Well of course all great things must come to an end – so the crazy $10 for 30 files giveaway is over, sort of.  I just increased the price to $30 for 30 files.  Still an amazing bargain.  But that’s not exactly what this post is about.

I thought I’d tell you what the results were and what I learned from what is simply another experiment in marketing photography on the web.

So I figured that with over 600k followers on G+ it shouldn’t be that hard to practically giveaway high resolution files at the rather low price of $10 for 30 files.

And after working on the mechanism for the last two months, i.e. how to automate the delivery of the high resolution files without having to mess with the cart that I’m currently using.  And that took me through several plugins.  One that is easy for managing the downloads.  One that creates those long funny looking urls that you need to access the post, and one other plugin that I needed to help with the automated email that would be triggered by the Paypal receipt.  In other words when the user goes through the process and views their Paypal receipt – they get to see the secret url to the files, but at the same time an email from me with the secret url is triggered.

So it all looks sort of simple but it took a while to put together.  There are lots of plugins that will do this as part of the cart process, but they all meant a lot of setup time and as I say – doing away with the current modified cart mechanism I’m using.

Okay – you skipped over that part because it is boring.  No problem.  So the big announcement with the link goes up on G+ and within ten minutes I had 30 orders.  Now – that is the type of thing that gives you goosebumps and makes you start dreaming of financial security.  Days of sitting on a porch with a corncob pipe or good cigars where a river runs quietly nearby and you just sit around and watch the checks come in.  No more worries about bill collectors or figuring out how to pay the utility bill…  And then, just as quickly as the surge began it stopped dead.

For the next five minutes, no more orders.

For the next ten minutes, no more orders.

I knew what was happening.  There is no good way to keep an announcement before those 600 thousand eyeballs.  It flits through the news stream of those who follow you – and unless there’s something eye-popping in there it goes into the stream called oblivion.

So after waiting a reasonable amount of time, I came up with the idea of reposting the announcement but with a different picture than I showed before.

Ah… sweet mystery of life at last I’ve found you…

Another 20 sales come in, this time it takes 20 minutes, but sure enough at least one problem is that the post isn’t being shared.  It isn’t being plus oned.

I ended up doing one more post.  Then I also sent a mass mailing to people who had bought from me before.  And it took two and a half days to practically give it away – but I hit my quota of 100 sales at $10.

Now, in the meantime, I began to get very nice notes from people who were doing prints and starting to put them on their walls and I was also happy to see that the whole programming mechanism worked fine.  Then I put my mind to ways of keeping the announcement post in front of people for a longer time and I have come up with a few good ways.

And after raising the price to what is still an extremely good deal and adding one or two images to what I now call PACK 1, 30 images for $30) I’ve had two sales at that price.

I’m working on:

A nice banner for the top of the announcement page to catch your eye

A zip file so that you don’t need to download them one at a time (though that’s still going to be huge)

Size info for each image, i.e. 7500 pixels by 5000 pixels.

And once I’ve got all the kinks out in terms of marketing – I’ll be adding more packs.

http://www.beckermanphoto.com/package-1-images-for-sale

So as you can see, I’ve spent the last month or so doing two things: building up a presence on G+ and probably more important in the long run, really getting into “tinting” or “painting” or whatever you want to call it color images.

Gaspow Bridge – Central Park

Began as Kodak HIE b&w infrared negative.

And this was done very quickly this morning – not a lot of creative imagination compared to
some of the other infrared color shots – but another good learning experience with what’s
possible with NIK.

The color thing began again when a calendar maker asked me if I had New York color images.  I got so heavily involved in learning to colorize images with NIK software that I totally missed the deadline for getting the images to the fellow.  It was the most interesting photographic thing for me in a long time.

In the beginning, I was taking images that were shot with the digital modified DSLR cameras and doing the old Photoshop Channel Mixing Swap (red for blue) and then going into NIK Color Efex and coming up with something reasonable.

But that took me to the next level where my workflow began (not counting the usual Dfine and Pre-sharpener stuff) and going straight to Viveza.  Viveza is usually last in the workflow – where you’d make final changes to the image: exposure, contrast, saturation, shadow detail, some degree of sharpening etc.

But I found that it was also very good at putting down swatches of color.  Because of the way that NIK filters works, this did not involve the usual painstaking masking that you end up doing with Photoshop.  NIK has a very unique method for making changes to an image – and it’s based on applying a circle – but what is effected in that circle is based on where the center point of the circle is.

