“Bluehost is shutting down everything….website, blog, email until the owners remove enough of the files to be under their new limits.”

You can read reviews of the downhill slide in service (here).

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Joerg Colberg’s weblog Conscientious has been down for over a day now and I wanted to let any of his regular visitors know that he’s down but not out. Apparently his webhost is MediaTemple which kind of surprises me because they have a good reputation and charge you more than most for the ability to handle traffic spikes. Still, things do happen and even a 99.9% uptime guarantee means you could be off the air for at least 9 hours a year

My experience with the cheaper hosting has always been that you will see outages from 15 minutes to an hour now and again but never anything like a day unless they have a fire or flood or some “act of god.” The bigger problem with cheap hosting has always been that they can’t handle the traffic spikes when you get mentioned on one of the big aggregator sites like slashdot, boingboing or digg. And, it’s not just your site that’s susceptible either, because you’re in a server with hundreds of other websites so if someone in your box gets “slashdotted” you’re going down too. Incidentally they way to prevent a server crash from too much traffic is to make an html page of whatever it is that people are linking too and serve that up instead of the usual pages which probably have 10 or 20 elements that need to be delivered for each visitor.

If anyone has suggestions for good cheap hosting I can make a list. I’ve used bluehost.com and know people using godaddy.com and both seem decent.

BlueHost $7/month
GoDaddy $5 – $15/month
Oditech $10/month
Yahoo Small Business $10/month
DreamHost $10/month
Tiger Tech $7/month
Site 5 $8/month
NearlyFreeSpeech Pay as you go
HostSite $10/month
ICD Soft $6-10/month
Certified Hosting $5/month
Host Papa $5/month
PowWeb $8/month
HostGator $15/month
WebHero $7/month
LaughingSquid $8 – $14/month
Pair $10 – $30/month
SurpassHosting $4 – $15/month
Eleven2 $6 – $21/month — Maybe not good. A commenter is having serious problems.
LiquidWeb $15 – $25/month

Looking to buy a new website?
A Photo Folio is a website design company created by A Photo Editor.
Have a look (here).

Looking to buy a new website?
A Photo Folio is a website design company created by A Photo Editor.
Have a look (here).

Looking to buy a new website?
A Photo Folio is a website design company created by A Photo Editor.
Have a look (here).

PDN just published their annual list of 30 photographers to watch. See it here or go get a copy on the newsstand. This annual list has always been something worth checking out for photo editors looking for new talent and new approaches to old ideas. What makes this list great is there’s no entry fee. Someone with influence nominates you and then from the pool of nominees the editors pick 30. Some years the list is stronger than others but it really depends on the pool of people they are pulling from.

The only gripe I have with this and all the other contests out there as far as this goes is with the way they present the work online. Photo editors have been using the internets for quite awhile now so why don’t they take the lists of photographers and present it in an easy to use format. Getting published in the magazine is all well and good but the real value is in the potential to land jobs from it.

I’ve decided to do it for them this one time so you can see how useful it might be. I added my own keyword descriptions just to help people quickly find what they’re looking for although I need to find a better way to parse the term “Fine Art” and documentary or photojournalism because those terms cover too much ground. I would add reference photos but I think PDN might not like that.

New York
Kathryn Parker Almanas- Clinton, NY [Fine art interior/still life]
Lucas Foglia- New York, NY [People in landscape with a fine art influence]
Wendy Ball and Dara Albanese- Brooklyn, NY [Traditional travel]
Martine Fougeron New York, NY [Fine art youth lifestyle]
Chiara Goia Brooklyn, NY [Color documentary with a fine art influence]
Flora Hanitijo- Brooklyn, NY [Dense color, fine art people and places]
Cornelia Hediger- New York, NY [Fine art self portrait interiors]
Victoria Hely-Hutchinson- Brooklyn, NY [Fine art color people and places]
Jared Moossy- New York, NY [B/W and color photojournalism]
James Pomerantz- Brooklyn, NY [Color documentary]
Fernando Souto- Brooklyn, NY [B/W Documentary]
Lucas Zarebinski- New York, NY [Food and product still life]

