One of the advantages of living in the middle of nowhere in the English Lakes is that we have plenty of wildlife chilling around. I am no wildlife photographer but early this spring we had loads of young birds of the feathered variety on our bird table outside our lounge window. They didn’t seem to worried when I set up my camera on its tripod with the lens up against the glass to take their portraits. After snapping a few frames I played around with my flashgun with a mini diffuser on it and stole a few more shots.
Mountain Biking Photos shot using chest harness taken from the riders perspective. Shoot done over cross country terain taken as part of an extreme sports / health and fitness project.
This post is about how I decided to make a chest harness for my Canon 5d. Thanks has to go out to @chasejarvis who always provides me with the inspiration and the motivation to drop what I am doing and grab my camera and shoot stuff!
These photos came from my own mini photography project to make a chest harness for my Canon Digital SLR. For a while I have been reading reviews of helmet cams and mounts for recording mountain biking exploits and other outdoor activities and hadn’t been successful in finding the right quality piece of kit for what I wanted. It always seemed to me that it would be best if I could use my SLR to get the desired quality out of the stills.
It was while I was watching the Chase Jarvis podcast I saw the lowe pro chest harness for an SLR so I jumped off my bed and shortened the straps on my SLR as short as they would go and realised I could shorten them enough to get the camera onto my chest. After scrabbling round for my old cheap wide angle lens I used to use on my 20D I also found an old belt that would hold the camera into my chest. Chopping a hole in a teeshirt to protect the camera from the elements I contemplated the problem of releasing the shutter whilst keeping my hands on the bars so I grabbed my shutter release timer I use for time release videos and set it to shoot every few seconds.
It was only cheap and loads of fun to mess around with. Below is a series of stills off the camera of my final images I hope you like they inspire you to go out and work on that project you have had in the back of your mind for a while!
Mountain Biking Photos shot using chest harness taken from the riders perspective. Shoot done over cross country terain taken as part of an extreme sports / health and fitness project.
Shocking idea! by sbrockmanmore "My sons decide to jump into the Thunersee, which is just 5 degrees."
I was looking on PhotoRadar’s site the other day at their post about POTY 2010 trying to use it to kick start my creative juices! They have now got their final shortlist for the Adrenaline catagory. You can see all the photos at PhotoRadar.
The judges were looking for originality and as always the competition has some amazing inspirational work. My particular favourite was this motox shot from danvojtech although not as technically advanced as some of the other entries it made me smile.
Flying gallery, by danvojtech "On the picture is FMX rider Libor Podmol."
I enjoyed using these shortlists for my own inspiration, looking not to use the techniques or subject matter but thinking of an image missing or that would fit in with this series of dissimilar images. Although I enjoy looking through other photographers work for inspiration it is hard when they have their own style or favoured technique not just to apply it to your own work. I think the key is to find what they are missing or as in this case look at a selection of work from different photographers and add your own creation.
The other catagories for this years POTY 2010 are below and you can follow the links to see their shortlists.
The past few nights I have been shooting the stars up by Black Sail youth hostel in the Ennerdale Valley, Lake District, UK.
One evening I was shooting a series of images designed to be put together into a movie of the stars going round. I just so happened to catch this shooting star flashing across my exposure.
We have been fortunate with the weather this spring after the disastrous flooding November 2009 which saw Cockermouth severely flooded and a lot of the English Lakeland in disarray.
It was a good day to take my Canon 5d for a walk up behind YHA Black Sail onto Haystacks. The route we took was west towards the mouth of the valley and we ascended Scarth Gap between Ennerdale and Buttermere. On the way up we had great views to Ennerdale Lake and of Pillar Rock standing tall below Pillar’s Summit. After a brief respite in Scarth Gap where I shot some photos of High Stile and the ridge we continued the scramble onto Haystacks.
The views as we walked across its summit across Butteremere Valley with its Lake and out towards Crummock Water were awe-inspiring. Despite living in this region seasonally for nearly two years now I am still blown away with the magnificent scenery.
