Is social media a waste of time?
Photoshelter asked 4 photographers the following 5 questions. Instead of commenting on their responses, I thought it would be best to answer them myself. It’s a great way to think about what and why one does.
1) When did you get started with social media? What prompted you to start factoring social media into your marketing efforts?
I started with a podcast for photography tips. For me it was a way of creating a discipline and forcing me to think through the photography process. If I can teach someone else how to become a better photographer, I learn more as well. I wasn’t looking at it any more than finding a way to help others. The added benefit is that when people think of photographer, they think of me.
2) What are the elements used in your social media strategy? Which do you feel is the most effective?
The biggest element is the concept of giving something back. It doesn’t matter which social outlets you use or what groups you target. As long as your message is relevant to that group. The purpose of social media is to create awareness, maintain awareness and basically advertise. You don’t have to post the sale of the month, just create useful relevant content that is worth something to some one. I get a lot… a lot of positive comments and a couple negative comments. The positive are a great boost to my energy and the negative allow me to look at myself and find a better way.
3) Do you feel the effort is worthwhile? Does it pay for itself? Can you describe any sales successes directly tied to social media?
Post beautiful portraits on Facebook, friends look at them and say… “Who was the photographer?” I get calls. Plain and simple. It becomes word-of mouth or in this case electrons-on-Internet advertising.
4) Who are you targeting with your social media efforts, and how to you expand your base of followers/fans?
I’m a generalist. It’s hard to be a generalist in any field without proof of your abilities, understanding, and experience. Social media gives you that very easily. With my background in physics, I feel I have a more unique understanding of light and how to make it do what I want so I can make the image. As a software developer I understand the representation and requirements for creating the final image. Social media is very organic, and configurable. Various categories of work will naturally show up to those who have an interest. This creates the targets and expansion very easily.
5) Please describe your normal social media routine – from start to finish. How long does the routine typically take?
My weekly 5 minute podcast generally takes about 2 hours on average. This includes either finding or creating the necessary photography, writing the copy, recording, assembling and posting. Then there is the notification process. Some pieces are automatic, but if I finish really late at night, I will either retweet or post to other sources the next morning when people are more apt to see the post. I don’t often dig up or rehash too much, since I have so much new content (at least for me) to do.
A blog post can take anywhere from 5 minutes to several days of work. I decided at the beginning of the year I would do the podcast and 2 blog posts each week. I have a mantra:
- Content worth sharing
- Start with the end in mind
- Write from my uniqueness
- Don’t brag, boast or stretch the truth
- It’s all about writing for people!
When you are ready to post, the most important thing is that your social media has to come from a source that you control. In my case it’s my website. I do not rely on any single social media outlet. So if the individual social media outlet’s terms of service changes, there is an outage, or the service disappears completely I haven’t lost a thing. Once the content is available on my site, it take about 3-5 minutes to push it to the various social media outlets.
-) And the question they didn’t really ask: Are you going to continue to expand and pursue social media?
Whole heartedly, Yes. If you are genuine in you desire to help others, good things come back. Social media is not a one way conversation, and one of the reasons my mother has a hard time understanding why Facebook is different than e-mail. Social media is a way of putting yourself out for examination. It keeps you honest and help show who you really are to the world.
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Sitting Still Life
Is it HDR, fancy photography or Photoshop? The answer is never that simple. Especially if you look at the subject matter, can you imagine getting a young boy to sit long enough for just just one image?
The Photography Tip of the Week #088
Get a Slave (Flash)
088 Photography Tip of the Week (audio)
This tip is one of the best kept secrets of photography. In fact is such a big a secret I often forget it more than I remember. For under $30 you can get a flash that automatically fires when it sees another flash. A slave flash. It doesn’t have a lot of complicated controls, you just turn it on and go. It works with every camera that fires a flash, even point-and-shoot cameras. I often use it behind my subject as a rim light or above as a hair light. It’s also great for illuminating a back wall or any dark area in your scene that just needs more light.
In this second image there is a slave flash behind the model about a meter or so pointed up at about a 45 degree angle. This fills in the background to complete the wrapping effect and make the subject standout. This added separation allows us more flexibility in the photo. It’s a pretty reasonable image as is, but now the subject is more defined we can do a few quick things in Photoshop. In order to do the darkening and blurring of the background in Photoshop took me about 30 seconds. A simple selection was all I needed to separate the subject from the background.
Even if you don’t want to do editing in an image manipulation program like Photoshop, slave flashes are an inexpensive way to add lights throughout your scene.
See into the shadows with HDR
My last post was about selecting which images to use for your HDR… and this is no different, but there’s a bit of a twist on this one. In this case I have a set of images from the same basic location, but there are a lot of shadows of varying degrees. Here is the set of images.
