Photo Blog­ging

Like video blog­ging, photo blog­ging has ignited with the emer­gence of smart­phones because nearly every­one on the planet now car­ries a cam­era with them at all times. And the cam­eras and asso­ci­ated apps and soft­ware avail­able are pretty amaz­ing qual­ity, con­sid­er­ing the cost. Even if you can’t spring for the .99 it costs for Cam­era+, you can still down­load free edit­ing apps and soft­ware that enable to you out-photo even the most expe­ri­enced pho­tog­ra­pher and dark­room lurk­ers only a few years back. I myself took a pho­tog­ra­phy class in col­lege back in the day, and spent an inor­di­nate amount of time and money on sil­ver halide paper and try­ing to develop and matte the stu­pid things. Inci­den­tally I saw the break­down of what each com­po­nent costs Apple to make an iPhone4, and the cam­era they put in them sets them back only $18 apiece. Incredible.

But blog­ging with pho­tos isn’t just for you that like to take them your­selves. There is an ocean of pho­tos on the web, which many peo­ple like to use to illus­trate their blogs. Many use them ille­gally, but many don’t. It’s impor­tant to pay care­ful atten­tion to what type of license your pho­tos have and give the proper attri­bu­tion, if necessary.

So, now that you know you can’t just snag any photo you come across and throw it into your blog, you’ll need to know what the dif­fer­ent types of licens­ing there are. I’m not going to get into that here, because it’s pretty well-documented.

What I will get into is some good places to get free qual­ity pho­tos and the ways to edit and look at them. I’ll also touch on the cor­rect way to make your blog­ging pho­tos SEO-friendly for those of you that don’t know. It’s really easy, but you just need to be dili­gent about dot­ting your t’s and cross­ing your i’s.

Word­Press Photo Plugins

If you’re already set up on Word­Press, you know there are a lot of Photo plu­g­ins avail­able. Some are help­ful and some are ridicu­lous, and some just suck. I’ve installed and used a lot of the most pop­u­lar ones, and there aren’t many I would really say “rock.” But if you’re short on time and resources, I cer­tainly can see how using them is appealing.

Pho­to­drop­per is one that makes find­ing and adding pho­tos to your blog easy. Find a photo you like, click on it, and wham! You’re done. It also only searches the free sec­tion of Cre­ative Com­mons on Flickr, and adds the attri­bu­tion auto­mat­i­cally. Pho­to­drop­per and Flickr in tan­dem prob­a­bly are the best bets for find­ing usable free imagery.

Get­ting to Flickr now. Flickr used to be a pho­tog­ra­phy ghetto, but thanks to the afore­men­tioned enable­ment of every human alive being able to take decent pho­tos on their iPhones and Androids, edit them eas­ily and upload them any­where within sec­onds, there’s a good selec­tion on Flickr. That ease has also spurred a lot of peo­ple to become more inter­ested and bet­ter at pho­tog­ra­phy around the world. Com­bine the “Inter­est­ing­ness” cat­e­gory on Flickr and match it with the Pho­to­drop­per plu­gin and you’re pretty much in the photo blog­ging business.

Using Pho­tos on Blogs

As you can see from this site, there isn’t a need to add images all over the place. We’ve arrived at a point where unnec­es­sary images, or dec­o­ra­tions” are more of a dis­trac­tion. Espe­cially if you’re try­ing to keep the reader focused on your writ­ing and topic at hand. This is com­ing from some­one that cus­tomizes every­thing, loves color and appre­ci­ates art. If you want a site to dump or dis­play images, there is a place and way to do it. But for good­ness sake, make sure the pho­tos are rel­e­vant. If they aren’t inte­gral to your story or boost your writ­ing, just stick to the text. Peo­ple go to the web for infor­ma­tion, so if the photo helps embell­ish the infor­ma­tion you are attempt­ing to relay, go for it. If not, bag it.