Haystacks has to be one of my favourite walks from the Ennerdale Valley, a feeling shared by the late A. Wainwright. Alfred Wainwright (1907-1991) is best known for his famous Pictorial Guides to the Lakeland Fells which he put together between 1952 and 1966. These handwritten and hand-drawn works of art have given inspiration to all true fell walkers for more than forty years.
Wainwright was the man who recommended Haystack’s attraction and chose it as the place where he wanted his ashes scattered making it one of the most popular fells in the Lake District. Its summit is full of interest and contains a number of attractive rock formations and tarns.
Our walk then looped round onto the increasingly popular coast to coast walk from St. Bees To Robin Hood Bay. We joined the route from the top of Loft Beck and headed back in the direction of St. Bees as we descended back down the well trod path into the bottom of Ennerdale Valley.
In late June Emily and I walked from Cat Crag where Ennerdale Youth Hotel is to Wastwater Youth Hostel. Along the way I took some landscape shots including this photomontage I put together of Wastwater.
If you have been following my blog so far you will have seen I have been posting about how to improve your SEO rating and promote your Photoshelter account using Social networking sites. In my last post I covered all about You Tube and how posting a video of my images to You Tube improved my rating. If you haven’t read it already I suggest you go back and read it!
In this post I am going to tell you about how using twitter can help boost your hits on your account.
Briefly, for people who have never used twitter fully, twitter is a micro blogging site where you can post ‘tweets’ or extracts of short text.
You can find my twitter account at http://www.twitter.com/nomadtj if you already have an account please do follow me. If not sign up and follow me!
So content, what do I post about?
When it comes down to it you have to be quite careful about what you post. You cannot just post a series of links to your site and be done and hope people will have a look for a couple of reasons.
1. No one will be interested in your page! Fact: Its the cyber equivalent of sitting in a pub and only talking about yourself! Unless you are a mini celebrity or a celebrity like Stephen Fry no-one is going to look at your page for very long and will not follow any links.
2. Crawlers like what Google uses to find out how popular your website is will recognize that the content on your page is poor and see that you have loads of pointless links to your website and mark you down for it.
This doesn’t mean we cannot put our own links on our page but we have to lace it up with some interesting content.
My Twitter I describe as Tweets about SEO for photography, links to inspirational photographers and photoshop techniques. All of my followers then know that I have got lots of interesting content to look at.
Tweeting types:
1. Tweeting: Plain simple, find something interesting make a mini link to it and post it with an opinion for example
nomadtj “loving the photos on FungiPhoto.com Mushroom Photo Catalog http://su.pr/AHVVVi”
or
nomadtj “SEO Basic … have you submitted to http://www.dmoz.org/The open Directorys Project, not just google?”
to shorten my links I use http://bit.ly where you copy and paste the link you want into it and press go and it gives you a shortened version.
2. Re Tweeting: This is where you can take what a friend that you are following is tweeting and repost it so all your followers can see it. In several instances it is a great way to get content onto your page but too much will mean that you are just reposting other peoples opinions which if we were back down the pub noone is going to find interesting.
3. Self Tweeting: Telling people about your site. From Photoshelter this is simple, you can go to a gallery or a specific and click the tweet this and up it pops on your profile. I tend to post a photo of the day on my twitter and whenever I add a new gallery post it as well. Having a blog I also have updates for this also.
Let me break down my Tweeting as follows:
New Content searched for by me (Tweeting) ………. 70%
Re Tweets ………………………………………………… 15%
Links to my site & blog updates (Self Tweeting) ….. 15%
Don’t just be self centered about twitter, often spending the time reading other peoples tweets can help. For Example:
I read and followed a link from Chase Jarvis a well known, very popular photographer where he had snapped the view from his window with his iphone and posted it and invited everyone else to do the same. I took a panoramic view off my balcony of Val D’isere where I am currently living at and posted it with reference to Chase’s post. As result it is now the most viewed picture in my Photoshelter galleries!
