Eye catching – isn’t it?!  So I went over to Tanya’s facebook page, saw the images from her 50′s session and my jaw dropped.  I just knew we had to feature her and share her beautiful work with all of you.  (You can view even more here on her blog or on her facebook page.)  So Tanya – thank you for taking the time to do an interview with us and “visit” the Cafe all the way from South Australia. 

What inspired the 50′s shoot?

It is something I have always wanted to do.  I have always been interested in the 50′s style era.  I love the style and energy generated around that time.  The idea was inspired through association with a number of younger clients and a learning institution for hair and beauty.  I worked with a great inspiration, her name is Francie, together the opportunity presented itself and the shots speak for themselves and the day was an incredible experience and loads of fun.

Where do you turn for inspiration or what do you do to push yourself creatively?

I have 3 incredible free spirited, energetic children who love new experiences and have a lust for life and all that it hands them. I draw from them, they inspire me to be a better person and to be all that I can be, the rest just flows. I love what I do and I believe that it is reflected in all that I see through a lens and transpires into life lasting memories for people. If you have passion for what you are doing the results speak for themselves.

Your camera of choice & go-to lens?

I drive a Nikon D3S and my lens choice would be at the moment 85 mil.

Is there a piece of equipment you couldn’t live without?

I just can’t live without my iMac.

Any non-photography-related hobbies?

I like to read, walk, I love the beach and spend time with my family and my new Polaroid 300 (so much fun!). I can’t wait for the re-release of the old Polaroid.

Fav food or beverage?

Thai food and lime margarita’s (followed closely by a water chaser)

What is your opinion on the current photography market in Australia?

The market is strong and opportunities are endless. Its a great time to be in the industry with technologies moving as fast as they are.

What is your favorite part of photographing a wedding?

Creating energy and excitement. Capturing all that I see and having fun with it.

One thing many might not know about you?

I love cookbooks, I have hundreds of them, but… I don’t cook…  Thankfully, my beautiful husband Simon does…

Morning person or night owl?

I like to believe I operate on all cylinders at all times of the day and night. I do like sleep but with 3 children my life is full.

Favorite quote?

“Well behaved women rarely make history.”  – Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

This set includes five 5×7 .psd file templates.  Colors can easily be customized to match your branding or photos.

Get all the details and snatch up these contemporary calendar templates here in our SHOP.

This set includes four 5×7 calendar templates.  Fully-layered .psd files allow for you to easily change colors to coordinate with your branding or photographs.

Visit our shop for all the details and to purchase the FRESH vintage calendar template set!

Now, before you start nodding off or clicking back to Facebook, give it a chance.  Zach makes this complicated subject simple, not painful.  We all know that parts of running a business may not be so glamorous or fun (like taxes or paperwork or making phone calls!!), but SEO can be a total blast once you start tweaking a few things and seeing how it affects your stats.  It becomes a game to see how you can control the numbers.

Today Zach gives some simples steps for optimizing your blog posts.  Read on…

Hi, I’m Zach Prez, and I help photographers rank in search engines with my photoblog SEO website. Now you know I’m not just full of it. SEO on a photography blog can double search traffic in under a fortnight. Don’t know how long that is, but I always laugh when I read an article that uses that horrible metric of time and I thought you could use a good laugh. Let me prove it to you. Go to Google and search for site:yoursite.com replacing yoursite.com with the actual domain name of your site. That shows you how many pages of your website Google knows about (indexed). Now do a search for site:yourblog.com. The average photographer will see many more searchable pages for his/her blog than her website. That means more chances for a blog to rank. More ranks mean more traffic, new business leads, and ultimately money. Rarely do I come across a blog post that is well optimized for search engines. All those pages, down the drain. Since less people visit my site than don’t visit my site, I want to write for the ones who don’t know about me but search for my services. Without giving away my entire Blog SEO Zen ebook, here’s a surface level overview on how to optimize any blog post. Let’s use Tinywater’s San Francisco maternity portrait photographer post as an example.

