Being situated right above NYC's Union Square has its benefits, like the Green Market, great restaurants, and unbelievable people watching.  Last week we saw a woman dancing on a pole (yes, that kind of pole) for charity.  We also saw a contortionist get his head, right leg, and right arm all inside the head of a tennis racket. And my personal fave, the Michael Jackson impersonator.

Early today, we saw a large gathering of people and noticed a fancy trailer, tent, white seamless backdrop, and a bunch of strobes.  So, I ambled over to get a closer look.  Turns out, Jake Chessum - known for his street fashion photos in New York Magazine's Look Book, is doing a photo shoot all day today for HSBC Bank. The fun part is, they're shooting regular people - yes, as regular as our bald and unshaven marketing director, Andrew.  No makeup, no stylist, just whatever you're wearing today and the misty ambiance of a foggy Union Square morning.  If your photos get picked for the HSBC campaign, you make $750. They're looking for real stories, and real people, doing what they can to get by in today's economy.  I'm sure you have a story to tell, so stop by Union Square today and get your inner model on.

A few months ago, PhotoShelter simplified the ability to insert Google Analytics into our photographer websites. At that time, I asked a number of our users to share their analytics with me for the purposes of creating some aggregated intelligence as a general baseline for all photographers. Twenty-four photographers shared their information with me.



I present this survey of the findings knowing full well that the sample is too small to be statistically significant, but still, it represents a range of photographers, and gives us the first published set of data regarding photographer websites. If you've heard me talk before, then you know how passionate I am about analytics and getting photographers to think about their websites as marketing tools, not just a display of photos.

I've chosen to report on the default set of "dashboard" information rather than diving too deeply into the other statistics. Because the data from any individual's website is so specific, it would be foolish to create decisions based on this survey. Analytics gives us a way to measure a baseline of activity, and then work to improve our own metrics over time through our marketing efforts.

In order to compare apples to apples, I have selected the defaults date range of one month in Google Analytics spanning April 20, 2009 - May 20, 2009. For purposes of comparison, you might want to set your dates to the same.

Visits
Google defines a visit as any contiguous activity within a 30 minute time frame by a web browser.
 
Low: 75
High: 2692
Average: 702

I feel that 1000 visits in a month is a minimum amount of traffic that photographers should be driving to their websites in order to expect any 1) reliable data on which to base marketing decisions, and 2) create a funnel of potential customers that is wide enough to produce monetary results (either through e-commerce on the site, or interactions via phone/email).

Photographers who aren't hitting this threshold should examine whether they are doing any marketing activity at all. If not, potential areas to investigate include:

- Mailers: postcards, calendars, etc
- E-mail
- SEO

Page views
Each time a user hits a page, a page view is counted. Traversing back and forth between two pages will still increment the number of page views. A high page view count is an indication that you have sticky content for your demographic.

Low: 283
High: 21,943
Average: 4824

I love digital, but let's be honest. There's still something cool about a mechanical film camera. Here are three new ones that have caught my eye recently.

Leica M8 "White Edition"
There was a White Album that was pretty good, so who are we to question the White M8? Sure, it's a little more conspicuous than it's original counterpart, but the coolness factor



Fuji GF670
Even though this camera was announced in 2008, it didn't start shipping until last month, and so far, only in Japan. But you can apparently score it on eBay. It's a 6x7 format with a little bellows.

Google Webmaster is free tool that can help photographers ensure their website is crawled and indexed properly. When you perform a search on Google, three main components go into serving up the results:

-    Crawling: Does Google know about your site? Does it know where the content is?
-    Indexing: Can Google process your web pages and parse the content on each page?
-    Serving: Are relevant results displayed to the user to match their expectation?

The Webmaster tool gives you a way to register your domain with Google, and then provides you with additional features to enhance and monitor the searchability of your website.

Add your site:
After you create an account, you can add your domain to the "dashboard" by simply typing in the URL. You can then click the domain.

Overview
The Overview page indicates some basic information:

• Has your site been crawled?
• How many pages are indexed?
• Were there any errors with the crawling?

On a small website (i.e. < 100 pages), you should do your best to minimize the errors. On larger sites with lots of dynamic content (and perhaps a number of legacy pages), it isn't unusual to have a few errors. Obviously, an error-free site is ideal, but often impractical.

