Jack Veight's Photography Blog

Geotagging and Google Earth

2007-09-07T22:32:00.000+01:00

Its been a while since I have been on Google Earth. Now, google earth comes with a geographic database of browseable photos, taken by loads of different individuals and uploaded to Panoramio, another Google tool. Pretty cool, particularly if shooting landscapes or architecture is your thing.

This is geotagging, the adding of location information onto photographs. A record or longditude and latitude information gets inserted into the EXIF header of a photograph, either by a GPS-equipped camera, or more normally, a GPS device that is time-synced with the camera - specialist software then merges the contents of the camera with the contents of the GPS.

Its possible I will invest in one of the GPS receivers aimed at photographers, such as the Sony GPS-CS1, but it's far from being necessary as model photography is concerned.

Good, Cheap Software

2007-07-24T08:49:00.000+01:00

At a recent gathering of photographers I swapped knowledge with a bunch of other people. I was able to pass on a fair bit of information on studio lighting, which is an area I am pretty competent at.

In return - I was clued into some interesting pieces of software, pitched at the consumer on a budget.

I was aware of ACDsee's Photo Browser, but had never seen their print studio software demonstrated before. It turns out to be quite a convenient tool for positioning multiple images on any size of page and adding template components such as frames and calendars.

The second package I saw was Breeze Browser Pro, a sophisticated photobrowser that amongst other things, generates web & thumbnail pages very easily.

Both pieces of software have time-limited free trials, so you can decide if they are going to do the job you need before purchasing... I am tinkering with them at the moment.

America 24/7 and Britain in Pictures

2007-07-10T11:37:00.000+01:00

From a bargain book store, I picked up the dead trees version of this online photography project, the result of which was an truly impressive collection of photographs, one collection per state and a super-set covering the whole of the USA.

Its not a new project to be sure, but I was very impressed by the book and I am happy you can see it online.

Meanwhile, I caught this TV series on BBC4 recently. Tom Ang provides professional photographers with unfamiliar cameras, in each case consumer grade digital cameras, then challenges them to take photographs of their local environment.

The show is a companion piece to a program about British architecture and as such, each episode takes us to a new region within the UK and features three different photographers from that area. The most interesting part of the show for me was comparing their differing styles, tastes and ways of working. Personally though, I think I would have preferred a program with a greater emphasis on instruction - still its nice to see any kind of TV program on photography.

There is a flickr group accompanying the series, where members of the public can contribute.

Jessops in financial difficulties

2007-07-03T13:37:00.000+01:00

So Jessops is struggling. I can't say I am massively surprised. What happened to Dixons previously is now happening to them

I rather liked Jessops, for the single reason that the staff I met always seemed to know their stuff gear-wise, though it seems my experience may have been unusual.

Around two years ago I noticed that Jessops were making big changes to their stock, massively simplifying it. The unusual bits and bobs one tends to collect as a serious photographer started to disappear from the shelves and only be available on pre-order. This left Jessops bricks-and-mortar stores with a core set of products and services - printing, consumer and prosumer grade digital cameras and a much reduced selection of accessories.

Unfortunately, the stuff they chose to focus on can be bought from plenty of other outlets, including online where price competition is fierce. Result - Jessops went from a fairly specialist camera retailer to being just a more expensive place to get a memory card.

Photocast Network

2007-06-25T19:28:00.000+01:00

A number of podcasting photography gurus have banded together, by the magic of technology and a willingness to ignore timezones, to bring us "Focus Ring" a roundtable discussion of all thing photographic.

I think the podcast is even stronger than those of the individual participants - one gets to hear differing perspectives on the same subject and the banter makes for a more entertaining show. If you only have enough time to listen to one photography podcast, this one is a good candidate.

YouTube as information mine

2007-06-21T16:45:00.000+01:00

Its come to my attention recently that YouTube is becoming a interesting resource for photographers and models. Whether its tips on photoshop, equipment reviews or advice for models, there are a number of people who are uploading informative video clips.

