5 Tips for Improved Photographs at WeddingsPosted by drfl on May 10th, 2010

At the end of my Arkansas-St. Louis adventure was a wedding.  First, I would like to say congratulations to the happy couple!  Second, while shooting the wedding as a guest, I thought of a few tips that may help others get the most out of photographing these events, and indeed they apply to many different activities. Here are 5 tips that may help you improve your photographs at weddings.

Tip 1. Keep the Depth of Field as shallow as (almost) possible.

Weddings have a lot going on, participants bustling about, scurrying to get in position or across the venue, children running to one relative to another, and guests trying to get seated. Once the music queues, everyone quiets, and the procession begins, hundreds of shutter clicks create they’re own conversation. As the beautiful bride strolls down the aisle, keep the Depth of Field to a minimum and then continue to use low settings. This will accentuate your subject and keep the background activities (see children above) from detracting in your composition. Prior to the event, test your lenses with different settings to see what’s best at what aperture. I have found with my 135 f/2 that 2.0 – 2.8 is ideal, while on my 50 CM 3.2 – 3.5 is the best range. One of the huge benefits that digital SLRs have over point and shoots is the larger sensors when combined with shallow lenses create some great blurred out backgrounds, use this advantage.

Tip 2. When shooting the bride and groom (or other man/woman combinations), place your focus point on the man.

Men show lines better, or they don’t care as much, either way, women are senstive to blemishes. When selecting focus on the man, if the woman is not in exactly on the same plane of focus, she will fall slightly out of focus. Generally, this lack of focus isn’t consciously noticeable, but it may lightly blur those features that she doesn’t like.

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An End of Year Retrospective for 2009 – Part IIPosted by drfl on December 30th, 2009

Yesterday, I presented 10 questions I ask myself at the end of every year regarding my photography and indeed I recommend everyone asks themselves as well.  Some of the questions can be answered with hard data and analysis.  Others require a more introspective look at our motivations, emotions, and attitudes.

As I mentioned yesterday, retrospectively, I feel that 2009 was a successful year.  I have expanded my portfolio by nearly 25% and I have ramped up some business marketing effort.  For today’s review, I have prepared my top blog articles from 2009 from a selection of over 180.  They range from the hard pragmatic to the philosophical esoteric.  Unlike yesterday’s post that contained purely subjective matter, today’s post is formed from some raw data.  I researched the articles that have had the most clicks, most tweets, most comments, most diggs, most emailed, and most discussed around the water cooler (ok, maybe not that).  Even after all that, though, I have subjectively weighted some of the articles higher.  To be fair, the most popular articles are the how-tos, what-to-dos, and why-to-dos.  Some of the less popular articles are the introspective goal, vision, etc. articles.  Indeed, it is more likely that many more people searching the web for this topic than articles on less tangible aspects of photography. So, here are my top blog picks for 2009:

#7 Returning to One’s Roots With a Point and Shoot

While the total number of views is less on this article, I included it since I believe that this has been a fairly hot topic. With more and more people getting high quality point and shoots, including professionals, I felt it important to add it to the list.

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How to Harness the Power of Page Titles – High Performance Photoblogging – September, 2009Posted by drfl on September 2nd, 2009

An early Native American title, artistic, but not Search Engine Optimized.

When I first began placing my photography on a website I figured that my work would stand on it’s own.  I was under the assumption that if I posted photographs to the web, they would come.  Who “they” were, I wasn’t sure, and why I thought they would come… well, let’s just say that it was the beginning of a long and never-ending education that I am happy to share today. 

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High Performance Photoblogging – August, 2009Posted by drfl on August 11th, 2009

In a continued effort to provide more information to photographers, once or twice a month I am going to offer a post entitled “High-Performance PhotoBlogging”. These posts will deal with blogging effectively, marketing photography, and news from the world of photography. 

In late May of this year I had the opportunity to listen to Guy Kawasaki speak at a conference in Las Vegas. A self-avowed “Technical Evangelist” and a very engaging speaker, he currently has the 88th most popular blog on the Internet today where he offers tidbits and advice for those looking to utilize the latest tools for marketing. Besides being an Apple fellow and numerous other accolades he is the founder of Alltop.com (mentioned in my SEO for Photographers series) and as such he is very in tune with the world of blogging and microblogging – better known as Twitter. I follow his blog “How to Change the World” constantly as I find the information entertaining and useful from a marketing and business perspective.

Last November he posted the article “Looking for Mr. Goodtweet: How to Pick Up Followers on Twitter”. While it focuses on the world of Twitter, many of the tips are useful from a blog perspective. Here are a few of the items I took away from the post:

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When a Photograph is Not Worth 1,000 Words – SEO Tips for Photographers – Part IIPosted by drfl on August 6th, 2009

Continuing on from yesterday’s post, When a Photograph is Not Worth 1,000 Words – SEO Tips for Photographers – Part I, in today’s post have three more tips to help photobloggers and photographers market their websites and heighten the visibility on search engines.

Now that I had incorporated the phrases into my pages I had to craft my sentences in ways that it made sense to the readers, but still relevant to the search engines.  This took a few iterations with some trial and error to craft sentences that seemed to flow well, but contained the words and phrases I wanted.   If I placed these terms too many times in my pages, the search engine will think that it is a blatant attempt at artificially increasing the placement and actually place the page lower and furthermore, the reader would leave uninterested. 

Tip 4: Use the chosen words in a logical manner that is easy for both humans and robots to read.  Keep the pages clean with little or no advertising and have a structure that is easy for the searcher and search engines to follow.

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When a Photograph is Not Worth 1,000 Words – SEO Tips for Photographers – Part IPosted by drfl on August 5th, 2009

When I began this blog I initially thought that I might write articles that would benefit other photographers with some of my past knowledge of technical items. Before I began, I researched the best way to market my work through my blog online. Overwhelmingly, the advice was that other photographers would not be who would ultimately purchase my work. Instead of writing articles for other photographers, the sources said that I should write items that would market my work to those who would buy it, keeping the articles short and simple. So, taking this advice I put away all my technical ideas and went to work on simply showing off my work – uploading a photograph and then speaking about it. Ultimately, I think this has merit, but as you will see through this [technical] article, I now believe that there is perhaps benefit in balancing articles such as this with displaying my images (so if this doesn’t interest you, please return next week). As a result, I am now authoring this to give other photographers a better understanding of what is needed to increase their standings in the search engines.

Why should I give away my “secrets”? I wish I could say it’s completely altruistic, but while there is a bit of that, the main reason is that I have come to realize that very few photographers work in my niche markets, and my hope is that other people will reference this article on their websites and blogs.

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