There are a lot of things to like about Brooklyn-based powerHouse Books. It was started in the mid-90's by Daniel Power, which is a sweet name in and of itself. His powerHouse Arena is an old warehouse space converted into a loft-like bookstore/exhibition space, providing hosting to book launches and events like the New York Photo Festival. But mostly, powerHouse is one of the good guys in the industry because they continue to publish photo books that range from the socially conscious to the political to the frivolous.

A few months ago, I picked up Scout Tufankjian's Yes We Can, which chronicled her coverage of Barack Obama's rise to the presidency.



And on Thursday, I'm heading over to Brooklyn for Kristen Ashburn's launch party for I Am Because We Are, which is a companion book to Madonna's Malawian documentary of the same name. Some critics, not so surpisingly, claimed the best part of the movie was Kristen's photos, but given the trail of awards she's left in her wake, it's no surprise.

So here's the details, and I hope to see you there.

I Am Because We Are
Book launch and fundraiser for Raising Malawi
The powerHouse Arena
37 Main Street, Brooklyn

The exhibition runs from March 27 - April 27, 2009, but there's only booze on the launch date....Tell them PhotoShelter sent ya!

Speaking of books and photography, one of the factors that I believe has influenced the hardships in the industry is the rise of the digital camera, which has (rightfully) empowered millions of people to take more photos, and subsequently turned photography into a commodity. And yet, there is clear difference between a good photo and a bad one.

Support of the professional industry would therefore manifest itself through the greater consumption of good photography. If you are a professional photographer, when is the last time you paid to consume good photography? When is the last time you purchased a photo book, or attended a photo exhibition? Clearly a few thousand photographers buying photo books won't solve the woes of the industry, but I think there is a resonant effect much in the way that "reach" in the magazine world is several times great than "circulation."

So I challenge each photographer to purchase a photo book each month for the rest of the year, and blog about it. Buy your friends photo books as gifts. Help yourself by expanding the consumption of better photography.

Last month, we presented the results of our research with over 550+ photo buyers discussing what they liked/disliked in photographer websites. Following on the heels of that information, Grover has been out and about presenting this information in seminars, and I finally cajoled him with a can of Sapporo into sitting at my computer and speaking into a mic for an hour to bring the video to you.



Here's a table of contents:

• Photo Editor/Buyer Survey Results
• Your site's purpose and goal
• The 2 different types of users
• Getting assignment work
• Selling stock/prints
• Getting a better/new job
• The 6 most important elements
• One website, multiple revenue streams
• Marketing your website
• Driving traffic to your site
• Search engine checklist
• Google and Flash
• Your title tag
• Marketing case study: Brad Mangin
• Photography websites best practices
• Some advice from your clients
• Evaluation criteria
• How PhotoShelter can help

PS. I wrote the opening music...smooth jazz.

Miki Johnson wrote a story about (and conducted a video interview with) Art Wolfe and Jim Martin, released yesterday on the liveBooks blog. Art is a World-renowned conservation and fine art photographer, and Jim is executive director of Art Wolfe Inc.

I recently went up to Seattle to visit Art and Jim, and get a tour of their operation. We ended up going to lunch, spending some time talking about tequila, but most of the time talking about how they are changing their business model, in part, by selling Art's stock images themselves, via PhotoShelter.

During my tour through his gallery and studio, I realized just how diverse Art is in terms of his work (he shoots more than just "Fur and Feathers"), and his business model, which in addition to stock, includes books, a television show, classroom workshops and lectures, and in-the-field shooting workshops to crazy and dangerous cold arctic places.

Art's studio comes complete with a full classroom, with computers on every desk. I immediately envisioned PhotoShelter training sessions being conducted there. Hmmm... could happen. If you like that idea and think you would attend, send me a note.

Some other really cool photographers also use Art's studio to conduct workshops, too.

One really cool opportunity that just opened up is a 4-day "Master Class with David Alan Harvey," coming up pretty soon - April 11-15, 2009. If you ever wanted to spend some quality time with someone like DAH (member of Magnum, his work frequently appearing in National Geographic), here's an opportunity.

More info on that here:
http://store.artwolfe.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=10&products_id=175

If you're ever in Seattle, make a visit to the SODO neighborhood and check out his gallery. It's worth going out of your way just to see all the nice huge prints on display.

At lunch, I suggested that he needed to add a bottle of Don Julio 1942 to his tequila collection. It might make his trips to remote arctic regions a little warmer.

Images from twenty-five Redux photographers fill the pages of "American Youth," a 240-page book that examines the newest generation of 18-24 year olds.

Redux is marketing the new book, which will be available in early May, in a few interesting ways.