I recently cleared out my YouTube bookmarks. All the LonelyGirl15 and MarkDayComedy stuff is gone, to be replaced purely with stuff I have found that is relevent to models or photographers. Have a look - and if you also YouTube, add me as a friend or subscribe:

Jack Veight's YouTube page

Photoshop Resources

2007-06-14T22:09:00.000+01:00

Someone was asking me about Photoshop resources recently.

Digital post-production is a huge subject and one I could devote an entire blog too. Fortunately there are others who already have and theres lots of online material written about the subject online already, so I get to be lazy and point the reader at some of the better resources I have found.

Photoshopcafe has a decent selection of tutorials. Photoshoproadmap also has a tutorial section. Pslover, tries to index the various tutorial pages that are out there on other peoples sites into one searchable directory.

For the podcast literate there's the wonderful photowalkthrough, done by fellow briton John Arnold, which provides tutorials in movie version. Similar tutorials are showing up on youtube.

Finally, most popular photography websites (photo.net, photozo, tipsfromthetopfloor to name a few) have forums dedicated to either photoshop or digital post-production.

In fact, there's such a wealth of free resources available, I would probably hesitate to buy an e-book on the subject, even though I see them on ebay frequently. For paper books there's a wide selection and I hesitate to mention particular volumes. The best paper books are ones that teach by example, give you the before and after images, plus intermediate stages. In the UK, several magazine publishers produce supplements in this way.

"Skin" by Lee Varis

2007-06-09T20:32:00.000+01:00

I haven't blogged about books in a while so I thought I would do a write up on a great new book I have been poring over recently. Lee Varis has written an excellent book called "Skin" and subtitled - "The complete guide to digitally lighting, photographing and retouching faces and bodies."

Over nine chapters and around 400 pages, Varis reveals his techniques for producing great images of people. He has structured his book on the steps in the workflow process, so he starts not with the picture taking, but with a discussion on configuring photoshop software, colour management and calibration, important beginning steps that others would miss or stick in an appendix somewhere.

Although there is an excellent chapter on studio lighting, with example images and lighting plans, the major focus of the book is digital workflow using photoshop, so readers using film or 'lesser' software packages are not catered for. Particular emphasis on the kinds of edits one does when one is photographing people. Skin tone, smoothing and beautifying are covered in some detail and there are some more sophisticated topics too, such has how to fake a tattoo.

The book finishes with a discussion on rendering digital images to print and some parting speculation on future trends in photography.

The book is illustrated with full colour photographs throughout, helpful when Varis is using them to illustrate some relatively subtle corrections. The book comes with a helpful CD with tutorial files and sample images, with the edits applied in layers, so one can witness electronically and deconstruct the effects described in the paper book.

It is a good book for digital photographers who know their basics but want to really push themselves creatively and technically when taking photographs of people. I certainly used this book to help navigate me into areas of photoshop I have not really used before and it has been a creative source of inspiration as well. I would love to see a second edition with even more examples, but at $25 street price, its a worthy addition to the bookshelf.

Interesting Photography Blogs

2007-05-07T13:48:00.001+01:00

Thought I would check out who else is writing about photography. Your average

photoblog is a collection of images in an RSS feed - I am more interested in folks

stringing sentences together... talking stories, equipment, techniques and so on.

Here's a few of the better "wordy" ones I have encountered :-

The online photographer, which appears to cover almost everything celluloid/pixel related.
Model and product photographer Michael Soo.
Fashion and Glamour photographer Greg Reninacker.
Russian portraitist and fine art photographer, Roge. (NSFW)
Strobist, lighting maestro.
Post-production resource After Capture.

Those not after words but fashion coolness could check out Static Photography.

Those after pretty eye candy could check out Glamour Nudes. (NSFW)

Another interesting site I have come across is Photography Voter, which aims to

become the digg of all things photo related - but hasn't really got critical mass yet.

Popularity Contest Rant

2007-04-22T08:44:00.001+01:00

Obviously, my work brings me into contact with a lot of models, both new and experienced. As a direct consequence, it seems like every other day I get a message asking me to vote for a model in this or that popularity contest, where the winner gets the most votes.

I'd like to think I am pretty supportive of the modelling community, but that support has limits and these competitions have really started to annoy me. Bluntly, I think a lot of these competitions greatly exploit models and those that would vote for them.