Determining how many pages are indexed:
There is no guarantee that Google will index 100% of your website. However, you can easily determine how many and which pages have been indexed without even using Google Webmaster. From the Google homepage, you can type in:

site:yourdomain.com

Note, there should be no spaces. For example:

site:photoshelter.com

Similarly, you can see how many pages link to your homepage by typing:

link:yourdomain.com

Both queries can give you a way to monitor any sudden increases or drops that might affect your SEO.

You probably don't add images to your portfolio everyday. You probably don't shoot a wedding every day. And you probably don't add stock images to your archive every day. In that respect, the "main" part of a photographer website can be fairly static.

Blogs, on the other hand, are a great way to talk about the photos you take, the projects you're working on, the photo workshops you're attending (or running), etc. I fret when people conceive of blogs as an online journal because I've always believed that the real benefit of a blog is as an SEO machine.

We get to choose the topics, the copy and the links in our blog, and all of those things can add up to some pretty good SEO juice.



I was on the phone with Robert Seale today, who is a fantastic portrait photographer in Houston, and we were talking shop about his website and his blog. Turns out that he registered robertsealeblog.com for his blog because someone had told him that having a different domain pointing to his website proper, robertseale.com, was good for link buildling.

While I would generically agree that building links is important, I disagree in this particular case for a few reasons.

Registration Data
All the information about domain registration is public. Setting up two domains that are registered by the same person and then pointing traffic to one another is a technique that Google is aware of. In extreme cases, this behavior can get you penalized. In less extreme cases, you're probably not getting a whole lot of benefit from a single website that has a majority of outbound links going to one website.

Robert told me that someone else had registered the blog domain for him. So maybe Google doesn't know, or maybe they have really smart engineers who figured out that robertseale.com and robertsealeblog.com were the same person. I honestly don't know.

Each time you take a photo, that image is copyrighted. Assuming that you can prove that you took a specific photo, then misuse of that photo could lead to monetary compensation. But the truth is that most intellectual property lawyers won't touch your case unless the image has been registered with the US Copyright Office. A copyright protects forms of "authorship" (as opposed to trademarks and patents which protect marks and inventions), and registration confers significant legal benefits to the photographer, namely that you can claim statutory damages of up to $150,000 per image infringed. A non-registered image isn't eligible for statutory damages, however, the infringed party can seek actual damages and "disgorged" profits (which in some cases can exceed the statutory limit). The amount of compensation can vary in size, and based on a judge's interpretation of "willfulness" of the infringer.



For example, if a nefarious publisher uses your unregistered image of a grizzly bear in a magazine, you might be able to claim a few hundred dollars (i.e. not enough to pay the lawyer). But if the image is registered, you could get up to $150,000 in statutory damages.

Nuances of "Infringement"
Statutory infringements are assessed on a per image basis, with a single award available even if there are multiple infringements. If the nefarious publisher uses the grizzly bear image in a brochure and an ad, you're only eligible for $150k in statutory damages, not $300k.

Additionally, if the nefarious publisher grabbed your images from a single magazine, or single website, there is also only one statutory damage available. The essay of grizzly bears ripped from your website and used in an ad is still only eligible for $150k.

Registration has a huge benefit, so make sure you register your images regularly.

There are numerous resources on how to register images manually, so we'll focus on electronic copyright registration.

Electronic Registration
In 2008, the US Copyright Office began accepting electronic registration of images through their eCO system (Electronic Copyright Office). Prior to that, a photographer had to burn a CD or DVD of work, fill out a form, and mail in the application with a check. Electronic registration has several key benefits over manual registration:

-    Lower filing fee of $35 (per case, which may include multiple images)
-    Faster processing times
-    Online status tracking
-    Online payment
-    Online upload of images

Create an Account
Fill out your name and login information.



Fill out your address information. Remember, some of this information will be in the public domain, so if you have privacy concerns, you might want to use a P.O. Box.





Agreeing to the US Copyright Offices terms is done by clicking "Next".



You are automatically logged in and forwarded to the homepage.

Avid blog readers know that Ami Vitale's work is on display at the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum in New York, as a part of a Nature Conservancy project to meld design with eco-consciousness. Ami was commissioned to photograph various artists and the local environments that they sought inspiration and raw material from.

Ami invited Grover and me to the opening yesterday, and after we grabbed some pizza, we headed over to 91st and 5th Avenue. Here's my little photo essay!

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a technique that helps your website rank higher in searches on Google and the other major search engines. But what searches are you aspiring to rank higher for in the first place? What's the practical application?

