The story...

Hi there! My name is Scott Valentine (not the actor), and I'm hoping I can get a handful of sponsors to help me buy some equipment, specifically: a laptop and a new camera. I don't currently have a laptop, and my dSLR is an aging Nikon D100 that I bought used a few years ago when my son was born. With that camera, I have won a couple of photography competitions, co-written a Photoshop book, and spent countless hours learning and sharing. But the income from all of these successes amounts to very little. Yet I want to keep sharing.

Why should you sponsor me? Well, buzz, for one thing. I am creating a page for logos (theysponsored.me), and will set up an AdSense account on that page. Any money from the AdSense account on that page will go to charity (which I will disclose later, but probably for animal rescue efforts). All I'm asking is for a donation to my PayPal account in exchange for a spot on that page.

How big of a donation? That depends on what you want! Here's what I want to do with your logo... I co-wrote a book on digital compositing with still images, so I figured I'd put that skill to use. Your logo will be composited into a public-domain image so that it looks like it was meant to be there. Obviously this takes some time, and is not trivial to accomplish. Keep in mind that I'm not just going to paste your logo into a box, but I will work it to achieve some level of realism, as if your logo were really there at the time the photo was taken.

Of course, there are some variations available. For basic inclusion on an image with several other logos (as they come in), I am asking for $100. Here are the options I'm considering:

$100 - Your logo in a conspicuous spot, with some minimum percentage of the viewable area of the image. You'll share with other sponsors on the same image.

$500 - Your logo alone and prominently displayed.

$1000 - Your logo as part of the image itself, perhaps replacing a building or landscape feature.

I will have a selection of images available to choose from, or you may provide an image so long as you are legally allowed to use it for this purpose.

As logos are added, the images will be available in as reasonably high a resolution as I can find to work with. These will be in a gallery along with text links to make it easier to find any given logo.

One more thing... your company has to be willing to give me creative freedom to use your logo for this purpose. Logos will necessarily be altered and manipulated, but will still retain recognizability.

I will have some examples up, soon, as well as a Paypal button. I am open to suggestions, too!

Well... Here I am.

I have eschewed the traditional "Hello, World" in favor of a Firefly reference - a bounty hunter named Jubal Early is left floating in a space suit, losing heat to the black. Right now, this concept is also just hanging out in space, but I do have a plan.

That plan is to start gathering sponsorships to help pay for stuff. Stuff that I will in turn use for generating market buzz and doing some charity work. Details forthcoming, but for now, I have the domains, the gmail account, twitter and FB pages all in place.

This should be a fun, lucrative experiment. Let's see how it goes!