In Photos dot org

Girls on the street

St. Patrick’s Day brought out a huge crowd onto the streets and here’s a group of girls we bumped into on Patrick’s Street.

We were on our way to a cafe for refreshment when I spotted a bicycle chained to a pole, but it had fallen down. As is my way I crouched down to get a shot of the wheel and the pole receding into the sky and when I got up this group of girls were looking at me. One asked what I was doing and of course I had to take their photo since they were enjoying themselves so much!

PS. Thank you Meg for linking to my blog at Cute Overload. Your blog must do some savage amount of traffic if referrers from your site are anything to go by. I did as much traffic here yesterday as I’d normally do on ocaoimh.ie!
PPS. Greetings to Zefrank too. I agree, check out the show, although can there be anyone left who hasn’t seen Ze Frank at least once?

I like these. Claire went exploring an old house: part 1, part 2.

I like these too - Donal’s Stomp photos are particularly good especially as they were taken at a live performance and in a darkened theatre! Very good!

Richard Hearne offered some great tips for making Irish photoblog mcawilliams.com more visible on the search engines and they’re very good general search engine optimization tips that can be applied to any website.

He has grouped his tips into the following categories:

1. Site Architecture
2. On-Page Optimisation
3. Off-site Optimisation

Richard’s post is well worth reading, even if you don’t have a photoblog. I know I learned a thing or two that are already paying off!

I have a few more tips to add to those above. Most of them are geared towards the photo blog community rather than general blogging sites, but read on even if you’re not running a photoblog!

1. Join Photoblogs.org before you do anything else. It’s the center of the photoblog universe and it’s worth participating in the community there.
2. Join VFXY and Cool photoblogs. VFXY displays thumbnails of their member’s blogs which is great for driving traffic. Coolphotoblogs is a photoblog directory. I’m a member of the former, but something went wrong with my application to the latter and I haven’t bothered figuring it out yet.
3. Join Flickr, Zooomr, 23HQ and any other social photo sharing site you care to mention. Zooomr are offering premium accounts to bloggers still I think. You can host your photo there, saving your bandwidth costs. It’s also a very good way of exposing your photography to a wider audience. Thanks to Flickr I’ve almost made back the cost of hosting this website through sales of my photos.
4. Taking a leaf from Richard above, if you host your images on Flickr, they require a link back to that picture’s page on flickr.com. Make sure you don’t leak page rank by adding rel=’external nofollow’ to that link. The same applies to Zooomr and 23HQ of course.
5. Visit the Photoblogs.org wiki, especially the tips and tricks page and how to get traffic to your photoblog.
6. Write. Search engines can’t do much with an image, but if you describe the image in a small paragraph of text that will help. In a similar vein, every photo should have a title. It might be tempting to number the image, or call them “Untitled #98″, “Untitled #99″, “Untitled #100″ and so on, but that won’t help people find your website.
7. As you’re now writing, link. Link to other sites and blogs and do it often. Photoblogs don’t link enough. Where’s the conversation? Everybody has their heads stuck in the sand doing their own thing, afraid that they’ll lose visitors for good if they leave their site. Link to specific blog posts and those posts will be sent a “ping” or a “trackback”. That tells that blog’s owner you’ve been talking about his work. It also plants a link to your blog right in his comments section where his visitors can find it and follow what you said about his work. Here’s a ping my blog sent to an older post on my site. My feed reader post has lots of external links. Oh look, there’ll be a ping from that link too! Links really are the lifeblood of your blog.
8. I may be biased, but I recommend you use WordPress to host your photoblog. It has support for pinging and trackbacks out of the box, a facility some other photoblog software don’t have. If you don’t want to host a WordPress blog yourself, open a blog on WordPress.com and check out what people are posting about photography, photos and even flickr. It’s a bit more limited than a regular WordPress blog but you’ll get a good feel for it. Best of all, you can export your blog and host it yourself when you feel up to it!
9. If you do use WordPress, install Ultimate Tag Warrior so your posts are categorised in a fine grained manner. Tags do wonderful things for search engines, and this is a must have for any WordPress blog. Note that tagging support is going into WordPress right now, but it’s still being developed. I think a small script to convert UTW tags to WordPress tags is called for. Hopefully I’ll have it running here within the next few days.
10. Join Google webmaster tools and enable “Enhanced Image Search”. Read more about it here but I’ve noticed an increase in hits from Google Image Search since I opted in to it.
11. Claim your blog on Technorati. Here’s the Technorati page for this blog. Add an icon to your user account to encourage clicks on your stories there.

With a few changes to your photoblog you can drastically increase the traffic to your site and share your work with a wider audience. You never know, one of your photos could become a viral email attachment sent around to thousands of people in offices and homes.

Animal Care Society Collection

Volunteers from the Animal Care Society were out in force on Saturday collecting to raise funds.
We bumped into Beamish and his owner and I forgot to ask her name, but hopefully she’ll see this picture as I gave her one of my cards. Beamish was lovely and very placid, perfect tempermant for dealing with the crowds on a busy Saturday in town.

I would love to know who made an email attachment of my thieving duck and thank them. The Aflac Duck seems to be a well known part of American insurance marketing and people got a kick out of these ducks stealing money from a lady on the street!