When users are looking for something, they type in a word or phrase that they believe is likely to lead them to the best results. For example, a couple might be looking for a wedding photographer, so they search for:

wedding photographer

Upon seeing the search results, they realize that the search was too broad, so they narrow the scope by adding some geographical component.

chicago wedding photographer

Another couple might type in the following:

wedding photographer in Chicago

How do you know which term to optimize for? And once you have that information, what do you do with it?

The New York Photo Festival returns to Brooklyn for its sophomore year, and look! Jody Quon, one of my favorite photo editors is receiving top billing as a show curator (you do have a New York Magazine subscription for the photos, right?)

And since you can't get enough of me, perhaps you can heckle me while I do my first talk on the presentation stage entitled "Click, Tweet, Repeat: Why taking good pictures isn't enough to succeed in the 21st century". Ain't that a catchy title? Here's the details:

Saturday, May 16, 2009
630 pm - 730pm

Spend the afternoon in DUMBO looking at the cool photography, catch me talking about photography, and you can still be home in time to watch NUMB3RS (or whatever one watches on a Saturday night).

Also, don't miss the show curated by PhotoShelter alumnae Meagan Ziegler-Haynes and erstwhile blogger, Rachel Hulin, entitled (super)natural which is showing in the Tobacco Warehouse. Details on Meagan's website.

Even in the best of time, we can all use a little stimulus. The recently announced PhotoShelter Local Grants program offers up to $500 to an individual or organization to promote photography. The "application" is simple! We've already received some great ideas, but there is still time to submit your grant proposal!

First of all, Ami Vitale might be the nicest person in the world.

Secondly, she's obviously one of the most talented photographers in the world (and the fact that she's a PhotoShelter user makes it all the more sweet). So much so that the people over at Nature Conservancy commissioned her to capture the work of renown designers Yves Behar, Stephen Burks, Hella Jongerius, Maya Lin, Christien Meindersma, Isaac Mizrahi, Abbott Miller, Ted Muehling, Paulina Reyes and Ezri TaraziIt. This traveling exhibit, entitled Design for a Living World, takes residence at the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum in New York City from May 14, 2009 through Jan 4, 2010.

Here's a little snippet from the press release that caught my eye:

"Mizrahi who turned Alaskan salmon skin--typically a waste product of the salmon industry--into a dress that references the scales of the fish from which it was made"

Here's a couple of teaser images for ya.

The guys over at zoom-in.com have continued their video interview series by covering one of our awesome photographers, Chris Owyoung. A few months ago, Chris attended one of our SEO webinars, and I happened to use his site as an example, and said that he should have the phrase "best concert photography" in his homepage title. Who would have thought that anyone would actually listen to me, but Chris did, and now he ranks first in Google for that phrase.

Check out the interview (that kind of hair would get me in trouble with my mom):



Despite being a music major, I don't know very much about popular music. I think the last album I bought was something that Whitney Houston put out in the 80s. Fortunately, there are much hipper people at the PhotoShelter offices. I think some of the girls like these pictures of The National.

One other point to mention is that I think Chris has a really great watermark. Yes, it's big and not opaque, but it seems to fit his brand and the type of photography that he's peddling.

Another weekend is upon us, and the sun is shining and the temperatures are in the 70s in New York, so I figured we need to have a little fun today instead of just talking about SEO and the business of photography.

It just so happens that our friends at On Location News published a set of photos of Robert Downey Jr in his Iron Man 2 suit, which got picked up by People.com and Digg, and is sending a storm of traffic their way.

Want some inspiration? Or maybe just something sweet to look at for a few minutes? Today we announced our selection of May featured photographers. Congrats to another exceptional group, who will have their images featured on the PhotoShelter homepage slideshow "Images" tab.  

These photographers are also featured on our photography website examples page, which means they get all the great SEO link love.  We had a really hard time filtering down the slideshow this month with so many great submissions.   



Like what you see?  You can embed this month's images in your own website or blog by clicking the "up arrow" in the lower right of the widget above.   

There's a lot to admire among this month's featured photographers.  Some notable ones:

• Masa Ushioda of Hawaii clearly has SEO on the brain.  He's selling stock photos and prints with PhotoShelter, and he customized a PhotoShelter template to integrate nicely with his existing website.   Masa shows up on the first page in Google searches for Ocean Wildlife Photos. 
• Elbert Chu of New York. Elbert says he "tells meaningful stories by creating captivating and emotive imagery." Amen Elbert.  Check out his stuff.  Powerful. 
• Shannon Plummer of Brisbane, Australia specializes in reptile photography.  With her camera.  A few of these critters look like they'd make really fun pets. 
• Three different photographers from Vancouver - Javier Freytes, Jason Manchester, and David Smith. Something in the water up there?

