SEO For Photographers, Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is important for photographers. With the growing number of photographer websites on the internet, it is increasingly difficult for a photographer’s website to be noticed by photo buyers who rely on search results. Good positioning in search engine results translates into revenue. Here in a nutshell are some of the SEO ideas that I have found effective in the 12 years that I have maintained a stock photography website.
Inbound Links and Link Juice. No secret here: to become highly-ranked your website needs inbound links from external websites that themselves are ranked well. It is widely accepted that acquiring inbound links is the singlemost important factor in achieving high search presence (i.e., being found on the first page of search results). The obvious implication is that your website should offer content valuable enough that others will link to it. Suppose Z.COM links to your website A.COM. The more highly Z.COM itself is rated (such as measured by its Google Rank or other metrics), the more “link juice” will flow from Z.COM to A.COM, increasing A.COM’s likelihood of appearing in search results. As your website accumulates inbound links from external sites that have a equal or higher Google Rank than yours, increasing amounts “link juice” flow to your website with the result that your website’s presence in search results increases. The more “juice” you have, the better you will usually do in search results. Link juice is the steriod of the SEO game, and trust me you want a fix. Obtaining link juice is a numbers game, both in terms of the quantity of inbound links, the number of unique websites from which those links originate, and the ranking or “juice” that those sites have themselves. Yahoo, CNN, DMOZ, National Geographic, wire services, Apple and Microsoft are examples of sites which offer a lot of juice in their links. (Wikipedia is a notable exception which I explain later.) Note that while quality content that attracts links to your site is the goal moving forward, the number of inbound links you have today depends a lot on your website’s tenure. The longer your website has been in existence and accessible to the world, the greater the number of honest and juicy inbound links you are likely to have.
The above-mentioned issue of inbound links is so overwhelming in its importance to search engine ranking and SEO that the remaining items can be considered second order. I will mention them anyway. But keep in mind that obtaining good, honest, inbound links with juice must be your priority if you wish to have a highly ranked website that succeeds in being found in search results.
Inbound Link Text. The specific text of an inbound link is important. For instance, suppose you have a web page http://www.mysite.com/bed-bug.html. Suppose two links point to it but with different text: “Click here” and “Information about the Bed Bug”. Which do you think is more likely to cause search engines to rank your bed bug page highly when someone searches for “bed bug info”? That’s right, the second link with meaningful text is the better one. So, when you build links within your own website, make sure that the specific text that makes up the link is composed of relevant keywords for which you wish the target page to be associated. If you care about SEO then your days of making “click here” links are over.
Google Is The Bomb. Face it, Google search is where you want to do well right now. Yahoo, Bing and the others are small time, relative to Google. If you can achieve high rankings in non-Google search engines, it will result in some traffic. But the real money and the big traffic is through Google. Learn how Google works and apply it to your own website.
The URL. The specific URL of your web page is mighty important. Try to construct the URL so that the keywords or topics that it should be associated with are actually part of the URL itself. For example, http://www.mysite.com/bed-bug-information.html is much more helpful to having your bed bug page rank highly for the keywords “information about bed bugs” than is the URL http://www.mysite.com/content_3a-7.html or http://www.mysite.com/page?id=347
Keywords. OK, by now we all know, or have at least heard, that search engines no longer consider keywords in their algorithms. In the old days crafty HTML coders would define way too many keywords in the META NAME=”KEYWORDS”… field, in the hopes of appearing in as many search results as possible. The search engines caught onto this long ago, and at this point it is believed that none of the search engines use keywords in ranking search results. They probably still have some value and I continue to use them, but I don’t hold my breath that they are helping the search engine presence of my site.
Description. The META NAME=”DESCRIPTION”… field is very important. Keep it reasonably short but at the same time make sure to use keyword-rich and reasonably natural language. It is thought that words that appear earliest in the description are most influential as far as indexing and ranking. Consider omitting words that, while perhaps important in a description that would be read in a printed document, are not crucial to your search goals – doing this increases the keyword density and importance of the remaining keywords in the description field.
Headers. In a similar way to the description metadata, header tags H1, H2 and so on also factor into how search engines rank and index a web page. Consider wording headers so they are particularly relevant, dense in meaningful keywords and positioned highly in the HTML source of the page. Note: blog post titles are often defined in H1 or H2 tags, so chose your blog post titles carefully.
Keyword Rich Content. Again, no surprises here. If you wish a page on your website to be considered highly for a given topic or set of keywords, the content (text) of the page should be rich in meaningful keywords for that topic. In other words, keyword density is important. However, going overboard and artificially repeating keywords in text probably works against you. My personal feeling is that Google is able to recognize highly unnatural language constructs, including repeated keywords, and penalizes for it.
Topmost Content Rules. The first 100 words of your page’s content are considered more important than the next 100 words, and so on. In the same way that many web visitors will only read the first few sentences of your blog post, search engines probably only consider a portion of the content at the top, perhaps only a small portion. So, make the first few sentences of your content count!
Ordering of DIVs. Often the appearance of a web page is somewhat independent of the ordering of DIV fields in the HTML. (If you don’t know what DIVs are, don’t worry. If you use modern blogging or template-driven website software, chances are good you have DIVs in your code.) Provided DIVs can be reordered in your HTML code, you should place those DIV fields that matter most earlier in your HTML. For instance, suppose your blog has a DIV with a list of courtesy links to other websites (e.g., a blogroll) as well as a DIV with actual text of your blog post for that day. You should be sure that the DIV composed of links appears last. If you don’t, there is a good chance search engines will consider the links more important than your actual content! Most good blogging software takes care of this for you. But, if you use a custom template for your blog or website, you should check to ensure that DIV fields are ordered so that the ones that are most important for SEO appear first in the HTML.
ALT Text. This one is a biggie for photographers. Important images on your website should have ALT text associated with them. No ifs, ands or buts. Get that ALT text in your IMG tag or you are limiting the potential for the world to find that image in search results. The reason for this is simple. Search engine spiders know an image is on a web page by virtue of the IMG tag. But the spider and its associated indexing algorithms have no direct way of understanding what the image is about. Search engines must infer what the subject of the image is by examining text the precedes and follows the IMG tag. There is, however, one way that you can directly associate keywords with an image: the ALT field in the IMG tag. The ALT field is used to provide information in browsers which are incapable of displaying images, or in which image display is turned off. Granted, there are not many of those browsers any more. But the field holds immense importance for ensuring that your images are indexed and appear in searches such as Google Images. For instance, suppose your bed bug web page displays your superb photo of the rare species Nocturnicus itchius. At a bare minimum, the IMG tag should contain meaningful ALT text such as ALT=”Bed bug photo, Nocturnicus itchius”. Without this tag, search engine spiders will have to guess what the image contains. If the content (the text your visitors are reading) is well written, search engine indexing algorithms may make a correct guess that the image has something to do with a bed bug. But don’t make the search engines guess: spell it out for them by defining ALT text for the image that makes it crystal clear what the image is.
Reasonable Number of Links Per Page. Too many links on one page is ineffective, at least as far as getting search engines to notice them all. It is believed that search engine indexing algorithms discount later links on a page that contains many links, eventually ignoring links beyond the Nth link altogether. What is N? In other words, how many links on a page before there are too many? That’s something only Google can tell us, and they of course won’t. But the general idea is that you should not stuff too many links on a page if you want them to be noticed by search engines. More effective is to have a small number of well-crafted links, the ones you really care about, and save the others for another page somewhere else.
Presence in Web Directories. DMOZ and Yahoo are two of the oldest and most substantial internet directories. Before search became the way we found information on the web (remember AltaVista, the first of the good search engines?), there were directories. Yahoo was the first one I recall, and DMOZ was sort of an oddball directory that eventually became huge and is well organized. Some measures of relevance involved in search engine rankings likely factor in whether a page or website is present in the directories such as DMOZ and Yahoo. Not to mention, the many free “directories” in which you can register and enter your information. Most of these directories provide a link back to your website.
NOFOLLOW Links Do Not Help You. “Nofollow” links are links that contain the NOFOLLOW attribute. Search engines will notice these links but the link will not add to the ranking of the target web site. A notable example of this is Wikipedia. At one time, links from Wikipedia were very important in search engine rankings. Wikipedia is one of the most prominent and highly ranked sites on the web. A simple link from Wikipedia to, say, your bed bug page would go a long way toward increasing the ranking of that bed bug page. However, because of the rash of spam links inserted by crafty webmasters into Wikipedia pages specifically to improve the ranking of their non-Wikipedia web sites, the folks at Wikipedia decided to convert all outbound links to NOFOLLOW. I noticed the effects of this on my own website when my Google rank dropped from a 6 to 5 shortly after this policy change at Wikipedia was implemented — the links in the various Wikipedia sites that pointed to my website suddenly became invisible to the ranking algorithms, lowering the rankings of sites such as mine that were formally benefitting from Wikipedia links. Now, I’d love to tell Wikipedia that all those links pointing to my website are honest and should be left in place without the NOFOLLOW attribute, that I did not put them there myself for my own selfish purposes, blah blah blah, but Wikipedia made their policy change and and as far as they are concerned websites like mine can go pound sand. What would be neat is if the entire internet reciprocated by converting their links to Wikipedia into NOFOLLOW links. By the way, links in Flickr image descriptions and comments are NOFOLLOW as well.
Blog Comment Links Are NOFOLLOW. Many photographers maintain blogs that foster commentary and discussion. These are great, I love them. However, it should be understood that blog software will often convert any links appearing in comments into NOFOLLOW links. This is done in an effort to curb blog comment spam. If your blog allows full-juice comment links (i.e., links without the NOFOLLOW attribute), you can expect to be targeted by blog comment spammers who will try to pepper your blog with comments that simply link back to their own website. So, if you are making an effort to add comments in blogs that link back to your website, you should understand that often those links will not carry any juice since they are NOFOLLOW links. The blog owner usually has control over whether comment links are FOLLOW or NOFOLLOW, and it is my impression that most prefer NOFOLLOW. Note that links in the body of the post are FOLLOW links, and lend juice to the site to which they point. It is usually just the comment links that are castrated by NOFOLLOW.
Tenure of Domain Name Registration. The longer your domain name has been registered, and the longer until it must be renewed, the more substantial your website appears to search engines. Consider a web site that has been in existence for only a few years, and whose domain name registration expires in 3 months. Do you think Google is going to consider that site to be worthy of a high ranking? Not! You can’t do anything about how long your website has been in existence — time will take care of that. But you can make sure that your domain name is registered for 3, 5, even 7 years into the future. Search engine algorithms take both past and future tenure of domain name registration into account.
