Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, Grady Gammage Auditorium sits on the campus of Arizona State University.  Although neither Wright nor Gammage lived to see the building constructed it was their partnership that brought the auditorium to life.  Originally designed as an opera house for Baghdad, Iraq, Wright adapted it to the campus of ASU as part of Gammage’s vision to create a university auditorium that stood out from all others.  It was Wright’s only public building in Arizona, the home of the western campus of his Taliesin School of Architecture.

The building reaches the height of an 8 story building and can seat over 3,000 people.  It has become Arizona State’s iconic structure with its prominent location at the intersections of Apache Blvd. and Mill Ave.  Today the auditorium plays host to everything from Broadway musicals to symphonic concerts to lectures and solo performances.

Above all else, Gammage Auditorium stands out to me because of its architecture, both exterior and interior.  From the repeated use of circles to the copper and pink tones that show their best in the setting sun this is a classic Wright design.

f/4.0 – 1/500 sec – ISO 400 – Focal Length 50 mm

In my list of the top 5 museums worth photographing in Phoenix I included Arizona State University Art Museum among them. As I mentioned, the museums in my list are there primarily because I feel they are photographic from an architectural standpoint rather than because of their collections and exhibits.  However, depending on your photography style and likes and dislikes, you may find the contents of the museum more to your liking.  Or you may want to take some shots of the architectural elements and then visit the art as a bonus.  Either way the ASU Art Museum will not disappoint.  The giant pink and gray concrete structure begs to be photographed and explored.  Its architectural details play with the light and shadows making for an image possibility around every corner.

Plan on spending at least an hour shooting the exterior before you head in to explore the exhibits.  Also keep in mind the mid-day Arizona sun can be harsh especially with vast expanses of gray concrete.  So you are better off arriving very early or waiting until that “magic hour” before the sun sets to photograph this museum.

Arizona State University Art Museum – Southern Facade

Arizona State University Art Museum Architectural Detail

f/5.6 – 1/100 sec – ISO 100 – Focal Length 28 mm           

ASU Art Museum Architecture Element

How to Implement Search Engine Optimization for Photography Blogs

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of enhancing your web site with the goal of driving more traffic to it.  This is usually associated with moving your site closer to the top of the first page of search engine results so that more people find it and visit it.  Most SEO tips and tricks revolve around optimizing written content for keywords.  For most photo based blogs that presents a bit of a challenge given the minimal written content and focus on the visual.  But there are still several things that you can do to help your photo blog SEO efforts and bring your site closer to the top of the search engine results for keywords that are relevant to your site.

Before  you start to implement any of these Search Engine Optimization tips you will want to have an idea of the keywords that are most important to your site and that you want people to use to find you.  Take some time to figure out what a searcher might be typing into Google or Bing that would be relevant to your site.  Keep in mind that the broader the term the more competition and less likely you are to show up on page one.  For example, photography is a very broad term that could lead to millions of sites.  But Phoenix Arizona architecture photography is much more specific and therefore more likely to work for a site that is focused on this particular type of photography in this region.

Here are five SEO tips for photo blogs that are easy to implement with each post.

1. Page Title Tags - The title tag is the wording that appears at the top of the search engine page.  It is an important determinant to the search engines as to the content of the site.  Make sure it is descriptive and has one of those keywords you are going after.  But don’t ramble, keep it to about a dozen words give or take a few.
2. Alt Image Tags – One thing a search engine spider cannot do when crawling a site to determine its content is decipher images.  This can be a problem to a photography blog that is heavy on the images.  But there is a way around this, alt image tags.  This is search engine readable text that describes the photograph in words.  If you are html savvy it can be added as part of the html code or most blogging programs have a way to add alt image tags when uploading images to a post.  The same rules apply to alt image tags as page title tags, make it descriptive and use one of your keywords.
3. Written Content – Your blog is all about your photography and you don’t want to clutter it up with words.  But written content, to some degree, can be vital to improving your ranking in the search engines.  It is this written content that allow the search engines to crawl your site and figure out what you are about and if you are relevant enough to show for a given search query.  That doesn’t mean you need page after page of babbling text.  But some good, concise, keyword optimized (not keyword stuffed) content describing the images can be very helpful.  Do not shy away from the written word.
4. Emphasize It – Don’t go crazy with this one, but formatting that makes something stand out to a human eye also makes it stand out to the search engine crawlers.  Bold text and italicized text say “pay attention – this part is important.”  Used correctly it can guide the search engine to the details of a page that are of particular importance to its overall theme.
5. Inbound Links - The content on your site is important but so is who else thinks your site is important.  The search engines determine this by looking at who is linking back to you.  High quality sites that link to your site can be gold.  You have to do some leg work and more than just comment on other blogs with a link to your site.  Get your web site out there.  Do guest posts, use Twitter, Facebook and other social media, discuss on forums, befriend other bloggers.  Get people talking about and linking to your site.

Bonus – Meta Descriptions – Although most search engines no longer use meta descriptions as a factor in determining the relevance and rank of a website they can still be a useful tool.  They are often used as the site description on the search engine results page (SERP) which means you can control those few lines of text that searchers see as the description of what your site is about when your page comes up in the search engines.  If you tie in some of those keywords that you are trying to rank for and it is one of the words the searcher used they get bolded.  That means you site could stand out a bit more as being the one that is relevant to what your searcher is looking for.