The photo has been cropped to give a nice zoom effect since I was only using a 200mm lens.

During a recent promotion though, which really had little to do with Google Engage, I found out where things just don’t connect when it comes to Google.

The whole thing started when Google Engage sent me a kit for a promotion they’re doing. While I don’t consider the promotion incredibly compelling, since it’s geared exclusively for new customers and has little benefit to me (pulling in a thousand dollars from the promotion only earns you a chance to win a Chrome laptop, while twenty thousand only gets you a chance to win a trip to Google head office), my real issue was with the execution of the whole thing.

When the box arrived for me, with a nice glass water bottle, twenty promotional flyers for clients, and a (missing) Google pin, I was a little surprised when I had to pay a COD fee, especially when I didn’t even know what was in the box. That’s when things started to get silly.

Apparently, Google did not intend for Canadian residents to have to pay this fee, which was effectively customs fees, so after writing to them to complain, they apologized and offered me a $50 code for Google goodies from their online store. They also then said they were sending me a refund for what I paid.

I looked around the Google store, but decided to wait a little while to pick something out, and then a couple of weeks later that “refund” came in the mail. Some genius decided to send out a domestic United States Postal Service money order, and the key word there is domestic. Since Canada has no USPS, I basically have a money order I can maybe some day use when I go back to the U.S.

Jump ahead another week or two and along comes a letter apologizing for the mistake, plus a Visa gift card. On the bright side, I was obviously able to finally use that gift card (although it said it was for $5 more than it was actually good for), but then came the final stupid little last kick in the teeth.

As it turns out, that Google code for $50 works fine, but guess what? Shipping on a $50 item to Canada, the cheapest rate available I might add, is $77.80 by ground. Shipping by air, you ask? That would be $210.79. What’s funny is that this is just to ship me a backpack that maybe weighs, what, a pound at most?

While I still appreciate what Google tried to do, and the effort of the contest overall, it just makes me wonder how a company could get a few simple things so incredibly wrong. When Google works, it works incredibly well, but this is an example of how the behemoth company may need to get just a little more organized if they’re going to work with those of us in Canada–which frankly is a lesson any company should consider if they want to make the most of their business in a new marketplace.

Cherry tree blossoms

As of 7:30 AM, the park is fairly quiet, but there were a lot of other photographers happily snapping away pictures of the trees and the blossoms, which made it interesting waiting for space to clear so you could get some angles.

That said, there was always space to shoot up at the branches, so I got quite a few decent closeup photos of the blossoms. Check them out below in these just-for-fun shots.

(Also, don’t forget to check us out on Facebook!)

Design elements included mouseover effects, the favicon image, some design work on the image used for the background, and the addition of SEO meta tags to the page.

PGS worked with Heritage Home Design to create a website that suited the company, while also writing content for sections of the website and creating some graphical elements. Some graphical elements were developed with the help of Matthew Labutte from Design-O-Matic.ca.

In addition, PGS is working with Heritage Home Design to provide photography services, capturing images of renovated homes, as well as running the company’s social media marketing and search engine optimization strategies.

Heritage Home Design

For the uninitiated, the difference between my old crop sensor camera and the full frame camera is literally that with the same lens on both bodies, I have a wider frame of view with the full frame. What it amounts to is that on the crop sensor, the sensor is a notch smaller, but the lens projects the same view into the camera body. The effect is that, because the sensor is smaller than the image coming in, the image that is captured is cropped to the size of the sensor. Obviously anything else falls off the edge and isn’t captured in the image.

Full frame sensors, as the name suggests, are larger, and so photos captured with the bigger sensor have a wider perspective.

While full frame sensors capture bigger images, and are higher resolution because they serve the professional market, there is one benefit to crop sensors: if you’re trying to get extra close with your photos, zoom lenses on a crop sensor get a natural boost. If you have a 300mm zoom lens, on the crop body that 300mm actually work at around 450mm, which is obviously a big deal.

Right now I’m still toying with the camera’s features, but for now I wanted to re-start my photography blog with my first two new photos from the camera.

First snapshot - our wedding shoes

Mr. Logan

Renovate XL is a Toronto-area renovation company that is owned and operated by Clive Callaway, a veteran project management professional, which offers services to both residential and commercial properties. The company is part of JDC Global Holdings, which PGS also developed.

PGS has managed all aspects of this project including website installation on our server, social media & email marketing, search engine optimization, and ongoing marketing services.

Follow Renovate XL on Twitter and like them on Facebook.

Celebrating excellence in journalism among newspapers outside of Toronto, the organization hosts an annual gala ceremony that brings together working members of the newspaper press, including  journalists, photographers, managing editors, publishers and participating sponsors.

The onawards.ca website was built using WordPress and a modified theme.

Website features include a content slider on the home page, improved image and photo gallery presentation, and a unique option to browse front page stories by images.

The Ontario Newspaper Awards site is also hosted on PGS servers.