Have stunning images to share?  You can submit your images to us. **Important: we're getting a few hundred submissions every month, so please, pay attention to the submission guidelines if you want to be considered.  Remember, you need to submit your images by the 20th of the month, and we'll put the winning images up on the first Tuesday of the month.

We want to help with your local photography events, contests, and seminars. 

One of the reasons I really like getting out to local photography events is to meet people who are trying new things - like sweet gear, software, or even unique marketing approaches.  Throughout the year, I'll get out for a few really good speakers and book launches too.  But, I'll admit, nothing draws a crowd quite like the words "open bar".  Wouldn't it be nice if your next event could have a few bottles of wine to get people mixing it up?  Or maybe this summer you'll spring for a few raffle prizes and a better speaker?  A better venue that has air conditioning?  Pro models and real lighting for your next shootout? 


Photo by Allen Murabayashi

My point is, we all go to photo events throughout the year, and most local organizations (yes, even in NYC) usually have to cut a few corners when getting everyone together. So, if you're planning an event, we want to help you make it better.  With this in mind, today we're announcing the PhotoShelter Stimulus Plan. 

If you have a great event in the works, apply for support from PhotoShelter. 

We're looking for local organizations (or individuals) that are helping keep the spirit of photography alive and vibrant in communities everywhere.  We have a small budget for event sponsorships - $500 every month - and can also provide speakers, prizes, discounts, judging platforms for contest, and temporary group accounts for displaying a group's collective work.  Depending on your event needs and how strong of a match it is for us, there are plenty of creative ways to get PhotoShelter involved.                          

Yes, we realize that $500/month and some raffle prizes are not necessarily going to change the face of the industry. For us, this is more about connecting with good people, supporting events that push photography forward, and a little good karma at a time we know it can be appreciated. 

Oh, and it's no surprise that we're favoring requests by PhotoShelter members.  We'll review requests monthly, so if you're currently planning something, submit our request form now. 

If you don't have an event immediately in the works, but you are an organizer of a local group - get in touch anyway and introduce yourself  - we'd love to hear more about you and your organization.

We'll keep the community informed regularly about events we're supporting via our blog and twitter.

Paul Jeffrey's Darfur
I don't want to trivialize the potential for the H1N1 flu virus to mutate and spread into something much more virulent. But less than 35 people have died worldwide and only a few thousand people have been diagnosed with the illness. Yet, because it reaches across borders, the media coverage in the past few weeks has been staggering.

By contrast, the genocide in Darfur has claimed the lives of over 400,000 people and displaced another 2 million in a few years. Reporting on the Darfur crisis takes dedication and experience that only real journalists can bring to the table. This isn't the paparazzi getting shots of David Hasselhoff passed out on the floor. This is covering a story with a purpose, and trying to bring light to a story that might otherwise get buried by those who don't want it to be known -- namely, the Sudanese government.

PhotoShelter user Paul Jeffrey and journalist Chris Herlinger recently published "Where Mercy Fails -- Darfur's Struggle to Survive" with a foreward by Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Instead of just photos and text of burnt down villages, Jeffrey takes a humanitarian viewpoint in showing how the crisis has affected the population in camps, schools, farms, and other areas of daily life. Check out their website now.

Scott Bourne, one of the Internet's major photo bloggers, liked what we were doing with the SEO Toolkit, and invited me to guest blog. Toilet Seats, Photography and SEO was my way of illustrating how SEO influences us on a daily basis, and how it is relevant to photographers.

We've been doing a lot of webinars on SEO, and the question that inevitably comes up is "does all this stuff work?" The answer is an resounding YES -- after all huge companies wouldn't be spending major dollars on SEO if it didn't. But the proof is in the pudding.

One of my first test subjects was actually my personal trainers, Darryl and Anne Marie. As I indicated in a past blog, their site design was previously doing nothing for their SEO. But with a few minor changes (i.e. adding descriptive page titles and on-page text), they were able to move from a deeply buried page to the fifth position in a few weeks. And now, they are actually in the first position on the first page for "tribeca personal trainer!"

As a small business, this is obviously very significant and no different from what a photographer might want as an SEO goal. Darryl told me that they picked up a new client as a result of the SEO.



Get Mapped
If you search for "tribeca personal trainer," you'll notice the map. This is part of Google's localization strategy. How do you get onto the map? Register your business with Google. It's free, and you should definitely be on there.

