Post Your Photos While They are Hot!

After you photograph an event, I realize that the last thing you want to do is stress over getting them online. You’re possibly doing it for free/cheap and the drinks you had at the open bar don’t make you feel like doing it right now. Still, focus and get them up quick. The difference between getting them online that night and 72 hours later is huge. Do it now, not later.

Creative Commons License your Photos

Some people will disagree with this (mainly 100% fulltime professional photogs), but I think its best to put your photos out under a Creative Commons License. This enables people to use them for their own personal use (think blogs, twitter profile photos, facebook, myspace, youtube, etc) legally. You can set if someone can make derrivatives (I always allow it) and if they can use it for commercial use (I generally don’t, but I’m generous in allowing most companies do it anyway. Just don’t want Time Magazine using my photo for free on the front page).

Holding the copyright and rights close to your chest rarely does you any favors that I’ve seen. Seriously, who is going to pay you after the fact for the license to a photo? Few. I’d rather have the exposure than the rights.

Make People Look Good!

I take a lot of photos at an event. Generally 50-100/hr if not more. I wish I could be more deliberate and make every shot count, but especially in group photos when people are drinking its often hard to get everyone with their eyes open and looking good.

Don’t publish photos of people with their mouth awkwardly held, lookng trashed or with their eyes closed. This is why I won’t use something to auto-publish all of the photos I take (like an EyeFi card, which is awesome technology). The last thing people want is bad photos of them out there. And on that note…

Touchups are Appreciated

I’m not one to try to make people look better than they are, but I want photos that look as good as possible too and that people want to share with others. If someone has a piece of food on their face, spilled a drink on themselves, has a cold sore, or a huge zit on their head then please Photoshop that shit out of there. Don’t try to get into the game of trying to make everyone look like 100lb model or airbrushing everyone to perfection. Just cut out stuff that really isn’t “them”.

If you do have some exceptional photos of really good looking people, then on occasion I’ll go through and do a tad bit more detail work. But it’s mainly for exposure and color correction. Bring out people’s eyes, lips and other favorable details color-wise and you will have a really cool photo.

Don’t Kill People with Flash!

You often must use flash in many situations. Events are generally in dark bars, ballrooms and event halls. Even shooting at ISO1600 (the best my camera can do before stuff starts looking like trash) with an aperture of f/1.8 or f/2.0, these rooms are dark, hard to focus, meter, etc. Flash is sadly needed.

But don’t overdo it! Create a small deflected pop to fill the room a bit, and don’t blast them with it. Don’t be afraid to ask people to turn or move into an area that has slightly better ambient lighting. Use any diffusers that you can to spread out the light. The last thing you want to do is make everyone look like a ghost or shiny because of the flash.

Way too many event photographers rely on just carrying a huge flash and using it for every photo. On my D200, I have my function button set to disable flash when I hold it. Get flash and non-flash photos when possible. Memory is cheap.

If you can afford it, go for better lenses and higher (but high quality) ISO over more flash. The new lines of Nikon and Canons each go to ISO25600 and look pretty damn good up there still! The ISO6400 on those looks amazing. Get a lens with an aperture that opens to f/2.8 or better and you probably don’t need flash for anything except to bring focus to a specific element.

Tag and Title things Properly

Do not under any circumstance just throw all of the photos online without proper titles and tags. Sure, at first in getting them up there they might start with just the name of the event as the title, but it doesn’t need to stay that way. Tag things liberally (with people’s names), put their names in the titles, and then also put links to their Twitter accounts and websites in the description.

Then, add all of the photos to the appropriate photo pools and groups. People will really appreciate you doing this properly.

I’ve found it best to title things like this for a photo with 3 people (2 of which that you don’t know)  “?, ?, and Jon Smith at Event Name”. Then crowdsource the titling to Twitter or elsewhere and get people to leave comments, notes and tags with the people’s names. This gets the job done quickly.

Proper exposure, cropping and rotation is manditory

There is literally zero excuse for publishing poorly exposed photos, with horrid cropping and the rotation being off. Just don’t do it. While you’re at it, make some judgement calls about the contrast and color balance. You almost always need to tweak your White Balance a bit too. I find that I’m always adding just a bit of contrast, then kicking up the exposure, increasing saturation a bit, and then perhaps bringing down the highlights just a tad. Photos will look richer, more alive and more vibrant. People will look better, which is what they want.

Don’t be a Douche

I’ve seen some event photographers to be complete assholes at events. There was one photographer for a major publication at ROFLCon 2008 at MIT. She was being a complete queen about her work, pushing others out of the way and being really annoying. On top of that, she had a huge belt mounted battery pack for her yet larger flash that she was carrying around. I mentioned to her at one point that all her photos were going to look washed out. She ignored me and snubbed me. Then later I asked when her photos would be online so I could see them, she turned and said in the most condecending voice, “My photos are exclusive through July!” then turned and walked away.

In the meantime, I was posting my photos hourly during the event and anyone who gave a rat’s ass about them saw them months before the article came out in this publication. Oh, and sure enough, her photos looked completely flash-washed out and boring. Full of fail.

Work with other photographers, share equipment if you can, and be nice to people around you. You aren’t the star of the event, no matter what publication you are with.

Err, nevermind. Too busy taking photos. See me on Twitter, Flickr, and Smugmug.