The majority of these competitions involve calling or texting a premium rate phone line. Recent scandals in the UK, show how poorly this is regulated - if Blue Peter can rig a contest do you really think random company is not capable of doing similar, particularly if the vote delivers a result they don't like?

Online competitions often involve you providing a legit email address and being deluged with spam as a result. Even if they don't require any contact details, these online competitions either have no published rules at all or have poor rules that positively encourage vote rigging. Most common fault, you can vote more than once. Why? It maximizes the profit of the organiser.

How is voting more than once in any way democratic? We wouldn't choose our prime minister this way - the winner would be the person who has supporters with the most time on their hands.

I am sure there are a few good and fair competitions out there, but its not particularly
possible to spot them, so model be aware that, if you ask me:-

I will not be calling/texting a premium rate phone line on your behalf
I will not be supplying my already spam-bombarded email address to a random company
I will not participate in a voting system that allows you to cast your vote more than once.

Colour Management

2007-04-21T18:08:00.001+01:00

I have doing some work on the area of colour management. In the past, I have been caught out when creating images that looked ugly when printed or displayed on other monitors, because my editing equipment was poorly adjusted. I have found some useful resources:-

Northlight Images has some excellent articles about colour management including many product reviews.
A free windows control panel widget is available.
Photo.net's Digital Darkroom forum frequently discussed this topic.
Display calibration dot com, has some useful free tools and test patterns.

My own conclusion is that, given the number of images I print versus have printed versus showcase online, monitor calibration is most significant to me. I bought a mid-range Spyder 2 colorimeter from an ebay dealer and put it to work. The software and widget will install on multiple computers, which is nice because I used more than one laptop for photo editing and its good to have some confidence that they are set identically. The actual calibration process was extremely straightforward at took less than 15 minutes per machine, but I had to tweak the colour temperature a bit as the initial settings were a bit too warm for my liking.

The provided software conflicts with Adobe's own colour management tools, Adobe Gamma, which is understandable as they both do the same kind of thing. A lot of advice on the net
is to disable Adobe Gamma from the start menu, but uninstalling elements, recalibrating and then reinstalling appeared to do the trick. On the way, I discovered msconfig, a cool little windows utility which lets you disable all the programs that run at windows start up. Just about every photo editor out there automatically installs a little app. that sits and looks for cameras/cards/storage devices with images. If you find these intrusive or if you have more than one of them, msconfig is a good way of getting rid of them.

Creative Zen Vision W

2007-03-02T20:57:00.000+00:00

There's a bit of a love affair going on between me and my Creative Zen Vision W. It's not a name that trips off the tongue easily, but its pretty damn cool gadget that happens to have some nice features for photograhers.

For a while, I have been looking for a iPod-like device that would also serve as a portable storage backup, or "image tank." I say iPod-like, the Ipod ruled itself out by not having some features I felt I needed, its limitations as image tank have been well documented by others.

I heard about the Zen Vision W towards the end of 2006 and bought one at the beginning of 2007. The Zen Vision W is an excellent portable entertainment centre, able to play MP3 audio as well as DivX and XviD videos on a screen large enough to be very watchable. The user interface is practical, though not exceptional. It is chock full of features and I am not going to go into them all, just focus on the ones that make it a decent tool for backing up photo's:

It has a built in Type I & II Compact Flash slot. As I still use microdrives, this is a very important feature for me.
It has a removable battery. If you plan using it a lot on a trip, you can bring pre-charged spares.
A reasonable 60 Gb of storage, provided you get the higher spec model.
A decent sized screen that covers pretty much the entire face of the device. The screen is a wide-screen layout (same dimensions as a Sony PSP) and is intended for watching movies, but as a side effect serves as quite a nice image browser.
It recharges from a standard USB cable, useful if one forgets to pack the power adaptor.

The Zen Vision W is noticeably larger and heavier than the current generation of ipods, but as long as you are using Compact Flash everything you need is built into the body of the unit - no need for additional adaptors or card readers, which makes the Zen both price and bulk comparable with the ipod once you have accounted for the extra accessories.

