Promoting yourself via social media

Social Media. What is it? How can you use it to benefit you’re photography? Let’s start by defining social media. Social media defined is: forms of electronic communication (as Web sites for social networking and microblogging) through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content (as videos).

There are many sites that allow you to share your photographs and promote your brand. Let’s examine how we can use social media to reach existing communities.

Many communities have formed and continue to form online. Some of these communities are professional networks, some discuss simple day to day photographic shots. Online communities are continually forming and they are using many social media tools to discuss topics and learn from each other. As a marketer, many of the participants in these communities may also be good customer candidates. If you are able to build a relationship with your community, marketing and sales opportunities will come with it. So in some ways, the birth of social media has makes it easier for us to find potential customers, listen to their needs and perhaps use social media and other tools to reach out to them. Working to build true relationships with like minded community members, you can have success.

Search doesn’t have to happen at Google.com. Many web-based services like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and del.ici.ous have search boxes of their own. As the web continues to move to “real-time”, search will become the predominate method of finding “status” and “presence.” While blog posts aren’t going away, the searcher wants to find out what is happening right now, hence Facebook’s recent redesign to more of a newsy interface and of course, Twitter.
Social media places on the web are by their nature conversational. People are talking. They were talking before but the information wasn’t being stored for all to see. Now it is and that information can be a powerful market research tool. Whether you are looking at blogs, watching already existing communities or searching on various social media platforms people are talking – about what they love and about what they hate. This information acts as real time market research and can be invaluable in all aspects of your marketing and business planning. And if you hear something worth commenting on, join the conversation and reach out to the existing community. The two way communication is a great research vehicle as well.

Types of social media are diverse. These are the most popular, but certainly not all inclusive. These are however ones that you definitely need to be using while marketing your brand and promoting community relationships.

Google+
Linked in
Twitter
Facebook
500px
Pinterest
Smugmug
Flickr

Consider the time commitment when choosing your social networks. You don’t need to use all of them to build a community of like minded people, but if you do, it can be somewhat time consuming. Most of if not all of these can be automated and updated from your website or your blog with plug-ins either using WordPress, Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop.

In closing, social media is by far the most efficient way to interact with potential clients, professionals and communities to promote, learn and market your brand.

Nightime photography

I spent this past week installing new exterior lighting around my home.  It was a fun project and I learned a lot.  The one thing that kept going through my mind was how much I couldn’t wait to take pictures of the house lit up at night once the lighting was done.  My wife was kidding me saying “Why does everything have to tie into photography for you.”  It’s true that I often look at the world through f/stops, but that is the joy of photography for me.  So, back to the project.  I anxiously waited all day for it to become night, hoping it was not going to rain as it was in the forecast.  The rain held off and 5 minutes before the lights were timed to come on, I had my tripod set up, and remote trigger ready to go.

I knew that I wanted to get the starburst effect with the coach lights flanking the garage and the porch light, so I stopped down to f/22 as my starting point and fired away.  I was pretty happy with the results.  The f/22 aperture resulted in about a 13 second exposure to capture the above shot.  Not satisfied, I changed the aperture to f/18 and did 7 frame HDR just to see what I would get.  I used Photomatix this time to assemble to shots.

The resulting HDR gave me more of the night sky which was kinda cool in the final shot.  I turned the porch light off for this one because it was so bright and really changed the overall look of the photo when doing the HDR.   I wanted a darker look to the photo that emphasized the lighting, and with the porch light on, the photo looked a little washed out and the starburst effect was not showing up as clearly.

Images captured with Nikon D3s, 24-70mm on LexarUDMA digital film.

Which HDR plug-in do you prefer?

In my opinion, this is really a matter of personal taste.  I decided to try a test to get a feel for which HDR program I prefer in my workflow.  I have both the latest version of Photomatix and HDR Efex Pro from NIK Software.  I have used both in the past with great results, but I really wanted to start focusing in on which one I think I can get the result that I like and fit into my workflow.  After all, photography is about creativity and whatever tools you use to obtain the result that you like is what you should go with.  OK, having said that, I took a 5 frame bracketed exposure with 1.0 EV dialed in on a tripod ensuring I would get the best five shots I could.  I used Photomatix on the first one and saved the results, but documented each slider.  More on what I did this in a minute.  I like what it did to the sky above this Hindu temple, but I really wasn’t liking the rest of the image.

The second image was processed in HDR Efex Pro.  To ensure fairness when comparing, I adjusted the sliders to the exact numbers that appeared in Photomatix.  I like the result in image 2 better.  It shows a softer image, especially with the light and that is what I recall seeing when taking the shots.  I realize that each program uses a different engine and algorithms to produce the images and that is why I recorded the settings in the Photomatix to be fair and really compare.  Perhaps the results would be different if I had bracketed a 7 or 9 but that is an experiment for another day.

While I was at it I wanted to see what the one I liked better looked like in black and white.  I think I will start playing more with B&W  HDR.

Captured with: Nikon D3s, 10-24mm on lexar digital film.