Dustwood Media is located in Clementsvale, Nova Scotia, Canada. As the owner of Dustwood Media, I wear many hats! These include: Photographer, Artist, Product Designer (offering print-on-demand and digital products featuring my artwork and photos), and my own Webmaster, Office Manager, and Bookkeeper.
Background And Experience:
ARTIST: I've been an artist since my early teens, with a love of drawing with pencils, pen, and later coloured pencils. I had a couple of great mentors along the way, including an artist friend of my dad's who taught me how to really look at what I'm drawing. I took art as an elective for all 4 years of high school, and majored in Fine Art in University (although sadly I dropped out before I graduated). My focus has always been on the world around me, including animals (starting with horses - I was a teenage girl, go figure), plants and flowers, and music themes (married to a musician for 40 years).
PHOTOGRAPHER: Although I used a Brownie box camera when I was young for family snapshots, I didn't become a photographer until the advent of digital cameras. With that and the use of "paint" software to edit my photos, I found a whole new way to express myself - or rather, to record the way the world impresses itself on me. As with my art, my focus as a photographer is on nature and on images of my life; I also take images of man's presence in the world, from artifacts to homes to industries. While art lets me focus in on the details of a thing, photography gives me the ability to freeze a moment in time.
WORK EXPERIENCE: I got my start on computers in 1986. While spending many years in office jobs, I also started doing small home businesses with my musician husband - designing music CD covers and promo materials and maintaining databases of his original compositions and albums, and uploading his music to various websites like Bandcamp.com as well as the usual business backup functions like bookkeeping. From there I moved into being an independent Virtual Assistant, helping to create and maintain my clients' websites, doing transcription, bookkeeping, document design and editing, creating book indexes, and doing photo editing. I now specialize in photo editing services and resources for authors, artists, musicians, and small businesses.
EDUCATION: 3 ½ years in university as a Fine Arts major; a one-year certificate in Bookkeeping; and continuing education courses including MS Office Specialist, Focused Marketing, Goal Setting, Knock-Your-Socks-Off Customer Service, The Quality Advantage, and How To Manage Projects, Priorities & Deadlines. I must admit, though, I've learned more from individual mentors and from hands-on experience than anything else.
Business:
LOCATION: Dustwood Media is located at 1338 Clementsport Road, Clementsvale, Nova Scotia, between Digby and Annapolis Royal, on the east coast of Canada.
HOURS: Dustwood Media is open from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. (Atlantic Time - that's 1 hour later than Eastern time), Monday to Friday. To contact me, send an email - I check frequently and usually respond the same day.
Paying by PayPal I accept payment by e-transfer, cheque, or PayPal. If you choose PayPal:
Your financial information is securely stored on PayPal's secure servers. I never see your credit card information. PayPal simply notifies me of the order details. How secure is PayPal? Here's what they say themselves: "Data Security and Encryption: The security of your information, transactions, and money is the core of our business and our top priority at PayPal." "PayPal automatically encrypts your confidential information in transit from your computer to ours using the Secure Sockets Layer protocol (SSL) with an encryption key length of 128-bits (the highest level commercially available). Before you even register or log in to our site, our server checks that you're using an approved browser - one that uses SSL 3.0 or higher." "Once your information reaches us, it resides on a server that is heavily guarded both physically and electronically. Our servers sit behind an electronic firewall and are not directly connected to the Internet, so your private information is available only to authorized computers." A final note: I've been using PayPal for over 20 years and have found them to be thoroughly reliable.