The large screen servers well as a photo-viewer and the browser will display 32 thumbnails at a time. No RAW viewer support, but the unit handled the 13-megapixel JPEGs from my Canon 5D without any difficulty. A single level of zoom is available, through the menu. This provides a scrolling window that covers about a sixth-portion of the image - helpful, but not really good enough to check for sharpness. Images can be rotate in ninety degree increments but the device was smart enough to pick the best orientation to fit the screen anyway. Exif information is viewable, again through a menu option.

The imported files are kept in a date stamped folder, separate from your other media. Whilst it is possible to sort through, rate and delete your images
on this portable device, the process is fiddly enough that I would imagine most would wait to do this on a PC.

I made a point to check the backup speed of the device, using different media:

10 minutes to backup a full, 2 Gb "generic" CF card, holding 260 files (mix of RAW+JPG)
27 minutes to backup a full, 4 Gb IBM branded microdrive, holding 430 files (mix of RAW+JPG)

The microdrive backup drained perhaps 20% of the battery power, from a full charge. Whilst I have not tested this, I anticipate being able to archive of about 16-20 Gb of data on a single charge. If I needed more, then carrying a spare battery would be practical.

There are very specialist photo storage devices that are purpose designed to support the photographer - they have the ability to preview RAW files, offer multi-level zoom and
slots for other card formats, but they are also more expensive. I would hypothesize that what most photographers want is a small device that will let them archive their memory cards quickly so the cards can be erased and re-used whilst "in the field" away from a PC. The Zen Vision W is well suited for this task, in my experience.

Importantly, the Creative Zen Vision W is the kind of gadget I would pack for any kind of trip/vacation, whether or not I am taking a camera. Because it has other uses, the odds are in favour of me having it with me when I run out of memory cards. If you are looking for a multi-purpose media player that doubles as a backup device, the Creative Zen Vision W is a good choice.

One final thought, before everyone rushes out and buys my preferred media player. The price of solid state memory has plummeted of late. Shopping around online, I find that, if I stick to generic brands, I could buy the equivalent 15x4 Gb memory cards at a cost only marginally more than the 60 Gb media center.

I wouldn't swap my media player, just pointing out that another solution to running out of memory cards is simply to carry more of them.

Panic Petition

2007-02-28T10:52:00.000+00:00

A UK photographer has started a petition as a consequence of becoming frustrated at the increasing harrasment of photographers in public places. I understand the sentiment, but disagree with the action - the petition implies new government legislation, but elsewhere the petitioner admits "there is no bill in the offing." It's scare tactics as far as I am concerned.

The example documented was a case of two photographers who decided to take pictures of children playing rugby in a public park. I think they were a little naive to assume that taking pictures of children they do not know will not provoke a reaction, regardless of legality.

If I wanted to take pictures of children playing in a park I would find the parents and ask permission as a matter of courtesy and I am sure the majority of photographers would do the same - not because the law requires it, but simply because we live in paranoid times.

Compared with other countries, the law is quite favourable to UK photographers, it is one of the reasons our paparazzi are so invasive.

A summary of relevant UK law pertaining to photography is available online.

Keep a printed copy in your photo-bag if you expect harassment of a similar kind. Understand your rights and responsibilties.

3-way or Ball

2007-02-12T10:38:00.000+00:00

A friend was asking my opinions on tripods. Thought I'd write down here what I told him verbally. This reflects my personal experience of having used various tripods and tripod heads over the year, including some pretty poor ones.

The golden rule, when buying a tripod, is bring your camera to the store and mount it to the tripod with its heaviest lens. The tripod should be able to hold the camera rock solid, for minutes at a time, when the camera is placed at a precarious angle.

Not everyone needs a fancy tripod. If you have a very lightweight point and shoot camera, then the kinds of cheap tripods you can buy in shopping mall and high street stores should work fine.

However, if you are serious about photography you probably have a heavier camera - a digital or film SLR. Especially once you have screwed in a zoom lens, these cameras are pretty heavy (over a kilo) and the weight is not evenly distributed.

You need a tripod head that will hold the unbalanced weight of an SLR firmly in place, at whatever angle you place it. Cheap tripods just don't do the job, in my experience.