It is equally good with edges.  Whereas you might have used a mask in Photoshop to make changes to one object in an image – NIK – can tell (to a large extent) what should be modified and what shouldn’t along the edges of the NIK circle.

It’s hard to explain in words – though maybe I’ve managed to explain it.

At any rate – after using modified color DSLR images to begin with, I moved on to straight color, and was equally satisfied with that.  And then the last step – was taking actual black and white negatives and “painting” them with the NIK software.

Once in a while I would be forced to jump into Photoshop to do a touch of masking – but for the most part – the workflow didn’t ever go beyond the NIK software.  Now – there was an extra bonus – or a dangerous area in NIK and that was the constant bit of wondering – what would this look like in HDR?  And what if you used NIK HDR or Photomatix tonemapping (which I also have) as part of the overall process.

So it was a dream world that I was after to begin with.  Infrared is good at that on it’s own.  But with the ability to completely change every bit of the image with so many combinations of tone, and palette, and on top of that it was very easy to save the palettes that you used with NIK so that I ended up with what I called an infrared palette which had a whole bunch of favorite things in it like: infrared sky night, infrared lake mossy, etc.

And I could use them over and over again.  So that drew me into this color world in a way that I hadn’t ever been.  Color has always been annoying because of how painful it was to make minute changes with many parameters, as compared to black and white which often falls into the dodge / burn / sharpen / etc. possibilities.

So these images were being posted on G+ (write me if you need an invite – though I don’t have that many left) and suddenly after about a month I found that I had over 6000 followers – or in their lingo – I was in the circles of 6000 people.  So that was a bunch of excitement and frankly – it caused me to procrastinate getting orders out in a bad way  and obviously I wasn’t writing in this blog very much.

With just a few minor changes – it seems to me that G+ could be the thing that takes the place of twitter, facebook, and even this blog.  The amount of referrals from G+ to my web store is about half of what I get from the normal Google Search – so that’s a lot – and will only grow as G+ opens up.

On the other hand – I haven’t had many sales while I was neglecting this blog – so whether that’s coincidence or the economy or what – I have no idea.   And whether I can convert G+ people into customers – that is the million dollar question.

For now, my plans are to put up many of the better color prints for sale – and to have some sort of introductory discount – and make that announcement on G+ and Facebook (my fan page there has grown, I think as a result of G+) and see if I can make some money.

I have had several requests for lessons which did come directly from G+ – so that’s nothing to sneeze at.

But today – the real world sets in – as it often does on a Monday – and I’ve got to finish printing and packaging before there’s a revolt by my loyal customers.

As always – you can see what I’m up to by using the G+ widget which you should see on the left side of this blog.

Okay – so the first thing I thought of when I got into Google Plus was – maybe this was another audience for my prints, i.e. potential customers. And I have to admit that I did totally go crazy for a few days posting images, and experimenting with various ways of using Picasa online.

And I’m very impressed.

But then one day as I was dragging people into CIRCLES I noticed that one person who was an interior decorator had put me into her circle. I didn’t notice this because I still have about 1000 to file away, and I don’t have a good way of doing this yet. In fact, I have a sort of stupid way which is to put big bunches of people into a PURGATORY CIRCLE and if they post stuff that I find interesting, I move them into another circle called LETHE. And so on until maybe they blow me away and I actually have them in the FOLLOW CIRCLE.

But I digress, and just as well or this would be a very shot post. So then I was wondering if it was possible to search Google Plus for people’s interests and/or occupations. And you know, to some extent it is possible by using Google search.

Google search syntax lets you search a site.

You can use the normal Google search syntax to search Google Plus.

It looks like this: site:plus.google.com widget

What exactly is indexed, and what is public in Google Plus I don’t know, but I searched for art buyers and other potential audiences such as architects and came up with quite a few that I simply added to a new CIRCLE. Remember, this search is only for people in Google Plus. One other tip, use quote marks around a longer phrase.

But I did pull back enough names in Google to keep me busy for a few hours before deciding to go to sleep.

This is just an example of how easy it is to pull and embed a slideshow from one of my Picasa albums that are now hosted on Google Plus.

There are a couple of ways of posting images to Google Plus – and some are better than others.  You can click on any of the images in this post for the full size screen grab.

Okay, first off the basics, a reasonable file size is about 1000 px (the longest side).  As with any web image, you’ll do best if they’re in sRGB, and so far I’ve just used the old standby, JPG format, though probably PNGs will work.

Now for the ways:

1) Use the upload image button.

