Websites Improvements: Publications & Clients

Photoshelter recently provided users with the opportunity to add customized pages to their websites. I added a page that highlights some of my clients and publications that work has been printed in. Take a look at my website and notice the new link on top labeled "publications" Click on it to check out some tear-sheets and client list.

Mosh Pits: Embedded Galleries

Up in the air - Images by Erica Stavis

Just a little bit to get your morning started..I figured out how to embed sideshows into other websites from PhotoShelter. Featured are some good mosh pit scenes.

Come back in the afternoon for a very comprehensive post about MVS lecture.

Huh? This is my most viewed photo ?

One of the great features of PhotoShelter is the built in "Public Image Views" function. While logged in to your site, you are able to see the top 100 images posted on your site with the highest amount of views. It is always interesting to see which of my pictures draw the most attention.

Strangely enough one picture stands out above the rest as having far many more views than any other photo....and it is the one at the top of this post. Now....its a funny picture yes, but is this really the photo of mine that people look at most? What so special about it?

It makes me wonder who is looking at my site......Did someone fall asleep on their keyboard while looking at my site and mistakenly keep reloading this one pic? Do people click on the small thumbnail because it looks like the lead singer of Monotonix is wearing no pants? Do the drunken tattoed goons in this shot send a link to all their friends to show them their picture posted on the web? Is a friend who knows that I obsessively check my "Public Image Views" consistently, just trying to mess with me and clicking on this shot over and over again?

Ive been looking into Google Analytics, which apparently gives you more insight into exactly who and when people are looking at specific pages on your website and how they get to your website from other links. I tried to embed the code in my site but still haven't figured out how to make it work. Once I do, it should be interesting to see who,what, where, and when people are looking at my photos. Whats funny is that this image has 20 + times more views than any other picture on my site....weird.

Yes Monotonix shows are crazy, as is evidenced by my gallery of images posted from One Eyed Jacks in September, but is that what it takes to drive people to my site?

Pictures of People Doing Things = Lifestyle Photography

It seems as though the commercial category for "photos of people doing things that they would normally do" is called lifestyle photography. For a long time i've been struggling with categorizing my photos and figuring out the best way to display them as sets. Using PhotoShelter is a blessing and a curse because of the flexibility I have with creating new galleries, or 'sets' of images. Sometimes I look at images and think......should this be in the people set, the entertainment set, the portrait set, or all of them? For instance, an image that has a particular commercial appeal might not have that same appeal in a gallery labeled "Travel: Italy" like this image. Knowing that most people don't last beyond the first few images of a gallery, especially ones that house hundreds of photos. Ive recently created a new gallery titled Lifestyle Gallery, which showcases some of the works that might not get as much credit because they're lumped in travel or event galleries with tons of other images. I guess at this point, I want to make my website as visitor friendly as possible and keep switching up the images on my homepage to make people view more and more of my photos. Is it better to show tons of photos from a variety of categories on my site or limit the scope so it seems as though i specialize in one area? Any insight from my followers?

I have a day off of work today due to the incoming storm, and im planning on busting my alien bee strobe lights out of their case and trying to do this beer shoot at the house. Im not really sure how it will turn out being as though its not really a proper studio, but Ill give it a try.

I also really want to try and figure out how to customize my PhotoShelter website by editing the html code. I have very very limited html skills but realize that I could probably achieve what I want to if I do a bit of research. If you look on my website powered by PS you'll notice that the top navigation bar on the upper right has 7 links. I want to try to add an 8th link "home" this way people can navigate back to the home PS page.

Last night I messed around with my real "ericastavisphotography.com" homepage designed in Dreamweaver and added two links so people can either enter the site or the blog. More on the trials of PS html coding later.

Photo Shelter Process and Meta Data

After months of trying to learn how to develop a thorough website of my photographic images I discovered a site called PhotoShelter (PS) which allows photographers to archive photos and create a gallery-based website of their work. Because the gallery function was hard to develop using Flash (a program I had never used before) on my original website, I did some research into PS and signed up for a one month account. What I immediately liked about the software was that I was able to create and edit galleries of photos which had the built in functionality of a slideshow/thumbnail view. My website has flash slideshows which I created after taking tons of YouTube tutorials on how to build flash slideshows, but the viewer has no buttons to scroll through images so they need to sit through the entire slideshow (which I know no one would ever do) Here is the general process for working with PS.

1. Organize and catalogue your images clearly and add IPTC and metadata to all of your images in Lightroom, or whichever program you use for RAW Conversion. It is important to ADD THIS DATA TO THE IMAGES THEMSELVES at this stage, because if you do it within a program like PS, Smug mug or Photobucket when you transfer images to another program all this data will be lost. This metadata allows people searching the web to find your specific images. Ie. if you're photo has specific tags associated with it within its metadata then when someone types "Portrait of old man in New Orleans" he/she will have a better chance of linking to your image if it has the tags, Old Man, New Orleans. Which I happen to have a good sample of on my PS site. The more people that click on your image, the higher up you appear within a search engine like Google. Im still in the process of doing this because obviously it is a major process and there is no limit to how detailed your description of an image can be. (more on this later) As of now, none of my files have any metadata, but after attending the PS webinar on SEO (Search Engine Optimization) I realize this is an important part of the process if you ever want to sell any of your work. Click here for a 16 min. vid on SEO from PS. If you can batch tag a bunch of images at once and then go in and add specifics that is good.
2. Import your images to the Archive section of PS. If you have certain albums or themed categories I've found it best to upload groups of images into folders within your archive. You can also upload photos all at once and then group them into folders within PS You will want to upload your largest native file to the archive because PS will save it as CR2 if you upload it like that, and automatically covert it to JPEG when posted to a gallery for viewing. I am still trying to develop an organizational strategy for how to store my images and categorize them into folders and I think it needs to really be thought out. This is one of the questions I always ask professional photographers that I meet. How do you organize your photos?
3. One of the neat features of PS is that now you have your native files backed up on a remote server somewhere so it acts as an extra backup. depending on which plan you get you have more storage room. I think I have the standard account (about $34/month) and I have 35 gigs, not really enough so store all my photos but its a decent starting point for images I actually would want people to see.
4. Once you've uploaded to the archive you can create galleries (either public/private/invitation only/passwords protected,etc) so you can send galleries to clients or friends using any restriction you want.
5. You now have tons of flexibility for how to showcase your galleries and customize your site , which is very user friendly on the PS interface.

There are a million other deatils to consider but the takeaways are:

• You dont need to learn to be a web designer to create a good site of your work. There are alternatives. All have a specific learning curves but there are many options out there.
• Better to learn all this SEO/Metadata/IPTC stuff now, because its easer to add Metadata as you process images rather than going back and adding data to a million photos you already have.
• Reflect on your workflow and consider how developing a pro-active system for photo organization can help you sell images in the future.

As always comments and questions welcome!