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Got an email the other day from National Geographic, telling me that one of my photos that I’d submitted into the 2008 International Photography Contest was going to be featured as April 22nd’s ‘Photo of the Day‘. Sadly none of my entries won in the contest, but at least this one was picked up recently and chosen to be Photo of the Day for what also happens to be ‘Earth Day 2009‘…

The original photo is shown below. It was taken on what turned out to be a longer-than-we-planned road trip through 21 states… 2 weeks, 6000 miles, 21 states, 1 wedding (not mine…) and 1 dog. Was a great trip, and took quite a few photos on the road. This one was taken as we were winding our way down to the Okefenokee swamp in Georgia.

There were multiple layers of trees, both back to front, and top to bottom – so I chose to pan with some of the middle trees as we were driving past. This landed up giving the effect of speed and movement with some of the tree trunks blurred, and others sharp as I panned with that particular ‘layer’.

Canon EOS-1D Mark III
1/40 sec at f/20
ISO 200
70mm

Related posts:

Earth Hour NYC (Empire State Building)
PhotoShelter Featured Photographer

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Had a nice surprise today when I checked my mail – seems that PhotoShelter have featured me on this month’s PhotoShelter front page image slideshow (click on the ‘images’ tab on the slideshow), which you can see in the screenshot above. They’ve also got a PhotoShelter Featured Photographers section where they’ve listed me and put a link to my Image Archive (PhotoShelter powered)…

The image that they used is my image of London’s County Hall taken from the London Eye. Click on the link to see the original photo, and see more information about the image.

I wrote a Review of PhotoShelter in a previous post when I first started using their product. I’m glad to say that since then, it keeps getting better! They’ve just released another batch of new features and tools – mostly focusing on SEO ( ‘Search Engine Optimization’) for users’ sites.

Several cool things came out of the update, and having recently re-designed my website and blog with SEO in mind I decided that it was time to shine the same light on the ‘archive’ part of my site (the PhotoShelter part).

Luckily PhotoShelter just made everyone’s lives a whole load easier with a free ‘SEO for Photographers‘ toolkit. Well worth a read and it’s full of useful tips about SEO – what to do, and what not to do.

Other PhotoShelter updates include:

1. A little green ‘SEO’ sticker next to anything in the archive manager that affects SEO… like keywords for images, or the title of an image, or the description. All of this shows up on the image details page, and therefore gets fed into google.

2. There’s also a new section of the site where you can customize your metadata – like page titles, and descriptions. All of this means you can enter more and more specialist information to the PhotoShelter site, and to your image pages, in order to try to glean as many search hits as possible.

3. The ‘grader’ tool – run the grader and it tells you what you’re missing out on. Missing descriptions? Not displaying keywords on the image details pages? Forgotten to use Gallery Descriptions? The tool will check all of these and more, and then give you a grade, and tell you what you’ve missed and how to improve your score. It’s like a personalised version of Website Grader (Website Marketing SEO Score Tool), specifically for PhotoShelter features. I actually learned about Website Grader through the PhotoShelter toolkit – looks like a useful site.

If you haven’t already, please take a look around my redesigned Photography Website and my Archive (powered by PhotoShelter).

Related posts:

PhotoShelter – April Featured Photographers – from the PhotoShelter Blog
National Geographic Photo of the Day

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A random way to introduce the ‘Blogs I read’ section on the right of the blog here. It contains a load of links, of sites that I visit regularly. Some are news-updates, some are other photographers’ blogs. One of which is ‘Camera Porn’….

It’s ok – it’s work friendly, as long as the url gets past the filters, and a while ago Ryan was running a competition as explained below:

Anyway, check out the original files, and the details behind the project here:
www.cameraporn.net/2008/01/13/cameraporn-project-1-revisi…

What I wanted:

To me the towers seemed ominous and almost foreboding, sitting in place where you’d expect to see small beach huts or palm trees lining the ocean, so I wanted to reflect this in the mood of the photo.

What I did:

1. Took the original files and (yes, cheating I know) HDR’d them in Photomatix to get a baseline HDR that I liked from the 3 original RAW file exposures.

2. Used tone mapping to get to a base HDR that I liked the look of without playing around too much with making it look ‘spiked’.

3. Took it back into the safety of Lightroom (yep, you can guess what I use normally now!) and bled out most of the colour. Removed spray spots. More spot removal. Did I mention spot removal already?
I then boosted the fill light slightly, tweaked contrast, brightness and other levels settings, and darkened the overall picture to get the moody look. Cropped the picture slightly closer at the top to emphasize the depth of the picture and cropped on the left so that the view is straight into the towers. Added vignette.

Please let me know what you think, and if you want the original files or want to have a go at Ryan’s project, please see his ‘Submitting Your Entry’ section on the link above.

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