In your main stream, click the CAMERA ICON. You can type something, or you can click the CAMERA ICON again and then pick your image to upload and you get this:

I clicked on + Add photos and selected the Big Head from my computer and voila.

You probably want your image to be Public (I think this makes it available in searches) and post to all your circles, or just some of them etc.  And then click SHARE.

THE PROS: This gives you a nice sized thumbnail.  But where the heck does it go, and how is it stored.  Whether you know it or not – everything is being managed by Picasa.  If you go to https://picasaweb.google.com/home you’ll find that this image has been added to an album called: Photos From Posts.

Now if that’s how you want to store all your images, or if you want to use picasaweb.google.com to move or copy or organize your images later, you can do that.

THE CONS: If you are managing a lot of images, this is going to be a pain.

2) Publishing an Entire Album with new image

So what’s that PICTURE ICON at the top of the screen for?

If you click on that PICTURE ICON ON TOP OF SCREEN you’ll be taken to all the images that you have anything to do with. Images from people in your circles, and at the bottom left, you’ll see YOUR ALBUMS.

From this screen, after you click on YOUR ALBUMS you’ll be able to add images to the album of your choice.  Here I’ve chosen the COLOR ALBUM.

You can add as many images as you like. And then hit SHARE. You’ll get a box like this, and you figure out what circles you want to share the album with.

And you’ll publish your Album with the new images to your stream. Voila.

PROS: You get a nice thumbnail and the smaller thumbnails.  But do you really want to publish your entire album every time you put up an image?  Also, so far you don’t have any control over the order of the images.

Believe it or not, there are still at least three other ways to upload and organize images.  I’ll just mention that there is an export to Picasa from Lightroom plugin - http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/picasaweb (It’s donation-ware, and I have used it to export images from Lightroom to Facebook but haven’t tried this one); and then there you could install Picasa on your computer and sync it with your picasaweb albums.  But I’m going to show you what’s been working for me.

3. Publishing a large thumbnail, without publishing the smaller thumbs, and without really publishing the entire album.  Also how to have control over the entire process.  What is in each album.  Moving and copying images between albums, and just publishing one image at a time.

There’s an application called, Picasa Web Album Uploader which you can install on your computer.  (I’m on a Mac.  I have no idea if it works on PCs, maybe someone can let me know).

Here’s the link to the mac version of Picasa Web Album Uploader.

And this is pretty simple.  Install the app on your mac and sign in with your Google login and you’ll have easy access to https://picasaweb.google.com/home

You don’t need the uploader to use picasaweb.google.com/home but it makes uploading a bit easier.  On my desktop.

You can set the size for the uploaded image, as well as the caption.

And now, here’s the one trick to get a BIG THUMBNAIL. After you upload your image to picasaweb click on View Album.  It will take you to Picasaweb.google.com/home where you can see the image you just uploaded.  Click on that image and copy that URL.  Here’s an example:

After you copy the URL, then (phew) go back to your Google Plus stream, and click on the LINK ICON beneath the entry field.  The URL should look like this:

Click Add:

And then Share:

And that’s it.  It takes longer to write about then to do.  The PROS:  You get a nice big thumbnail without all the smaller thumbs beneath it.  But this image is in the proper album, so that if you click on it, you’ll get the right image, and be able to navigate through the rest of the album.

THE CONS: If you change the name of the album, then the URL won’t be found.

If you just want to embed a smaller thumbnail, then you can use the LINK field that’s on the right side while you’re in PICASAWEB.  And I think that’s enough information for one post.  You might want to experiment with moving things around etc. on PicasaWeb.  It’s pretty powerful.  Hope this doesn’t cause more questions than it answers.

Haven’t been writing in the blog much lately, but you can get a feel for what I’m up to since this is a feed from my Google Plus posts.

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So – if you aren’t signed up for Google Plus – is this link visible to you?

I think it should be since I’ve made it “Public” but I’m just curious.

It’s about the SPARKS part of Google Plus and what I see as a race to learn how to get listed well in it.

https://plus.google.com/116247667398036716276/posts/YrpUUx6SoJ5

http://www.facebook.com/beckermanphoto

Yup.  That’s what I’m going to do with my facebook page.

You can submit a photo to fb.com/dave.beckerman

Or email me a link and if I think it’s new and special or old and special or just special – I’ll post it on my page: www.facebook.com/beckermanphoto

BTW, it’s not all that easy to find “good” photos on FB.  I know that they’re there but I’ve been scanning the photo groups and have only found a few so far.

