A photography book publication by Weigold Photography
Weigold Photography is pleased to introduce our latest art print titled “Sombrero Light in the Sun″! This image is currently available in several sizes and customization such as sepia, black and white and bordering is available. Please select a standard size below, or contact us for customization options at sales@weigoldphotography.com
Your purchase of prints such as this will help us fund our photography book project: Underwater Sombrero!
On this date in 1789 Congress passed legislation which provided for the establishment and support of lighthouses and other navigational aids. One of which was installed on our favorite key!
Perhaps you could help us celebrate National Lighthouse Day and help support our Underwater Sombrero project by purchasing a print of the Sombrero Lighthouse!
As always, we thank you for your support!
Steve, Dee, Elizabeth, Dennis and Robert – The Underwater Sombrero Project Team
Friends of Underwater Sombrero:
As departure for the 2013 expedition to Sombrero is just days away, we find ourselves a bit frustrated at the lack of results we’re getting in our crowdfunding efforts. To date, the project has been blessed by the fact that the project team has covered the expedition travel expenses and we’ve had a few supporters chip in which has helped with some of the other project expenses, we are a far cry from being able to publish this book.
Please remember that once we get our book published, sales of the book will benefit the 
education and conservation mission of Reef Relief and images from the project will be contributed to the Marine Photobank, also helping others in their mission of conservation.
Based on current estimations, we’ll need to raise about $4000 to reach the next phase of our project. We still have plenty of images to capture and process, and we need to look forward to expenses such as obtaining an ISBN number and printing costs. We could really use your help.
You may remember that we’ve already tried the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter and they failed us. While we reached out to our network, what we expected from Kickstarter was some assistance expanding that network. We received none. You can read more about the Kickstarter results here. Since then, we’ve been managing our crowdfunding efforts on our own, and while we’ve had some success, we’re still dealing with the fact that our network isn’t as big as it needs to be.
You can help! We aren’t asking for donations. If you wish to make one, you can do so on our donations page. We certainly won’t turn it down. What we’d rather do is have you buy a piece of the project and have something to show for your support! Our funding incentives page details how you can do just that. We have funding incentives starting at just $10!
If a financial contribution isn’t in your budget, you can still help by telling people about our project. Get your friends to like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter. The more people that know about our project, the more likely we are to find some that are willing to help with the crowdfunding.
Don’t forget that everyone making an effort to help out our project will be recognized as a project backer, both here on the website and in the book itself. Be sure to check out our backers page to see those that have already helped out!
Watch for more images soon! As I write this, it’s less than 48 hours until we’re headed to Sombrero again!
As always, we thank everyone for the support!
Steve, Dee, Elizabeth, Dennis and Robert – The Underwater Sombrero Project Team
Friends,
While you probably haven’t seen much from us recently, it isn’t because we haven’t been busy! We’re head down, nose to the grindstone working through the images we got from our December 2012 expedition to Sombrero and trying to get ready for our October 2013 expedition. We got a bunch of great images last go around even with the equipment limitations we had, but we need to go back for more, and we really need the equipment upgrades we’ve been trying to get to do it right.
We’d welcome your help in the process. To make a simple donation, you can visit our donations page, but we’re sure you’d rather have a piece of the project. For that, you can visit our funding incentives page. Your purchase of a funding incentive gets you a part of the project, and the sales help us get the equipment we need to finish it!
As always, we thank everyone for the support!
Steve, Dee, Elizabeth, Dennis and Robert – The Underwater Sombrero Project Team
Weigold Photography is pleased to introduce our latest art print titled “Sombrero Light″! This image is currently available in several sizes and customization such as sepia, black and white and bordering is available. Please select a standard size below, or contact us for customization options at sales@weigoldphotography.com
Your purchase of prints such as this will help us fund our photography book project: Underwater Sombrero!
Friends, we’re getting close to our next expedition to Sombrero! Remember that we’ve already got the trip scheduled (and paid for) and we’re leaving in a few weeks.
We still need your help though! In order to make the most of the trip and get the photography we need to support our book project we need a few more pieces of equipment and to get it, we need to raise another $800 as quickly as we can!