Web Hosting. If your web hosting service is spotty with frequent downtimes or slow response, it may affect your rankings negatively, especially if there are times that search engine spiders try to crawl your site but cannot reach it. Make sure you are with a solid hosting company. Enough said.
Social Media and Networking. I am not sure where the “social media” forms (Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, photography community websites and forums) will take us as far as SEO and search presence is concerned. Social media seem effective for developing contacts and followers who in turn may link to your website. So in that sense working to achieve social media prominence may indirectly improve the search presence of one’s site by virtue of additional inbound links. However, if generating visibility in search results is the goal, I think social media may be helpful only in a second- or third-order way. Indeed, it may be misleading by giving one the sense that one’s website is being seen and quality traffic is being generated. In my opinion, for the photographer wishing to sell images, the best traffic does not come from other photographers encountered in social media networks but from actual photo buyers. I have yet to generate a single photo sale that I can directly credit to Twitter, Facebook, Flickr or any similar networks. (Mind you, I am not prominent in these networks which may be the reason.) However, I have managed to touch base with a wide variety of talented, inspiring and interesting photographers, so in that sense social media networking has been productive and enjoyable so far. One is smart to stay abreast of the very fluid world of social media and networking; who knows what the playing field will be like in 2-3 years.
Geocoding and Geotagging. Read my past comments about geocoding and geotaggings your photos. Very few photographers currently geotag their photos so I am ahead of the curve in this regard. But not for long: technology is quickly making geotagging sufficiently simple that soon many photographers will be doing it. There are geo-oriented search situations in which geotagged images will appear and non-geotagged images will never be seen.
Link Farms. Don’t do it. In the old days smart-ass webmasters would set up a multitude of worthless websites, all linking to each other or even to a single target website, you know the one: Buyjunk.com. The idea was to fool Google into thinking Buyjunk.com was worthy of a high ranking due to the sheer number of external links (from the other domains in the link farm) that pointed to Buyjunk.com. Google caught on to this simpleton scheme long ago. It is thought that Google penalizes this technique heavily. Especially obvious are link farms in which all the domains are owned by a few owners or are hosted in close proximity to one another, something Google can determine easily by cross referencing domain name registration information, and by comparing IP addresses and traceroute paths.
Cloaking. Don’t do it. Another smart-ass trick some webmasters use is to present one set of content to human visitors but another to search engines. (This is done with server-side scripting and examining the user-agent to determine if the visitor is a human or a search engine crawler.) Search engine algorithms will detect this (by occasionally sending a crawler that looks to your website like a human and comparing the two versions of content that it see) and penalize you for it.
Flash Websites. You guessed it: don’t do it. That is, if you want a given web page to be noticed and well-indexed by Google, don’t make it a Flash page. We’ve all seen them, the beautiful web pages with moving images, slide shows, awesome user controls, etc etc. However, when was the last time you saw one of these pages showing up in Google search results? The only way a web page be effectively indexed and appear in meaningful search results is through the use of text content and tags (all those mentioned above). Flash obscures text. Flash is a visual tool and does not put emphasis on text. Flash web designers will tell you they can make hidden HTML and text code “behind” the Flash presentation. While text “behind” the Flash-presentation is possible, I still have yet to see one of those all-Flash web pages show up highly in a set of Google search results. By the way, a Flash programmer may structure a page to deliver text content to Google and other search engine crawlers but Flash content to human visitors. This is nothing more than cloaking (mentioned above) and will be detected and likely penalized by search engine algorithms. Challenge your Flash designer to point you to an example where a Flash-based website shows up highly in a Google search that matters; I do not think he will be able to. There are some exceptions to this caveat, in which Flash occupies only a portion of the page and is surrounded by textual content and tags that search engine spiders can latch onto and index. But in general, if you really want to have a Flash-based website, it is best to maintain two sites: a Flash-based website for your ego, and a text-based website for Google. You’ll see which one gets the traffic.
Summary: Offer Killer Content and Hope for Juicy Links. The most effective strategy for a photographer to achieve strong presence in search is to offer fantastic photos that others want to link to. Put great images on your site, surrounded by meaningful and interesting text, make sure to use keywords in the right places and in moderate amounts, and be generous in linking to others so that they in turn may decide to link to you. And cross your fingers that Google takes notice.
Resources: I would be remiss if I did not mention the excellent tutorial that Photoshelter offers about SEO techniques for photographers. None of the information is new, but it is assembled in a concise and informative presentation. Also, some months ago I posted remarks about Websitegrader.com, a great resource for finding weaknesses in your website’s overall internet presence.
In my experience, good positioning in search engine results translates into inquiries and revenue. I have reasonably good position in search results. With the exception of my blog, the code on my website is 100% homegrown and hand-written. My blog is a heavily modified version of Wordpress; I have made many changes to improve it for SEO purposes and to fit my own preferences. Much of the luck I have had comes from tenure. My website has been on the web since 1997, and my blog since 2005. My website may not be the prettiest but it has proven to be reasonably effective at being crawled, indexed and ranked highly for many of the subjects that I have photographed. By virtue of the way I have designed and maintained my website with SEO in mind, I have some 5000+ unique visitors each day, up to 10,000 a day if one of the subjects I have happens to be in the news and people are searching for photos of it. Some of those visitors are photo buyers. Some of those photo buyers like my image(s) enough to contact me and inquire. And some of those inquiries result in sales. Basically, my marketing plan is to continue adding images to my website, and sit and wait for the phone to ring. Admittedly, I could be more proactive and market my photos in traditional ways: submitting article proposals, contacting editors with story ideas or to inquire about what their editorial calendar holds for the coming year, networking with industry types, joining photography societies or developing a “brand”. However, life for me these days precludes any substantial marketing, so I instead pick the “low-hanging fruit”. In general a client will contact me about an image that he has found on my website, usually via search engine results. Note that this is a “self-selected client”: it is already established that he is interested in my image (or he would not have contacted me). So the only unknown is if we will agree on the fee. Low-hanging fruit indeed, due entirely to an appearance in search results. Note that I have never “exchanged links” with anyone who has approached me with a link exchange proposal, nor have I ever paid for any advertising or paid-link services.
I am pretty sure my search engine presence is organic, honest and based on simple SEO tactics. For example, take the latin name (scientific name) of virtually any subject of mine, add the word “photo” or “photos” to it, and search for it in Google. Chances are good my site will appear on the first page of results, often in the top 3. A few examples: Balaenoptera musculus photo, Megaptera novaeangliae photo, Cardinalis cardinalis photos. Similarly for common names combined with the word photo/photos: sea lion photos, jumping cougar photos, tiger shark photos, photo of Mesa Arch, Vernal Falls photos, and here’s an odd one: list of fish species. Results shift around a bit over time, but today most of those examples show one of my pages appearing first in the results and (today) none is lower than #3. By the way, you will notice Ron Niebrugge’s and Q.T. Luong’s websites appearing very highly in those results too. As well, in his recent post Top 10 SEO Tips for Photographers, Jon Cornforth offers some examples of how his SEO work has put him at the top of search results for some of his Alaska photo subjects. This is no surprise, all three of these professional photographers have exceptional images and well-designed web sites. In fact, Q.T. Luong’s site is one of the few photographer sites that receives a Google Rank of 6. (I used to have a 6 but when Wikipedia changed their links to NOFOLLOW I dropped from 6 to 5. Damn you, Internet!)
Keywords: SEO, search engine optimization, photography SEO, website design for photographers.
A Note To Visitors
Please link to this website!
Do you like these photos? I hope so! I’ve gone to a lot of effort to not only take these photos but put them on the web for you and others to enjoy. If you like them, please consider linking to my web site. That’s right, make a link to my site (OceanLight.com) from your Facebook page, MySpace page, your Twitter account, your favorite internet community or from your school’s website. Linking to my site is a cost-free and effective way to support my photography efforts since your link will raise the visibility of my website and, hopefully, lead a few more photo buyers to use my images in their publications. If you do link to my site, drop me a line and let me know. I’ll do my best to respond personally and say “thanks”.
I you want to link to my site, here is some HTML you can use. Just put your cursor in the box below, hit Control-A (”select all”), then Control-C (”copy”), and then paste it. Thanks!
Student Questions About My Photographs and Requests to Use My Images
Since this site was first published on the web in 1996, I have many questions from students worldwide regarding my photos and the animal subjects I photograph. Regrettably, constraints on my time do not permit me to respond personally to all questions these days.
I also receive numerous requests from students and well-meaning organizations to use my images in school reports and on school or personal web sites. Please know that these images are costly to produce and I cannot give them away in high resolution form without a fee. However, you may use a printed copy of one of my images in your printed report, see below.
Printed Reports:
Students may use the images appearing on my site (OceanLight.com), in printed reports only for use in an elementary school, middle school or high school setting, provided:
- The image is not altered in any way. This means that the watermark credit embedded in the image (if there is one) remains intact. I hope you understand, the watermark embedded in the image really needs to be there. The reality of the internet is that if I don’t put my name in the image, people will use it without even mentioning me or the fact that I worked hard to produce the image.
- The image is reproduced in printed form only. It may not be copied to another web site, emailed to others or stored on a computer server.
- A link to my website (Oceanlight.com) is created on your Facebook or MySpace page, Twitter account or your school’s website, and a written acknowledgement is included in the report, with a statement like “Blue whale image copyright Phillip Colla / Oceanlight.com.” See above for how to make a link to my website.
If you are really curious about the copyright, you can see my Full Copyright Statement.
Metadata, Photography and Workflow for the Web
Metadata (n, pl): data about data. Any questions?
Recently, there has been a lot of discussion in photography circles about metadata: what is it, how to manage it, what is it good for, etc. Some of the photographers I follow in the blogosphere and more recently on Twitter have interesting things to say on the matter (look to the right for links to some of these guys). I decided to offer some comments about how I use metadata, in the hope these might be useful to other photographers. Who the hell am I and why do my comments matter, you wonder? Good question. I do not have much of a profile among photographers, which is somewhat intentional, but I do have a website that does well with the one search engine that really matters. By way of introduction, here is a short bio about me and about how my website developed over the last 11 years. During that time I have learned how to leverage photographic metadata on a photography website (at least search engines seem to like my site) and am willing to share some of what I have learned. As an aside, other than maintain a website I do no marketing whatsoever, nor do I send out submissions anymore. All of my licensing activity comes either because a client contacted me via my website, or through a couple of old-fashioned photographer-representative-type agencies I am with. Revenues stemming from my website outnumber the agency revenues about 8:1. I attribute this to the effective use of metadata on my website.