1. Start with the Title

The post title is the most important thing on the page for ranking well. Google matches the keywords in your title against the words the user searched for. If a user searches for “San Francisco maternity photographer” and your post title is “Photos of Claudia” Google doesn’t know that your page is a good fit for the person searching. The post won’t rank for anything (anything good at least). The post title is the first thing I write because it sets the tone for the post and helps me focus on the right keywords. Our example post uses the title “Best San Francisco Maternity Photographer” which appears in Google as the clickable link and is an almost exact match for the people searching. The blog also uses this phrase in only one or two post titles since only 1-2 pages from our site will ultimately rank for a single phrase. No need to put “- San Francisco maternity photographer” or your blog name at the end of every post. I see that all the time and it just decreases the value of important keywords. Pick 1-2 main posts where you want to rank for that phrase and only use the phrase there. In WordPress the title of each post is easily controlled with the All in One SEO Pack. Otherwise it is typically generated from the post headline (the big bold, can’t miss heading text at the top of the post text).

2. Get Keywords in the URL

About .02 milliseconds after Google looks for keywords in a post title it checks the URL. WordPress allows for easy editing of the post URL (called a permalink), in this case /portraits/best-san-francisco-maternity-photographer/. Notice the “portraits” category in the URL, which is done through a custom permalink structure in WordPress, and will help this post rank for portrait searches as well. Your first step is to make sure your blog posts use keywords in the URLs and not something generic like /post123, then choose quality words in the permalink.

3. Round Out the Post with a Quality Headline and Post Text

As long as your main phrase (aor a close variation) is in the headline, and your post has 300 words of text, Google has plenty of information to know that the post is a good match for the person searching. That probably came as a surprise because I rarely see a photography post over 300 words, which is why it’s not ranking. Give Google and your users some meat! I’m affiliated with a tool called Scribe that I use to analyze my post for keywords and SEO placement. It checks the post for the most used keywords, makes sure they are in the right places, and gives me a score.

4. Label Images Appropriately

Alternate text behind an image. If your blog platform doesn’t have a field for alt text, it’s usually generated form the image title. Without a field for image title (like for Blogger blogs), you need to go into the post source and manually add the HTML for alternate text on each image. Here’s an example of quality alternate text that uses secondary keywords like belly, tummy, pregnant, and adorable. Extra credit for using a great image filename and caption.

5. Generate a Few Links to the Post

Once a blog post is decked out with keywords in the right places, the best chance of ranking it has to do with the number of links to your main blog, aided by any links to the individual post. The fastest rank will come if you can get a couple of links to your post using your main phrase in the link name. The best link examples are links on other people’s websites, embedded within the main body of text. You have CIA-level skills if you already noticed the link earlier in this post that will further help the example post rank for Tinywater’s main keywords. You’re promoted to secret agent status if you realized that guest posts like this one are a great way to establish links. Obviously you can’t get multiple links to every one of your blog posts. Focus on the most important post and build links until the post ranks well. Then start over again with a second post.

6. Bonus step – Compelling Meta Descriptions

I like to over-deliver which is why I’m revealing this bonus step about meta descriptions. Meta descriptions are a 1-2 sentence summary of the post that hides in the site’s HTML code, so they are often overlooked and misunderstood. The only visible place for this description is on an actual search result, as the black text to describe the link. It’s a myth that the keywords in meta descriptions help you rank better, but they do appear in bold if they match any portion of the user’s search phrase. In the example post, a compelling description is used to entice users to click on this post if it appears in search. I like to use my company name somewhere in the description for branding purposes.  

Hopefully you’re on your way to ranking blog posts with these basics. The best advice I can give is to choose a couple very important phrases you want to rank for (and that you are not trying to rank your main website for) and create a new post using your phrase in the headline. Wait for results before optimizing another post. Lastly, check out Scribe, even just for a month in order to train you on keyword choice and placement. Here’s how the original post was improved with Scribe, taking it from a 40% to 100%.

Here is the analysis with update keywords.