Nine exposures taken with a polarizing filter to cut down on the glare of the windows.
In this case I’m more interested in the extremes. I want to make sure the window frames aren’t too bright. I also really like the deep sky. I could take all of the center exposures, but I’ll only opt for 1/50 since it covers the midtones the best. That should be the case for your photos as long as you properly expose the photo.
Selecting four of the extreme images, but the midtone can make or break the image.
The final tonemapped image allows you to see into the lamps, what’s on the other side of the windows as well as maintain the shadows of the umbrellas, without making them overbearing all while having that beautiful blue sky. Now it’s ready for any enhancements to bring out selected details.
Good range of shadows covered.
Nine to Five HDR
When photographing for HDR images, it’s good to capture nine exposures at on stop apart like the following set of images from the Yadkin Arts Center.
Nine images captured at one stop increments.
Most people would just jump right on in and merge them all. But I’ve almost never found a need to use all nine exposures. Generally I haven’t had a need to use more than five exposures. It’s not a case where it’ll always be the same set of exposures. One would think you would always want the darkest and the lightest, but the reality is that you only use them in extreme cases, because these often inject the bulk of the noise in the image. Below is my choices for this image.
The 5 selected images used to merge the HDR.
I do start to see which image gives me the best highlights and best shadows, but you have to look across the images to see which ones show detail in various parts of the image. I’ve circled the areas that most interested me. Every major section of the image has to be taken into consideration. I want to make sure I have enough detail when looking through the glass as well as the light fixtures under the roof. The final merged photo has the best attributes of the sequence.
Final tonemapped image. The image is ready for any stylistic additions.
The Photography Tip of the Week #087
Munchie Bag Flash
087 Photography Tip of the Week (audio)
Ok, here’s the scenario: It’s after twilight and you with a bunch of friends are sitting around a campfire. You want to take a few photos to remember the occasion, but you have to use the flash since there’s barely enough light to focus. The first image you take is great, you freeze the action and you have no motion blur, but the flash makes everything look strange. You don’t have the nice warm glow from a campfire since the flash made everyone look like surprised ghosts. You adjust your flash power, but no matter how you change your settings either you get a flood of unnatural white light, or really blurry people. So what do you do to balance so you can get the best of both worlds.
Surprised by the white light of the flash. There are hard shadows and the glow of the campfire is barely noticable.
In order to make the photos you want, you have to color your flash. There are many ways to do this, some rather expensive and some not. Before you go out and buy color corrected gels for your flash, try what I call the munchie bag gel. Many bags that have snack foods are translucent and quite capable of coloring the light of your flash. This is inexpensive, available in abundant colors and a way of using those bags. They will even work for point and shoot cameras, because all you have to do is cut enough of a bag to cover your flash.
Cut part of the munchie bag and put it in your difuser or if you don't ahve a difuser use some gaffers tape or blue painters tape to tape it over the flash.
It takes some fiddling to get the look you want. The translucent material is a filter after all and you will need more power to get the light through. It may not be the most professional looking way to color the light from your flash, but it does get the job done on a budget and can yield some surprising results. Here’s a photo from that same campfire using a bag of Chester’s Puffcorn.
A nice natural look with only some minor color correction, there's no need to use Photoshop to colorize the image.
What is HDR
I know that this may be splitting hairs to some, but HDR is a process, it is not a look. So what is HDR?
High Dynamic Range is the process of capturing multiple images at different exposure settings. These images are then merged in software into a HDR file. This file has multiple values for each pixel at different exposure values. And that’s it as far as HDR goes. Currently there is no monitor and definitely no printer that can display this data.
In order to display the data you need to process it and currently the most widely used processes are called tonemapping and exposure blending. Tonemapping allows you to apply a complex set of curves to the HDR file to push and pull various set of pixels to create hyper realistic images to surrealistic images. Exposure blending is a much simpler process of intelligently choosing which pixels to use based on the exposure values. This ensures that none of the data gets clipped and you retain detail across the shadows, midtones and highlights.
This photo is an example of a exposure blended image. It looks very natural and appoximates the richness in color you would expect, especially in the sky.
Technically speaking there is no such thing as an HDR image, since you can see all the data in the HDR file at once. It’s like trying to draw a 2D representation of a 3D object. There’s no way to accurately represent all the data at once, you only show a sampling of it. But like many other tings, I’m sure the term HDR image will end up in the dictionary with a reasonable definition that’s not 100% scientifically or mathematically accurate.
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I am a top photographer in the Mocksville, North Carolina Professional Photographers guide on MarketingTool.com.