If your goal is to develop a stock photography website that shows up in search engine results, metadata about your photographs is crucial. Text, in particular metadata accompanying photos, is all that search engines are able to grab and hold on to as they try to index and spider a website. If your site displays beautiful images with little metadata to accompany them, your site stands a good chance of not appearing in meaningful search engine results. Except for specialized search engines that index image data directly (e.g., Tineye), search engines use the textual information on your site when evaluating it. This goes for images too — search engines will consider the text associated with an image when trying to categorize an image. If you have organized that text information well, and made sure it includes meaningful metadata about the image(s) that are displayed on that web page, that image or page at least has the potential to show up well in search results.
In my workflow there are three types of metadata that I am concerned with:
- EXIF: shooting parameters, recorded by the camera
- GEO: geographic data, if I am geocoding the images
- IPTC: user-supplied information, describing characteristics and business matters related to the image or me.
Following is a description of my photography workflow, from the time the images are downloaded to a computer until my website is updated to include the most recent images. The percentages are the relative time it takes for each step, not including the selections, editing and Photoshop work which take place at the very beginning and which are independent of the metadata side of things.
Step 1: EXIF, The Default Image Metadata (5%)
First I edit the shoot down to keepers. Typically, each keeper is a pair of files: one raw and one “master”. The raw file automatically contains EXIF data about the shooting parameters, copyright information, etc. The master file, usually a 16-bit TIFF or high quality JPEG that is a descendent of the raw file having been processed in a raw converter and or Photoshop, contains the EXIF data as well. At this point nothing special has been done about metadata. The EXIF metadata that is already in the images was placed there by my camera, requiring no work on my part and is what I consider “default metadata”.
I back up my RAW keepers at this point. They have not been touched by any digital management or geocoding software; they are right out of the camera. These go on a harddisk and on DVD disks, and are set aside for safe keeping in case the RAW file is somehow corrupted later in my workflow. It has not happened to me yet, knock on wood, but one never knows…
Step 2: Geographic Metadata, Geocoding (optional) (5%)
If I have geographic location data, it is added now. I often geocode my images, which is the process of associating GPS information, e.g., latitude, longitude and altitude, with the image. I use a small handheld GPS to record the locations as I shoot, and these locations are added to the images by a geocoding program. Conceptually, geocoding gives the image some additional value, since it is now associated with a particular place at a particular time. Sometimes the accuracy of this geocoding is as tight as 20′ (6m). It usually just takes a few minutes to launch the geocoding application, point it to the images and the GPS data, and have it do its thing.
Having GEO data in the image, and later in the database that drives my website, allows me to do some interesting things with my images and blog posts, such as presenting them with Google Earth at the location where they were shot. For example, this photo of the Wave in the North Coyote Buttes is geocoded, and can be viewed in Google Earth by clicking the little blue globe icon. The same goes for most of the blog posts I have: they can be viewed in Google Earth at the right place on the planet. Here is another example. If you have Google Earth installed on your computer, you should be able to click on both of the next two links, which will open into Google Earth. One will display a track and the other will overlay photos, both from a recent aerial shoot around San Diego:
http://www.oceanlight.com/kml.php?file=20090116.kml
http://www.oceanlight.com/22285-22305.kml
Yes, somewhat crude, but we are in the early days of geocoding and there will be more interesting things in the future we can do.
I’ve written a fairly lengthy post describing how I geocode images: How To Geocode Your Photos. At present, I use a free application named “GPicSync” to add GEO data into each image. This application will update the EXIF information in my RAW and master images to include latitude, longitude and altitude.
A bit of opinion: my belief is that having GEO data associated with your image, on your website, is almost certainly a good thing. Even if no person ever looks at it, there are new technologies coming online constantly that look for, index, spider, collate and retrieve images and web pages based on their GEO data. Those images and web pages that are lacking in GEO data will not see any of the advantages that these new technologies offer. I admit I am no expert on this, and the entire geocoding world along with the entities out there that are indexing geocoded webpages, is all rather new to me. However, I am certain that there will be visitors to my site, and probably already have been many, that arrive as a result of the GEO data that is present alongside my images and blog posts. Having the GEO data embedded in the metadata of the photograph is the first step in this process.
Step 3: Import Images into Digital Asset Management Software (5%)
I import the keeper images, both RAW and master, into Expression Media, which is the software I use for “digital asset management” (whee, yet another acronym buzzword: DAM). I’m no fan of Microsoft, but I do like Expression Media and am used to it (I formerly used its predessor, IView). In particular, Expression Media allows programs (scripts) to be written in Visual Basic. The scripting feature alone is worth its weight in gold as I will point out in the last step of my workflow, and is what makes my processing of images so automated now. I’ve written a dozen or so scripts. It’s quite easy. I have had no training, and have never read any manual for the software. I just based my scripts on examples I’ve found on the internet from other Expression Media users, modifying them to meet my own workflow needs. They carry out mundane tasks and really speed the process up, for example:
- Set baseline IPTC metadata, including copyright notice, name, address, email, website.
- Set baseline “quality”, based on the camera model information in the EXIF. In this way I can rank certain images higher on the website if they shot on a better camera, other factors being equal. I normally don’t want images shot with a point and shoot to appear before those shot with a 1DsIII. I’ve come up with a baseline ranking scheme to differentiate the following image sources relative to one another in terms of typically quality (not in this order however): Canon 1DsIII, 1DsII, 1DIIn, 5D, 50D, 30D, Nikon D100, Panasonic Lumix LX3, LX2, Nikon Coolscan LS5000, LS4000, various drumscans. I can easily fine tune this later for individual images, increasing or decreasing the “quality” of each image so that certain images appear first when a user views a selection of photos.
- Determine the aspect ratio (3:2, 4:3, 16:9, custom) and orientation (horizontal, vertical, square, panorama) of the master image, which may be different than that of the raw image(s) from which it is sourced. This is important for cropped images and for panoramas and/or HDR images assembled from multiple raw files. The script recognizes the multiple raw files that are used to generate a single master file.
At this point my images have EXIF metadata, perhaps containing GEO data if a geocoding step was performed, and basic IPTC metadata that identify the image as mine, how to reach me, etc. So far all I have done is run some applications and scripts. I really haven’t done any “manual” keywording or captioning yet. If necessary, the images are now ready to place on the web, since they have a minimal set of metadata in them that at least establishes them as mine (DMCA anyone?). However, the most important step is to come.
Step 4: Keywording and Captioning (80%)
It’s time to add captions, titles, keywords, categories, etc. to the image. With my new images already imported in Expression Media, and already containing full EXIF metadata and baseline IPTC metadata, I am ready to begin.
- Captions. There is no shortcut for this. Each image needs a decent caption. It is common to group images and assign the same caption to all of them, and then fine tune captions on individual images as needed. The notion of a “template” can be used too, and lots of different DAM applications support this. Whatever application you use to caption your images, there is no alternative but to get your hands dirty and learn how to do it, what approach works best for you. A key concept is to caption well the first time, so you don’t feel a need to return in the future and add more.
- Keywords (open vocabulary descriptors). In general, the same notion as captioning applies here. However, DAM applications often have special support for keywords, allowing you to draw keywords from a huge database of alternatives, facilitating the use of synonyms, concepts, etc. Expression Media allows the use of custom “vocabularies”. A vocabulary is basically a dictionary. For animal images, I developed a custom vocabulary/dictionary of 26,000 species, including most bird and mammalian species, with complete hierarchical taxonomic detail. So, when keywording, I simply type in the latin (scientific) name for a group of images (all of the same species) and up pops a taxonomic record in the vocabulary, showing kingdom, phylum, family, genus, species, etc and a bunch of important scientific-gobbledygook for the species. Hit return and bingo, all the images I have highlighted are all keyworded with appropriate taxonomic metadata. Similar ideas work for locations. I do not do much keywording for “concepts” (e.g., love, strength, relationships, childhood) since I do not pursue that sort of thematic stock, there is enough of that in the RF and micro stock industries already. Here is a list of keywords I currently have among my images.
- Categories (closed vocabulary descriptors). This is the third area of captioning that I find important. Images in my stock files are typically assigned one or more “categories”, and these categories are stored in the metadata of the image alongside captions and keywords. Some examples are: Location > Protected Threatened And Significant Places > National Parks > Olympic National Park (Washington) > Sol Duc Falls and Subject > Technique > Aerial Photo > Blue Whale Aerial. Here is a stocklist of categories I currently have among my images.
- Custom Fields for the website. I have a few other metadata fields that are seen by website visitors that I set via Expression Media scripts. For example, once the captions are created, a script can be used to create “titles” for a group of images, which are really just excerpts of the full captions and can be used for HTML titles, headers, etc. For the most part, these additional metadata fields are secondary in importance to the captions, keywords and categories.
- Custom Fields for Business Purposes. In addition, I use some metadata fields for recording characteristics of the image that I need to track for business reasons. These include licensing restrictions, past uses that affect exclusivity, etc. These metadata are embedded in the image so they are sure to travel with the image as it moves to a client, but they are not presented to the public on the web site.
Note that I consider keywords to be “open vocabulary”, in the sense that any keyword can be used with an image. In other words, I don’t hesitate to add keywords that I have not yet used, its an open set and grows as needed. This is especially true of synonyms, but one doesn’t want to get too carried away with synonyms or it can dilute the search results that a web visitor sees. I often add keywords to images that are already in my stock files at a later date. However, I treat categories as “closed vocabulary”, in that I have a relatively fixed set of hierarchical categories. I will introduce a new category when it makes sense, but usually only when there is a sufficiently large group of images to which it applies, and there is not already a similar category in use.
Once all the metadata for the keepers in my latest shoot are defined in Expression Media, they need to be written out to the images themselves. In other words, Expression Media is aware of these things, but if one were to open one of the images (RAW or master) in Photoshop the new metadata would not be there. This last step in Expression Media is referred to as “syncing” the annotations. (”Annotations” is Expression Media’s word for metadata. I guess “metadata” is scary to people.) I highlight all the files for which I have been adding metadata, then Action -> Sync Annotations -> Export Annotations To Original Files and click “OK”. All the metadata is now stored in the images themselves, and will flow into any derivative images that are created, such as the thumbnails and watermarked JPGs that go onto my web site. (Think DMCA!).