Don’t forget to check out Blog Seo Zen (affiliate link) for 35 pages of recommendations to update your blog plug-ins, pages and posts for the perfect rank.

1) Tell us about yourself and your journey as a photographer.

After the birth of my first child, five and a half years ago, I found myself taking a million pictures and quickly being disappointed with the images of my point and shoot.  I dug out my old film Pentax and had to dig out the memories of photography classes taken…a long time ago. I joined some online photography forums and learned a lot, including PhotoShop.  But almost three years ago, my best friend asked me to take pictures of her newborn.  That was the very first time I took a picture for someone else, and that started everything.  She sent the pictures to all of her friends, who then started calling me, and I was slowly pushed into photography as a business.  It was not until last year that I decided to focus on photography as a career choice and put everything I have into making my business a success.

Last fall I started focusing on special needs children, though I still photograph all babies and young children, but I was recognized by Chicago’s ABC news for my special needs work. That then led to being asked to be the photographer for a special needs calendar, and things continue to progress, with an image being published in an international magazine in October.

I am still growing and learning, which is one of the reasons I love this industry.  With art, there is always more to learn, always more to try.  And by photographing only babies and young children, there is always the element of surprise and the unknown, as you can’t fully predict anything with a toddler.

2) How did you discover your passion for photographing children with special needs?

In March of 2009, my son was diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome, a high functioning form of Autism.  We had always considered him “smart and quirky”, but now we understood why his eyes darted everywhere but at us when we talked to him, much less tried to get him to look at the camera with any semblance of a normal expression.  With autism, you get thrown into the world of sensory processing disorders, as well.  My personal life was separate from my professional one at first as I drowned in the information and diagnosis.  A few months after the diagnosis, I was photographing a client, and we were chatting about our children since they were about the same age.  When I mentioned his recent diagnosis, she commented that her sister’s son was autistic and that they had not been able to get a family picture taken since he was a baby.

I had not considered integrating my personal experience with my professional until it dawned on me that I do offer something unique.  I do not have a studio, instead traveling to my clients’ homes or on location.  This, alone, is a big relief for many parents with special needs children.  Being able to keep them in a familiar environment and providing as little disruption to their routines as possible allows for the greatest chance of success.

Word spread quickly, and I worked at it, to be known as Chicago’s special needs photographer, covering mental, physical, and behavioral disabilities.

3) What are some of the joys that come with photographing children with special needs?

Probably the best thing is being able to give parents something they have never had – custom pictures of quality that shows their child as THEY see them, with natural smiles and expressions.  As parents, we see our children’s joy and gorgeous smile and mischievous eyes, but photographs don’t always show the world what we see. Being able to show the world those intimate expressions is a wonderful thing.  I also love feeling their relief at the end of the session.  Most of these families have not had good experiences in the past.  Photographers were not patient with their children, rushed them, judged them, and didn’t know how to work with them, so that is the expectation, the fear that they have.  I love seeing the gratitude in the parents faces for being patient with their child.  And from the kids, my goal is always to leave them thinking the session was fun, so that they want to do it again.

Specifically with autism, the BEST thing I can ever give is the rare full eye contact with the child engaged with the camera.  It is a difficult thing to accomplish, but priceless for those families.

Another thing that parents have come back and said to me is that they love seeing the positive comments on my blog about their children.  In a community of photographers, we know the importance of blogs in terms of SEO and whatnot, but leaving nice comments on photographers’ work is also a little ego boost for the parents, too.  Hearing that their daughter is beautiful when she has a disorder that makes the beauty harder to see is a gift to the heart.

4)     What are some of the potential challenges that could arise?  What tips do you have?

For those who photograph subjects with special needs who do not have personal experience, the biggest challenge  and main thing I would like to point out is that you must be patient, and you must be flexible.  I recently had a photographer comment about lighting on a picture, and I sort of laughed.  If you are someone who relies completely on your set up, on needing a subject to look this direction and stay still, then don’t bother with special needs children.  Pass them on to someone who can work with them.  A lot of these children are more difficult to direct than the average child, and if you push  too much, it is easy to hit a wall with them or get them angry.  This means a lot of improvisation on my part. I have to do a lot of moving with them.

