10 Top RSS Feeds Every Photographer Should Read

I have been following several RSS Feeds and I thought it was about time I reviewed 10 of my favourites.  These RSS Feeds give me many things from inspiration to industry news. They are in no particular order so I hope you will follow them all.  Add them to your RSS reader of choice and enjoy reading them with your morning coffee!

A Pictures Worth – Photoshelter

Photoshelter is a fantastic site in itself and if you haven’t had a look at it you should!

Even if you are not using their services though you should be reading their blog. Written by PhotoShelter co-founders, Allen Murabayashi & Grover Sanschagrin, it has their take on the photo industry, photographer websites, selling photos, SEO, gear and more.  An invaluable source for anyone in the industry.

A Photo Editor

Written by former photography director Rob Haggart, this is a source of common sense for photographers! As a photographer some of the best advice is the advice that comes from your customers or photo buyers.  With up to date industry news interspersed with interviews from Rob’s contacts that he has built up as a man with his finger right on the pulse, this has to be one of the best RSS Feeds for photographers.

Chase Jarvis

Chase Jarvis is one of the current day’s great photographers, not just for his fantastic and inspiring work but also because of what he gives back.  Chase blogs about his work, gear and lifestyle.  With posts about how he creates his images, industry conventions he has spoken at and so much more.  Chase Jarvis is a hero of the photography world. It is also worth my mentioning that in other parts of his website there are videos of his shoots that are well worth watching!

Jim M Golstein

Jim Golstein is a travel and landscape photographer who has a particular interest in nature. His blog displays some of his photos from his shoots which are well worth a look at.

Joe McNally

Based in New York, Joe McNally has an impressive CV amongst which lies 20 years of shooting for National Geographic.  Blogging eccentrically about life as a photographer, his shoots and his projects to put back into the photography community the skills he has learned.  I think the most wonderful thing is the amount of variety his work carries.

Peta Pixel

An open vault that is constantly updated with new jewels of the photographic world. Aimed at technically minded photographers it hosts information on the more technical side of digital photography. Written by Michael Zhang and Jessica Lum together they produce some amazing content that I cannot get enough of.

Photocritic

Photocritic is written in a very individual style and the content is always forthcoming. Articles are a range of funny personal projects and opinions on all aspects of photography by the editor.

Scot Wydon

Scott Wyden is a photographer based in New Jersey he is currently on number 315 of his 365 series.  Most of these series are like kissing your dog, they are cute but kind of stink at the same time.   With this one I have enjoyed the photographers style throughout and its broken up with other interesting articles.

The Photoletariat

This is a fantastic read, the articles are like full magazine pieces and have great content. Recent articles have content about workflow, technology and philosophy. I can’t wait for the next article to be published.

Light Stalking

With guest posts from several contributor, Light Stalkers hosts articles with how-tos on computer software, camera techniques and post production workflows.  Some of the articles are a bit soft but there are some gems.

Photoshelter SEO – Social Networking Sites – Twitter

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

http://listorious.com/

You could also have a look at who I am following and add some of them that are relevant to you and look at who they are following and so on.

I am sorry but that is all from me today have a look at my other posts and sign up to twitter!

View my images at Thomas Jupe Galleries

Find me on twitter as Nomadtj

Go back and look at my Blog Photoshelter SEO – Social Networking Sites – YOUTUBE

Thank you for reading.

Photoshelter SEO – Social Networking Sites – YOUTUBE

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.

Thomas Jupe – Photographs of Ennerdale Valley – Lake District

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.

Photoshelter … An SEO Journey

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.

Google Adwords Keyword 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

Opportunist Photography ….

Opportunism

n.

[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

Val D’isere Fireworks – Images by Thomas Jupe
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