Little kids love dinosaurs.

Dinosaurs are huge, mean, and featured in lots of movies. But you might have noticed that dinosaurs are also extinct, and adults don't like them nearly as much as kids. People talk about dinosaurs with nostalgia, like "remember when dinosaurs ruled the world? *lol*"

Even if you don't know much about the K-T boundary and giant meteors slamming into the Mexican Peninsula, there's one thing that scientists agree on: dinosaurs went extinct because they couldn't adapt to the changed environment, which leads me to my next point.

Things are changing in photography, but it's likely that you still have that same old website you had around the turn of the century. You know, the one that just shows pretty pictures that you haven't updated in 3 years. Your website is a dinosaur, but you are a mammal, and mammals can adapt (see mom, that liberal arts education is paying off).

Everyone who sells websites to photographers makes one big claim: your website will help you get more work/clients/new business. In most cases, that's generally false. 

Next time you hear that, I've got 1 simple question you should ask: "How?" And if you don't get a straight answer, and you still feel like poking, here are 3 follow up questions. All get to the heart of the matter: how does a website get you more business?

Is the website designed to attract search engine traffic? And just saying "We're SEO friendly" doesn't cut it. Show me how. What tools do you give me to impact my own website's search engine optimization? Can I infuse my website with text that's rich in keywords that my potential customers are searching for? Can I update my content frequently to provide the freshness that search engines love? If you help me attract new users who don't already know me (via search engines), you're helping me get new work. 

Does the website motivate or drive visitors to some type of action? This could be purchasing something - a print, stock photo, mousepad. This could be signing up for a newsletter.  Follow me on twitter. Request a copy of my photobook. Attend a gallery opening. Register for RSS feeds of site updates. Etc, etc. etc. If there is no way to connect, capture contact info, or complete a goal, your website visitors are simply window shopping. Enable me to convert visitors to contacts/clients in some way and you're helping me get new work. 

Can I measure traffic patterns and user behavior? Can I easily optimize based on what I learn? Does the vendor offer an analytics package or can you easily add Google Analytics?  If so, once you get all those handy insights - how simple is it to update your site? Let's say you learn that the images you're featuring on your main page are not as compelling as the new work you produced last week. Do you need to find a really talented designer with snappy flash skills, pay them a few hundred dollars for their time? If so, that's a real shame. A website that gives you the ability to constantly measure, learn and constantly optimize...that helps you get more work.      

If someone tells you, "we make your photos look good online" - sure, that's a big help. Thanks very much. But that's not helping you with smart new ways to market yourself, display your photos, attract more visitors, and generate new business. And if you're still using the website you built with Adobe Page Mill in 199, you're basically doing the equivalent of photographing with a camera you built yourself.

We've been hard at work on several new features that address this important need - and we're releasing a few of these today. (Hint: there's even more to come.) Let's discuss:

WORDPRESS INTEGRATION VIA GRAPH PAPER PRESS
Graph Paper Press (GPP) makes some gorgeous themes for WordPress blogs. We're partnering with GPP to bring you a fully integrated blog/website/archive experience for your users. When you put these two powerful tools together, you get a really elegant way to display your photos, an SEO machine, and a completely seamless user experience that unites your blog, portfolio, and searchable, e-commerce friendly archive. Pretty powerful stuff, right? Here's what we're doing specifically - you can now:

• Easily customize PhotoShelter to tie in with GPP's popular Modularity theme, with more themes to come!
• Post your PhotoShelter images directly to your Graph Paper Press site - no more double uploads to WordPress!
• Blow out your SEO with frequently-updated, text-rich content that search engines love - across your Graph Paper Press front-end and PhotoShelter.
• Get crafty with a bunch of cool plugins and widgets by Graph Paper Press for an even deeper PhotoShelter integration - like a PhotoShelter search widget and recently updated  gallery display.

Here's a quick example - Jack Gruber's Graph Paper Press theme and his PhotoShelter account are integrated, so visitors to jackgruber.com can navigate across both destinations seamlessly.
 


