As you may have noticed, or possibly not, I updated the header image recently.  My original goal was to rotate this image out more often than I actually have.  I finally got around to switch the image because I was motivated by this particular photograph.  I like the lighting and shadows, the muted colors, the perspective and the simplicity of the landscape.

I took a photography road trip to Southern Arizona last month with only a slight idea of where I was heading.  I found the location of this image on the map and decided to see if there was anything worth photographing.  There definitely was.

The image was taken in the Las Cienegas National Conservation Area near Sonoita, Arizona.  This is cattle ranching and vineyard country with miles of grasslands, majestic mountain views and long stretches of empty back roads.  If you get the opportunity and want to try your hand at some Arizona landscape and nature photography this is a fantastic area.  It is not the better known Grand Canyon and traditional desert views Arizona is know for, but it is a hidden Arizona photographic gem.

The need or opportunity to photograph a new car in any detail probably won’t come up too often.  But shooting a new car can be fun and allow you to explore a subject from every angle.  It is a great exercise in seeing.  So should the chance come along, here are 5 tips to help you get started photographing a car.

1) Pay Attention to the Light – Although lighting is key when shooting any subject, the lighting you use to shoot an automobile can play an exceptionally important role.  With very few exceptions, a new car is very shiny.  That means the wrong lighting can reek havoc on your subject.  Get the lighting wrong and you can have all kinds of issues; glare, reflections, over exposed in one area and under in another, the list can go on and on.  Since most of us cannot set up an indoor studio large enough to accommodate a whole car we have to resort to natural outdoor lighting.  But do not fret, there is a magic solution, of sorts.  You have two chances each day to find the ideal lighting situation for car photography.  The magic hour , as it is known, will give you natural light without harsh shadows or overly bright highlights.   This limits you to only an hour of shooting, give or take, but the end results will be well worth it.

2) Explore – You will want to take the basic shots; one from all four sides.  But do not stop there.  Explore the car in detail as you would any subject.  Get down low – even if that means laying on the ground, get up high – bring a ladder along, get up close, follow the natural lines of the car, check under the hood, in the trunk and don’t miss the interior.  And don’t forget the details that make each car unique.  Most cars today have some amazing lines and curves that when composed well make great images.

3) Don’t Let the Minor Details Ruin the Image – When shooting any subject even the most minor thing can distract from the overall image.  Think of that one hair that is out of place and how it becomes the focus of a portrait.  The same is true when photographing a car.  Keep a sharp eye out for these minor flaws that can ruin the otherwise perfect shot such as dust, scratches, window smudges and the like.  Of particular importance is reflections.  Again, being a shiny object it sees all.  Make sure you are not taking an unintentional self-portrait or that other objects nearby are not stealing center stage.

4) Chose Your Location Carefully – When deciding where to photograph the car you want to pick a location that compliments the car and doesn’t steal all the glory.  Or worse, one that is just a distraction with too much background busyness.  A parking lot may seem like a natural choice for a car, but make sure it is one without 17 other cars making yours look like “just another car.”  There should be no doubt that the car is the subject of the photo and not the building, people, city scape or whatever else is in the background.  That having been said, an appropriate urban, rural or scenic setting can often compliment the car and help tell its story.   Just keep the car as the main character.

5) Post Processing – Post processing, editing images in a software program such as PhotoShop, can be your best friend.  In case you miss one of the above tips, and it will happen, there is not much you can’t fix after the fact if your post processing skills are up to it.  You obviously want to get as close to the perfect shot the first time right out of the camera.  But perfection rarely happens the first time around.  So when you have the perfect setting but there is a no parking sign in your shot or you overlook your own smiling face in the chrome, don’t hesitate to save the image with a little magic wand and spot healing.

The Magic Hour, or as it is sometimes called, the Golden Hour, in photography is the time of day when the natural  ambient light is said to be at its ideal.  Although the time may not be an hour by the clock it is generally the hour (or so) following sunrise and preceding sunset.  At these times of day the hue of the lighting is warmer (more towards the orange and reds of the color wheel) and it is less harsh overall.  In contrast, mid-day lighting can be overly harsh causing deep and dark shadows and highlights that are too bright.  These conditions can often lead to an over exposed image.  The softer light of the magic hour will give you a much better lit image and fewer dark shadows.

Lighting, whether ambient or added in, plays a critical role in the end result of the image.  Paying attention to the position of the sun and the time of day can make a significant difference and is worth taking into consideration before snapping the shutter.

With the recent death of Jim Marshall, a highly regarded photographer who documented much of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, interest in the photography of that era has been on the rise.  Photography played a significant role in documenting the Civil Rights struggle and bringing it to the forefront of America’s consciousness.   The New York Times recently published Civil Rights Battles, in Black and White by David Gonzalez on their blog Lens as a tribute to the photography of the era and its role in the movement.  Well worth checking out.

