A Sorta Kinda Photo Editing Contest!
I’ve decided it’s time to play a game! This is close as I can get to The Price is Right or one of those huge jars of candy that you have to guess how many pieces it holds! So I’m going to host a photo editing contest – sort of. The easy thing is that I’m not asking you to edit any photos, that’s on me. You just have to guess how good I am at setting up a shot in the first place! Dominic and I are back from a weekend full of photos in Humboldt County celebrating his 35th birthday, so I have a lot of editing to do!
Read MoreSelling My Photos on Fine Art America
A friend of mine called me an “accomplished photographer”. Thanks Bill! While I disagree, his kind words encouraged me to finally look into the realistic prospect of selling my photos as artwork. He recommended I check out a site called Fine Art America over the more well-known Imagekind. He recommended Fine Art America for their superb marketing materials, and I can see what he was talking about.
Read MoreWanted: Photographic Inspiration
Being an amateur photographer (with skills somewhere around intermediate, I think) I always want to improve my skills. Four years ago I took the leap to upgrade to a DSLR from a regular old point & shoot, and have not regretted it. Since then I’ve taken a few classes to sharpen my skills and really learn more of the functions of my camera (a Nikon D5000). I’ve upgraded to a longer lens after a great experience renting one from BorrowLenses.com a few years back, and I’ve increased my arsenal of accessories, from tripods to monopods, rubber hoods to rubber skins. It got to a point last year that my dad wanted to buy me something camera related for my birthday and everything I could possibly want was up in the hundreds of dollar range (like different lenses, flash units, etc) since I’d bought all the little stuff (filters, remotes, bargain flashes) myself.
It’s gotten to the point where I don’t take many pictures anymore. A perusal of my Flickr feed (a yearly birthday present to myself to keep the Pro account) shows a set I took about a month ago, before that some I took at the beginning of February, and then before that… Christmas. I need ideas for photographic inspiration!
Where do folks find inspiration for going out and shooting? I like nature shots, flowers, sunsets, but it seems that anywhere I’d like to go, I either can’t get anyone to go with me or there’s a LOT of walking involved. Which, I’m into photography… not hiking. So I know that if I got tired of walking around some place, my pictures would suffer.
I’m still kicking myself in the butt for not capitalizing inspiration I had a couple months ago. There was a carnival in town near the Oakland Coliseum, and I thought that it would be cool night shots to go to the Martin Luther King Jr. Regional Shoreline across the estuary from where the carnival was and get the rides all lit up with the reflection of the water. But of course, before I got off my lazy butt to do it, the carnival had moved on to a less picturesque location.
So, photographers out there… where do you go for photographic inspiration? Where do you look?
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Has Photo Sharing on Facebook Met its Match?
Photos are always an excellent way to attract more people to your personal website. Facebook has always been the best way to store your photos and share them with the people on your friend list. By sharing a glimpse into your personal life, your readers will associate a more human element with your website, blog, or company. Over the summer, Twitter unveiled a new photo sharing service that is set to rival Facebook’s dominance and make it easier to market your website.
Facebook has recently changed the privacy settings on how you can tag people and places when uploading a photo. The steps to posting a quality photo for your followers to see are more complex than they have been in the past making it a more selective way to share photos with friends and family.
Twitter’s ease of access and openness make it a simpler tool for people to share content quickly. Recently, bored New Yorkers stuck in their apartments due to Hurricane Irene used Twitter as an escape mechanism to deal with their boredom. As reported on Yahoo News, they posted pictures from the movie “The Day After Tomorrow” where the Statue of Liberty was destroyed by tidal waves.
If you are a marketer using an integrated social media campaign over several different platforms such as Facebook, Foursquare, Flickr, Twitter, and YouTube; it has always been a struggle to seamlessly blend all of the social networks together. By posting a photo or video and sharing your location directly to Twitter, the need to market on other social media websites becomes less of an issue.
A couple of months ago, in order to share photos through Twitter, users had to use a third party service like Yfrog, Twitpic, or several other similar sites. Facebook had the advantage of offering a centralized photo sharing service that made it easy and convenient to store content. Now with a centralized gallery available on user’s profiles powered by Photobucket, pictures sent to these photo sharing websites are collected and stored in a gallery on Twitter profile pages.
Because tweets are searchable through Google, you can optimize your post with organic SEO keywords so it will appear higher in search results. Twitter’s new photo sharing service will soon be available on smartphones and will be easy for LG Android phone users to instantly upload a photo for their followers to see. This will give you the opportunity to perform important search engine marketing while at the grocery store checkout lane or out for a jog. You can easily attract new followers while away from your computer.
Facebook is still a great way to organize and store personal photos, but Twitter’s new photo gallery is an excellent way to make your content public as well.
Read MoreAffiliate Summit East 2011 Photo Recap
I’ve been back from New York since Thursday and I can easily say I’m still not fully recovered. I’m always surprised at how exhausted I am after one of these shows, but given the fact that I work at home in relative calm and sedation, 3-4 days of getting up early, talking all day, walking all day, and going to bed late can really take it’s toll.
I finally just got all 250+ photos I took from Affiliate Summit and the surrounding events I attended up onto Flickr today. So for now, instead of writing a long recap of words, I’ll share with you a recap in pictures. You can see all the pictures in my Affiliate Summit East 2011 Set on Flickr.
Day 1
How to Pitch Your Company Panel: Tricia Meyer, Kim Rowley, Ad Hustler, & Robert Adler
Dominic Fawver at the For Me To Coupon Meet Market Table
Mike Allen on the mechanical bull at the ShareASale Barn Dance
Brook Schaaf on the mechanical bull at the ShareASale Barn Dance
Day 2
Wil Reynolds’ Keynote
Dominic & I at the For Me To Coupon Booth
The Performance Marketing Association Networking Event
Tricia Meyer & Eric Nagel Singing “Summer Lovin'” at Affiliate Karaoke
Daniel Feinberg Singing an AC/DC Song at Affiliate Karaoke
Day 3
Yankee Stadium
The Luxury Suite Seats at Yankee Stadium
Oakland Athletics’ Brandon Allen at 1st Base helping to achieve the A’s 6-5 win over the Yankees!
And one more just because it’s pretty… the friendly skies, somewhere over Chicago
If you really are in the mood to read, here’s some other good recaps that came through my Google Reader these last few days:
- Affiliate Summit East 2011 Day 1 Recap – Shawn Collins
- Affiliate Summit East 2011 Day 2 Recap – Shawn Collins
- Affiliate Summit East 2011 Day 3 Recap – Shawn Collins
- Affiliate Summit East 2011 – Quick Recap and Pictures – Geno Prussakov
- Affiliate Summit East Raves and Regrets – Tricia Meyer
- Affiliate Summit East 2011 Recap – Joe Sousa
- Affiliate Summit East 2011 Recap – Adam Riemer
Affiliate Summit West 2011 in Pictures #ASW11
So, I found out what was wrong (I guess). It seemed my installation of WP Unlimited was severely outdated (pay attention to those update release emails, people)! I updated it and low & behold, all of a sudden today I can create the album using NextGEN Gallery!
Without further ado since it’s been a whole month since Affiliate Summit West 2011, please enjoy my pictures from the show. As you may be able to tell, I took notes via taking photos of the slides during the Drew Eric Whitman keynote. I forgot my notebook 🙂
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Please leave comments letting me know if this was valuable to you… or just commenting on any of the photos! They can also be viewed on Flickr in my Affiliate Summit West 2011 Set. Remember that you don’t want to miss the fun and excitement of Affiliate Summit East 2011 in New York City, so register today!
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