Read more on combining Graph Paper Press and PhotoShelter, plus a 30% discount offer for PhotoShelter members. If you don't have a WordPress.org blog yet and want to get started, check out http//visualsociety.com - a hosted WordPress service with all their GPP themes and plug-ins built in, brought to you by the gang at Graph Paper Press.

We're looking for more examples to feature - so if you're an early adopter, please share your site!

SLIDEHOW: NOW BETTER LOOKING AND MORE CUSTOM OPTIONS
Our embeddable gallery slideshow just got much better. You now have much more control to customize the slideshow - including color, sizing, scrolling thumbnail display, image transitions, removing the borders and captions and more. This gives you a much more elegant way to display slideshows, and you can play with it until you're perfectly content.  Want to get rid of the borders completely, blow it up huge, and run a band of thumbnails across the bottom.  Do it!  Care for a transparent background so your vertical images don't look weird?  Done.  Want to shrink it down, color the border purple, have bouncing image transitions, and display captions for every image? Er, go for it.    

Let me show you what I mean. Here's the original, default slideshow from our buddy Kike Calvo in Panama.


Silver Banks: Dancing with whales - Images by KIKE CALVO

Now, let's use the "crop to fit" function to get rid of the gray borders, and remove the top toolbar:


Silver Banks: Dancing with whales - Images by KIKE CALVO

Here's no toolbars, and a little bigger.


Silver Banks: Dancing with whales - Images by KIKE CALVO

And how's about a little bigger, with no toolbars, but with the "filmstrip" on:


Silver Banks: Dancing with whales - Images by KIKE CALVO

For those just joining us, another fun part of our embeddable slideshow is that you can grab the embed code and pass it around online like a YouTube video. No matter where the slideshow ends up, all clicks go back to your website. It's another way to extend your marketing reach online.

Today you can embed the slideshow in blogs and any HTML site (including your PhotoShelter manual customization) - and we're building it into each of our themes now, so check back soon for more fun!

So, back to helping you get more work. Our goal here is to constantly produce new tools that really do give you the power to market yourself and generate more business through your photography website - whether you're shooting weddings, nature and travel stock, concerts, football, global conflict, or little league.  Yeah, we also like to give you fantastic looking ways to display photos too.  But if you want to succeed in a changing industry, you need to realize that marketing your photography business online is about so much more than simply showing pretty pictures.        

Did you ever find a photo on the Internet, and you wish you knew who took it?
Have you ever found your photo on someone else's website without your consent?
Have you ever lost sleep over the potential Orphan Works legislation?
Do you just love Canada?

We're happy to announce a little partnership between PhotoShelter and TinEye -- a reverse search engine created by the good people over at Idée in Toronto. Their CEO, Leila Boujnane, and I grab lunch in New York City every few months at Republic Noodle shop, and enjoy talking about synergies between the companies.

As it turns out, they have a fantastic fingerprinting algorithm (more on this in a second), and we have a lot of photographers with tons of images. So we decided to work together to ensure that all of our photographers' public images were indexed by TinEye.

What is a fingerprint?
If you watch the casino specials on the History Channel like I do, you know that gaming industry has employed facial recognition systems for a while to find suspected card counters and cheats. That technology is based on creating a "fingerprint" of facial characteristics like the distance between the eyes, nose, etc. If you've ever used "Shazam" on the iPhone to listen and identify a piece of music, then you're also familiar with another type of fingerprinting.

The TinEye fingerprint is similar. They analyze an image, find some distinctive characteristics and build a fingerprint. The cool thing about the fingerprint is that it doesn't matter if the image gets cropped, converted to black and white, or altered in any other way. Here are some good examples of matches that TinEye can find.


It's the same image, but used in a variety of ways (did we really have to go there with the Yoda, guys?).

So as of October 7, TinEye will fingerprint and index all the publicly searchable images in your PhotoShelter account ensuring that there is a record of an originating publisher.

How accurate is the fingerprint?
It's accurate enough to discern photos from two photographers shooting the same subject standing next to one another. But like any search, a "match" is really a confidence score of a certain threshold.