Step 5. Downsteam, or, “Go Forth My Minions” (5-10%)
If I have defined the metadata once there is no need to do it ever again. The metadata, which is now contained in the DAM application but also in the header of each image, “flows downstream” with no further effort. For my purposes, “downsteam” can mean a submission of selects sent to a client, or a submission of images to an agency, or an update of my website.
Downsteam to Clients
There is not much to say here. Best practices in delivering images to clients include using metadata properly. If you are sending out images to clients, or to stock agencies (the old-fashioned kind that actually represent their photographers) or to, for shame for shame, stock portals (RF, micro, they are all evil), then you should have rich, accurate metadata embedded in your image. It is the only way to ensure that the information travels with the image. I’ve received submission requests from potential clients who simply wanted JPGs submitted as email attachments, with the proviso that if a JPG did not have caption and credit embedded in the metadata it would be immediately discarded without consideration.
Downstream to the Web
For many photographers, the final step in processing a new shoot is to update one’s website. In other words, get the new images along with all their metadata (captions, keywords, GEO locations, categories, etc.) onto the web so that they can be seen by the entire world.
For photographers who are using a “gallery” of some kind to host their web site (such as Smugmug, Flickr, PBase, or any of the freely available installable gallery softwares, etc.), simply uploading the images into a new (or existing) gallery is usually all that is necessary. Provided you have managed your metadata in step 4 properly, the metadata will be present in the headers of your new images. As these images are uploaded to the gallery, the gallery software peeks into the header of each image for metadata and, if it is found, extracts the metadata and prepares it for display alongside the image. The details of what metadata are used (caption, keywords, location, GEO, name, copyright, restrictions, EXIF, etc.) differ somewhat from one gallery provider to another, but the general idea is the same.
However, see the final notes at the end of this post for a few caveats about how gallery software may alter your metadata as it processes your image.
My situation is conceptually the same. My website software is essentially a “gallery” including a pretty extensive search feature. However, the software was hand written by me and does not extract metadata from image files automatically like the big-boy galleries do. (Perhaps someday I’ll figure out how to do that.) As I described a few days ago, my web site evolved to be written entirely in PHP and MySql. Underneath the website there is a database that contains information about all 25000 images in my collection. Basically, this database **is** the metadata for my images, or a summarization of those metadata. The database has one record per image. Each record stores the metadata for that image: caption, keywords, image name, location, GEO data, categories, orientation, etc. etc. That said, the issue for me is: how to create this database? The gallery software in the previous paragraph does this automatically, but my home-brewed web software does not.
The beauty of using Expression Media for DAM in my workflow is that with a single click, Expression Media can create this database for me. (Although I have not used other DAM applications, I am sure they are similar.) Expression Media has a few ways of doing this. I could use Expression Media’s built in export functions (Make -> Text Data File or Make -> XML Data File). But after doing this for a while I decided to write a BASIC script within Expression Media that creates the database while doing some fine tuning and error checking on the metadata fields as it does so. Either way, if I use a script of my own or Expression Media’s built-in export features, the database is easily created. Then it is simply a matter of uploading the database along with the images when it is time for a website update.
The point here is that once the work is done in the DAM application, it should be a very quick process to upload the images and metadata to the web and get the images out there for the world to see. Then, if all goes well, the phone rings.
Afterward
After all that work defining the metadata for your images, and ensuring that it is embedded properly in each image, you would think you are home free, right? Well, there are a few provisos you should know.
Metadata Can Be Stripped By Gallery Software
Some stock portals, gallery hosting services, or install-yourself gallery software (usually written in PHP) will strip metadata from an image. That’s right, they will strip it right out of your image! Why? They claim the reason is to shrink the JPGs that are displayed on the web, in an effort to reduce bandwidth. While this is true, it is a big mistake in my opinion, and is one of the principal reasons I am not involved in any of the stock portal sites or popular photo hosting services. I want my metadata to stay with the image wherever it goes, to all derivative versions of the image. The few extra bytes of storage required for this are trivial compared to the importance of this data being preserved. Think DMCA! Think Orphan Works!
Metadata Can Be Stripped By A Thief
When a thief, or some unwitting schoolkid, makes a copy of your image off the web, the chances are quite good the metadata will be stripped. If the image is taken via a screen shot, the metadata will disappear. If the thief/kid uses “right-click and Save As”, the metadata should remain in the image. But in the end, if the thief/kid alters the image in Photoshop and uses “Save For Web” to save a new copy, the metadata will probably be stripped out. (Yes, Save For Web can optionally preserve metadata, but it is easy to configure Photoshop so that it strips metadata from the image in “Save For Web”, and older versions of Photoshop do not offer the option to override this.)
Too Much Metadata Can Be Displayed
The photo hosting sites seem to display the EXIF fields (shooting data) of your photo’s metadata. This may or may not be what you want. Among hobbyists there is little concern about making the date, time of day, and technique (ISO, shutter speed, aperature) known. Indeed, it is one of the ways that we learn, by understanding what others have done. But often pros have good reason to keep this information to themselves. So, the caveat here is: if you are using a photo hosting service and you don’t want the EXIF data in your image available on the web, you may need to take steps to prevent it.
The Evolution of Oceanlight.com
Oceanlight.com is a natural history stock photography website that first appeared in 1998 as an exercise to learn what the world wide web and websites were, learn to write the HTML to bring a site into being, get it hosted and see if the world thought anything of it. Considerable thanks is owed to Mike Johnson, a good friend and skilled photographer with sublime images of pelagic animals and blue whales, who offered much early advice about the entire process. For the first few years, the only photos on Oceanlight.com that were worth looking at were blue whales (and even that is questionable). The pages were static and created either by hand or with primitive tools such as NetObjects Fusion.
As inbound links to Oceanlight.com began to accumulate and the resultant traffic (mostly from AltaVista and later Google) built, more images were added to the site and publishers began to contact me to license them, usually for use in editorial books, magazines and news publications. I realized that Oceanlight.com had become a defacto stock photography enterprise, and was actually one of the first of its kind for marine and natural history photographs on the web. I was represented by a couple small agencies but had to learn how to field requests and license images properly on my own. Sometime around the turn of the century, armed with about 1000 images and a need to search by keywords (open vocabulary) and hierarchical relationship (closed vocabulary), I decided to learn PHP and MySql in an effort to create what has now become a powerful, well-indexed and comprehensive online image search program. The result is so effective, in fact, that many of the subjects of which I have coverage now appear quite high in Google rankings. For example, Google “kelp forest photo“, “Guadalupe Island“, “blue whale photos” or “Carcharodon carcharias photos“; as of January 2005 (and October 2007, and June 2009), these all show up in the top 3 or 4 Google results, some of them via Gygis.com, a companion site of mine that is driven by the same self-authored PHP/MySql/search code. Alas, it is inevitable that as better photographers than I shoot these same subjects, my pages are bound to lose traction in the Google ranks. But at the same time my setup allows new subjects to quickly gain traction and show up in Google, e.g., Mobius Arch, The Wedge, Silver Salmon Creek Lodge. While there are exceptions, in general most of the animal and plant subjects for which I have coverage will appear on the first page of Google results when searched by their latin/scientific names, e.g., Zalophus photos, Corynactis photos, and often by their common names as well.
The last 6 years or so have seen an acceleration in the process of making photos, getting them on the web and in front of photo researchers and publishers, and licensing them. I am adding about 4000 new images to the library each year, using Canon digital cameras (Canon EOS-1Ds Mark III & II) with lenses like the 500 f/4, 400 f/5.6, 300 f/2.8, 70-200 f/2.8, 24-70 f/2.8, 16-35 f/2.8 II and 15mm fisheye (all killer lenses).
The image search, keywording and categorization aspects of the Oceanlight.com photo library are now highly automated and need little further work, so that as new images are added to the stock files they appear online with rich metadata in a few days, and are eventually indexed and have the potential to appear in Google search results rapidly. The addition of textual (non-image) content naturally requires more time. Some photographers hand-build individual pages for their subjects. I just don’t have the patience for this, so instead I use weblogging software to add new text content to the website. Currently, I use WordPress that I have customized in a number of ways. There are 650+ posts so far, as of June 2009.
At present, Oceanlight.com has a Google rank of 6 (update: looks like it just changed to 5, huh?) and receives about 5000 unique visitors (omitting robots and crawlers) each day. Sure, there are other measures of a web site’s traffic and relevance. However, I think Google’s opinion of my website is more important than anyone else’s, and counting the unique visitors to a site is a no brainer. These numbers are quite good for an individual photographer’s web site, and I think they are attributable primarily to smart use of metadata, longevity, inbound links from people who have found my site worthy, and simple HTML design. Note that I have never placed any advertising on my site, and probably never will. All the traffic is organic; I have never resorted to link exchanges or any of those get-ranked-quick gimmicks. By the way, I found a tool that can help one fine tune a website for SEO and web presence, and described it in a post entitled Post Up … Shoot … Score.
Post up … Shoot … Score!
I haven’t paid much attention to web site design and optimization for a few years. Recently, however, I have noticed and read a few posts around the internet discussing how to make one’s website rank better, look better, work better, be greener and more politically correct, etc etc. Besides the great tutorial from Photoshelter on how to tailor a photography website intended for editors and photo researchers, I also found WebsiteGrader. This nifty site “grades” a website on its SEO (search engine optimization) using a scale of 0 to 100, relative to the rest of the web, using criteria gathered from Google, Yahoo, Alexa, DMOZ, Zoominfo as well as examining the webpage coding itself.
However, if my experience is any indication, these scores may be just a tad bit inflated. WebsiteGrader gave my website a score of 98.8 and my blog a 98.7, considers the content of my blog appropriate for high school and doctorate-level visitors, and it informs me my website has a Google rank of 6 (of a maximum 10). Mondo Teknospheric! Comon, are these for real? Seriously, these seem like pretty good scores, particularly for an individual photographer shooting stock “when able”, especially in comparison to some large agencies for some of the specialized subjects I shoot. Important to remember that these are just scores and what really matters is how many phone calls come in from buyers wanting to use an image. These scores are transient benchmarks, somewhat arbitrary and could change at any time.