ROFLCon Crew, dressed for the part. Christina, Tim, Diana, Dean

Burial at sea, view from the bridge

The Splash

Dean about to lower the Zune and iPod

The Brick resting peacefully

Everyone gathering at JFK Park

Evening prior from the 8th floor of the Harvard Science building roof

1. Prepare to take photos. This involves making sure all gear is charged, lenses and filters clean, cards cleared off, and cables/gear packed in my trusty backpack
2. Take photos. Not that hard
3. Transfer photos to external hard drive in an Aperture library
4. Split into various libraries if needed
5. Create two or more “Smart albums”. One has items rated above 4 called “to upload”, one is called “X” and contains only photos with a rating of -1 or X.
6. Rotate all photos upright. Aperture 2.x no longer gets this right, as in Aperture 1.5 they automatically rotated based on the metadata. Aperture 2.x sees the metadata but does nothing with it. I suppose I could write a script to make this right, but this doesn’t take long
7. I use two monitors, the one on my MBP and a 37″ 1080p LCD. I have a mirror of each photo sent to the 37″ screen which I use to gauge sharpness, focus, blur, details and DOF. The MBP screen is used for all color choices (matte screen).
8. I rate all photos in the first pass quickly looking for gross errors, poor composition, blurring, horrid exposure, etc. Those get an X. I roughly sort the other photos
9. In a second pass then I focus on sorting the photos in priorities, trying to figure out the ‘best’ ones. I keep not the best ones as rating of 1, 2, 3 stars. Photos I think suitable for printing get a 5. I don’t give many 5’s. Photos I want to put online get a 4.
10. Photos with a 4/5 get a pass of color correction, cropping, etc
11. I upload the 4/5 photos to Flickr, and choose if they are Creative Commons or not. I’ve been using CC more often than not recently.
12. Photos that get a 5 might be uploaded to Smugmug for printing capability
13. I delete the photos in the Smart Album “X” as they are worthless and not something I want to keep. Anything that I might want to ever see again (alternate shots, etc) I keep however.
14. Delete memory cards, promote photos, twitter about them, etc. Start over.

I normally keep the Nikkor 18-200mm VR lens on my camera, and honestly its a killer daily lens. The 70-200 is twice as big, nearly 3x as expensive and likely weighs 4x as much. That being said, it’s significantly faster and much sharper. The 18-200 isn’t ‘unsharp’ but it is certainly not razor sharp like this lens. To get any sharper you must go with a prime of some sort.

I honestly hope that I don’t like the lens TOO much, as it’s $1700 (actually over 2K on Amazon) and I’d rather not add this to my wishlist of photo gear. Ken Rockwell has some killer information and review of the lens. Err, and that’s his photo of the lens above.

“My name is David Fisher, and I am an analytics junkie.”

Ok, I admitted it. Let’s move on. With a Flickr Pro account you get to have a little Stats page about your photos. It’s pretty cool and useful, but it leaves me wanting so much more. What are the problems that I have with it? What more do I need? Honestly, much of the functionality of Google Analytics would be really appreciated

• A longer history: The past 30 days only isn’t really sufficient for me. I haven’t been taking photos for only 30 days. I’d like to be able to compare the response that I’ve gotten between events. These events might be months, or even a year apart. As it stands now, it’s just a pretty picture of the last month of activity.
• Variable time selection: I want to be able to select a timeframe of just a week or so. I appreciate that it shows it by “yesterday” and “all time” but I want to see things for a specific month or slice
• Comparing vs others photos in a pool: I’d like to see how much traffic everyone else has gotten about a specific tag or event. I have a “hunch” that I had the most popular photos for ROFLCon, but it’s really hard to tell. That’s a really big thing for me.
• More graphical trend information: I’m a visual person. I like to see everything that I can visually. Just the fact that I’m on flickr makes this apparent. Graphs, charts, diagrams. You can’t overload me.
• In this vein of things, I want to see referral information over time.
• I want to know some things about my viewers. Resolution, color depth, browser, time spend on page. I also want to know if they “bounced” or kept viewing more of my photos. How many unique viewers vs “hits” overall? What sizes are they viewing?
• Tell me about what I’m doing: What cameras am I using, what size am I generally exporting, what lenses am I using? Graph my EXIF metadata for me. Some of us shoot with multiple formats, cameras, etc… and I’d love to know more about my own shooting/usage and compare it against traffic patterns.
• Overlaying: I want to be able to overlay any of this data against each other. I want to see trends. Are all of my creative commons photos getting more traffic? Are the things that I shoot in portait getting no traffic? I want to know!
• A simple/advanced mode: I don’t think that everyone wants all of these. Some people are overwhelmed by Google Analytics. I don’t want to scare people off, but some of us need more power!
• I’d like to have export to CSV or XML. Sometimes I just need to export data and analyze it elsewhere.

A few things could happen here:

1. Flickr could allow the insertion of analytics Javascript into the pages on your account, and you could use some external service. I’d love to build a Flickr analytics engine/page or hell, just use Google Analytics and then hack a few extra things onto another page to deal with stuff
2. Expand their own! They have gotten some of the smoothest photo management software going and they can’t get decent analytics out there? WTF?

It kinda pisses me off that they are screwing around with Video services on flickr, when it’s clear that YouTube has that covered and it’s kinda pointless, when they should be improving the photo services. There is a reason that I still use a Smugmug account for my “professional” work.