It's like a TV cop show. "Ma'am, are you sure you saw the perpetrator wearing a Boston Red Sox cap?" "I'm 99% sure."



I know someone is using my image, but TinEye didn't find it. What's up with that PhotoShelter?
The Internet is a very large place, and TinEye is methodically indexing it. But let's face it, not even Google can index the entire Internet. So have some patience.

I can add my images to TinEye myself, what's the big deal?
Yes, it's true, you could add your images yourself. But since you've already uploaded them to PhotoShelter, why spend the time? We automated it for you. We were wrong. You can't add your images yourself! So PhotoShelter is a great way to ensure that your images get crawled and indexed.

What does this mean to me?
The TinEye servers regularly crawl the Internet and compare images they find against the images they've fingerprinted and indexed. So you, the photographer, will be able to find where your images are appearing on other sites. And a consumer will be able to find you through TinEye.

At this time, we haven't built in any automatic notifications. We realize that this is a logical next step, but we are moving forward in a stepwise process, and the first part of that is indexing.

As we (both companies collectively) gain a better understanding of how people are using the service, we'll be able to develop more utility in the future. So get started today, and stay tuned for more exciting announcements!

by Antonio Rosario

Believe it or not, there was a time when photographers bought strips of material called "film." They'd put this flimsy stuff inside their cameras and go take pictures. When they were done, they'd take it to a special place called a "lab." Here, people in white coats would process it and return in a few hours with actual photographs embedded in cardboard. Incredible, huh?

Today, many of us don't use film. We have sensors, chips, flash cards, megapixels, and files. We don't edit over light boxes, mail chromes to our clients, or store them in filing cabinets. Instead, we sit at a computer "managing digital assets." We've become experts in IT, dealing with geeky concepts such as metadata, DAM software, and workflow....

workflow |ˈwərkˌflō|
noun
the sequence of industrial, administrative, or other processes through which a piece of work passes from initiation to completion.

What did I shoot and where? Where are my images stored and are they safe? Having a solid workflow keeps you organized, and allows you to focus more on the creative process than worry about the disposition of your images.

So what is an effective workflow? It's not just about how you manage your photographic files once you sit down at the computer. Workflow begins before you pick up your camera to shoot (or "capture files," as the photo geeks like to say). You need to consider all sorts of things: Will you shoot raw files, JPEGs, or both? Is your camera's clock set to the right time and time zone? If you're using more than one camera, are their clocks synced? Is the color space correct? Will you back up your images while on location or leave them on your memory cards? I could go on.

Apologies to Leica, but the best camera is the one that's with you. (I'd still like that M9)

Our buddy, Chase Jarvis, has just launched an iPhone app that ties into a website and book project named after a little phrase he coined. It's a cool little idea which bring photography and the sharing of photography to everyone.



You might remember Sean Rocco's cellphone project. Grover had one too. And you might find it surprising that the most popular camera on Flickr (based on number of images originating from that camera) is actually the iPhone. So while the image quality of a cellphone will never rival that of a D-SLR, its ubiquity can often make it the "best camera."

And the only thing better than taking a nice photo is sharing it with your friends. Congratulations to Chase on cool concept.

Download the iPhone app today!

We talk to a lot of photographers, and one question that never goes away is "how much should I charge?"



For answers to this and more, you might want to run over to Adorama's Workshops tomorrow, and see John Harrington's presentation entitled The Art of Negotiation: Pricing, Negotiating and Licensing. John is the author of the Photo Business News blog , and author of several photography business books that should be on your required reading list.

By the way, Adorama has great workshops every month, so check out their full schedule.

I'm also speaking there today about using photo books to market yourself, but you're too late! It's already sold out!

Last month, I wrote about using Blurb's PDF-to-Book functionality to create a photo book. Photo books are not new, but I've typically considered them as items that soccer moms were ordering for their scrapbooking activities. But it's clear that a well-designed, well-executed book can be a great upsell item for professional photographers who have seen a decline in print sales.

