The difference in audience between a discussion about art
& a discussion about SEO and social media
says what about our priorities?
Obiter dicta: Art and social media
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A Photographer’s Guide to SEO & Social Media
Hey Folks,
What’s your page rank? How many friends do you have? Retweets? Have you shared anything today? What’s your title tag? Incoming links? How’s your website rank?
Now that summer is over, and it’s officially “office season”, you’re probably spending your time doing much of what I’ve been doing lately; website work, photo editing, marketing and promotion via the sticky, tricky and infinite webs we call SEO (Search Engine Optimization) & Social Media (making me wonder what, exactly, Anti-social Media might be).
SEO is a pretty tricky beast. It’s a lot of research, reading, re-reading, web-coding, overhauling, reviewing, more research, re-coding and hair pulling. It’s mostly a lot of trial and error; it’s not a given, for example, that what works for one site is applicable and relevant for another. And it’s almost certain that what works on the article you just carefully absorbed will not work on your website. So, it’s mostly guesswork.
Sometimes the results are what we hoped for, and we pat ourselves on the back, and think how clever we are. Sometimes, despite all out best efforts, the old googles kick our superbly optimized page to the bottom of page 11 on their results; this really hurts when you see some trashy, 1993-styled geocities looking webpage showing up on the first page of rankings.
Continue readingObiter dicta: Blackened fridays
“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing
the word sale.”
– Edmund Burke Carl Donohue
Photographs are making us richer
Hey Folks,
You perhaps saw this recent story in the news about our ‘drowning in a sea of images’. It’s an interesting view, and, I believe, a very valid point. Any kind of inundation makes staying afloat a difficult task. And sometimes it’s impossible.
A photographer and artist I admire, Chase Jarvis, recently posted a response to this on his blog, about how we’re not drowning, but getting richer with this unabating torrent of images. That’s kind of a weird take on it. What kind of flood can we swim through?
Chase argues “shouldn’t it be said that we’re not drowning in photography at all, that we’re perhaps getting metaphorically rich off more and more of these veins of gold?”
“veins of gold”?
Gold has value because it’s rare. And because it’s durable. If gold were produced quite as readily as iphone “pics” seem to be, and had a similar lifespan of any digital file, it wouldn’t cost eighteen hundred dollars an ounce right now. I’d suggest a better chemical analogy might be carbon dioxide. CO2 seems to be pretty prevalent right now, becoming ever more so, and, contrary to what the s(k)eptics tell ya, it’s not enriching our world.
Continue readingSometimes you have to work
Hey Folks,
Sometimes the work of an artist is simply to be persistent; keep at it. Follow through on that little spark of an idea that awakens us at night; pursue that little ‘idea’, no matter how trivial, how distant it seems. That trigger is where art begins. All art.
I suppose this point may be made more clearly in reverse; sometimes it’s easier to simply think ‘yeah, that would be neat’, but never actually follow up when we receive an idea. It’s always too easy to conjure up excuses not to do something, rather than actually take a single step in the direction that calls us; something akin to what they say about evil and good men doing nothing.
As an artist, when you notice that little spark of an idea, that trigger that calls your attention, no matter how briefly, give it your attention; make an effort to follow that story, that path, that rhythm, that idea, and see where it takes you; that journey is what art is. Don’t “do nothing”.
The idea of a photo like this has been bouncing around in my head for years now; Mt. St. Elias, after dark, with a night sky packed full of stars, and the faintest of glows from our favored star, the sun, lighting the mountain. Yet there were so many reasons why I never took this photo; Mt. St. Elias is hard to get to, and costly, and when you do visit, the summer sky doesn’t get dark enough anyway. Further, in summertime, the alpenglow is on the far side of the mountain, which would mean either shooting the shaded and unlit mountainside, or camping on a glacier (even harder and costlier to get to) on the mountain’s northern side. So, for these and so many other reasons, this photo remained nothing more than a fantasy. I thought ‘oh yeah, that’d be neat’, but never followed up.
Finally, last month, I set off on an adventure that included a very singular focus; I wanted to shoot a photo of Mt. St. Elias, aglow under a night sky.
Don’t do nothing.
Cheers
Carl
Obiter dicta: Social Media and Redundancies
Social Media, with all its tweets, posts, shares, likes, pluses and retweets
=
The internet’s foolproof insurance against avoiding redundancy.
The Hubbard Glacier and Mt. Seattle
Hey Folks,
Here’s an image from the first night of my most recent trip, a month long adventure down around the coastline of Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve. This photo was taken on the air taxi flight out to the coast; we departed a little from the scheduled route and I shot some images of the Hubbard Glacier and surrounding area.
The points of interest here start with the Hubbard Glacier itself, generally regarded as the largest tidewater glacier in the world. At over 70 miles long, it’s quite a chunk of ice (given part of our trip was to look at the Malaspina Glacier and it caving into a tidal lagoon, the Hubbard’s claim to fame may be short-lived; the Malaspina is much bigger, and most definitely reaches the ocean).
Continue readingObiter dicta: Images and the Truth
To say that an image can’t lie is akin to saying a picture can’t tell a story.
Wrangell-St. Elias aerial photo – Erie Mine
Hey Folks,
An abstract aerial shot of the Wrangell Mountains, with a little fall color thrown in. Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve, Alaska.
I’d actually asked the pilot to fly us up in this area in the hope to find a particular glacial scene I wanted to reshoot, but the great patterns and colors along the ridges above the glacier were more interesting; in part because we didn’t find what I was looking for anyway.
Aerial photography is an exciting challenge; trying to see compositions that work in camera from such an unusual perspective is harder than one might imagine. The sensory overload of flying through such magnificent scenery,
Continue readingBrown bear feeding on salmon
Hey Folks,
Just back from 2 weeks of photography brown bears here in Alaska, and I hardly have time to unpack before I’m heading out on my next trip, but I wanted to post something from the bear photo tour before leaving.
This year I wanted to concentrate on some different kinds of images than I normally shoot, so I shot a lot less, and threw out even more than usual; but I did come away with some photos, I think, that I’ll be happy with. I still haven’t looked over all of them yet, but I know I made at least a couple I will like. Once I get down to editing I’ll try to post a few.
Continue reading