California
Chloe Aftel- Los Angeles, CA [Lifestyle with a snapshotty/polaroid aesthetic]
Cole Barash- Oceanside, CA [Snowboard sports and lifestyle (Caution: Music)]
Melissa Kaseman- San Francisco, CA [Fine art objects, people and places]
Lisa Wiseman- San Francisco, CA [Fine art people]

Oregon
Corey Arnold Portland, OR [Rich color documentary with a fine art appeal]
Toni Greaves- Portland, OR [Color documentary with a fine art influence]

Argentina
Alejandro Chaskielberg- Capital Federal, Argentina [Fine art narrative with rich color and shallow depth of field]
Emma Livingston- Buenos Aires, Argentina [Fine art color landscape]

Australia
Adam Ferguson- Newport, Australia [Color photojournalism]

Germany
Julian Faulhaber- Dortmund, Germany [Fine art graphic interior and exterior with patterns and everyday subjects]
Susanne Ludwig- Hamburg, Germany [Fine art people and empty industrial interiors and objects in patterns]

Ohio
Nathan Harger- Cleveland, OH [Graphic industrial fine art]

Washington DC
Jeff Hutchens, Washington, DC [Color and B/W documentary with a modern aesthetic]

Pennnsylvania
Justin Maxon- Philadelphia, PA [B/W and color photojournalism]

Egypt
Dominic Nahr- Cairo, Egypt [Color photojournalism]

Japan
Kosuke Okahara- Yokyo, Japan [B/W documentary]

China
Ryan Pyle- Shanghai, China [Color documentary]

Singapore
Darren Soh- Singapore, Singapore [Traditional color industrial and modern natural landscape]

Looking to buy a new website?
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Looking to buy a new website?
A Photo Folio is a website design company created by A Photo Editor.
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Where do you draw the line between observation and action?
How do you get into the hot zones without putting your life on the line?
I wonder what you think the international community could do to improve the lives of the people of the DRC? What lies at the root of this conflict?
Is shooting sport a welcome break from your other work?
Have you had to apply different skills in Congo as opposed to other places you’ve worked?
How easy is it to work in Congo as a freelancer… costs for transportation, translators and fixers?
Are you intense?
Do you have any hope for the future of Congo based on your experience there?
When everyone has a camera on their mobile phone what is the future for professional photographers?
Isn’t it frustrating that the news gets less media attention?
How has my formal education prepared me to work as a photojournalist?

Visit the Reuters page (here).

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This growing trend among top photographers I attribute to google searches that will turn up all kinds of strange and possibly unwanted results (and other steven klein’s of the world) if you don’t have a site dedicated to your work online. Also, growing the fan base is always a good idea.

From Steven’s artist statement: “Portraiture in the past has been regarded as a documentation of a person but for me it is a documentation of the encounter between myself and the subject. It is not meant to reveal them, nor is it meant to subject them to an X-ray; it is a departure from that.”

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Looking to buy a new website?
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“…But that’s the problem: They’re usually putting out online versions of printed papers. They’re still pasting newspapers onto a screen–and the state of the online art has moved way past that.”

“Spend some time with an online newspaper–and compare it to leading Web sites–and you know what I mean. Most newspaper Web sites have a gazillion links on the home page; the eye has no idea where to look. They’re ugly, overstuffed and foreboding. They’re trying to do way too much. The most successful Web sites, by comparison, usually are minimalist, and designed for quick scanning and visiting. Believe me, there’s no fast read when the “National News” header on a newspaper Web site sits atop 10 or 20 small-type headlines. Snore.”

“There’s more: Newspaper Web sites still are organized like, well, newspapers. They follow the traditional News/Sports/Local/Features model from print. That’s not a bad organizing principle, but it may not be well-suited for the Web, where readers are used to quicker, even simpler organizational schemes. (Check out Google’s home page, which is still all about pretty much one thing: search.) Focus on what readers want, not on how your print newsroom is organized.”