Ingrid and our friends at AdoramaPIX also offer a book making service, and I took it for a spin.

Instead of going through the rigamarole of design and color profiles, I decided to approach it more from a consumer angle without worrying about all the various settings that were available to me. This approach would be more akin to the standard offerings from most companies in the bookmaking space.

Unlike many other services, there is no software to install on your computer. AdoramaPIX's book designer works completely in the browser. This is great if you want to upload the images from home, and perhaps work on the book from the office, or the road when you have more time.

Nice website, buddy.

Every week I see various message boards filled with critique requests from photographer who have recently launched a website. I always like to check them out, and I'm always disappointed to see that photographers still don't get it.

Yes, the photos are nice.
Yes, the layout is clean.

But many photographers can't answer basic questions about their website.

• Who is your intended audience?
• How are you going to get people to it?
• What do you expect them to do when they get there?
• How are you going to tell if your website is helping you?

Instead, these critiques are filled with high fives and terrorist fist jabs. "Nice photos, but it takes a long time to load," or "I couldn't see it on Firefox 3.1," which only goes to reinforce why your photography website is a big fat stinking black hole of time and money.


NASA Images

If you're asking photographers what they think about your website, you've already lost the battle. Photographers aren't your audience.

If you didn't consider Search Engine Optimization in the design phase, you're gonna end up spending a lot of time and money with direct marketing efforts to drive people to it. (And why the heck are you trying to build a website in the first place? Take pictures, outsource the other stuff)

If you only have a few galleries of images and nothing else, then what's the point? You hid your e-mail address and phone number so effectively, that no one can find it. And you don't have any e-commerce capabilities, so if I found an image that I like, there's no opportunity to purchase it. You spent time and money to bring me to your website, and all I can do is view 30 pictures, and read a bio you wrote in the 3rd person? Why on earth would you drive traffic to your website, then have a link that reads "to license my photos, go to Getty where they will take 70% of the sale from me"?

And finally, you have no idea what people are doing on your website because you didn't install an analytics package like Google Analytics. You have no idea what your most popular content is. You have no idea if people are navigating the site the way you intended. You have no idea if all that time you're spending on Twitter is actually increasing visitors, and nor do you understand if Twitter traffic is better than an e-mail newsletter.

If you can't measure what you're doing, how the heck can you determine whether your website is losing you money or not? It's like joining Jenny Craig but not weighing yourself, ever.

You're smarter than that.

Get our free 43-page guide that we've created called "Google Analytics for Photographers." The kit also contains a quick start guide and 5 basic marketing questions that Google Analytics can help you answer. Make marketing decisions based on facts, not hunches.

» Get it for free.

I'm not a big proponent of photo manipulation because I have a lot of respect for photojournalists and other photographers who's skill is a the point of capture. On the other hand, I'm really digging these photos from Peter Funch's Babel Tales. Peter spent some time in New York, and sat around taking photos of people doing the same thing on the same street corners. Then he artfully composited the shots to make cool panoramics of everyday, boring stuff.

The first time I really became aware of Dan Winters was back when I subscribed to the print edition of the New York Times (ah, the nostalgia). Leonardo DiCaprio was on the cover of the Sunday Magazine, and I just couldn't believe my eyes. The portrait was perfect -- the pose, the lighting, the color of DiCaprio's eyes matches the background and the hue of the image. (The image, not so surprisingly, went on to win a crapload of awards)



The second time I became aware of Dan Winters was when I started noticing some cool pictures of workbenches and gadgets in the science magazine Discover. There was something so unique and recognizable, and by golly, it's that damn Dan Winters guy.



Photography is fun, but it ain't easy. There's nothing easy about taking a good picture. And it's even harder to take a good portrait. The one that makes you stop. But Dan Winters seems to do it over and over again. He even took a portrait of our friend Fiona Aboud.