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You might find it illuminating to see how WebsiteGrader grades your website. In my case it offered some good feedback. For example, I had no idea the main page on website had NO KEYWORDS in the metadata. Ooops! In spite of having had a website up and running for over 12 years (that’s 583 in www-years) I am still making rookie mistakes. It also said something about making a “301″ to redirect “oceanlight.com” to “www.oceanlight.com”. Hello, English please? My initial reaction is that I should figure out how to fix that stuff soon. Upon further thought, I realized that I would likely screw something up and kill my own rating. Better leave it alone!
Miscellanea
Trey Ratcliffe has a great tutorial on HDR. Boy does he produce some incredible images, really fantastic stuff.
Trying to figure out Twitter, what its all about and whether it is useful. Right now it seems a bit over-busy, but could foster some new connections. Tweetdeck is a popular free app that seems to make it much easier to use.
Photoshelter has published the best tutorial on Photography Websites I have ever seen. None of this information is new, but it is assembled in one fairly concise presentation. It is worth watching even if you are not a Photoshelter user. (You may become one.)
Made a 5′ print of this San Diego City Skyline Panorama Photo at Giant Photo for a client. The print turned out fantastic and the client is thrilled. I am quite impressed with Giant Photo’s service, looking forward to making more big prints with them.
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| San Diego city skyline at sunset, showing the buildings of downtown San Diego rising above San Diego Harbor, viewed from Harbor Island. A panoramic photograph, composite of thirteen separate images. San Diego, California, USA. Image: 22255 Location: San Diego, California, USA  View this Image in Google Earth!Pano dimensions: 4759 x 15430 |
Correction to Yesterday’s Post
It appears my contacts in Washington and London reported partially incorrect information yesterday, which “I” ** in turn passed on to my reader. Actually, the whole post was a lie, except for the part about the Federal government making a rights grab for all the images on the internet which I think is in the planning stages. This blog will refocus, renew, rededicate and reenergize by displaying imagery only and staying away from news and information, until at least next April. And of course, this blog will continue to maintain the lofty level of truthiness for which it is known.
** “I” have fired my celebrity blogger and resumed all blogging duties “myself”. However, “I” will continue to maintain my celebrity twitter-writer for now.
Here is an eagle photo!
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| Bald eagle in flight, Kachemak Bay and the Kenai Mountains in the background. Kachemak Bay, Homer, Alaska, USA. Image: 22586 Species: Haliaeetus leucocephalus, Haliaeetus leucocephalus washingtoniensis Location: Kachemak Bay, Homer, Alaska, USA View this Image in Google Earth! |
Economic Recovery Plan for Photographers
This is an exciting time to be a photographer in America!
Just a few days after Inauguration, the Obama Administration quietly created the Presidential Digital Imaging and Photography Commission. This blue ribbon panel of industry experts was tasked with devising market incentives, rather than bailouts, for the photography industry, in an effort to keep major camera companies from bankruptcy. The Commission made public their plan this morning, and the Obama Administration has put all recommendations of the commission on a fast track, scheduling a special session of Congress to enact the new laws in time to benefit those who have not yet filed their income tax returns. From President Obama, in London to attend the G-20 meetings:
“Tough economic times and crisis call for creative and aggressive solutions. Today, the DIP Comission, which I formed two months ago expressly to save the photography industry during this financial crisis, charted a new path and created new tools with which photography professionals can do their part to rebuild our economy and avert the crisis.”
Some notable elements of the DIP Commission’s plan are:
Tax credits. New tax incentives are now established for the purchase of digital imaging equipment, retroactive to January 1, 2008. Specifically, purchase of digital cameras, lenses and tripods can take advantage of a 45% credit on 2008 and future income tax returns. This means that, if you have not yet filed your 2008 tax return, you are eligible for a tax credit equal to nearly half the purchase price of new camera equipment purchased in the last 16 months. Unlike some tax credits which are gradually phased out with income, this egalitarian credit is available even if you did not owe any taxes in 2007 or 2008.
Travel vouchers. Expenses for photography-related travel will now be reimbursed through the Congressional Office of Tourism and Travel. “In these difficult times, we in Washington understand that it is difficult for struggling photographers to afford both quality equipment and the travel expense required to make fine photographs. The federal government is stepping up, doing its part and becoming a partner in the photography travel industry. If you’ve got a camera, we’ll get you where you need to be to get that once-in-a-lifetime shot!” said Gilsten Marsten, assistant deputy vice director of the Office of Tourism and Travel. To apply for reimbursement up to $12,500 per trip, a traveler needs to provide copies of receipts along with the COTT reimbursement application. A one-time exception to the receipt requirement is permitted whereby travelers can simply provide a letter of participation from their workshop leader.
DIP-STOCK, a New Internet Stock Photography Agency. The DIP Commission, along with the U.S. Copyright Office, is forming a new stock photography agency “DIP-STOCK”, inspired in part by the “Hope” poster, the Obama campaign graphic created by innovative and original leading edge artist Shepard Fairy and some photographer. The essence of this innovative new plan is to leverage new and innovative copyright regulations to form a innovative, expansive and worldwide stock photography agency positioned to compete in innovative ways with industry giants such Gettty Images. Effective April 1, 2009 and retroactive to January 1 2008, all images posted on the internet are eligible to be represented by DIP-STOCK. By posting images on the World Wide Wide (invented by Al Gore who has now ceded majority control to President Obama), all rights to the image are implicitly transferred to DIP-STOCK. Licensing revenues based on these images will be used primarily to expand the TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) in coming months and to facilitate employee retention at such strategically crucial companies as AIG and Madoff Funds. (A small portion of each photo sale will be placed in escrow to cover legal representation for certain, i.e., most, of the Administration’s Cabinet members.) DIP-STOCK’s automated search bot, DIP-Finder, which has been crawling the internet acquiring images for the past two months, has slurped full rights to 73% of the images currently on the internet.
Kevster Glossten, director and CEO of DIP-STOCK: “This is indeed an exciting time to be a photographer. The Administration has developed new copyright tools that allow us unprecedented opportunity in this time of crisis. By simply posting an image to the internet, perhaps on a blog or as part of an online photo collection with Flacker or Yophoto, photographers automatically become ‘members’ of the largest stock photo agency in the world. If you have a website already, your images are already in place in the DIP-STOCK library. Photographers continue to retain the right to print their images on their home inkjets, as they always have! DIP-STOCK will now handle all other bothersome licensing matters using industry-accepted emerging market microstock pricing models. And, as a special value-added service for professionals, there is no need to update records for images already registered with the copyright office — rights for these images were transferred to DIP-STOCK automatically last week. By granting DIP-STOCK exclusive rights to manage the licensing of all of their online photos, photographers are now contributing to the economic recovery. And sometimes photographers receive a photo credit! It is a win-win situation for everyone, and helps to fight the economic crisis.”
Further information about these and other exciting developments in the federal photography funding and acquisition initiative is available on the Presidential Digital Imaging and Photography Commission’s website: www.dip.gov.
No guarantee, warranty or trustee is offered for the truthiness of this release.
Blue Whale Photo in National Geographic Magazine
I am very fortunate to have one of my blue whale photos (Balaenoptera musculus) appear in the March 2009 issue of National Geographic Magazine. It is an image of a whale’s dorsal ridge and fluke, taken underwater, in the “Inside Geographic” section near the end of the magazine which describes an upcoming NG television special about blue whales and the researchers who study them. It is related to the excellent article on blue whales appearing earlier in the same issue, written by Kenneth Brower and beautifully photographed by the world’s foremost whale photographer, Flip Nicklin.
Blue whale, National Geographic Magazine, March 2009, copyright Phillip Colla
Canon 50D Initial Impressions
I’ll offer my comments on my Canon 50D. I’ve used it for one shoot so far, and will keep it for at least another shoot (at Bosque del Apache next month) before I decide whether to keep it. Note that this is not a formal test, just my anecdotal observations of one body. I am fairly critical of my images as ultimately I would like them to past the laugh test and go out into the publishing world to be seen by bazillions of admirers.
First, when I received it I checked the focus of the camera right out of the box using a 300 f/2.8 on a few static subjects in my back yard. It was fine, no front or back focus that I could see. My raw converter (Capture One) currently does not support 50D raw files (hopefully in a few weeks this will be fixed) so I am using the DPP software coming with the camera. I find that I need to use a high sharpening setting in the raw conversion to get results I am happy with. In other words, the raw images appear soft coming out of the camera, which was mildly disappointing to me. However, I’m fine with countering that in raw processing, provided it does not create other problems (noise, artifacts). Realizing that I will have to sharpen the raw files hard, I have decided to expose “to the right” with this camera to avoid noise problems with underexposed images that are then exacerbated by hard sharpening.
Last week I used the 50D on a Canon 500 f/4, 80% of the time of a 1.4x teleconverter, to shoot sea otters (Enhydra lutris) from a boat. I also shot with a 1DsII, same lens setup. I shot about 2800 images with the 50D, and about 400-500 with the 1DsII. My plan was to use the 50D to get a little extra reach, and more “pixels on the subject”, than I could get with the 1DsII. I used ISO from 200 to 1000 on the 50D (200 to 320 on the IDsII).
I shot the 50D using servo AF, IS stabilizing mode 2, single focus point was typically upper right, upper left or center. I always have it in high speed drive (something like 6 or 6.5 fps I think?).
A) the 50D images taken **without** a teleconverter look pretty good. I’m happy with the sharpness of those, given I exposed to the right (just getting the tiniest of blinkies on the highlights of the animals) and then sharpened hard in the raw.
B) the 50D images shot with the 1.4x teleconverter and 500 are soft, more than I expected. I’d say about 1 in 10 passes my critical sharpness threshold. Now, shooting an equivalent 1200mm on a boat (albeit a stable, flat bottom boat) is tough. I know motion blur and lens shake softness (having shot of lot of that over the years!). And I know that a teleconverter can cut sharpness even when stopped down to f/8 or f/11. Its a subjective thing and I think I am more concerned with sharpness than others. Eliminating images that suffered from motion blur or lens shake — i.e., considering only images where the animals was essentially static and posing, the servo AF had a chance to lock on and the IS on the lens had a chance to settle — I still found most of the images shot with 50D/500/1.4x were soft. Just too soft for my liking. I think I kept about 30 images with the 50D/500/1.4x combo, and those were for the most part images where the behavior is enough to warrant keeping the image, or the pose of the otter is just too cute that it must be kept in spite of softness. I did have some shot with that combo that showed critical sharpness, scattered among the bunch, so I am encouraged and perhaps with more rigorous technique I can get that number up in the future. I should add that when I shot the 1DsII/500/1.4x combo, my rate of images passing my personal sharpness threshold was about 30% or so, but that may reflect my experience using that body.