First, they've got a blog dedicated to the book. It contains stories from the photographers, and even share image outtakes. It's a really nice way to continue the storytelling even after all the pages of the book have been printed.

The blog is really interesting and educational, especially the parts where the photographers talk about the assignment itself.

Some stuff that is especially cool...

Angie Smith on photographing tailgaters in Southern California.
http://americanyouthbook.com/blog/?p=127

Cheerleaders! Outtakes from John Keatley
http://americanyouthbook.com/blog/?p=112

Second - they're on Twitter, and making great use of it. I must admit, when I first heard of "Twitter" I thought it would die out like 8-track tapes, but after we set up a PhotoShelter Twitter feed, I quickly realized how this medium was a way to quickly reach a very large audience.

Third, they are making use of PhotoShelter embedded slideshows (shown above.) These little Flash-based gems allow their images to "go viral," and (legally) spread all over the web, giving their images, their blog, and their book exposure in places they never even knew existed. Click that little triangle on the lower right and you'll see the code that makes it go viral.

And fourth, since they are using PhotoShelter, they were able to seemlessly integrate PhotoShelter galleries into their blog, which gives them a more powerful image gallery creation system than what's normally available for most blogging tools.

Photographers with images in the book are: Marc Asnin, Ben Baker, Nina Berman, David Butow, Peter Frank Edwards, Danny Wilcox Frazier, Eros Hoagland, John Keatley, Andy Kropa, Erika Larsen, Gina LeVey, Joshua Lutz, Preston Mack, Kevin J. Miyazaki, Darcy Padilla, Mark Peterson, Michael Rubenstein, Greg Ruffing, Q. Sakamaki, Erin Siegal, Angie Smith, Ben Stechschulte, Brad Swonetz, Nathaniel Welch, and David Yellen.

I also spotted this line in their blog:

"We will have an event in May to celebrate.  Stay tuned here for details."

Nice. Can I get an invite?

Few names in photography are as esteemed as Magnum Photos. The photography cooperative is a who's who of photography, spanning the generations from Capa and Cartier-Bresson to modern masters like Alec Soth and Paolo Pelligrin.


Jonas Bendiksen/Magnum Photos

So we're very excited that Magnum Photos asked PhotoShelter to be a part of their Magnum Expression Photography Award "with the goal of raising awareness and inspiring change through campaigns using photography as an expressive medium." Along with HP and Blurb, the award will celebrate the concept of "communities," and unlike other contests, there is no submission fee to enter the Expression Award.

Did I mention the $10,000 prize and HP Z3200 printer?

The jury is composed of Magnum photographers Jonas Bendiksen, Susan Meiselas, Alec Soth and Paolo Pelligrin.

Get all the nitty gritty details on The Magnum Expression Award website, and start submitting your 8-15 photos now. We look forward to seeing some stellar work!

Photography business guru John Harrington recently published a piece entitled "Just Words" in which he describes how he chose to sell himself as "John Harrington Photography" instead of "John Harrington - Photographer."

Hearing advice from consultant Elyse Weisberg convinced him that "photography" conveyed a sense about a business, while "photographer" spoke about a single individual. He decided that he wanted to portray himself as a business, and in retrospect, he argues that this simple change along with using pronouns like "we" when he describes his business has made it seem more significant and given him more leverage.

In light of all the discussions around search engine optimization, I was curious to see if the choice of keywords was more than just perceptual. So I headed over to Google Adwords Keyword Tool to run a keyword test.

If you've already Failed as a Photographer and Made Your Photography Like a Bad Cold, then you're probably ready to find out Why Your Blog Sucks.

But don't let my provocative titles scare you off. There is actually a point here, and that is to help you understand how to leverage the Internet as an indirect/passive marketing tool for a fraction of the cost of traditional direct/active methods.

What am I talking about?

Back in the olden days of yore, marketing for a photographer only consisted of activities like sending out a mailer, visiting a photo editor, taking out an ad in a source book. And although these direct marketing activities haven't gone away, they are expensive in terms of time, money and effort. You certainly shouldn't abandon direct efforts, but you should realize that there are more marketing tools available to photographers.

When the Internet rolled around, we suddenly had a virtually free mechanism for advertising our services. But even still, we were doing a lot of heavy lifting in Web 1.0. We created a website, we stuck a few pictures up there, and if we were intrepid, we advertised our email and URL. If you're chuckling at this 1990s view of the web, you shouldn't be. The majority of photographers on the web still think this is the value of being online. They still think they are controlling who is visiting their website.

(cue chuckling) They are not.