He’s even got solutions.

Hopefully someone will listen.

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I also noticed that Phil Toledano does the same with his projects, Phone Sex Operators (here) and Days With My Father (here).

Finally, Anthony Georgis showed me his new project called Blood Makes The Grass Grow and it has its own url (here).

Emerging trend or passing fad?

I’m into it. I don’t think it’s necessary to hang everything off the same url anymore. The better search becomes and the more that people are talking about photography and photographers online the less likely people will find you by simply typing your url into the browser. What I really like about it tho is how easy the work is to pass along now and how it suddenly doesn’t exist as just a portfolio piece but instead becomes a finished product. This is how things spread and turn up in unlikely places and get discovered by people who otherwise would never know your name.

This is the hardest thing for media companies to understand. They think about the brand and about making sure everything is in one place where it can be controlled, but that actually ends up preventing people from running into you in unlikely places and therefore prevents casual readers from discovering a piece that’s relevant to them. The casual readers are who’s leaving magazines because it’s just not worth the effort anymore for the 1 or 2 stories that you found interesting and because it’s more convenient to find them online. You can capture them back again if you are willing to let the content go free and roam around unlikely places to be discovered.

Anyway, it makes me think about the lists I make and the projects I’ve done with photographers. I think it would be cool to do a few things and then set them free and see where they turn up, who runs into them and how popular they might become.

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I think about SEO a great deal now, because I build websites for a living, but the thing that struck me the other day was how many times in the past I’ve typed into google the name of an advertising campaign or a story in a magazine that I saw somewhere but forgot who shot it and never, ever, found what I was looking for. This will and probably has already changed as a new generation of photographers blog about their shoots and those of us blogging about the industry in general report who shot what for whom. There are other reasons photographers want good search results of course but the amount of times I’ve tried and failed to find someone this way seems like a good reason for everyone to think about it.

Anyway, now I’m business partners with Erik Dungan, someone who’s spent many years helping wedding photographers improve their search results and building websites that are SEO friendly, so I thought I’d ask him some questions about it.

Can you tell me the biggest SEO myths and how they came about?

The biggest myths tend to be outdated information from the web 1.0 (or earlier) days. For some reason, this bad information keeps circulating into the hands of new photographers every year–like a bad email forward.

The biggest myth is definitely that meta tags provide any meaningful impact on your search engine rankings. People learned long ago that it was easy to game the system with meta keywords. Search engines haven’t given the keywords any significant weight for a few years now. The meta description affects how your result is displayed–but it too has little (or no) weight on your position.

Second (especially for photographers) is that Flash-based websites can’t be optimized well. If you embed your Flash correctly, provide alternate content, and use links appropriately, Flash sites can be optimized just fine. I’ve done it for several sites. Adobe’s recent announcement could make things even better–but even now, getting a Flash photography site on page 1 is possible.

I’ll throw in another myth regarding searching behavior. For some reason, photographers often worry about how their site ranks when searching for their name. Trust me, if a potential client knows of you by name, they won’t have a problem finding your website. Worry about your market and areas of expertise. Optimize for those searches, provide appropriate content, and the long tail of search terms will fall into place.

I’ve always thought of SEO as stuff you do to the code of your site, programmer stuff. Are there really things photographers can do on their own without mucking about in the code?

Definitely. One of the biggest is blogging. Good blogs naturally use layouts, page elements, links, and URLs that search engines love. Setup a blog and make sure you have links between it and your site’s home page. Then, blog at least once a week about the jobs and projects you’re working on. Search engines love content, so make sure you’re blogging about photography. People love tutorials and behind-the-scenes stuff. Regularly blogging about photography builds appropriate content and improves the chances of getting quality inbound links. Who cares if no humans read your blog. The search engine benefits alone are worth it.

Also, many websites include a CMS of some sort, allowing you to adjust elements of the site without getting your hands in the code. For example, your browser title is an important ranking factor and many control panels let you adjust that.