Let’s see if technically this even works. I don’t think that I allow anyone to post images to my dave.beckerman page – and I don’t see how to have separate photo posting settings for my page as opposed to my wall.

DB

I’ve written a lot about SEO (search engine optimization) as it relates to photographers, but never in any consistent way.  Photoshelter SEO COOKBOOK for Photographers, as part of a their way of attracting customers, asks you to supply them with your e-mail address and then sends a link to this valuable PDF called Photography Websites: SEO COOKBOOK.

And that’s a good deal for one reason – it confirms most of what I’ve personally experienced over the last decade.

One of the main points it makes, and maybe this is already obvious, but in the old days, photographers did “push” campaigns.  You had postcards made, portfolios etc. and sent them out to potential clients.  Now, potential customers are going to find you.  And the first place they will look is the Google search engine.

And how many pages deep will they look for you?  That’s right, probably not more than one page.

And on the first page, who will they likely checkout first?  That’s right, the first three or four listings.  So in other words, if you are attempting to “let people find you” then you need to be on that first page.  And what that means in practical terms, is that you are going to need to pick a narrow enough niche phrase to give you a chance.

Just to give you a taste of what you’re up against, the Google robot that crawls your site is looking at about 200 variables.  No, I don’t know what they all are.  I don’t know if any one person does.  But the power of the search engine is such that they will make or break your business.

I don’t want to repeat what’s in the photography SEO pamphlet – but I’m simply advising that it’s worth downloading.  I’m actually going to put it on my iPhone and read it there. Again, here’s a link to the page that has the PDF SEO Cookbook for Photographers.

ALL DONE! THIS WENT IN ABOUT FIVE MINUTES.
But if you’re still interested, go to the page below, like it, and I’ll do it again next month sometime.

DB

Like me on Facebook, and then enter the contest.

Rules etc. are on my new Facebook Page at http://www.facebook.com/beckermanphoto

Good luck.

Dave

Yep, the big boys are about to slug it out.  Google, which is just about ubiquitous with a browser, an Operating System, the top search engine, gmail, scanned books, book store, and frankly, if you were to list all the bits of your world that Google touches it would take more than this post.  The only place so far that they haven’t conquered, though I expect that soon, is the social network thing, and my kitchen appliances (which Microsoft is working on).

And I am a big consumer of one particular Google endeavor and that’s all the books they’ve scanned.  As I write this, almost 100% of my reading is with the Google Book Reader on my iPhone.  At some point I might write a comparison of the various readers for the iPhone / iPad but Google has put together a near perfect app for those of us that want free books (I’m reading all of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and I mean his books about spirituality and fairies etc.) after having re-read every Sherlock Holmes story printed.  For free.

This is a digression, but without digressions there wouldn’t be much of a blog here… but it reminds me of how I read books when I was in college, or when I was a kid, and that was to find an author that I liked, and then just go through every book I could get my hands on.  This began with the Hardy Boy books, and then Tarzan, and eventually Hemingway, and Gogol and Dostoyevsky etc. and that’s how I use the google reader.  I started with Sherlock Holmes, but I also remembered reading stories about photographs that Conan Doyle showed of Fairies and spirits.  And I got interested in that.  And so that’s how this post goes from the Google v. Facebook war to how I read and how much I love the Google content from public domain.

Back to the topic at hand:

So the news that Google Plus will arrive soon to take on Facebook gives me mixed feelings.  On the one hand, I am not a big fan of Facebook because the system has always seemed so “closed” to me.  I’m not going to call it a fascist system but on the spectrum of user control and honesty – FB is close to that line.  Just yesterday, for example, they banned a plugin for moving images onto Facebook (sort of like the plugin I use sometimes with Lightroom to put photos on Facebook) AND deleted all the photos that the gadget had uploaded, and didn’t make a prior announcement.  Just zap.

Now if anyone was dumb enough to think of Facebook as a place to save original photo files, then they are getting what they deserve.  Still, just about every day, Facebook makes some sort of change without an announcement, and you find out about it when you notice a new app has been added (that’s how BING got there) or that they have shared your info with everyone under the sun that would pay for it – well that’s the reason that Facebook is profitable as compared to Twitter (for example).

Well anyway, I did a search for Google Plus expecting it to show up in my Google profile – but it was nowhere to be seen.  And so I did a search for it and eventually discovered that it hasn’t been “rolled out” to me yet.   So I dropped an email to them saying to notify me when it was ready.

