions at 800-750-0494. Need BASIC instruction in PhotoShop to create your Watermark? Contact Darren Hanson in Support at ext 456.


New Version of CORE released on Monday October 30th.
by Denise Mangiante

This new version includes the ability to ID images for the Professional Portraits Market. What would you use this for? You can ID composites, cap and gown pictures and senior portraits. This gives you the opportunity to give your customer a higher quality print than the grad market and provides you with a great marketing tool. By using CORE to ID these photos, you can print proofs to mail to the customer and send emails that will take them directly to their images.
The design of this market in CORE is very similar to the Grad market; therefore it will be easy to learn. This version also allows you to set a custom watermark when creating an event in CORE.

If you would like training or have any questions, please contact the support department.

New Additions to QEMS Now Available.
You now have the ability to set up hot market events in QEMS. Simply choose to enable hot markets on the set up tab, go to edit CCS accounts and mark the accounts that you would like to default to hot market. When you set up an event for your hot market account, it will always default to hot market although you can override it before you create the event. After the event is created, you can not change the hot market flag.

The Campus Addition is now available in QEMS. The campus addition allows you to display bid day images on the QEMS site. This is simply a good way to draw people to your website.
Here is what the campus addition looks like on www.normanpartypics.com (under the College section)

To add the campus addition to your QEMS site, simply go to the organization tab, click on the organization and choose campus addition. Follow the directions on the page.

If you have any question about how this feature or would like training in QEMS, please contact customer support.



Service times for the week of October 22
by Bo Lewis