On the other hand, I always encourage photographers to be brave and get into the HTML code for simple things. It’s not for everyone, but c’mon–if you can calculate exposure values in your head, I hope you can edit a TITLE tag without doing any major damage.

And what about in the code. What should photographers make sure their website designers have done?

Related to my above point, the more you can control aspects of your site (via a CMS or control panel), the better. That goes for SEO changes or simply keeping your site fresh with new images. The days of having a developer build a site from scratch and having to call/email him for every minuscule update are over.

If you’re building a Flash site, there are some additional questions to ask. You want to make sure your Flash is embedded properly–using OBJECT/EMBED tags is not ideal for SEO. You want to make sure your Flash content is embedded with JavaScript and that it’s mirrored as HTML content in one way or another. If this paragraph doesn’t make sense to your web designer, it’s time to find a new one :)

I’ve heard a few pitches from SEO companies where they’re basically saying they can game google or that they work closely with google. Is this a scam?

I’m hesitant to call anyone a “scam” without hearing the pitch, but I’m leery of most SEO pitches–especially if they’re cold-calling you. Be skeptical of any monthly subscription offer. Any of the following pitches should also throw up red flags:
“we will guarantee you #1 ranking or Y amount of traffic” (no one can make guarantees like that)
“we have a partnership with Google/Yahoo! and we can put you at position X” (I’ve heard this one myself … organic searches don’t work this way and its easy enough to do your own ad campaigns)
“we will submit your site to all the major search engines for $x per month” (since that’s not necessary anymore, it’s not something I’d want to pay for … especially monthly)

There are more, but in the end … real SEO pros don’t seek you out–you seek them out.

Ok, give me you best tips for getting higher and better search results.

Ok, here’s what I’ll do: I’ll toss out 10 tips that will help photographers here rank higher. I wont go into too much detail, but I’ll keep an eye on the comments and try answer any questions people may have. You can also find more info just by searching around.

Establish a baseline

1. Make sure you have web stats installed on your site and your blog (Google Analytics or Mint)
2. Install the Rank Checker plugin for firefox. Plug in any keywords or phrases that are important to you and see where you rank now. Check it every 1-3 weeks and add new phrases as you see them in your stats.

Blogging

3. Set up a blog (WordPress if you want it on your own site; SquareSpace, TypePad, or WordPress.com if you want a hosted version) and start blogging once a week.
4. Make sure your blog links to your site’s home page and vice versa.
5. Collaborate with 3 industry peers. Link to their site and/or blog (on your blog’s sidebar) and ask them to do the same. NOTE: I don’t advocate huge, convoluted link-trading schemes. I’m talking about peers that you actually know and work with.
6. Submit your blog to Google Blog Search and Technorati. You only have to do this once and some blog systems will do it automatically.

Site updates

7. Edit your browser title, making sure that it contains at least 2 keywords/phrases that are important to you. This is easily the biggest “bang for your buck” update that you can make.
8. Update your About/Bio page. Don’t just write about how you fell in love with photography after your dad gave you his old Rollei. Write about what you do, where you do it, your specialties, and past clients.

Local search

9. Submit your business to Google’s Local. It takes a few weeks to get in there, but it’s worth it.

Inbound links

10. This tip is a bit general (and related to #5), but inbound links (links to your site from other sites) are crucial for SEO. Contact peers, mentors, agencies, editors, clients, or local publications that you have worked with and have a good reputation. The goal is to get a link to your site. It could be from a “recommended photographers” page, a blog post, or just a simple credit/byline. When it comes to local publications, be creative–offer to write a how-to article or take some headshots.

Looking to buy a new website?
A Photo Folio is a website design company created by A Photo Editor.
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APhotoFolio.com

It was 6 months ago, when I had assumed that not working in New York meant not working in the photography industry, that I decided to pursue internet related projects, so that I could stay engaged. A Photo Folio joins the blog as the income producing part of what will eventually be many different products and services for photographers and photo editors, some free some not and I promise, not all beginning with an “A.”