The thing is – my world – and my business are based on Google.  And although their motto or credo is, Do No Evil which is like the doctor’s Do Not Harm oath – the question is whether you can become incredibly powerful without becoming corrupted, i.e. power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.  So what I like is that they have a chance to take on Facebook.  What scares me, and has scared me for years (though I’m not exactly trembling in my boots) is that Google could actually make a big dent in the social media world.  They’ve tried before, with stuff like buzz – but haven’t gotten anywhere near it.  This time they are putting out what appears to be a copy of Facebook with different names.  Instead of a wall, for example, you have a place to hang out.  I like that better.  No more, up against the wall FBer.

Anyway – I want to join up as soon as I can because it may give me a slight advantage as I already have so much invested in Google and trying to understand it.

Spent the night putting together a print sale.  Making the graphics.  And changing the code in the store to handle the 25% discount.  It’s a Christmas in July Sale in the emails I sent out, with a bonus for anyone who knows (without looking it up) who directed that film, and which is the funniest scene in it – without a doubt.  Hint – it involves guns.

And on top of that, even managed to send out a Mad Mimi email. Now, tomorrow is going to be a bad day since I expect to only be half awake, but I really only have to put together one package of about 8 prints for shipment to California.

When I pull one of these long nights, the poor cat is way confused.  Usually he’s the one keeping me up, and now I turn the tables on him.

Well, now I can go to sleep.  File this under the Photography Business category and see if I can sleep ’til about noon.

Oh, one other thing that has worked out nicely – and a good tip if you are using Paypal for your sales: I got rid of Fedex since my poor friend on the corner lost his Fedex store (went out of business) – and I had been meaning to open a UPS account so that I could test out how the UPS printing of labels would work with Paypal.  Totally great.  I no longer have to copy and paste from Paypal to my old Fedex account.  I can print the label through the Paypal interface, and it shows up in my UPS account for tracking etc.  Saves a lot of tedious work.

And with that – I wish you all a good night.

Maybe some paper dries instantly – but it all depends on what you mean by the word “dry.”  Inkjet paper may dry to the touch quickly, but many papers are still giving off gases for a day or so.  At any rate, this was the system that I came up with a few years back for stacking prints so that they could dry, get some air-flow, and at the same time not have dust, cat hair, and other junk fall onto the surface and possibly stick.

It’s cheap, and flexible meaning that you get to use your brackets for different sized paper and if you are doing this as a business you will have a house filled with cardboard sheets.

Just buy a bunch of right-angle brackets, and as your prints come out of the printer you create a stack like this.  I can do a stack of about eight at a time this way.  It’s especially useful for those of us that don’t have much horizontal space to work with.

12 x 18 stack of inkjets

An actual right-angle hinge and some inkjet cartridges

I seem to have all these Doors songs rattling around in my head lately.  They keep popping up as post titles.  I wonder if that’s what happening to baby boomers all over the world right now.  As we move into our 60′s, we’ll get to live through the 60′s all over again.

Purpose of this post: I setup a new fan at the evil empire (Facebook)

If you would be kind enough to LIKE IT, then when I get to 25 likes I can give it a proper url.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/New-York-Photo-Blog/212600228785027 as opposed to being the number you see here.

One area of the photography SEO that is especially confusing, is the Google image search. Now remember, I’m not talking about the normal web search for key words such as Black and White Photography or New York Photography, but the Google Image search.

I have no presence in that search.  And even if I do a search for my own name, Dave Beckerman, the images that show up are all mine, but from other people’s sites.  So even with years of futzing with the search engines, and reading as much as could find out about image searches, this is one area that remains completely mysterious.  It’s an interesting search – as I get to see some places where my images are being used, often without attribution, but as to why those other sites show up and not my own – as I say – I don’t have a clue.

I posted a few days back about using a Wishlist (or favorite images) for users.  Now, one thing that I had totally forgotten about was that the favorites plugin also included an accumulated stats widget.  I just put it up in the photography store sidebar (scroll down a bit) and you’ll be able to see what people have added to their wishlists – which is to say a sort of real tally of what prints are most popular.

You’ll see the same trend there that I’ve talked about for years – i.e. if there are people, they are abstracted, or small in the frame and certainly nothing in the list that comes close to being “street photography.”

But there’s another factor, and that is which images are first in the gallery.  As a general rule, the closer to the start of the gallery, the more likely the print is to be put on someone’s wishlist.  This fits in with theory about average attention span for looking through images.  It’s about 2 minutes (the average) but every once in a while someone can make it to five minutes.

Which is another reason to have the wishlist.

Here’s the link to the store.  Scroll down a bit to view the wishlist.