We’ve learned that some of the equipment we need is on sale and if we can get it soon, we can save the project hundreds of dollars!
Please consider an advance purchase of one of our project prints or other funding incentive to help us get the equipment we need and make this project happen!
Here’s a handy link to purchase a 5×7 print and other incentives from the program:
If you’d prefer a bigger print or some other incentive, please visit our Funding Incentives page for other options. If you’d prefer to just make a simple donation, we’d welcome that also. You can do so by visiting our donations page.
Thank You!
It is safe to say that it has been a challenging 30 days as we tried to promote the Kickstarter funding drive to try to get this book published. We sincerely appreciate all those that stepped up and pledged their support. If you saw the last project update there, or looked at any of the new material here on the site, you know we aren’t giving up on this project.
If you were a pledged backer there and are willing to convert that pledge to an incentive purchase, please visit our Funding Incentives page and do so. It’s less clicks and hassle than the Amazon process from Kickstarter! You already pledged the money. Please follow through and get it to us!
As we move forward, we’ll be managing our own funding drive for this project. No more Kickstarter for Underwater Sombrero. When we started with Kickstarter, we new that we would have to promote the project ourselves as much as possible, both to our contacts and to our contacts’ contacts. We also had an expectation that we would receive some support from Kickstarter in the form of project exposure. That didn’t happen. Kickstarter keeps some 5% of project funds if a project is funded. For our $8000 Kickstarter goal, that would have amounted to $400. Our project would have paid $400 for nothing more than 30 days of web hosting. That’s it. Even the payments are processed by someone else at an additional expense to the project.
You can see the statistics yourself. Below is the final pledge statistics graph provided by Kickstarter. Only in the last 10 hours or so of the project did we get any attention from the Kickstarter website at all, and then it was as a result of the automatic “ending soon” feature which prompted two $1 dollar contributions from site members, likely wishing to simply up their “projects backed” stats without having to spend any money. So, after 30 days of hosting on a site with “Featured Projects”, “Staff Picks”, “Project of the Day” and a blog that discusses notable projects, not to mention Facebook and Twitter promoting projects, we got no attention from Kickstarter at all until the last 10 hours, and then only because their automated “ending soon” function picked us up, and then it was too late. We wonder how the outcome might have been if we had been publicized even just once by Kickstarter. Apparently we’ll never know.
Keep in mind also that we didn’t sit idle and hope for Kickstarter’s attention. We availed ourselves of every opportunity to tweet @kickstarter on Twitter, post on their Facebook page and tag them in Facebook posts. An email to Kickstarter HQ asking about being featured was met with an automated response which we interpreted as “keep marketing to your own contacts. Maybe we’ll notice you.”
So, Kickstarter for us turned out to be nothing more than web hosting for our project. Had we managed to get funded through our efforts, it would have been expensive funding at that. $400 for 30 days. We don’t need to spend that kind of money for hosting, so we don’t need Kickstarter! We also don’t need their help to manage online payments and we can offer incentives just like those offered on Kickstarter. As is probably obvious by now, we won’t be using Kickstarter again.
Moving forward, we’ll continue to run our funding drive, by our rules, on our own site. Payments are being handled securely by Paypal, and you don’t need a Paypal account to donate or purchase funding incentives. It’s even fewer clicks than the Kickstarter/Amazon process! No deadline. We can work on the project as funding becomes available. If you have questions, or want to discuss your contribution, please don’t hesitate to email us at info@underwatersombrero.com
If you were a Kickstarter backer, please visit our Funding Incentives page and select your incentive and follow through with the purchase. You already committed the money and it would have been collected today. We’re just asking that you please go ahead and get it to us!
As always, we thank everyone for the support!
Steve, Dee, Elizabeth, Dennis and Robert – The Underwater Sombrero Project Team
Thank you for your interest in the Underwater Sombrero publishing project. We are offering advance purchase of many items from the project such as prints, certificates and copies of the book to help fund the project. If you want one of those incentives, please visit the Funding Incentives page.
If you prefer to simply make a donation to help the project succeed though, you can do so here! Thank you very much for your support!
Our donations and purchases are handled by Paypal and can be completed with or without a Paypal account. Your financial information is kept safe by them and never revealed to us.