I feel blessed and lucky to have met two talented, hard working guys who build websites on the wedding photography side of the business. Erik Dungan and Mike Caston started BigFolio.com in 2004 and have grown it into one of the top destinations for wedding photographers seeking web portfolios. From me, they have endured endless stream-of-consciousness emails, philosophy statements, wouldn’t-it-be-nice missives and all manner of inside magazines jargon and handled it all with aplomb.

We built two designs, a kick ass control panel (so you can go change everything around) and a home site to house and sell it all. The price is fair, the designs are contemporary, clean and built with a clients eye (just show me the pictures and no music please). They display photography beautifully and are easy to navigate. Additionally, I’ve added consulting on the portfolio edit and logo design (with a typography expert) as an important component to building effective websites. If these designs don’t appeal to you now every few months we build a new one, so you can let me know if there’s something you’re really looking for.

Ok, that’s the only sales pitch you’re going to get out of me. I hope some of you who are in the market for a portfolio will consider ours.

Looking to buy a new website?
A Photo Folio is a website design company created by A Photo Editor.
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On the panel with me was Zana Woods, the photo editor of Wired Magazine who was previously and art buyer at Foote, Cone & Belding and Debbie Mobley the Senior Art Producer at Venables Bell & Partners.

I loved hearing the different approaches we all have to working with photographers and I thought I’d highlight some of the interesting things that came up.

Zana prefers to see a book over a website and in fact bases all hiring decisions off looking at books. That was a refreshing point of view for a panel on websites. The website is not an end destination or even the place where decisions are made about hiring photographers.

Debbie leads the typically busy life of an advertising art producer. Websites are tools for quickly looking at portfolios to see if the photographer has the look or skills you need for a project you’re working on RIGHT NOW. She catalogs photographers by the printed and emailed promos photographers send her and when it’s time to find photographers for a campaign looking at websites is efficient and fast. She almost always uses printed books when discussing photographers with creatives and *never* shows a website to a client (they’re too literal).

When I was presenting all the different parts of photographers websites that I use when making a hiring decision (bio, personal work, tears) Debbie was looking over at me like “are you crazy, how in thee hell do you have time to look at all that stuff” and so we talked about some of the big difference between how commercial and editorial clients view photographers websites. In advertising it really is “all about the photography” and you can be a complete a-hole but if you’re photography matches the creative for the campaign. You’ve got the job. Additionally she never deals with the “I need a photographers in Canton, OH who can shoot a portrait for $4500. Monday.” So, she does way less crystal ball gazing on websites than I do. On editorial shoots the photographer and subject need to match up or you can have serious problems and on most shoots there’s nobody on set so you’ve got to make sure this is the right person for the job. In editorial, shoots fail, in advertising, never.

At one point we were talking about Matt Mahon’s website (here) which I’ve mentioned a few times here as something I find very entertaining and proposed a theory to Debbie that creatives might champion a photographer who they find interesting and entertaining at which point she whipped out an email where she asked her art directors what websites they particularly enjoyed to which they replied how much they dislike photographers who think they’re flash designers. “We just want to see photos, you’re photographers for crissakes, not designers.” Theory debunked.

I really enjoyed Zana’s point of view because she works on a national magazine but doesn’t live in NYC which was my experience for many years. She kept talking about this guy Andrew Hetherington (here) who’s some kinda hot shot photographer who shoots for Wired (had to bust your chops on that Jacko and yes she brought you up several times). Since she’s worked at Wired since 1999 she’s built a group of trusted photographers that she likes to work with, keeps a wish list of photographers she’d like to work with and uses the traditional methods (mailers, other magazines, contests, photographers recommendations) to locate new talent and call in their book. It was interesting to find out that she never reads email promos unless the subject line or email is personal and that they keep a database of all the photographers they’re interested in that’s searchable by location and shooting style.

Much of the conversation with Zana came back to this idea that she enjoys looking at websites but uses them to call in books. It’s never the place where decisions are made about hiring people. This is how many photo editors use websites and it’s important to remember that.