Apparently my thieving duck has become “the most sent-around-ha-ha-look-at-the-duck photo evar” but I wish I had watermarked the image with my blog url. It has appeared on:

• Snopes.com
• Organized Crime
• Freeple.com
• iidb
• Cute Overload

To those that linked back here, thank you. To the rest, shame on you, why didn’t you use Google and find my blog?

I’m still chuffed that an image of mine is now an “urban legand” of sorts. Not many can say that! More comments on flickr but please link here if you’re going to link anywhere!

Update - welcome visitors from the Zefrank forum!

Update on June 14th. It appears the News of the World newspaper used the Thieving Duck last Sunday. I sent them off an email this afternoon so hopefully I will hear from them within a day or two.

Alcatraz Control Center

The Control Center in Alcatraz. This room is visible to all visitors to the prison and is beautifully preserved.

I couldn’t find anything specific about this room but Alcatraz History has a very good site with lots of information about the prison on Alcatraz Island.

My feed addiction has got to stop! It’s a great way to keep up to date on my favourite blogs but when it gets to over 300 blogs then something has to be done. That means cutting back on my subscriptions. Unfortunately the first to go will be those photoblogs that don’t offer a full feed, or only show thumbnails. If I had time, I’d visit your blog every day but I don’t, and it’s impossible to judge the merits of a photo from a tiny thumbprint of an image.

Without further ado, here’s the list of blogs I have dropped from my feed reader. If you’ve come here because you saw traffic to your blog through a link in this post, please consider a full feed. I’d be back like a shot because I enjoyed your photography enough to subscribe in the first place!

• panhandlin’
• Deceptive Media
• North Atlantic Skyline
• Life Vicarious
• Alakija.com
• Shorpy (which I featured only a few days ago!)
• in-Public
• Stockphototalk - photography news site
• Water Molotov - love his street photography, sigh.
• Never Happen
• Chromasia
• image ANAlogy
• MUTE
• XoverIP
• Every so often
• 10xzoom.ro
• a b s o l u t e l y n o t h i n g almost got the chop but it’s thumbnails are just big enough to make out.
• Gingerpixel stays too, but please Claire, full feed?
• No Traces - wonderful photos but not even a thumbnail in the feed.
• Images of my thoughts - ugly watermarks.
• Mystery Me
• Eterisk
• Pasci it
• Annaweb
• caps:photo
• Low Exposure
• Twenty4 - Twenty4 now uses Pixelpost and has a full feed! Find it at http://twenty4.net/pp/. Thank you Grit! The pictures of your niece are delightful!

Your feed readers are the most loyal of your readers and they should be treated accordingly. Give them something to get their teeth into instead of a small morsel and you’ll find that traffic to your blog increases, you’ll get more links to your posts and maybe even more comments by an appreciative audience.

Here are the photography related blogs that stay.

• Chromalark
• Flak Photo
• About Photography - a partial feed but worth haning on to.
• Thomas Hawk
• Photo Business News & Forum
• intermittent shots
• The Candid Frame
• The Online Photographer
• Strobist - started out great but I find myself not visiting as much. Partial feed unfortunately. Almost chopped.
• Renaissance Man
• The Digital Story - although I wonder why I still subscribe. I rarely listen to podcasts.
• The Photography Blog - started out well, but it’s now mostly “yet another list of camera reviews” site.
• The Death Boogie Diaries - some NSFW stuff.
• Svenfoo - GIMP developer.
• Open Source Photography (OSP)
• GIMP Users on Flickr.
• McAWilliams Photo blog
• Photojournalism - Partial feed, but Mark’s a brilliant photographer and writer.
• Photogranny
• A tiny blip in the continuum
• Digital Photography World - partial feed but I like his writing.
• Digital Light and Shadow
• ajaxnetphoto
• Daily dose of imagery
• A Walk Through Durham Township, Pennsylvania
• Therefore, I_blog
• Digital Camera Reviews
• Donal
• Phil’s Photos
• Headphoneland
• Alkos
• Round Here
• Capture Capture
• Photostream
• Rymus
• Red Mum

And a lot more but I got tired of copy/pasting everything.

Coming up on Monday: search engine tips for your photoblog. Don’t miss it!

A view on an Alcatraz Street

Looking through a doorway onto one of the streets of Alcatraz Prison in San Francisco. Tourists congregate while listening to the electronic tour guide.

I think I should have all my photos of Alcatraz and San Francisco posted before my next trip there in July.

Joy of Tech makes a good point about the pricing of Adobe products. If you can’t afford to buy a copy of Photoshop then give the GIMP a go. It’d free, it’s what I use to process all my photos and it has many of the features most people need. (via)

Silhouettes in the club

Some of the audience who gathered to take part in the Stanley Super 800 video of Gatecrashing silhouetted against the bright lights around the band’s equipment.

I underexposed on purpose so the silhouettes of the people in the image contrasted with the stage lighting. Shot during a break in performances when most people were outside getting some air!

Gatecrashing on Caroline Street

Another shot from Sunday at Stanley Super 800’s recording of the Gatecrashing video. The multi-shot posts are such a pain to do the rest of these will be single photo posts!