Finding Followers for your twitter account:
The only way to get followers is to follow people and hope they return the favour if they find your page interesting. To find interesting people to follow sign up to people through a list from a website like
In my previous Blog I outlined the first step on the road to SEO for Photoshelter Accounts. That post was going to have all the information in but unfortunately it looks like I have got a long job ahead of me so I am going to continue in a series of posts so if you wish to follow me please add a book mark or follow my RSS Feed.
The following is a list of sites I have signed up to for my photo business.
You Tube:
Twitter:
Linked In:
Facebook:
There are some other sites but these are the main ones. I will cover the rest in another post as-well as going into more in-depth details about how I use each site.
Lets start today with YOU TUBE.
It may seem strange for you to try and image why you tube is top of my list but it has directed a lot of traffic to my site and I’ll explain why. The reason I came across this as an idea was from browsing SEO ideas for shops. One post I came across suggested posting you tube videos showing how products are used as so many people use you tube as a search engine.
I took this idea and decided to make the following video.
As a result I had a couple of people included this video in their blogs with links to my website. In my google analytics it shows up how many referals from youtube to my site I received and it was significant! I have made a resolution to make one of these videos for each of my galleries … watch this space!
To make these sort of videos it is very simple, I took the images in my gallery and batch resized them so they were quite low in resolution and inserted them into the movie maker on my mac. You can use windows media maker or any similar free software to make it. I added some music and some titles at the start, the whole process doesn’t take long at all. Once I uploaded the photos to my You Tube account it was just a case of copy pasting some of the text off my gallery on photoshelter and adding a few tags. Easy!
Thats all for now folks but keep following for more information of how to promote your Photoshelter Account using Social Media Sites including twitter, linked in and facebook.
If you wish please visit my site and view the Stock Images By Thomas Jupe on Photoshelter.
Well I signed up to photoshelter a few months back and threw myself into collecting and following as much advice as possible. Here I am going to share my knowledge and tell you all what I have done to SEO optimize my photoshelter account.
First things first! Have a look at the SEO grader in your account. You will find it under the “My Website” heading in the photographer area. Answer the five questions and then get your grade. If you then scroll down it will tell you the good things you have done, the things that you could do better and also what needs to be fixed. The good news is it has links to where you can sort any problems and descriptions for how to do it.
The biggest struggle for me was thinking of Keywords to add to my site. I used Google’s Adwords Keywording Tool.
It makes keywording incredibly easy and also allows you to download the words you collect into .txt documents which I keep filed on my computer in catagories so I can apply them to any new galleries I make.
This process takes a while but with not much effort you can get your grade up to ’96’ like me!
From now on its a waiting game for your results to appear in the likes of Google, Bing and Yahoo.
To help these search engines place your site you will need to work on links to your site and your connections. The stronger they are the better.
Please read my soon to come Blog about Social Media sites for the next step.
In the mean time feel free to browse my photoshelter site and Images by Thomas Jupe
[Cf. F. opportunisme.]
The art or practice of taking advantage of opportunities or circumstances, or of seeking immediate advantage with little regard for ultimate consequences.
I always keep my camera or any camera I can close to hand. You never know when you may need it! This evening while playing around with the HDR automator in Photoshop I heard some fireworks go off. I grabbed my camera and ran outside to see if I could catch them on my new canon 5d. It was a good job I did the fireworks lasted for several minutes allowing me to catch them perfectly.
Living in Val D’isere in the French Alps is a perfect place for me to expand my portfolio with a selection of images that not many photographers can catch. Its a perfect way of showing how my lifestyle helps me with my creativity. Many photographers have studios and a base from which they work where as I travel around and capture as much as I can in several places.
For one of the photos I used the HDR in photoshop. I will write a tutorial of how it works soon but in this instance I don’t think the final image is as good as the one I merged myself in photoshop!
HDR IMAGE
PHOTOSHOPPED IMAGE
When I do photoshop work I have to be quick to keep my productivity high. I like to use big brushes with plenty of feathering to achieve my results. It is easy to become trapped trying to edit one photo to perfection, precisely with pixel to pixel accuracy but often the results are no better, even when zoomed in on that a quick edit! Having a camera which has a larger output is also a great help!
Follow this link to see all my images taken of theVal D’isere Fireworks