Photo SEO

Plac­ing your pho­tos on your site prop­erly is impor­tant for SEO. Not hard, but impor­tant for good Search Engine Opti­miza­tion so you can be found online. Here’s the way:

Make sure your photo is saved with some­thing descrip­tive in the file­name, like “EiffelTower.jpg” not “img000237.jpg.” That does you no good, and you’re pass­ing up an oppor­tu­nity for your photo and site to be eas­ily discoverable.

When you upload it, make sure the file­size is small. You gen­er­ally don’t need full-screen, major-high-res images to tell a story. When you’re sav­ing your photo onto your com­puter, crop it down, com­press it, reduce the dpi (dots per inch) or what­ever you can to get the file size down. Usually photo edit­ing soft­ware will help you along with this in the form of text boxes ask­ing if you’re going to be putting on the web, if you want to cut down the res­o­lu­tion and so on. Pay atten­tion to them, and don’t be afraid to reduce here and there. No one will be able to tell and it will result in faster load­ing pages, which ulti­mately leads to more read­ers and bet­ter con­ver­sions, if that’s what you’re look­ing for.

When you’re upload­ing your photo to Word­Press, be sure to fill in the alt-image and title. Many peo­ple over­look or breeze past this, but don’t do it. It’s a lit­tle step that will result in bet­ter SEO. The alt-tags tell search engines what the image is of. Pretty important.

Stock Image Photo Sites

I’ve already men­tioned Flickr is a great place to find free images. But there are oth­ers as well. Some will charge a small fee or “credit” but for the casual blog­ger, I can’t see main­tain­ing an account with a lot of money invested in cred­its, or hav­ing a sub­scrip­tion. If you have the dough or need, go for it. But I per­son­ally don’t, espe­cially when I can find and take free photos.

Here’s a list of cur­rently book­marked sites I use to get pho­tos and even videos from, if that’s your thing. If you have any worth adding, please advise and I’ll cer­tainly include them. I need them just like you.

11 Photo Blogs That Will Make You A Great Photographer

Learn­ing some basics of imagery com­po­si­tion and ways to use your equip­ment can eas­ily ele­vate your pho­tog­ra­phy expo­nen­tially ver­sus NOT know­ing some basics. I say that from expe­ri­ence. A very lit­tle time learn­ing some tips from the pros can take your pho­tog­ra­phy from ‘meh’ to ‘Holy!’ In other words, it’s worth your time to read through some of these. If noth­ing else, they will inspire you! And these go to Eleven!

  1. Dig­i­tal Pho­tog­ra­phy School
  2. DIY Pho­tog­ra­phy - Cam­era hacks, such as using a peep­hole as a fish­eye lens
  3. Pho­tog­ra­phy Concentrate
  4. Inspire Me Baby - Here are 5 more inspi­ra­tional photo blogs as well
  5. Beyond Megapix­els - Begin with Get­ting started with Photography
  6. The Photo Argus
  7. Pho­to­Jojo
  8. Stro­bist - Start with Light­ing 101
  9. Canon Blog­ger
  10. Photo­Fo­cus
  11. Nikon Rumors

How to edit online photos

I’m no pro­fes­sional, but I do want to share at least one basic thing to keep in mind when com­pos­ing your shots: the rule of thirds.

rule of thirdsRule of Thirds

It’s an easy con­cept that may trans­form your pho­tos from some­thing weird into some­thing worthwhile.

It’s so sim­ple, and you may have even seen lines across viewfind­ers that divide the screen into nine blocks. The rea­son is that you want to place impor­tant visual lines on them. Hori­zons should be on the top or bot­tom line. Peo­ple and objects gen­er­ally want to be on the inter­sec­tion of lines, in “one-third” of the screen. Of course, you typ­i­cally want to “lead” if it makes sens for the shot. Such as a car dri­ving past; you want it to have room in front, not so that it’s dri­ving off the and out of the image.

Next time you’re watch­ing a movie, try to notice how the rule of thirds is in play. Pretty cool!

Do you have any favorite sites or soft­ware you rec­om­mend? And that you hate? Leave a comment!