The panel really showed that everyone uses a photographers website differently but first and foremost for everyone was finding your portfolio and viewing the images cleanly and quickly. Some of your clients will continue on to check out other parts of the website some will call in your book and others will catalog you away. I think it may be disappointing for photographers to discover that a slick website and nifty features won’t really increase your chances of getting a job. I’d be willing to bet that changes in the future… just not when.

Looking to buy a new website?
A Photo Folio is a website design company created by A Photo Editor.
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A reader asked me awhile back about optimizing websites for the iPhone which I immediately dismissed as ridiculous and then, what do you know, I was out of the office later that day and tried to access a photographers contact info by going to their website on my palm phone because I didn’t have it in my database and couldn’t do it because of the flash so I thought ok, maybe there’s something to this.

In the larger scheme of things nobody will ever receive or lose a job based on the ability of their portfolio to render on a palm phone or iphone but more and more I find myself using google as a phone book instead of carefully entering photographers contact info into my database like I used to do.

It looks like a company called MoFuse (here), (TechCrunch report here) has a free and paid solution to the problem I’m just not sure how well it works with image galleries.

Looking to buy a new website?
A Photo Folio is a website design company created by A Photo Editor.
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Flash vs. Html: I love flash. Photos look better in flash and there’s no way around it. There’s an argument floating around about using html so google can read/rank your website better that people seem to be confused about. It’s not so people can find you by name it’s so that people can find your images with google. If your photos are embedded in flash then the search engine doesn’t know you’ve got a killer photo of Richard Branson and when my Creative Director does a google image search to trounce the lame Corbis images I presented yours will not be in the results. Thats a problem. I think you will need a stock and a portfolio website to solve it.

There are other problems with flash as well, like incompatibility and deep linking issues but I still think the image quality trumps all that shit.

Livebooks: I’ve said it before, “I love livebooks.” They revolutionized the online portfolio. Big, vibrant photos and not much else. I’m not shillin’ for them at all and I can honestly say photographers have risen a notch in my book by switching to their product. Contributor Terence Patrick coined it “the black leather portfolio book of the web.” That’s how I feel about it as well. If you can’t beat it, don’t bother.

Famous Photographer Websites: Don’t look to them for inspiration. Check out Martin Schoeller’s website (here). Now google Martin Schoeller (here). Olivier Laude said in a previous post that the ultimate website is endless hits on google.

Ok, here’s what I’ve got. Please add to it and I’ll update.

Template websites
APhotoFolio
SiteWelder
FolioLink
LiveBooks
Other Peoples Pixels
Click Booq
Evirium
Blue Domain
Picaholic
Site Design Works
Big Folio
Parade
Creative Motion Design

Custom designed websites
Robinizer
Group 94
Neon Sky
I House Design

Free designs or DIY
Pixel Post
Movable Type/
Indexhibit
Wordpress (Big UP)

My favorite creative sites
Jason Fulford
Matthew Mahon
Tanit Sakakini

The best I’ve seen for displaying photography
Nick Cobbing

Here are some my contributors like
Great flash sites:
Jeff Wall Exhibitiion
Filippas Medhagensund
Lauren Greenfield

Jeremy Cowart
Tom Nagy

Red wrote: HTML rules.
Erik W
Yerin Mok
Eliot Shepard
Alec Soth

First, a good flash site: Todd Hido
Second, a good CSS/HTML site: Graeme Mitchell

Fazal Sheikh
Jacob Holdt

Elizabeth Weinberg.com

Looking to buy a new website?
A Photo Folio is a website design company created by A Photo Editor.
Have a look (here).

Looking to buy a new website?
A Photo Folio is a website design company created by A Photo Editor.
Have a look (here).

Looking to buy a new website?
A Photo Folio is a website design company created by A Photo Editor.
Have a look (here).

I get to spend most of my life in the office but I know many of you are in the field sometimes standing around in airports or waiting for the assistants to set up the lights or waiting for talent to arrive or driving around in circles trying to find the set or sitting in the hotel bar smashing vodka waiting for the client to come down for dinner and you may want to check in and drop a comment.

