You have to make the determination yourself regarding the purpose of your blog and then do it. or not. If your blog is perceived as an extension of your portfolio or part of your business marketing, etc. then if it is all over the place it might give the wrong impression to potential clients.

Oh True Grit or shall I call you #43 you have revealed the light – surely a choice between people and computers has to be made.

Eskildsens significant and valuable images are on the net now and also some of his words about this work and I appreciate that, I am thankful for him telling about it and that is what I mean.

Well Little Mr Aggressive, interesting mannerism that you think I am saying that photographers ought to skip what is motivating and meaningful to them and instead go and blog.

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I’ll tell you where they’d be — they’d be leaving the camps, and leaving the real action, (where the pictures are), and laying down their cameras, and riding back to town, to try to find a Starbucks Roasting Saloon, and trying to get their WIFI card to work in their wooden laptop, to transmit to the Pony Express guy, in order to get it to upload — that’s where they’d be! Missing the action!

You can’t be in two places at once. And you can’t be in two mindsets at once. The danger of stepping foot into this “instant broadcast mentality” is that you have to mentally leave the scene, and go into tech mode, and that comes at cost to the quality of the photographs. Go and look at The Roma Journeys and imagine him not spending time with his subjects, after dinner, and sinking into their community, but instead, going back to his hotel room and trying to get his village dial-up to work, in order for you to have instant cotten candy to read every night. Screw that. You’ve got to make priorities, how you’re going to spend your time.

http://tinyurl.com/5ywalf

Imagine if Lee Miller had a blog when she first encountered the concentration camps or if Roger Fenton while photographing The Crimean War in the year of 1855 also made regular posts about what it was like travelling with 5 horse drawn wagons full of photographic equipment.

For all of us who also write about photography and are interested in the creative process and what humans do while on this planet some of the blogs are a lovely read.

Clients don’t respond in dramatic numbers, but I think any good job or sales is worth the effort.

It is a lot of work and in my opinion it only (!) works if I keep ‘feeding’ it with new posts. Which is where also the danger lies, boring posts creep in because I think ‘better post something… ‘ when I really have nothing new to show.

And there will always be people who do not like my work or the way I present myself online, so be it. I am getting a little tired of reading about advice on what to do and what not, because ‘potential clients might watch, too !’
There are many potential clients out there who appreciate our new freedom of showing whatever we feel like showing and not staying in a box. Others don’t, but I can’t please everybody …
(Another benefit of posting my images on a regular basis is I can click on a label, lets say, ‘Trinidad and Tobago’ or ‘movie stills’, and I have all my work in that category right there on display since Sunday, Feb.6.2006, when I started the blog !!!)

I’m frequently invited by a college here in Chicago to do portfolio reviews and speak to classes about the business and art of photography. I enjoy it as a way to be connected to my industry on an entry level. Recently I added a Q&A section to my blog where photographers are invited to ask business questions that I and my colleagues respond to. It’s called “How to get ahead in Photography?” (Thank you Heather Morton-Ask an Art Buyer?) I get questions from all over the world.

I’m enjoying it as a way to elevate the consciousness of young photographers as well as engage other industry professionals around me to get involved in what I am trying. Like I said, I enjoy this kind of networking and moreover, you never know who will be reading.

What also made it so interesting is that here, 5 years later, he’s shooting covers for Rolling Stone among others, and back then he was still in Austin working for the Statesman, experimenting with strobe techniques and taking random fun pictures of himself or his friends.

As a young photographer (not all that young in age, but young in professional experience), it was immensely inspirational to see that such a successful photographer was just like me only a few short years before.

It seems that his early blog might be gone now as google doesn’t find it anymore… I’m glad I found it when I did.

#7 check these out! gleaning through these over coffee this morning.

I really have enjoyed david alan Harvey’s window of the world. http://davidalanharvey.typepad.com/road_trip/.
and here’s a whole photoblog site!
http://www.photoblogs.org/
http://www.lensculture.com/webloglc/index.html

I think part of this reluctancy might be a fear of looking dorky to clients, (or to other photographers). How much do you let them see behind the curtain? Is it better to maintain mystery or let them see you with your pants down?

Heather Morton’s comment is the most interesting in here to me. I think photographers could learn from this. Here she is, just enjoying getting a glimpse into our lives, when, in truth, most photographers are just making sure they “look cool and have it together” most of the time. I mean, could you really imagine someone like a Steven Meisel having a blog, and there he is, just typing away, with that fur hat taken off, not dressed well, and just sharing details of his day and maybe posting an outtake from an Italian Vogue shoot, (that might be better off never being seen, for fear of risking his perfect image)? And trust me, Meisel is an awesome photographer in my eyes. If I was advising him, I’d say NoWayJose on the blog idea. Keep the curtain drawn. Don’t let them see you sweat.