In the past two years or so, there has been a perceptible shift in the way that savvy photographers view the Internet. It's no longer just a place where a digital translation of their portfolio is posted. Instead, it's become much more robust and integrated. And most importantly from a marketing perspective, smart photographers have realized that the cost of deploying a smart web strategy is significantly cheaper than the direct strategies of the past.

I could easily spend $5000 design, producing, and mailing a post card to prospective buyers. But I have no direct way of measuring the success of that campaign. I don't know who received the postcard. I don't know who looked at it. I don't know if they came to my website afterwards. And clearly, if my website doesn't have e-commerce or a searchable archive, then a visitor has no point of conversion on my website. That's akin to the Gap advertising in a magazine, but when you make the effort to visit the store, you can't try the clothes on, nor buy it. Hey we sell clothes! Oh, but you can't buy it in our store. You have to call us during business hours to find out what's available and how much it costs.

Are you beginning to see the absurdity?

A contemporary online strategy for photographers isn't just about having a website. Nor is it just about having a website with e-commerce. It's about building a presence over time that passively draws unsolicited visitors to your website to make more money. Why rely soley on direct marketing efforts to drive people to your website when there are billions of people online? All it takes to get to you is finding your website. But they aren't going to find your website if you haven't considered how your website is going to get into Google.

But I digress. Let's talk about why your blog sucks.

In a city of 8.2 million people, it's not surprising to find photographers out and about trying to capture portraits of the everyday New Yorker. Almost every few blocks has a different name from TriBeca to BedStuy to Clinton (nay, Hell's Kitchen), and each with a different personality and crowd of characters. There is hardly a place in the world where such diversity and independence exists.

Copehagen-based freelance photographer, Simon Høgsberg, traveled to NYC one month each year from 2003 - 2006 to work on a project he called "The Tower of Babel." Curiously, he stopped because "I realized I no longer believed in the idea behind it." It's unfortunate because I think his images are fantastic. This first one is amazing -- dude taking a self portrait with newly purchased camera from B&H.

 

As I mentioned in my last post entited Why SEO Matters to Photographers, links and link text make a difference in how you optimize your photography website for search engines. But how do we know if Google has indexed any of our pages?

Simple.

Go to Google, and type in:

site:[your site url]

It's a common misconception amongst photographers that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) means that when you type in your name into Google, your own website comes up at the top of the results. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The goal of SEO is to increase unsolicited traffic to your website.

Why?

Because you don't have enough marketing dollars to push all the traffic you need to grow your business continually. The web provides us with a FREE source of visitors if we are smart about how we attract potential customers.

Too many photographers tell me "I don't care about that stuff. I'm trying to attract top notch photo editors." Oh really? What a load of crap. You cannot control who is visiting your website. And it would be foolish to limit your visitors to a handful of photo editors.

The classic marketing funnel shows us that conversion percentages don't really change much. That is, the % of people that enter the Gap and try a shirt on, and the % of people that end up purchasing that shirt doesn't really vary. So the funnel tells us that we need the largest number of absolute visitors as possible.

A photographer website is no different. If you're a professional photographer, then increasing your revenues is your number goal. Anyone who thinks differently is either crazy or has a trust fund. Search Engine Optimization combined with analytics provides photographers with the most powerful feedback loop for free.

In this video webinar, I'll show you how photographers can use free tools like Google Analytics and Google AdWords in conjunction with a PhotoShelter website to enhance their SEO.


Photographer Websites: SEO and Why it Matters from PhotoShelter.com on Vimeo.

We'll have more SEO and analytics-related webinars for you in the near future. So check back soon!

Last month, David Walter Banks gave me a call. He told me he was in New York City, and wondered if we could meet up. I said sure, and he came to the PhotoShelter office with Matt Slaby. I always like to meet up and hang out with photographers -- especially when I really love their work, which is the case here.

They were in New York, showing their portfolios around, looking for work, making contacts, and other making-the-rounds and paying-your-dues networking fun that nearly all serious photographers do at one point or another in their career.

But what is really interesting about these two guys is the teamwork they have. They are both independent freelance photographers, both looking for work, both could be considered "competitors" yet they're going door-to-editor-door together, and they're happy about it.

It doesn't stop there, though. They've also got the work of four other photographers tucked under their arm. Six photographers, all working as a team to promote each other individually and as a group.

Each member of the group has their own unique style, and brings their own personal vision to the table. If a photo editor doesn't think one of them is a fit for them, no problem, there are 5 other portfolios to check out - right then and there. In this economy, this is a smart move.

They're calling themselves "Luceo Images," and their approach to marketing, networking and support of each other is a very refreshing thing to see -- especially in today's business climate. There is strength in numbers, and they know it.