Photography Examples
Yeah, yeah. I know, you don't care about personal trainers. How's about some photography/SEO examples. Our users started a thread on the forums about how they used SEO to improve their photography websites.

• Warren Diggles appears on the first page for "colorado stock photography"
• Gerry Walden appears on the first page for "photographer southampton"
• Stephane Lacasa appears on the first page for "surf photographer hawaii"

People are much more likely to search on terms rather than your name. Outside of (perhaps) Annie Leibovitz, you'd be hardpressed to find a photographer name that the general population knew. SEO is about being optimized for terms like "chicago wedding photographer." It's not about finding your own website when you type in your name.

And Finally
I attended a Tesla Motors event in New York last week (and got to ride in their new sedan prototype). While I was walking up to the bar, I bumped into an old friend and TV personality, Alli Joseph, who was interviewing people at the party. She was working with photographer/videographer Rick Graves, who has photographed the Tesla cars before. I was chatting with Rick and he showed me some of his strip camera photos that he's been producing by running a piece of 220 film through his Hasselblad. Others have done strip camera work before, but Rick uses a radar gun to correlate the speed of objects against the rate at which the film is traveling to reduce the amount of distortion in the image. Cool stuff.

Masa Ushioda

Masa's manually customized a PhotoShelter website, where he sells stock photos, art prints, and personal use downloads of Hawaii's ocean wildlife.

Shannon Plummer

Shannon is based in Brisbane, Australia and specializes in animal photography, particularly reptiles. Using a PhotoShelter Crisp theme, she markets an impressive selection of prints, products, and royalty free stock photos.

Danielle Libine

Danielle is based in Krakow, Poland. She displays her diverse body of work, including food photography, weddings, and portraits, using our Farah theme.

Dan Pearce

Dan specializes in people. His work includes weddings, portraits, and stock photography, and he uses our Mars theme and sells prints, products and royalty free licenses.

Ilker Gurer

Ilker, an Istanbul-based photojournalist, artfully depicts human strength in the face of hardship. He sells rights managed licenses with a basic PhotoShelter portfolio page.

Cory Permack

Based in Vancouver, Canada, Cory specializes in event and lifestyle photography, and uses a PhotoShelter Crisp theme to sell rights managed licenses, prints and products.

Massimo Casal

Massimo is based in Hanoi, Vietnam, and captures brilliant travel and cultural images across Asia. He uses our Chill theme to sell prints and rights managed stock photos.

Jack Koon

Jack, a Portland-based freelance photographer, captures the American west and displays his work using our Chill theme.

Mike Greenslade

Mike uses our Caboose theme to display an array of travel images and stock photo collections. He sells prints, products, and rights managed downloads.

Luigi Clemente

Luigi, based in London, specializes in fine art, alternative portraits and photoshop editing. He uses our Induro theme to display and sell his work, including limited edition signed prints.

Elbert Chu

Based in New York, Elbert has an eye for capturing powerful stories. He uses our Chill theme to display his photos.

Michael & Jill McNamara

Based in Phoenix, Michael and Jill specialize in editorial, portraiture and food photography, and sell their work using our Crisp theme.

David Smith

Based in Vancouver, Canada, David and Anna Smith are freelance and assignment photographers and writers, specializing in travel.

James Morgan

James is a UK-based professional travel and documentary photographer. He's applied a few subtle manual tweaks to our Induro theme. His work can be purchased as prints, personal and commercial use downloads.

Javier Freytes

Javier is based in Puerto Rico, and specializes in fashion, editorial, commercial and corporate photography. He displays his work with our Induro theme.

Pedro Cortacans

Pedro is based in Barcelona, and uses his basic PhotoShelter portfolio pages to display a diversity of imagery, including architecture, lifestyle, nature, and conceptual work.

Jason Manchester

Jason, based in Vancouver, Canada, specializes in sailing photography. He uses our Crisp theme to sell prints and downloads for personal and commercial use.

Nathanael Gassett

Nathaniel, based In Natchez, Mississippi, specializes in events and stock photography. He sells rights managed licenses using his basic PhotoShelter portfolio page.

Ron Vesely

Ron, a veteran pro sports photographer based in Chicago, customized PhotoShelter to integrate with his liveBooks website, so his entire archive can be searched and displayed in a virtually seamless experience.

Gilles Sabrie

A freelance photographer based in Beijing, Gilles' work is displayed using our Crisp theme.