Yet I must admit, it’s always enjoyable reading someone News Section or Blog section, or whatever we’re going to call it. (Agreed that the word blog should be retired, as should the word Twitter). It’s just human nature that you want to get to know someone that you respect.

I’d wonder how a client views a blog like the Chase Jarvis thing. Always full of gear talk. But then, you wonder, “Are many ADs out there just frustrated photographers? Might they just eat that stuff up? Might that gear talk actually attract a job now and then?” Or do you risk, “Wow, he comes off like a dork in a way. Do we wanna work with a gearhead?” So yeah, it’s a tough call; a mixed bag.

I think the way that Erik Almas does it is a good balance. I think he just calls it News or Recent, and then posts a JPG outtake, and who the client was. It just lets clients know that you’re not sitting around, not working, or making YouTube videos of how you pack your Pelican cases.

More than anything, I think this topic is making everyone rethink their website, and that the whole concept of “just a static site” is just not enough any more. It doesn’t change enough. People want new News every single day, (just like we went new News here on Rob’s site). It’s like you begin to think of your site more like a TV channel than a book — always changing and always updated.

How many hours are there in a day, again?

Someone sent me a link to a nice site the other day, but when the site opened, it was all autoplay videos of Behind The Scenes stuff. It was all I could do to find the damn photographs! So much WhizBang Stuff that you had to think twice — “is this guy a photographer or a videographer? Where are the damn pictures?”

My clients have told me that they read and enjoy seeing what I’ve been working on. Very good assignments have come from new clients reading it or seeing new images.

Sometimes, I’ll talk about a piece of gear I’ve used. (Jon Roemer, Mark Tucker and I voiced our opinions about a piece of gear that was not up to snuff and my blog was the carrier for us and that post helped quite a few photographers make a decision about if they should purchase that piece of kit)

Most of the time, it is a news section.

Having a news section on your website makes it easier to update viewers/clients (or with RSS, they update themselves) without making changes on your portfolio site every few weeks and then sending out an email blast. If you’ve got the ability to string a few well-worded sentences together to talk about what you’ve got going on (assuming you’ve got something going on), it’s a nice diversion.

So, now. How do we get rid of the word “blog?”

In my opinion it’s all relative… I know someone working purely as a photographer needs clients, but do you really want a client that judges you by a weblog? I doubt there are that mant potential clients that would take the time to read such things, presumably making sure your photography is the front of your page and your journal is something else, perhaps not even linked on your portfolio.

Don’t have a blog to brag about yourself TOO much!

To me the draw is the freedom/challenge to create my own “channel”, and fill it with original content that functions independently of any separate “main” career. Photos. Art. Music. Writing. Maybe video. If it did end up having a commercial component, it would the result of traffic generated to the level where taking on advertisers, or promoting other creative projects that are for sale, became a viable.

But the blog would be the thing, not the thing about the thing. (Yes, I get that this isn’t an original idea, I’m just saying that’s what attracts me to this avenue of expression.)

Unless you have something intelligent and constructive to write – something that is actually useful to others – then stick to photographing.

Of course I shoot women so 99.8% of the visits are from wankers or lookeeloos but that’s OK.

It takes a lot of “something” to know that the first photo potential clients are going to see of yours is the last shot you posted… So I don’t lead with lame stuff. It keeps me on edge and helps force me to edit and shoot at a higher standard. But I’ve also learned to stop obsessing over the top image having to be representative of my work — it’s more important to show that you’re constantly working and growing — it’s not like the typical Flash Intro — the purpose is to suck people into a relationship through the blog — having come back and talk to you.

Its the problem with photography in general. Everybody wants to get the inside story and the rumours. “How was it done technically?” “how did that model behave . do you think was she doing drugs?”
ok of course you dont post the drug thing (hell I dont even want to know myself) but at the end of the day when I think about it : is there anything I can post without potentially pissing of some client?

I can’t say I have a total success with my blog, but I know some people check it out on a regular basis, especially local people from Philadelphia area who know me already. I’ve got some portrait and music gigs through it before. I also think it’s important to give it a specific direction based on your target audience.

Like some already said, I can confirm that it is also valuable in terms of search engine as google likes to crawl keyword filled blogs.

I guess the big thing for us is trying to decide if posting random outtakes from a summer long project dilutes the impact of the final project? As you said the blog becomes an extension of your portfolio and 20 images scattered in 15 different posts doesn’t have the cohesive presence of project presented as a whole.

We’d have some pretty interesting things to blog about, but the posts wouldn’t carry nearly the same weight without images.

So is there value to be had in posting work that’s in progress or is it best to hold onto it until the project is complete? That’s the idea we’re struggling with.