I have a few conclusions, again just one Canon 50D body and one shoot, but this is what I am thinking on this camera:
1) ISO up to 1000 looks good! I did not try higher than 1000, but I like what I see up to 1000. The images I have do not suffer from any noise that I can see. I did expose them to the right somewhat.
2) I will NOT use a teleconverter on this body if I can help it, including at Bosque. I sense that I will be happier about the sharpness if I just leave it off and accept the subject being smaller in the frame. I will NOT crop to compensate. Sharpness is more important to me than distance to subject. (I do not have this same reservation about teleconverter use with a full frame body.)
3) I have not shot this on subjects that are moving fast, so I do not know what to expect trying cranes and geese for the first time in a month. I will try to use center point AF when shooting servo. I know some guys are shooting birds in flight with the Canon 50D and sound happy with it. But if it does not lock on, I won’t hesitate to put out the Canon 1DIIN and use that instead next month.
4) I do not like how limited the 9 AF points are. OK, granted, this is a differentiation between 1-series and others, and given the crop nature of the body it probably does not make sense squeezing 45 points in there. Regardless, more points to select from would have helped. I found it tough to keep the otters eye where I wanted it in the frame with just the 9 points. The 45 points of the 1DsII are much better in this regard, which is why the 1DsII is still my favorite body.
5) I believe the AF was working well, although at times the AF seemed to lock on to, say, the whiskers rather than the eye of the subject. I think it may have to do with how large an area each AF sensor actually covers, and also the “assistance” of the 6 “assist” sensors. I may look into turning those off (if it is possible) if necessary in the future.
6) I have not seen a single ERR99, or any other problem for that matter, with this camera. I have firmware 1.0.2. I got about 1400 frames per battery, one is a brand new 50D battery and another is a little-used 5D battery about 1.5 years old.
7) Finally: when the subject is near enough that I can use my 1DsII, I will choose that over the 50D. I do not really need frame rate. (I’ve always been happy with the rate of the 1DsII.) So I view the 50D as a special purpose camera, for now, for situations where I want some extra reach beyond what I can get with the 1DsII, and where low light levels suggest the 50D (with its higher ISO capability) would be helpful.
8) I am also looking into housing this camera for use shooting surf, replacing a 1DIIN. The frame rate of the 50D is high enough to shoot action situations like that, and the smaller and lighter package would make handling the camera in surf much easier. The higher ISO would make early morning and sunset shoots more successful. The downside is that with the 1.6x crop factor, my 15mm fisheye (a favorite for shooting waves) loses a lot of its cool look. If I get there I’ll post something about it.
Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX3 Sample Images
I just picked up a Panasonic Lumix DMC LX3, after having used its previous incarnation (Lumix DMC-LX2) for about a year for our family snapshots and as a general grab-and-go camera. There is plenty of information about the Panasonic LX3 on the web already, so I won’t get into a detailed review. Instead I’ll simply offer my positive recommendation and some sample images. Here is a particularly accurate review.
If you don’t want to read any more, the sample images are here. (Update: the raw files are now removed, they’ve been there for a few weeks and I don’t want them eating up storage space on my server.)
Here are a few more, not available in high res but you can get an idea of how I use this camera and what images I think are “keepable” out of it. These are straight out of the camera, no postprocessing.
As I expected based on my experience with the LX2, for a point and shoot camera (P&S) the Panasonic Lumix LX3 is, in my opinion, a pretty darn good camera. I really like its small size, wide angle lens (24mm equivalent), 16:9, 4:3 and 3:2 aspect ratios, and good exposure and flash capabilities. At the wide end, the LX3’s Leica 24mm-equivalent lens is great for landscape images as well as any “forced perspective” image in which the foreground subject takes on a larger-than-life importance in relation to the rest of the image. For me this is a big plus, since I shoot the LX3 as wide as possible 95% of the time, and 24mm is noticably wider than the 28mm or 35mm focal lengths offered in most other P&S cameras. (The LX2 had a 28mm equivalent lens). As far as exposure goes, I generally leave the camera in its “P” mode (program exposure) and just dial the exposure compensation up or down. Occasionally, if I am shooting a landscape with the camera on a tripod, I will use aperature-priority mode with the aperature set at f/8. Once in a while I will shoot deliberately blurred images, for which case aperature priority mode is again useful (f/8, ISO 100). When shooting flash-lit images, one can dial the exposure compensation on the flash up and down independently of the compensation used for the available light exposure. And like most P&S cameras these days, the LX3 has a video feature which allows us to get some grab videos on our vacations.
A note on RAW. Like the LX2 before it, the LX3 can produce a RAW file in addition to JPG. However, my experience with the RAW converter provided with the LX3 — Silkypix — has not been pleasant. Frankly, I couldn’t stand it. The interface seemed awkward and slow, and I found it difficult to batch process a group of images that all required slight variations of RAW adjustment from one another.
Note: as of March 2009, Lightroom supports LX3 raw files, so I use that when I feel the need to shoot RAW with the Lumix LX3.
I’ve posted a selection of sample images taken with the Panasonic Lumix LX3 over the past few days. I may revise this group of sample images in the coming weeks if I have a chance to shoot more. The JPGs shown are all straight out of the camera, the only adjustment being that they have been resized and sharpened for display as a web gallery by Expression Media. They all used auto-white-balance, some form of auto exposure (P or A). Most were shot with ISO 100 although some were shot at ISO 200. I’ve linked the full res JPG and, where available, the RAW file as well so you can see what detail or lack thereof is found in the original. However, if you get into pixel-peeping, consider that you are probably getting too critical and may be loosing sight of how P&S cameras such as the LX3 fit into the quiver of a photographer. I consider my LX3 to be the camera to use when I would otherwise not have a camera. I do not expect anywhere near the same degree of sharpness, color fidelity and shadow detail that I get from my dSLRs! In my opinion this camera, when properly used including careful technique and exposure control, produces images that are acceptable for press, web, and small to medium-size print use.
Some of the images I shot with my LX2 are now in the stock files of myself and at least one agency, and I expect selected future images from the LX3 will be as well.
Update: the raw files are now removed, they’ve been there for a few weeks and I don’t want them eating up storage space on my server.
How To Geotag Your Photos
Recently I’ve had some correspondance with other photographers about geotagging, what it is and how I am using it. I was encouraged to put my remarks on my blog. While I do not pretend to be an expert, I am happy to share what I am doing — my workflow if you will. I’ll probably revise this post as I give the matter further thought.
GEOTAGGING DIGITAL PHOTOS is the process of tagging (i.e., merging, joining) digital photos with information about the location where they were taken. So, geotagging (v) is a process in which digital photos are modified. Geotagged (adj) describes a digital photograph as having location information embedded in it. Wikipedia has a good article about geotagging.
1. Digital Photos and Metadata. Digital photos exist as computer files. Two common file types (formats) are JPEG, TIFF, but there are many others. Many of these file formats store not only the image itself (the pixels) but also metadata about the image. Metadata means “data about data”. In this case, the primary data are the pixels in your digital image, and the metadata are other pieces of information the describe the photo or the circumstances under which it was taken. Some examples of metadata are the date and time at which the photo was recorded, the camera exposure settings, the camera brand and model, lens focal length and even the version of the camera’s firmware. These metadata are organized into a bundle and stored in the file header of your digital file. In other words, this stuff is in your TIFF, JPEG or raw file. It happens to be stored at the beginning of the file, before the pixels. Maintaining these metadata inside your digital photo file is, in theory, a good thing since this information then remains with its associated image. As long as you have the photo, the data about how, when and where it was taken are in your possession as well. Furthermore, if you make derivative copies of the digital file, such as a smaller version for display on the internet or a version to send to an editor at a magazine, the metadata are in that version of the image too. Ideally, the metadata stay with the photo wherever it goes. (Naturally there are exceptions to this which I won’t get into, but you get the idea.)
2. EXIF Metadata. An industry group (e.g., a group of computer geeks with decision making power) developed a standard, or group of widely accepted rules, for organizing these metadata. They named the standard EXIF. Each piece of information in this bundle of EXIF metadata is known as an “EXIF field”. For example, date, time, lens, camera model, shutter speed, etc. are all “EXIF fields”. So, when you hear mention of “the EXIF data”, or “EXIF header”, just know that this refers to the metadata describing when and how the photograph was taken. EXIF metadata are generally considered readonly in the sense that they should not be altered. Indeed, most image editing programs such as Photoshop will allow you to see what the EXIF fields are but do not allow you to alter the EXIF fields. This readonly restriction is really just an industry practice — there is no physical reason why the EXIF fields cannot be altered. Indeed, there are software programs out there that allow you to fiddle with and change the EXIF fields, such as time, date, camera model, etc., but I don’t have any experience with them. For the most part EXIF data are created at the moment the image is taken and there is no reason to change them later — with the exception of latitude, longitude and altitude.
It should be mentioned that there are some other bundles of metadata that may be found in the header of your digital photo and which can be viewed with image management and editing software. XMP and IPTC are two of them. XMP is a more recent standard that, in the long run, may prove to be more flexible and useful than EXIF which has some shortcomings. IPTC is another group of metadata fields, developed for press photographers to store descriptive information about their news photographs. IPTC is the place where you would enter a caption, keywords and copyright restrictions about the photo. While XMP and IPTC are important groups of metadata for digital photographers to understand, I will only be describing the EXIF metadata since that is where latitude and longitude fields are.
3. The Latitude, Longitude and Altitude Fields in the EXIF Metadata. There are three EXIF fields of interest for geocoding: latitude, longitude and altitude. While there are some recent cameras that support communication with GPS equipment in real time and fill these EXIF fields when the photograph is taken, most of us will find that these fields are empty or do not exist in the EXIF metadata of our photographs. Essentially this is because the camera is unaware of your latitude, longitude and altitude. Sure, the camera probably knows the date and time (you set these when you first get your camera) and it sure knows what lens is being used and what the shutter speed is. But in general, your camera does not know where you are. The EXIF standard includes fields (spaces) for latitude, longitude and altitude. But since the camera does not know your location when the photo is taken, these fields are left empty. Its up to you to fill them in later by geotagging the photo after it has been downloaded to your computer.