The tripod for the serious photographer is actually sold in two bits. Separately, you should pick up:

· a set of legs which will have a 3/8 inch screw fitting at the top
· a tripod head with a thread that fits the screw

With a set of legs you have a range of choices based on how high you want the tripod to go, how compact, how light and how well protected against the environment. Some tripod legs come with a centre column that can be mounted horizontally, so the camera can be pointed straight down. A centre column with a removable section will let you place the tripod very close to the ground.

With tripod heads you get a base that attaches to the legs, a plate that attaches to the camera with a 1/4 inch screw, a holder for attaching the plate - and the camera, to the tripod and a set of joints for changing the camera position. For the joints your choices are basically a ball-and-socket type arrangement, or a 3-way head or pan head. The ball and socket head has a single joint with three degrees of freedom - a single control tightens and relaxes the joint. The 3-way head has a rotating base and two hinge joints that are separately adjustable with 3 controls.

Having used both it's my observation that the most frequent camera movement is tilting the camera from horizontal (landscape) to vertical (portrait). For the same amount of money, a 3-way head will probably be better in this respect than ball. The three-way head design is such that the joint under strain can only move in one direction, which in turn means it is likely to support more weight.

However, I didn't chuck my ball joints away - Instead I mount a monopod tilt head (which only has one joint) on top of the ball joint. This gives the critical horizontal-to-vertical movement, using the stronger joint that supports more weight.

Once you get into the game of having multiple cameras or multiple tripods, it helps to standardize on the one size of release plate. Keep a plate permanently attached to each camera, then mate the camera to the tripod as required.

Useful tripod links :-

Tripods and Tripod Heads - photo.net
Tripod & Monopods - shortcourses.com

Professional Portraits

2007-01-02T17:18:00.000+00:00

Recently I have been tinkering with an interesting piece of software for image manipulation. Portrait Professional performs a number of beauty treatments on faces, including blemish removal, skin tone correction eye and teeth whitening and it does this by comparing your photo with anthropomorphic information stored on a central server.

The package is very easy to use, needing no artistic skill. The process involves loading an image, specifying the gender, then defining a series of marker points that identify the position and dimension of eyes, nose, mouth, chin and cheeks. The package then connects over the internet to exchange information with a server and then presents the user with a modified image that can be adjusted by tweaking a variety of slider controls.

With practice it is possible to do a decent beauty pass on a headshot in about 5 minutes:-

2 minutes to identify all the marker points
1 minute, or less, to do the internet handshake thing
2 minutes playing around with the controls to get the best result.

This is a definite speed improvement on doing all the retouching manually and the major selling point of the software.

The makers seem to indicate that the software works best on portraits where the model is looking directly at the camera, but I found it to work acceptably on shots where the models head is at an angle, but both eyes are still visible. I also found it worked equally well on models of different ethnicities.

The package does have some limitations. Although it works with compositions other than straight head shots, the face is the only thing it manipulates, so you may need to complete your beauty pass on other exposed areas of skin with other post production tools. It's a supplement and not an alternative to other photo manipulation tools. Also, positioning of the marker points proves

to be critical - get them a little off and weird artefacts start happening.

The developers indicate the client/server nature of the application is to protect their intellectual property, but the requirement to have a internet connection means the package is no use to me if I don't have my broadband. Its an annoyance, but depending on your computer setup - probably a minor one.

If used sparingly on the right kind of image, its a pretty neat tool and at the current price of £15, an inexpensive one.

Photography Competition and Critiques

2006-12-04T12:21:00.000+00:00

I found a new photography website recently - Earth Shots. If you take National Geographic quality images, or you just like looking at them, it's worth checking it out. The site is essentially a blog/RSS feed combined with a photography competition where the winning image changes daily and is some representation of the beauty of the planet we inhabit.

There are a bundle of other photography competition sites out there, probably too many to list, so I am just going to mention a couple that I am impressed with. Both Fotofight and dpchallenge are free to join, run contests on a wide variety of themes and feature pictures with a very high standard, so even if you don't want to enter, you can learn by example.

