Warren Diggles Photography and Design

Me with some of the familiar faces of Photoshelter
(Rachel, Me, Allen, Grover and Andrew - Photo by Mellissa Diggles)

If you have read my blog before you will know that I am a big fan of Photoshelter. If you are not familiar with Photoshelter, they are the place on the web where photographers get seen and sell their work. It is my opinion that Photoshelter provides photographers with the most complete set of tools available to maximize the benefits of the web. With my Photoshelter customization website northerncoloradostock.com, I am able to set up a searchable archive for my stock images, provide traditional customers with access to their images via the web, offer online order fulfillment, and seamlessly integrate all of this with my existing portfolio website and blog.

While on a family trip to the east coast for our niece’s wedding I took the opportunity to visit the hub, the center, the heart of Photoshelter. When we got to Union Square where Photoshelter is located we noticed that a commercial photoshoot was going on, very cool, I thought that Photoshelter was behind it so I looked around a bit but came to the conclusion that they weren’t - the funny thing is that when looking at Photoshelter’s blog today there is a post about it - you can read about it on A Picture’s Worth.

Anyway, we found the building located at 33 Union Square West and headed on up to the second floor. When the elevator opened I saw the Photoshelter logo and knew we were in the right place. First I want to mention how friendly everyone is and how my family and I felt very welcome. After introductions and a brief tour I talked a bit with Allen and Andrew about marketing a photography website. They shared with me some of their insights and let me know they are getting close to unveiling the next set of PSA upgrades - can’t wait to see exactly what they are…

What I gathered from my visit reinforces what I already know, Photoshelter is about photographers. A company that is continuously providing us with web based infrastructure, effective web marketing tools and the knowledge to utilize both with the free SEO resources of sites such as Google, Twitter, Facebook and whatever comes next.

Thank you again Photoshelter for your hospitality. Allen, my family agrees, the pizza at Patsy’s is delicious!

Advertising Photography Questions (including answers)

Thank you Jaak for question #1

Jaak Writes

Hi Warren,

…What words are better to use for gallery description and gallery name. Stock photos, stock images, stock pictures or stock photography. I understood about your research that images is not the best solution. But I have seen a sites in Google like it http://www.terragalleria.com/parks/np.grand-canyon.html if I wrote grand canyon stock photos. You can see in gallery description words like pictures and stock photos too. What do you think. Do you have any idea for best solution… There is a lot of other factors for good SEO too what we should to use. By the way do you have had some success with good SEO ranking. I mean does any photo buyer found your stock images thanks to your good ranking. There is philosophical question for me. I think that serious photo buyer use a stock image banks like Getty, Alamy only. So a SEO is not important for them. SEO is important for people who do not know about image banks. My conclusion is that some not serious picture buyer will found our images thanks for good ranking, but they do not pay money for pictures. I hope that I am not right….

Sorry about my english

All the best,
Jaak Nilson

–
Jaak Nilson Photostock
Phone: +372 502 6327
www.jaaknilson.ee

Response

Hello Jaak,

Just ran a few terms through Google Adwords Keyword Tool and these are the average worldwide search totals/month:
stock images - 165,000
stock photos - 550,000
stock pictures - 22,200
stock photography - 201,000

stock photos is the most popular, but photography and images are searched a lot too. My thoughts would be to have images, photos and photography in your seo. I use “stock photo image” in my page titles - iptc headlines for images. Because my site name is Northern Colorado Stock Photography then I have “stock photo image and photography” all in the page titles. For my filenames I am putting a descriptive term with the file # name. ie A8EW0225-Chocolate-Milk-Glass-Bottle.jpg this way your filename numbers are not messed up and you have a descriptive name in the title. Still a work in progress though, I don’t have quite half of the images ready yet.

So far I have not had great success through Photoshelter with SEO, but I know that what they are saying to do is good SEO and I believe that Photoshelter will continue to improve on their end so I am integrating their recommendations into my site.

Hopefully this helps,
Warren

–

Warren Diggles Photography & Design
www.warrendiggles.com
(970)412-0583

/***These are actual emails that have been copied and pasted***/

Just a couple of days ago I was reading the Alamy blog about their much anticipated Manage Images v2.0, the online batch image IPTC manager for the Alamy stock photography archive. If you have ever tried managing the keywording of 1000+ images you will know right away why this is a much anticipated release.

I saw that only 250 photographers would be chosen for the test phase before the first site wide version becomes live. Something to look forward to, well I guess it will be a while before I have a chance to use it…Then there it was, right in ‘My Alamy’, nice!! Plus an invitation email, I have been chosen as one of the beta testers!