4. Recording GPS Data. There’s not much to say here. Simply purchase a GPS that supports tracking latitude/longitude to data files, then carry the GPS with you and make sure it is tracking your location while you while you shoot photos. I use the relatively small Garmin 60CSX model, which is capable of determining latitude, longitude and altitude to within about 20′. That is accurate enough for my purposes. I installed a 4GB micro-SD memory card in the Garmin 60CSX and set up the tracking options so that when I turn it on it automatically records latitude, longitude, altitude and time to a file on the memory card. There are various spatial and/or temporal intervals at which points on the track can be recorded; I have chosen 10-second intervals. (On one flight I made I chose a mode in which a location point was recorded to the track whenever the plane had travelled more than about 20 yds so it recorded many points during the flight. The result was a big GPS data file but very accurate geotagging later when the location data were stored in the photos.) On a recent 10-day trip, during which I had the unit recording about half of all daylight hours, I found that less than 1% of the 4GB micro-SD memory card was used to store tracking data. I have a few multi-week trips planned in 2009 and 2010, and this setup should record the GPS data for every moment of the trip with no trouble. I do find that I have to change batteries at least once a day if the unit is continuously operating, so rechargeable AA batteries are the way to go. The files that are created on the memory card are “GPX” files; GPX is simply a form of XML text file that geotagging programs understand. On my Garmin 60CSX, one file per day is created containing all the GPS tracking data for that day (even if I have turned the GPS on and off several times during the day). When I return from a photo outing, I can either connect the GPS to my computer and transfer the GPX files from the GPS to the computer, or I can remove the memory card from the GPS and plug the card into my computer and access the GPX files that way. Ultimately, I put all of them into the same folder on my computer, a growing pile of GPS files that just sit there until I need them for geotagging. Here are two examples of GPS tracks. You will need Google Earth installed to view these. The first is a trip around Vancouver Island. The second is a bike ride around UCSD in La Jolla. Note no photos are shown with these tracks, that will come later.
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| Vancouver Island track (view in Google Earth, Google Maps or Live Search Maps) | UCSD bike ride track (view in Google Earth, Google Maps or Live Search Maps) |
5. Geotagging: Merging GPS Data Into Your Digital Photos. You have finished the shoot and you carried your GPS with you the whole time, tracking your location while you took photos. You are back in your office and its time to do the geotagging! This is the point in your workflow where latitude and longitude metadata are transferred from your GPS into the EXIF fields within your digital photos.
Everyone shooting digital photos understands that photos must be “downloaded” to one’s computer, right? Well, the same goes for the GPS data: you must download the data files from your GPS unit as well. The actual geotagging, where the photos and GPS data are combined, can occur at two points in the process: either while the images are being downloaded (i.e., copied) from your camera to the computer, or after all the files have been downloaded and are sitting on the computer in separate folders.
I use the latter approach, and here is how I do it. I use a nifty little program named GPicSync, available free from Google. I make no claim as to its performance, but I have found that it works well for me.
- Download the GPX tracking files (i.e., files with extension .gpx) from the GPS unit’s memory card to a folder on my computer. The Garmin 60CSX happens to make one GPX tracking file per day with names like 20080811.gpx; other GPS units may be different in this regard. I place all the GPX files in a single folder; mine happens to be named “c:/gpx” but you can put them wherever you wish.
- Download the files from my camera’s memory card(s) to another folder on my computer. Let’s say the folder is named “c:/pics”. The files produced by my camera are raw files, but they could just as well be JPGs.
- Launch GPicSync. I first specify the folder where the GPX files are located. I just point it at the entire group of GPX files and it figures out which ones it needs. Then I specify the folder where the digital photos are located. Lastly, I specify the “UTC Offset”. This is the number of hours between the location where the images were shot and Greenwich Mean Time. This is needed because my camera’s internal time zone is local to me, but the GPS records time using Greenwich Mean Time. If the photos were taken in my neck of the woods (Pacific Time Zone) then the appropriate difference is -7 hours, so I enter -7 for the UTC offset. Then I press “start”.
- What happens? GPicSync looks at the time at which each photo was taken, compares that to all possible GPS tracking points that it finds in the GPX tracking files and finds the closest match. In other words, it determines which GPS point was recorded closest in time to when the photo was taken. The latitude, longitude and altitude are extracted from that GPS point and inserted into the appropriate EXIF fields in the digital photo. Nothing else is altered (hopefully!) and the digital photo is written back to the computer disk. In essence all that is changed is three EXIF fields in the digital photo, all the other information including the image pixels themselves are unchanged. At least this is how it is supposed to work, and so far I have encountered no problems.
- I am now free to continue on with my workflow and raw files, converting them into JPEGs and preparing them for display on the web and delivery to clients. They are now geotagged so (again, hopefully) the software that I use to manage my photo collection, make JPEG versions for the web and high res TIFFs for clients ensures that the location information in the EXIF metadata is passed along from one generation of the photo to the next.
There are other software programs that can do this geotagging step. I chose GPicSync primarily because it supports tagging Canon raw files. In other words, it will go ahead and permanently alter the EXIF data (adding latitude, longitude, altitude) in my Canon raw files. This is a requirement for me, since I want as much metadata in the source image (my raw file) as possible. However, if you shoot JPEG then you have other options. Notably, I should mention a program named Downloader Pro, made by the developer of Breezebrowser Pro. I have been a longtime user of Breezebrowser and love it, it is perhaps the fastest and easiest image browsing program out there. When I set out to geotag my photos I planned to use Downloader Pro (a companian program to Breezebrowser Pro), but I soon found that it has a limitation that I cannot work around: it will not geotag Canon raw files (.cr2). I shoot exclusively raw files. I generate JPG and TIFF files from the raw files, but the “master” file is a raw file and the master file is the one I want geotagged. I emailed Chris Breeze (the maker of Breezebrowser and Downloader) about this and asked him why his program does not support geotagging Canon raw files. His reply was that by altering the EXIF header in the proprietary raw file one can damage the raw file, thereby making it unreadable by other software. (I understand that this is a risk, but since I can always save an unaltered copy of the raw file before it is tagged, I can work around that issue easily.) In any event, at the time of this writing Downloader Pro does not geotag Canon raw files, so I don’t use it. If and when that changes, I will immediately reconsider and probably start using Downloader Pro.
One further note on this step: consider backing up your original digital photos before proceeding with the geotagging. The geotagging that I describe alters the EXIF information in your digital photo. In the event that the geotagging software you are using has a flaw, it could corrupt the digital photo beyond repair. GPicSync, and probably most other geotagging programs, allows you to make a backup copy of each photo while the geotagging is being done, ensuring that you have a safe copy in case something bad happens to the altered copy. Needless to say, its probably a good idea to use this option if it is available, at least with shoots that are important.
6) Geo Data Flows To The Web. OK, you have geotagged your photos. Now what the heck do you do with them? Good question. I honestly don’t know all that is possible with the software that is out there. I use Expression Media to manage my collection of 22,000 images, most having 3-5 versions apiece, including keywording, cataloging, captioning, ranking, etc. Since Expression Media allows me to view the EXIF fields of my photos, I can check that the geotagging worked and that the correct latitude, longitude and altitude appear in the EXIF metadata. Great, but that is merely an exercise and does not really move me or my photos forward.
Importantly, I exploit the lat/long (latitude, longitude) data on my web site. Each photo in my collection has a corresponding record in a big database on my web server. The database has entries for location, species, keywords and a bunch of other database stuff. This database is created by Expression Media and then uploaded to the web server. This means that if Expression Media sees that an image has been geotagged, that lat/long information will flow from Expression Media to the web database. In other words, images that have been geotagged have lat/long entries in the database record, while images that have not been geotagged are missing entries lat/long entries in the database. When my website software (written by me using PHP and MySql) displays information about a geotagged image, it will notice the lat/long entry in the database and pass that information along to the display that the website visitor see. For instance, take a look at the summary information for this image of the Wave in southern Utah:
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| http://www.oceanlight.com/spotlight.php?img=20608 |
You will see not only the coordinates of the location where this image was shot, but a few links related to the coordinates and some small blue ball icons as well. What are those? Read on for the most interesting part of this whole process.
7) Geotagged Images In Google Earth. Google Earth is an amazing world visualization product from Google. At present it is available in a free version and a commercial version. I have only used the free version. I am sometimes blown away by what can be done with it. For starters, it allows one to visually fly around the world and then zoom in close, seeing Earth features from a birds eye view. That alone is pretty fun. But it gets better for photographers.
I should mention that if you do not have Google Earth installed on your computer, the discussion below will be merely academic. You won’t be able to check out the examples I mention without first installing Google Earth. Instead, click the “Google Maps” version of each link, but know that Google Maps is the lesser sibling to Google Earth when it comes to presenting geospatial stuff.
It is possible to generate Google Earth “overlays” that allow one to display almost anything in concert with Google Earth. These Google Earth overlays are similar in some ways to web pages that you view in a web browser but they are instead viewed in Google Earth, which is like a browser but for viewing the globe rather than text. For web visitors that have Google Earth installed on their computers, clicking on one of these Google Earth “overlay links” allows them to view things within Google Earth, usually in a meaningful spatial context. For instance, here are two overlays that together summarize the keepers we got in Tofino a few weeks ago. The first link presents the tracks, showing where we hiked (green), boated (purple) and flew (orange). The second link superimposes some photos above the sites where they were taken. Load both of these links in Google Earth:
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Tofino tracks (view in Google Earth, Google Maps or Live Search Maps) Tofino photos (view in Google Earth, Google Maps or Live Search Maps) |
One of most oft-mentioned examples of a “GeoBlog” — a blog that is customized for Google Earth — is that of noted primatologist Jane Goodall’s Gombe Chimp research group, which publishes a blog about their ongoing activities. The blog is “geo-enabled”, meaning that not only can it be viewed as a traditional web page but it can also be viewed in an enhanced form within Google Earth at the exact location where the research is being conducted in Africa. Look for the little blue ball icons on the blog, indicating Google Earth-enabled links.
I’ve done a similar thing with most of the major parts of my web site, including the blog and the individual images. For instance, most pages on my blog are now geo-enabled. Here’s an example of an individual post of mine that is geo-enabled. The first link below just shows the blog post, while the second link displays it in Google Earth at the proper location on Granville Island in Vancouver:
(Also, the entire blog is available as a “KML Feed”, meaning that it is a feed accessible by Google Earth. The KML 2.0 link for this is at the bottom right of the blog, under “Meta”.)