As for getting critiques of your images, there one website you need to know and its name is photosig.com. Many social-photography and hosting sites allow others to post comments on your images, but photosig is uniquely set up to encourage constructive criticism. The best way to see how it works is probably to visit, put simply in order to publish you must also critique and other viewers must consider your comments to be helpful. Their publishing mechanism is pretty good at providing feedback a little more meaningful and verbose that "cool" or "loved the shot" but the flip-side is you need to have a thick skin about it. If you post sub-par images, the membership will soon let you know.

Digital Journalist

2006-11-23T11:18:00.000+00:00

Whilst googling for Harry Benson, I stumbled across a fascinating website called the devoted to photojournalism, appropriately called The Digital Journalist. Next to portraiture, photo-journalism is probably my favourite type of photograph to view - first because there are normally people involved and second because there is usually some narrative or story to tell.

I have also been looking for a primer on Flash photography for a presentation. As usual, wikipedia came through.

For light painting work, I am a big fan of the Maglite. Not the cheapest flashlight in the world, but certainly the best design and construction quality I have come across. There are now a bunch of thirty parties who sell extras and add-ons for this popular torch. The latest innovation in the world of flashlights is the use of powerful light emitting diodes to replace normal halogen bulbs. It will be interested to get a hold of some of these and use some lights with completely different colour balances...

What's bad about Digital SLRs

2006-11-22T20:47:00.000+00:00

I was fascinated by a project feature on the Gadget Show, by tech-journalist Jason Bradbury. He has created a camera that takes a picture of what he sees and uploads it to the internet in real time, every 30 seconds, 24 hrs a day, 7 days a week. Five years ago this would be the sort of thing done by a final-year MIT student for his dissertation and it would involve building some electronics and writing software. Jason did his Life Cam by combining a camera phone with other consumer products, free software and commercial services.

Camera phones, bluntly, don't take great pictures. Fitting a sensor and optics into a small device that also makes telephone calls involves something of a compromise and that compromise is picture quality. However, cameraphones impress in two ways that Digital SLRs do not - they can be programmed and they are networked.

Evolving Digital SLR technology has brought us a sensor the same size as a 35mm frame, with similar sensitivity to film, albeit at considerable cost. Other than making this more affordable, camera makers Canon and Nikon need to be considering where to go next. I would plead to add more programming and networking features - not as optional extras - but physically built into the camera:-

I would love to do auto-exposure bracketing, by aperture change, in manual mode - but I cant.
I would love to set my camera on a tripod and set it up to do time-lapse photography - but I cant.
I would love to reprogram my camera's buttons to make mirror lock-up more accessible - but I cant.
I would love to transfer my photos to my laptop using built-in wifi - but I cant.
I would love to pop in a SIM card and upload photos to the internet automatically - but I cant.

So build me an SLR that's more like a camera phone.

Half a Million Hits

2006-10-23T12:49:00.000+01:00

My website, as a whole, past a significant milestone in the last day or two. It has received half a million image downloads. This is someone, looking through my galleries and clicking to look at a full size image. If one counts gallery and thumbnail views the hit count is over a million.

My site is gaining more attention and is starting to attract offers of commercial sponsorship. As a consequence, I will be performing a site re-design, introducing some new content and adding advertising links in the near future. On a technical level I will be polishing the HTML and CSS code of the website for W3C compliance and better browser compatibility.

The other feature I have been neglecting is photo-a-day, but the good news is that I have a large reserve of photographs that have been completed and these are going to start to show up. Some of my older images will be archived.

In short, big changes planned for the website.

Light Painting Tutorial

2006-09-16T18:42:00.000+01:00

I recently attended a photographic tutorial on Light Painting. Hosted by Bent Brae studios and given by the photographer David McLeavy it was a wonderful insight into the techniques and equipment involved in generating some extremely artistic and beautiful work. I learned some things that didn't fit my expectations of what the process would be and got to give the technique a try myself.

Sometime soon am going to book a model and a studio to continue my experimentation. Note to oneself - a very dark location is required... a studio that cannot be properly blacked out isn't going to cut it.
Also on the prep list - a good tripod, a cable release, a couple of powerful flashlights and a model patient enough to stay in one pose for the time intervals required. In the meantime, I will be checking out the following sites for some additional inspiration:-

Chris Becker photography :: light painting
Wireheadarts
Digital Photography Tips From The Top Floor » tfttf66 - Painting with Light

My OneModelPlace downsized

2006-09-10T18:53:00.000+01:00

It is with some reluctance that I reduced my subscription level in OneModelPlace, from silver to bronze membership.