Also, for the assistants, when the client is too cheap to get a hotel with wi-fi and you’re stuck in the hotel room washing 50 sheets of 665 Polaroid neg you can quickly upload a rant.

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I’d like to ask that people commenting on these posts at least consider, that what they say will be permanently attached to the photographer. Imagine if I posted your website what kind of discussion you would like future clients to see when they google your name.

Thanks.

Looking to buy a new website?
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Sure, they’re all free but there’s a ton of crap to wade through… hey that sounds just like… oh, nevermind.

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I was looking for a program that would allow people to submit portfolios to me on this blog and came across this free software called pligg. I can’t believe how many features it has and I have no idea if it will prove useful or just more of a time suck. I loaded all the photographers I’ve written about to get things started. See what you think.

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As a bonus he’s got a post up today about NY/LA vs local talent.

Looking to buy a new website?
A Photo Folio is a website design company created by A Photo Editor.
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Yeah, I know it’s padded. Not always, but I can tell when it is.

Sometimes, I call the client to see if they liked working with you and they have no idea who you are because it was a stock photo they bought from Getty… not a global advertising campaign that you shot for them.

The idea behind the list is lost if you use it to tell me about every single person you ever sold an image to. What’s the point of that?

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I really don’t give a crap about your design or goddam logo or witty intro. I just want to look a photos. Fast. The more the better just make sure you have a proper portfolio so I can see if it’s worth my time poking around.

Think KISS in concert not the 4th of July fireworks display. Open HUGE.

Jason Fulford’s website (here) doesn’t follow any of these rules and it still totally rocks.

Looking to buy a new website?
A Photo Folio is a website design company created by A Photo Editor.
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If you’ve ever met Brian Storm of Mediastorm he will tell you that rich media is a large part of the future for photographers which I sort of buy into and even more so after seeing Pat’s website and again even more after finding out Magnum has something called Magnum in Motion (here) where they produce these types of presentations.

Check out Dennis Stock’s show where he talks about shooting James Dean (here). Good stuff for working photographers.

As much as I enjoy looking at photography without some dude telling me whats going on in this picture and what happened here sometimes I just want to kick back and watch the images go by.

Looking to buy a new website?
A Photo Folio is a website design company created by A Photo Editor.
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would you hire a person based only on their portfolio?

ex…

would you hire someone that shoots like this..?

http://www.joeyl.com

if you knew that.. this guy is

17 .

yes.. 17.

Yes, I hire photographers all the time having never met them and sometimes without talking on the phone. I try to be unbiased in my assessment of whether a photographer and subject are a good match based solely on the photography.

But, it’s impossible to be completely unbiased and so I usually end up in the personal photos section and then tears and finally the bio section to help me confirm or discredit the decision I’m arriving at.

Your Bio is really important. You may not realize that we’re reading your bio’s.

Back to Joey. His bio states that he’s 17 and not based anywhere (which we all know is a trick so you don’t just call him for jobs in his home town don’t we photographers-living-simultaneously-in-LA-and-NY). While I’m not really into his photography I’ll bet there’s a few advertisers out there who wouldn’t mind a 17 year olds perspective on their product so I wouldn’t discount it either.

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Solid stuff, really good photographer but heyyyy what’s this video here.

Gotta say watching that video made me want to hire him even more.

(click images for links)

Looking to buy a new website?
A Photo Folio is a website design company created by A Photo Editor.
Have a look (here).

It’s usually the last place I visit on a photographers website and I have to make it all the way through the portfolio and tears without clicking out but then… to see the photos of your wife, kids, friends, vacations, birthday parties, breakfast, house, neighborhood is so absolutely pleasing to me and confirms your love of taking pictures and your need of an assignment so you can enjoy all these things.

It makes it personal.

Looking to buy a new website?
A Photo Folio is a website design company created by A Photo Editor.
Have a look (here).