On of my favorite places to photograph nature and wildlife, birds in particular, is the Riparian Preserve in Gilbert, Arizona.  I have spent quite a few early mornings there with camera in hand.  The Preserve is supported by the Riparian Institute which has the mission to:

To promote awareness and appreciation of Arizona’s ecology and natural history, particularly desert and riparian environments, through:
-  education and recreation programs for a diversity of visitors, and
-  research and development of strategies to reserve and protect these unique environments

As with most organizations such as this fund raising to support the mission is critical.  The Riparian Institute is no different and they are holding a Feathered Friends Festival to raise both funds and awareness as well as provide a day of fun for the community.  The festival is on Saturday, March 27th and starts with bird walks at 8 am and runs through 2 pm.  Along with exhibits, activities for kids and live music they will be holding a fund raising raffle.  Which is where I come in.  One of my prints taken in the Preserve will be part of the raffle to support this great cause.  So be sure to head out to Gilbert, at Guadalupe and Greenfield on Saturday to support the Riparian Institute  and the environment it protects.

First for a disclaimer; I am in no way condoning taking photographs in places where you see one of these signs.  However, as we see more and more stories in the news (or at least in photography news) about photographer’s rights it is interesting to see the photography of those who do defy the signs.

Strictly No Photography is a collection of photographs taken in places such as museum, churches, concerts and government facilities where photography is forbidden by signs such as this.  They state their mission as: “To organize the world’s forbidden visual information and make it universally accessible and useful.”  As a bit of further defiance, there is also a gallery of “no photography” signs.

I have stacks of Popular Photography and it is by far one of the best photography magazines around.  Even if you do not read it cover-to-cover it is a great resource to keep on hand and refer back to for tips and tricks as well as a buying guide.  Now you can get a full year’s subscription or renew your current subscription for only $4.00.   At the risk of sounding like an infomercial; “that is only 33 cents an issue!”  But wait, there’s more!  Add on a second year for only $4.00 more!  this great deal is through discountmags.com when you use the coupon code 6976.  I’m not sure how long this deal is going to last so make sure you take advantage before it expires.

UPDATE: This promo code has expired.  But the code J20 will get you 20% off your order.  Not quite a $4 per year subscription, but still a good deal for Popular Photography.

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.

I have taken 1000s of photographs over the last few years but I have had very few of them printed.  Most are displayed digitally on this blog or Flickr or Facebook or stored on my external hard drives.  For the most part I just never think to have my photographs printed.  I suppose if I had done a lot of film photography before getting into digital photography I would place more significance on the printed image.

However, I was recently awed by a print of one of my images enough that I may have to rethink my whole view of having my photographs printed.  It started with being followed by and and following @photocanvas on Twitter, aka ZaZa Gallery.  They were offering free 16 x 20 canvas prints in exchange for a review of the finished product.  Free is a price I can get into and was happy to oblige.

The hardest part of the process was deciding which image to have printed.  Not having had any canvas prints done before I was not sure how it would turn out or what image would look good in this format.  I decided on one of my favorite images (on the right) of the Barrio Historico in Tucson, AZ.  I love the pops of color on the three doors and the clear blue sky above the adobe building.  So I sent the image off with no idea what to expect in return.

The result was amazing.  I got a 16 x 20 canvas print with a mirror wrap (that means the image is “mirrored” or repeated as the canvas wraps around the edges of the frame) and was blown away.  The colors were true to, if not better than, my original.  Every detail of the image is crystal clear and vibrant. The construction is very solid using archival canvas.  All I can say is “wow.”  This particular print runs $68.  I have never price shopped canvas prints so I have no idea of this is high, low or right in the middle.  But for the quality of the final product i got it is well worth it.

My friend over at Awesome Toy Blog forwarded me an article from the British Journal of Photography about photographer’s rights in the UK.  There has been a lot of buzz in photography news lately about the rights of both amateur photographers as well as photojournalists in the UK being impeded upon by the police.  Although you hear similar stories of “harassment” from the police of photographers here in the US, the British seem to have taken it to a whole new level.  All in the name of anti-terrorism.

New laws that recently went into effect in the UK  could result in jail for photographing police. The laws:

allow for the arrest – and imprisonment – of anyone who takes pictures of officers ‘likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism’.

This seems to leave a lot of room for interpretation by the police while limiting the rights of the photographer even further.  There have been stories of everyone from press photographers to wedding photographers being stopped, questioned and even detained for what the police determine to be “suspicious” photography behavior.  I would hope this would be no more than a minor inconvenience for the truly innocent but at the same time it seems to be taking things too far.  Especially when images of more and more public spaces are readily available to anyone on the web via Google maps and live web cams that record more and more of our everyday lives.  Are the terrorists really the ones standing in front of Parliament with their Canon DSLR snapping photographs?