Each individual image of mine that is geotagged can be viewed in geospatial context in Google Earth, at the exact point on the globe where the photo was taken. The first of the two links below shows a detailed view of the photo on a boring web page, while the second link displays the image in Google Earth at the point in the Paria Vermillion Cliffs Wilderness where the Wave is situated and the photo was taken:
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http://www.oceanlight.com/spotlight.php?img=20608 (web page) http://www.oceanlight.com/20608.kml (view in Google Earth, Google Mapsor Live Search Maps) |
Lastly, you can view an entire collection of my images altogether in Google Earth. This was the hardest part for me to figure out, and required some geeky programming to get it right. But its now pretty powerful (at least I think so). In one fell swoop I can show you all of my images from, say, San Clemente Island, superimposed on the spots where they were taken. Or I can do this with all my blue whale images. Or those from the Galapagos, or Guadalupe Island. You get the idea. If you have Google Earth installed, check out these links and let me know what you think! Warning: each of these links displays dozens or hundreds of photos at once on Google Earth. You will need Google Earth installed to use these links.
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| San Clemente Island underwater photos on Google Earth (View in Google Earth, Google Maps or Live Search Maps) |
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| Galapagos Islands photos on Google Earth (View in Google Earth, Google Maps or Live Search Maps) |
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| Blue Whale photos on Google Earth (View in Google Earth, Google Maps or Live Search Maps) |
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| Guadalupe Island photos on Google Earth (View in Google Earth, Google Maps or Live Search Maps) |
Comments? Errors? Please let me know by email and I’ll try to amend this post. Thanks.
Interview
Photographer, Floridian, traveller and blogger Bill Lockhart was kind enough to take an interest in my photography and interview me recently. Bill is building a collection of fine interviews focusing on a diverse collection of photographers. I am fortunate to be considered among them. Thanks very much, Bill!
Tidelines Calendar 2008
This year’s edition of the Tidelines calendar is especially nice because one of our photos appears on the cover (duh). Can you guess where it was shot? Hint: it rhymes with “ledge” and lots of bones are broken there. Order your Tidelines calendar now so you too can time all your ocean functions to take maximum advantage of the tide. By the way, a big swell arrives tomorrow, if you have a Tidelines calendar on your wall you’ll know when to go.
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Plumes
Another interesting shot of the smoke plumes viewed from space. Look, there’s Guadalupe Island down there too!
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No, I didn’t take this photo. NASA did. They have better cameras than me.
Red Sunset
The Witch Creek fire has now eaten 200,000 acres and at least 500 homes. It is the largest plume visible from space at the moment, dwarfing the fires in other parts of California. Temperatures have dropped noticably today, humidity has risen and the fire seems to have lost some of its strength, but I don’t want to jinx things by feeling too optimistic.
Sarah and I went down to check the surf at Ponto tonight. It was strange. The water was glass, with small shapely waves. It looked at once fun and depressing. I wish I had had time to get in the water. There were a handful of surfers out. The sky was bizarrely red and it was hard to distinguish the horizon due to the haze. A layer of soot and ash lay over the beach and was pooled thickly in some of the depressions in the sand where the breeze could not pick it up. Groups of helicopters were passing by just offshore every few minutes, some going north and some south, busy with their firefighting efforts. A gal that my daughter spoke with had come from Jamul earlier in the day, trying to help a friend of hers save property and horses, but I sensed from her mood that they did not have much success. The sky and sun were so super saturated red/orange/yellow that they practically fried the electronics in our little point and shoot pocket mini micro digicam.
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Some links:
The best page for info about the perimeter of the fires, but it is getting very heavy traffic: San Diego Fires - Information.
SD Union-Tribune blog, updated frequently. Traffic was so heavy they had to move this page to Blogspot, the U-T servers couldn’t deal with the demand.
SD Union-Tribune main website (often down due to heavy traffic)
Local TV news coverage: NBC, ABC, CBS.
Area Traffic: SigAlert, Dept of Transportation
An interesting, animated look at the smoke plumes from space: Satellite Animated View.
Fires
We’ve received many phone calls and emails about the wildfires that are raging throughout Southern California. Immediate danger to our house appears minimal, although the air quality is unbelievably bad with ash raining down. The fire that was going yesterday (Monday) in San Marcos (due east of us) was a real concern as the Santa Ana winds would have blown it right through us. It appears that particular fire is now 100% contained and mostly under control. The major tragedies are the Witch Creek, Harris and Rice fires. About 6-12 miles to the south of us, the huge Witch Creek fire has mowed down a broad swatch of open space, rural and residential communities from Ramona, through Rancho Bernardo and Escondido, touching Rancho Santa Fe and Fairbanks Ranch and continuing on towards the coast. It currently threatens areas near Del Mar near the ocean. Many of our friends in Encinitas, Olivenhain, Leucadia and La Costa have evacuated, either voluntarily or at the request of authorities. We are packed to leave but so far do not feel seriously threatened, and consider ourselves very lucky. At the moment.
Some links:
The best page for info about the perimeter of the fires, but it is getting very heavy traffic: San Diego Fires - Information.
SD Union-Tribune blog, updated frequently. Traffic was so heavy they had to move this page to Blogspot, the U-T servers couldn’t deal with the demand.
SD Union-Tribune main website (often down due to heavy traffic)
Local TV news coverage: NBC, ABC, CBS.
Area Traffic: SigAlert, Dept of Transportation
An interesting, animated look at the smoke plumes from space: Satellite Animated View.
Alaska Trip ‘07
Just back from my ‘07 trip to coastal Alaska. I was scoping out some places for a longer trip next year, to determine if they make sense for a family (they do). I made five flights in bush and float planes over two national parks, did some easy hiking, got to see 30+ brown bears, 25+ glaciers, lots of seabirds, some eagles and a marmot, ate really well and managed to make a few new friends along the way. I’ve got 5500 images to sort through, so it will be a few weeks before I get any posted.
Utah Road Trip
OK, I’m back now. The trip was killer, the photography conditions were top notch and the scenery beautiful. The weather was really cold. I got a sunrise in Bryce at -4°F, two sunrises at Mesa Arch in Canyonlands National Park at 0°F and 8°F, and sunrise in Arches National Park at about +11°F. Each morning I would scrape the ice off my windshield with a credit card. All the food in my car froze solid each night — it’s not easy eating frozen pesto pizza from Jax in Moab for breakfast the following morning, and I damn near cracked a tooth on a rock hard Clif bar. Fortunately, the cold front had dusted the landscape with snow and provided for clear skies — not a cloud in 4 days. It finally warmed up a little by the time I got down to Monument Valley and Antelope Canyon, and the drive home through Zion was downright balmy at 30°F. I’ve got 1700 images to sort through now, so it will take a few weeks to get them edited and selected for the stock files, and then I’ll start posting them.
I’m in Utah right now, shooting landscapes in Bryce, Arches and Canyonlands National Parks, and running some control tests to determine just how bloody cold the weather must be before my camera freezes and I switch my attention to sampling the microbrews of Moab. My office will be handling requests for comps (for layout) and low-res images (for publication), sending those by email but with a delay of up to 6 hours before those requests are sent. Unfortunately, I will not be able to deliver high res images until I return after January 12. Happy New Year!
What?
Oceanlight.com is a natural history stock photography website that first appeared in 1998 as an exercise to learn what the world wide web and websites were, learn to write the HTML to bring a site into being, get it hosted and see if the world thought anything of it. Considerable thanks is owed to Mike Johnson, a good friend and skilled photographer with sublime images of pelagic animals and blue whales, who offered much early advice about the entire process. For the first few years, the only photos on Oceanlight.com that were worth looking at were blue whales (and even that is questionable). The pages were static and created either by hand or with primitive tools such as NetObjects Fusion.
As inbound links to Oceanlight.com began to accumulate and the resultant traffic (mostly from AltaVista and later Google) built, more images were added to the site and publishers began to contact me to license them, usually for use in editorial books, magazines and news publications. I realized that Oceanlight.com had become a defacto stock photography enterprise, and was actually one of the first of its kind for marine and natural history photographs on the web. I was represented by a couple small agencies but had to learn how to field requests and license images properly on my own. In mid-2002, armed with about 1000 images and a need to search by keywords (open vocabulary) and hierarchical relationship (closed vocabulary), I decided to learn PHP and MySql in an effort to create what has now become a powerful, well-indexed and comprehensive online image search feature. So powerful, in fact, that many of the subjects of which I have coverage now appear quite high in the Google rankings by virtue of the PHP/MySql code I wrote. For example, Google “kelp forest photo“, “Guadalupe Island“, “blue whale photos” or “Carcharodon carcharias photos“; as of January 2005 (and October 2007, and June 2009), these all show up in the top 3 or 4 Google results, some of them via Gygis.com, a companion site of mine that is driven by the same self-authored PHP/MySql/search code. Alas, it is inevitable that as better photographers than I shoot these same subjects, my pages are bound to lose traction in the Google ranks. But at the same time my setup allows new subjects to quickly gain traction and show up in Google, e.g., Mobius Arch, The Wedge, Silver Salmon Creek Lodge. While there are exceptions, in general most of the animal and plant subjects for which I have coverage will appear on the first page of Google results when searched by their latin/scientific names, e.g., Zalophus photos and often by their common names as well.
The last 6 years or so have seen an acceleration in the process of making photos, getting them on the web and in front of photo researchers and publishers, and licensing them. I am adding about 4000 new images to the library each year, using Canon digital cameras (Canon EOS-1Ds Mark III & II) with lenses like the 500 f/4, 400 f/5.6, 300 f/2.8, 70-200 f/2.8, 24-70 f/2.8, 16-35 f/2.8 II and 15mm fisheye (all killer lenses).
The image search, keywording and categorization aspects of the Oceanlight.com photo library are now highly automated and need little further work, so that as new images are added to the stock files they appear online with rich metadata in a few days, and are eventually indexed and have the potential to appear in Google search results rapidly. The addition of textual (non-image) content naturally requires more time. Some photographers hand-build individual pages for their subjects. I just don’t have the patience for this, so instead I use weblogging software to add new text content to the website. Currently, I use WordPress that I have customized in a number of ways. There are 650+ posts so far, as of June 2009.
At present, Oceanlight.com has a Google rank of 6 and receives about 5000 unique visitors (omitting robots and crawlers) each day. Sure, there are other measures of a web site’s traffic and relevance. However, I think Google’s opinion of my website is more important than anyone else’s, and counting the unique visitors to a site is a no brainer. These numbers are quite good for an individual photographer’s web site, and I think they are attributable primarily to smart use of metadata, longevity and simple HTML design.
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Updated: November 20, 2009