Alamy.com, buy and sell images at the web’s largest stock photography site with 15.77 million stock photos. It takes a lot of photographers to produce that much professional reproduction quality rights managed stock photography. Very cool, I guess I get to be one of the first to try it…

In the invitation email participants are asked not to give any details, but as soon as I can I will…
» Read the Email from Alamy Member Services

One of the many things I love about this world we live in is how you never know where opportunities are going to come from. Over casual dinner conversation Hank Grey from Madison Insurance and Cathy Halpern, owner of Organized Balance were talking when the subject of websites came up. Well one thing led to another and Cathy recommended our services, Madison Insurance contacted us, I headed down to Denver for a meeting with Hank and Murray DeLine, and now we are managing their website. Thank you Cathy for the referral, and thank you Madison Insurance for the business.

Madison Insurance Website Redesign
If you are interested in our website redesign and management services please email us at info@warrendiggles.com then we will set up a time to strategize your website marketing.

The first step of the project was a site and functionality redesign. If your website was created a number of years ago there is a good chance that it needs to be redesigned and rethought. When redesigning a site it generally makes most sense to use the current content and page linking as the starting point. We are not reinventing the information just rethinking the way it will be presented and organized to get the most out of it in the future. Of course there are modifications to the information but that is done throughout the process.
» More about the Madison Insurance site redesign...

The website for Morning Fresh Dairy performs many marketing tasks. One of these is the Online Order Changes form - a PHP email form with database functionality that gets used 100 times a day. With this form dairy customers can conveniently make changes to their order, cancel a delivery, or add items as needed. All of this can be done twenty-four hours a day.

Screen shot of Morning Fresh Dairy's online order changes - note the image links on the right hand side of the page. These ad links are randomly chosen from a folder that contains several different ones. These are designed to introduce random products to current customers of the dairy, products that the dairy offers for home delivery.

The order changes form saves the office staff two to three hours of labor a day because these tasks used to be done on the telephone. Order changes also generate add on sales because of its ease of use and ability to add items to your order simply.

Functionality like this will bring very real and measurable profits to your business.

This is very fun news…

Logo initial icon W - Western Spur selected for new LogoLounge project, Master Library series under initials and crests.

Rockport, my favorite publisher of Graphics Design and Logo books has selected one of my logos for a new LogoLounge project called Master Library series. The logo will be included in the initials and crests section. These are my favorite logo books, I actually own LogoLounge 1 through 4 and 5 is coming out July 1st, 2009.

Don’t do what I did and buy them at Barnes & Noble for a much higher cost, you can get them through my Amazon affiliate links at the bottom right corner of this page.

» Click to read the letter from LogoLounge

Large interior with 2 studio lights
Commercial Photography Lighting Techniques: Example 8

Equipment Used
* Canon 1ds * 24mm tilt shift * 24mm ISO100 f10 .3sec
* Speedotron Brownline 800ws two M11 heads
* 16″ Reflector (Beauty Dish), about 15′ behind the subjects
* 7″ Reflector, as high as stand will go pointed at ceiling

Shooting interiors is always challenging, but before setting up the lighting there three things that are very important to assess before you start.

1. What is the purpose and goal of the photography session
2. What commitments did you project to the client and what expectations do they have
3. What is the budget or how much time do you have

Since I was hired for this shoot by a magazine the purpose is to create feature and ad photography for their client East Moon Asian Cafe. The restaurant had a limited budget which allowed for 2 hours of photography time. » More Interior photography lighting

Speedotron Brown Line and Beauty Dish
Commercial Photography Lighting Techniques: Example 7

Equipment Used
* Canon 1ds * 100 macro * 100mm ISO100 f13 1/60sec
* Speedotron Brownline 800ws one M11 head
* Beauty Dish (16″ Reflector) 5′ away about 45 degrees to the left of subject, ceiling height
* The direction of the light is perpendicular to the subject
* White reflector directly to right of subject just out of camera view

This room is about 12′x14′ with a dining room table in it, we did not have much space to light the subject and background separately! This is an area where the beauty dish shines. » More Speedotron Brown Line and Beauty Dish

{Edit 3/30/09}
Since FaceBook changed their interface my screen shots do not match the current FB website, and my new to me now old FB Fanpage looks a bit drab with the new FB interface. OK my first opinion is they are on the right track and I guess it is time to update the branding on my FB Fan Page. This is something that has just been put on the list of things to do…

Embedding a Photoshelter Flash Gallery to your Fan Page still works the same way, FaceBook just changed their interface so it will appear different.

More coming soon…er or later
{/Edit}

Photography and Marketing Facebook Fan Page - click link to see a Photoshelter flash gallery embedded to Facebook fan page and by all means become a Fan!

Before you can add a Photoshelter flash gallery to a Facebook fan page you need to install » More info embed Photoshelter flash gallery to Facebook fan page...

As marketing on the internet evolves many companies will be looking to redesign their websites. Businesses will want to update information, add new functionality, upgrade the design and interface, etc…

Currently I am working on a website redesign for Madison Insurance, a Denver based insurance brokerage (more on this later…). While I was researching their current website I noticed this interesting little icon on the contact us page with the words “contact manager information” next to it. Of course I decided to click it. » More info on vCards