When I first started out I considered OneModelPlace as a good means of recruiting models. The website had a decent design and some handy functionality. However, I now find it increasingly easier to recruit models via other sites.

Part of OMPs problem is that it hasn't evolved. The services it charges a premium for are being offered for a lower cost, or free, elsewhere. Its pricing structure has not changed, as far as I am aware, in the few years in wihch I have been a member. Thanks to technologies like PhpBB it is getting pretty easy to set up your own DIY community site and many photographers and models are choosing to do just that.

The other major problem I have with OMP is that its a pretty US-centred site. The site doesn't understand regions within countries outside the United States with the result that its location-based search facilities are not that useful. When I search for models I am more interested in whether she lives close to me than whether she is 5'4" or 5'8'' and I am sure this is true of most other photographers.

The subscription fee I was being charged was my biggest single web-hosting/site membership cost and about half my hosting/marketing budget. For the same amount of money I can get a podcast hosting account (so that I can distribute video and audio) plus another domain name or two, which is probably going to be a better way of marketing myself.

Link Exchange Pitfalls

2006-08-31T11:59:00.000+01:00

I was approached by the marketing manager of a certain US based photography company. In exchange for linking to their website, she would reciprocate by linking back to me from a selection of different websites. It was a slightly strange offer so I did a bit of research.

The problem with her offer was that the selection of different websites were clearly link farms. If I participated in this kind of scheme, search engines like google could actually discriminate against me.

I turned down the marketing manager and would advocate that anyone with a website be selective about who they exchange links with. More isn't always good.

Exchanges links with your friends, your colleagues, with sites that you consider have relevant or similar content, with sites that have a good PageRank. Consider getting the Google Toolbar as this displays the PageRank of any piece of content you are looking
at. A website falsely claiming to be important, relevant or more
visited than it actually is will soon be detected if you use this tool.

Link to sites that you consider to have great content, whether or not you are getting anything in return.

Finally, focus on developing good content yourself and exposing that content to search engines. Then people will find it and link to you.

Cool Edinburgh Bookshop

2006-08-30T22:16:00.000+01:00

After a morning doing street photography, photographing the performers of the Edinburgh Fringe, I took refuge in a specialist bookshop called Beyond Words, which turns out to have an impressive collection in photographic publications of all kinds - journalism, sports, portraiture and instruction manuals. Check it out.

Through browsing I encountered the work of a contemporary model photographer I wasn't familiar with, a photographer whose work I loved. check out Richard Avedon and see if you agree with me.

It occurs to me that most photographers either alive today or dead but with a considerable following will have their own website, so my next project will be to assemble a collection of links to the photographers I love.

Wired on Photo Finishing

2006-08-03T23:14:00.000+01:00

I am a big fan of Wired magazine - both online and print (I get the dead trees version airmailed from the US). It's a good way of keeping track of tech trends in general and has some pretty interesting blogs.

The latest version contains a short piece that differentiates the various different photo services available. Of the services mentioned, I had never heard of Arles. Good idea of a product, but it is annoying to me that europeans buying european software from european Servers will now be charged european sales tax. Way to stimulate the technology economy mister eurocrat!

Meanwhile, I found a nice PDF file on UK Photographers Rights which covers a lot of legal stuff in an easy to digest manner.

Making Slideshows

2006-07-22T17:02:00.000+01:00

My image hosting company introduced another new feature recently, it displays all of the pictures stored in a gallery in slideshow format. Nothing particularly innovative quite a nice way of browsing a gallery:

Slideshow of Favourites Photo Gallery by Jack Veight at pbase.com

Meanwhile, if a photographer requires a slideshow that can be embedded in another page, there is always the option of using slide.com.

Offline slideshows can be created as screensavers or movie files by a number of different software packages, e.g. Picasa, though you usually have limited control over the slideshow speed. If you need a tool that will create slideshows with complicated transitions and/or timed with a music track, then it is a package like Premiere Elements you will need.