I’ll make this a short(er) post hopefully…
Started off the last day of PhotPlus (sniff…) with Rick Sammon. Interesting talk about portrait photography, particularly when mixed with traveling to different places. Lots of travel tips and portraiture tips, especially focusing on how to do things ‘on the road’ i.e. when you can’t just leg it down to B&H and pick up the exact 27 1/2 inch triple folded shoot through umbrella that you need. Interesting to note that this was the first talk that focused a fair bit more on ‘technical details’, and the questions reflected that…
On a whim, I then went to see John Harrington. I was trying to see how I know him, and realised that because I (recently) discovered the joys of Google Reader, I hardly ever go to anyone’s actual sites anymore. Anyway, I googled him to find the ‘front’ of the blog – he has a lot of useful ‘soft’ information about the photography business, like tips on SEO especially, and other businessy nuggets. Looks like he’s also doing ‘Day 1… day 2…esque blog entries on PhotoPlus.
John was talking at the LiveBooks stand about SEO, and had a number of good tips about getting exposure through the ‘big 3′… Google, MSN Live Search and Yahoo. Also did a demo of Google Analytics. Might do a dedicated blog on this at some point – it’s an interesting tool – if you haven’t already seen it / implemented it, I’d suggest you take a look! In a nutshell, it lets you add a simple tag to your website, and then allows it to track a bunch of stuff… so in a pretty cool interface, you can tell, for example, that 3 people from New Zealand, using FireFox viewed page X on your site, and were referred through Y link to it. There’s heaps more to it though – just take a look at the product tour on the link above.
Urm… disclaimer – I can already feel this post getting out of hand. If your standing, sit. If you’re sitting, recline.
Anyway. Next up was another freebie. Actually failed on my homework with this one, but luckily came across it by accident. Vincent Laforet – talking about his photos and some of the stories behind them, including ‘behind the scenes’ stuff. 30 minutes of interesting stories, and another look at his pretty awesome photo collection. His aerial stuff is inspiring, and his ‘Play magazine’ series (under ‘Sports’) is genius. All in all, a great photographer. Only downfall is a website niggle… when you go to his website, it’ll re-size your window to how it wants to. I think that’s my pet peeve of photography websites. Anyway, still definitely worth a visit. And add his blog to your checklist too.
The last event of the day… and of the whole expo for me, was the ‘How to break into Lifestyle/Travel Photography’ panel. It was vaguely similar to a seminar I went to at ‘Shoot! the day’ event in NYC. Some things discussed were similar, but I got a lot more useful information out of the talk, and actually found myself taking notes. Probably a first for me, in any kind of meeting. Normally if I’m understanding then I’m remembering, but there was so much useful resource-type information flitting around the room that I needed something to help me out.
Really useful insights into what it’s like being a travel photographer, how each panel member got into the gig, and importantly, what the views of a photo editor are. Lots of tips on how to apply for an assignment in travel/lifestyle, and how to position yourself in whatever you’re doing now to make you more marketable to a travel magazine photo editor. Lots of the questions produced useful hints on how to put together a portfolio too, a lot of which could be applied to any speciality.
Ok, so the short post totally didn’t work out. Anyway, it’s been a great 3 days: 6 subway trips to/from the Javits Centre, 12 events attended, 20 photographers listened-to, tens of booths visited, and gallons of ideas and information absorbed!