Another major and obvious challenge with autistic subjects is eye contact and engagement.  My number one tip to photographers is to know what the child is really interested in.  Have the parents have something handy – if the child is really into Thomas the Train, I place the train on top of my lens.  Eye contact is easier to achieve if you aren’t trying to get the child to look directly at you or the camera.  Place something on the lens (skittles, smarties, lens pet, toy).

Another common challenge that is easy to overlook and ruin any trust between you and the child is when there are sensory issues.  If you know you are going to be photographing a special needs child, you need to ask if there are any sensory issues, which to the outsider would present as behavioral issues in response to stimuli that we do not  understand.  You need to know if you can touch a child, if the sound of the shutter is going to be too loud, etc.

5) What specific resources would you recommend?

In the categories of cognitive, physical, and behavioral disabilities, the hardest to work with are behavioral issues (which stem from a multitude of reasons).  Understanding sensory processing disorders is probably the key point for an outsider, as it is foreign to most people.  If you want to take the time to educate yourself, I highly recommend the book The Out of Sync Child.  Heck, Google “sensory processing disorder” and just learn  about how the input gets misinterpreted and then pushed out as a behavior.

The best training would be to spend time with special needs children.  If you have a friend with one, spend some time talking with your friend and interacting with the child just to learn and see first hand what it is like.  If there is a special needs photographer in your area, contact them, see if you can shadow a session.  I’m thinking of offering workshops just for this purpose, to give training in the three areas of disabilities with live models to show how to work with them, and how no matter how much you know, the unexpected will happen. LOL

6) What else would you like our readers to know?

Photographing special needs children isn’t for everyone, just like wedding photography isn’t for anyone.  I don’t have the lenses needed, nor the experience to do a good job with a wedding.  If you aren’t extremely patient and flexible in your approach with sessions, then don’t bother with special needs photography.  Parents have enough experiences with people who judge or just show their displeasure with their children, photography doesn’t need to be another one.  If you don’t have the personal experience, seek training or research to help give you the experience you need to put these families at ease and give them the quality of work you do with your other sessions.

All parents should be able to get beautiful portraits of their children.

Last year I gave these to my own clients.  I printed them as 5×7 prints with a linen textured finish at my lab and then adhered them to 5×7 magnet sheets that I purchased from Magnet Valley.  They coordinated with and fit perfectly in the DREAMY client holiday cards I sent out.  Since this is such an affordable gift, I was able to send it to every single 2009 client, and I even sent it to some of my clients from previous years that I wanted to make contact with again.  They absolutely loved them!

Visit the SHOP here to get the DREAMY calendar templates for 2011!

Coordinate the calendar templates with these DREAMY client cards!

Other 2011 Holiday Card Templates…

• SIMPLE holiday card templates
• VINTAGE holiday card templates
• WONDERLAND holiday card templates

Slideshows are boring. Your photography isn’t. Created by TV & film producers, Animoto Pro turns your breathtaking photos into stunning videos in minutes. Fast, award-winning production value. 1000+ free, commercially licensed songs. And totally unbranded! Not only can you create videos in the Animoto Original style but also you can produce your videos with one of four element styles: Air, Water, Fire and Earth. And to top that, just released is the Elegance collection!

Simple and graceful, the new Elegance collection gives you more flexibility than ever to showcase your images in the perfect way. Whether you photograph babies, weddings or anything in between – the four new Elegance styles are ideal for every occasion that demands a toned down, high-production quality video. Check out this sample video:

In addition to the pro-exclusive Elegance collection, you might also like the simple style that we’re releasing today for all users, Simplicity. With even more conservative transitions, Simplicity is the cleanest way to present your images and video clips. Check out Simplicity within our style selector.

Not yet signed-up with Animoto Pro? Purchase a year of Animoto Pro by August 14th and we’ll add 2 Free Months to your account. Promo Code: photocafe

Click here to purchase the WONDERLAND card template set!