Periodical Photographs is a collection of his images of people and things. If you read the Times Magazine, Esquire and Discover, then you've likely seen many of them before. But many of the images were still new, and surprising like the one of U2 backstage. The images are quiet, sometimes oddly disturbing, and highly distinctive. I respect a guy who can follow his vision to a state of unique perfection. And I respect people that shoot large format because it's slow and hard. And if my reaction to seeing large format portraiture is wanting to go out and buy one, then I know it's good stuff (and no, I'm not going to go buy one).



Some people object to his nearly ubiquitous use of ring flash. Yeah, I see it, even when it's 3 stops under. Some people don't like the feather light look. Some people don't like that blue background. But he's going with it, and you should too.

Besides, when's the last time you bought a photography book?

Hey hey! Who wants a look at some wonderful photography? Today we're delighted to announce September's PhotoShelter Featured Photographers! Their selection of images will be displayed in the "Images" tab of the product tour.

There's a distinct international flair among September's featured photographers. In fact, 12 of the 20 are based outside the US. So, you'll see images like:

• Rafa Rivas' (Spain) intense images of unlucky matadors
• Sephi Bergerson's (India) unique approach to Indian weddings (not to mention a very nice integration of PhotoShelter with his custom WordPress website)
• Carl Pendle's (UK) high quality collection of lifestyle, food, and travel stock photography
• Dave Walsh's (Ireland) travels aboard several Greenpeace expeditions

And we were captivated by so much more. Many of these photographers sell their work through PhotoShelter as prints, products, stock photography and personal use licenses. Their websites are great examples of how you can customize PhotoShelter using our templates or your own designs.

Like what you see? Embed our September featured slideshow in your own website or blog by clicking the up arrow in the lower right of the slideshow.

Want to submit your images for consideration for the October slideshow? Here's how. Images must be submitted by the 20th of the month, and winners are posted on the first Tuesday of the following month.

Who doesn't love (winning) a good photo contest?  Today we helped the Advertising Photographers of America launch the 2009 APA National Photo Competition. This contest - "a celebration of photography and a recognition of extraordinary image making" showcases the work of talented photographers from across the country and is open to both APA members and non-members.  All submissions will be hosted and submitted through PhotoShelter.


PhotoShelter member Tom Sperduto was last year's Grand Prize winner.

There are plenty of good reasons to get involved with this contest - like the high profile judges who will review your work.  And of course, everyone likes cool prizes.  The Grand Prize winner will receive a basket of products and services from a lot of our favorite companies, including:

• MacBook Pro, 13-inch: 2.26GHz
• Canon EOS 7D dSLR Camera Body, 18 megapixel CMOS sensor, Dual Digic 4 Image Processors (8 frames per second) JUST ANNOUNCED!
  
• ADBASE Premium Edition One Year full North American Subscription
• PhotoShelter One Year Free Pro Subscription including a customizable website, e-commerce, SEO, and 100GB online storage
• $1,000 credit toward any liveBooks package*
• Lowepro Rolling Computrekker Plus AW
• Winning Image(s) featured in December 2009 "Pictures of the Year" issue of Rangefinder Magazine
• Winner's Gallery, Year long Promotional Showcase powered by liveBooks
• The Winner's Book published by Blurb

 (Just one of the above would be a real treat - but the Grand Prize winner gets ALL of them.)  The prize packages for placing 1st 2nd and 3rd are pretty stellar too. 

We're really excited to host this contest for the first time.  It's a great connection for us because we respect the work APA is doing to support photographers and help grow their businesses.  Admittedly, we're also really excited to get the first peek at the outstanding photography this contest is certain to attract.  Plus, we're delighted to show scores of new advertising photographers how PhotoShelter can be a powerful business tool - for photography websites, online marketing and image sales, secure archiving and image delivery.  And for existing PhotoShelter members - you can submit from your account, which is a nice treat. 

There are 7 different pro categories you can enter (and ahem, win prizes), plus 1 student category, including:

• Lifestyle
• Portrait
• Fashion
• Action (Sports / Adventure)
• Still-Life
• Landscape / Architectural
• Personal / Fine Art
• Student

The deadline for submitting images is September 30. Good luck!
 
» Full contest details
» Enter the contest