Banks and Slaby joined with fellow photographers Kendrick Brinson, Matt Eich, Kevin German, and Tim Lytvinenko to form Luceo Images a year ago, and they're celebrating this fact with an Anniversary Print Sale, where they are selling collector's prints for a limited time.

Brilliant. Opening up another revenue stream while showing off their work and getting their name out there all at the same time. (Would I be writing about them right now if they didn't have some really good timely reason for me to do so? Probably not.)

They announced on their blog that people can choose between 24 different 11x14 fine art prints for $99 each. Great prints for a really great price. How'd they do it?

They're using a PhotoShelter Personal Archive account to do the print sales, and they've teamed up with AdoramaPix to make the prints. Two services that actually work really well together.

We actually have prints here in the office, hanging on the wall, made by AdoramaPix that we absolutely love. Their quality is amazing and you seriously will not believe how good their prices are.

When David and Matt were chatting with me, I was really impressed with their spirit, and their marketing smarts. It's one thing to be a great photographer. It's another (rare) thing to be a great photographer that has a knack for marketing. These guys have it, and it was fun to just sit down and toss ideas around with them.

I encouraged them to go talk to Ingrid over at AdoramaPix because I thought they would make a great match, and a perfect partner for their print sale. All six members of Luceo Images are PhotoShelter users, and I knew that with our manual print fulfillment abilities, they could sell images using PhotoShelter's built-in e-commerce tools, and then have AdoramaPix handle the making of the prints - knowing that the prints were going to be good.

Congrats on your first anniversary, David, Matt, Kendrick, Matt, Kevin, and Tim. May you have many more print sales in your future.

Luceo Images prints for sale.

Luceo Images blog: http://luceoimages.wordpress.com
Luceo Images website: http://www.luceoimages.com
Luceo Images print sale: http://www.luceoimages.com/store/

AdoramaPix blog: http://www.adoramapix.com/Blog.aspx
AdoramaPix website: http://adoramapix.com

• 
  
  Landon Nordeman
  Landon's archive or editorial and commercial work is linked to his website, completely searchable, and enabled for sales of prints and rights managed stock.
• 
  
  Robert Caplin
  Robert uses PhotoShelter to send hi-res images to editors, and sells his print collection with our Chill theme.
• 
  
  Brad Mangin
  Brad's archive is priced for rights managed licensing, fully searchable, and integrated with his liveBooks website.
• 
  
  Mira Images
  The Creative Eye Cooperative licenses stock photos through Mira, using PhotoShelter's Chill theme for its website.
• 
  
  Tommy Zablan
  Tommy showcases his portfolio of fashion and advertising photography using our Induro theme.
• 
  
  Thomas Mangelsen
  Thomas' nature photography - breathtaking wildlife and landscape shots -- are available for rights managed stock photo sales and as prints with our crisp theme.
• 
  
  Kelvin Aitken -- VW Pics
  Kelvin's work is represented by VWPICS (Visual&Written) - a stock and news agency in New York City and Spain.
• 
  
  Mason Ibas
  Mason shoots pro and youth sports events in Arizona, embeds PhotoShelter galleries into his blog, and integrated PhotoShelter's features with his own website.
• 
  
  Cameron Davidson
  Cameron is a master of aerial photography. He backs up his archive and sells stock photos direct from his own website.
• 
  
  David Walter Banks
  David's uses our Chill theme to display his archive and provide downloads for clients of his commercial and editorial work with a conceptual twist.
• 
  
  Bruno Vincent
  Bruno, an award-winning international freelance photographer, left Getty Images in 2007. From his PhotoShelter archive, he sells prints and rights-managed and personal use downloads using our Induro theme.
• 
  
  Christopher Owyoung
  Chris shoots live music events. He displays his galleries, sells prints and downloads using our Crisp theme.
• 
  
  Tom Theobald
  Tom photographs major dance and gymnastics events. He displays and sells his work straight from his PhotoShelter gallery.
• 
  
  Stephen Voss
  Stephen's photojournalism work and portraits have appeared in dozens of magazines and books -- he uses our Crisp theme to sell prints and rights managed licenses.
• 
  
  Jimmy Williams
  Jimmy's archive of stock photography shows his original eye for subjects and landscapes -- as does the creative twist he's put on his PhotoShelter website.
• 
  
  Swoan Parker
  Swoan specializes in people, portrait and documentary photography, and displays her galleries using our Chill theme.
• 
  
  Julia Zave
  Julia displays her music and night life photography and sells prints using our Crisp theme.
• 
  
  Tommy Abad
  Tommy uses our Mars theme to display and sell his stock archive.
• 
  
  Adrian Young
  Adrian sells rights managed stock photography and prints of Asia using our Chill theme for his website.