I’ve been stepping up my activity on PhotoShelter recently – adding custom slideshows for my facebook fan page and allowing buyers to choose prints in a variety of different formats using the ‘self-fulfilled’ option…

My work is mostly travel-related photography focusing on landscapes, architecture and travel scenes. I’m now able to offer signed prints through my website and allow buyers to easily order the prints to their specifications. Recent projects include a look at New York icons and buildings, called ‘Manhattan – A Closer Look’. This series was also featured on PDN’s Photo of the Day. I love to travel and love photography – so it’s been fantastic to combine the two!

There’s a number of reasons I’m glad that I stumbled across the PhotoShelter offering a couple of years ago, and why I’m still making adjustments and changes using their ever-growing list of features. I’ve done a couple of reviews previously – one early PhotoShelter review here, and a PhotoShelter review update here – where I’ve mentioned some of their SEO tools and toolkits specifically for photographers.

Here’s a run-down of why I use PhotoShelter:

Archive

It’s always a good feeling – even if your off-site hard disk backup hasn’t been refreshed in a while (hey, it happens!) – all your most important photos are sitting securely on PhotoShelter’s storage system at their highest resolution. If the worst were to happen, downloading the original archived files to the computer again would be pretty easy.

Website Integration

To me, this is of huge importance; being able to make the ‘archive’ and ‘e-commerce’ components integrate fully with the main website. It means no awkward jump in look-and-feel between components. Consistency. I’m a regular reader of Smashing Magazine, which made me realise that I could take a stab at my own web re-design. The results are what you see on my current website.

After building the ‘front end’ of my newly designed website, I could then apply the exact same look, feel and branding to the PhotoShelter archive component of the site. If you’d like more info about the re-design, I created what was meant to be a short article (but turned out a tad large) about customizing my WordPress blog, my website and the integration with PhotoShelter here.

I think its hugely important nowadays for websites to be seamless and well integrated – PhotoShelter lets me do just that! Now, even if people hit google search results and go straight through to my PhotoShelter site first, they still see the same branding and cohesiveness… (is cohesiveness even a word!?)

Social Media Tools (and Facebook slideshow integration)

There’s a whole bunch of Social media tools and features built into the PhotoShelter system that allow you to easily post galleries and photos to facebook, flickr, or twitter… Take this example below – where people can click a link to buy the image directly from the article, and also get their own embed links for their use – which will link straight back to your portfolio.

Best of all – how many times have I been thankful for this feature? – you don’t have to worry about the watermarking. I normally post pictures at a small resolution to social media sites and I was worried about uploading the ‘full size’ to PhotoShelter. Luckily it’s easy to set up a customized watermark in whatever style or size that you want. The watermark then automatically gets applied to the photos when other people view them. Your original photos are left untouched, and you don’t have to faff with anything fancy in Photoshop.

There’s also a great write-up by David Calvert on the PhotoShelter blog about customizing your facebook fan page with PhotoShelter slideshows. That tutorial inspired me to set up a facebook fan page for my travel photography (long overdue), and to set up a slideshow on the custom ‘welcome’ page with some of my images. Again – the PhotoShelter system makes everything so customizable that it’s easy to set up a gallery of images that you want to appear in the facebook slideshow, but that you might not want to appear in the list of galleries that people see through your website.

‘Soft’ side of PhotoShelter

I touched on this briefly in my updated PhotoShelter review – it’s not all about the ‘product’ at PhotoShelter – I also get great information from their ‘A Picture’s Worth’ blog, as well as attending their free webinar sessions on anything from monetizing your PhotoShelter galleries to setting up Google Analytics for your site. There’s also the free toolkits that they produce, like the SEO Cookbook for Photographers or a guide to designing websites for Photography Buyers, through to the recent Social Media Guide for Photographers.

All in all, it makes you feel like part of a local community!

In summary…

I use PhotoShelter to:

- Sell signed prints to buyers, who can buy online at any time of the day
- Offer coupons and incentives to buyers
- Keep a secure offsite copy of my most valuable photos
- Market my photos through social media and slideshows using the same source photos
- Integrate the e-commerce needs of my site with my ‘front end’ website and wordpress blog
- Use their free resources – like the toolkits and blog posts…

Yep – I’d recommend to a friend!

Related Posts:

Website and WordPress Integration with PhotoShelter
PhotoShelter Review Update
Facebook Fan Page – Become a fan!

I did a previous review of PhotoShelter back in Jan ’09, but on re-reading it, I discovered that I pretty much missed out one large area of discussion. That is, Community…

Before we get to that though, since I wrote the original post, there have been a bunch of further improvements to PhotoShelter, and a load more features added, such as:

1. The SEO-Grader. This is a pretty cool tool – it’s the equivalent of having someone sit down with you and discuss what you’re missing on your site. Have you missed writing descriptions for your gallery, have you put in SEO-friendly meta data in your main page areas, have you written captions for all your images, have you customised your page titles, have you installed a code for Google Analytics… and so on. Yes, you can click through all the different sections on the ‘customize’ screens, but having the grader tell you what you might be missing is a great feature!

2. More stats available – as well as seeing how many users are viewing which images on your site, you can see who’s adding what images to their cart.

3. More SEO Emphasis, like allowing you to customise page titles and loads of other items, as well as including the gallery name in the URL now, instead of a not-so-friendly unique number.

All in all, a whole load of things. And the original review still stands in terms of how easy everything is to set up / integrate with paypal etc.

So the thing I missed completely was that there’s also the ‘softer’ side to PhotoShelter, i.e. not the website, not the galleries, not the product itself – but the community feeling of PhotoShelter.

There’s a whole load of resources that they’ve created, like their Stimulus plan for encouraging more photography events, or the fact that they give away so much really good information to the photography community for free…

1. Blog posts, like this one on SEO Search Engine Optimization.

2. The Free SEO Toolkit, which has a load of information that can be applied to any site. ** Updated in 2010 with the new 2010 SEO Toolkit for Photography Websites…

3. The Image Buyer Survey, in which they interview industry professionals and then share the results of what they like in a website, or what they hate in a website. Again, all stuff that PhotoShelter have used to improve the design of their own product, but then have also shared with the whole world for free. They also have a video on vimeo called Photography Websites: What Buyers Want 2009 on the same subject.

4. Grover recently did a free Webinar over at the Livebooks Webinar series about Leveraging your photo archive to grow your business.

5. Or live in person, at a free Adorama workshop, called ‘Killer Websites’.

6. PhotoShelter also have their own schedule of webinars, listed at the Free Photography Websites Webinars page.

Point being that they really seem to do a whole load of stuff for the community, and it’s all there for everyone to use!

Related posts:

PhotoShelter Review (Jan 14th, 2009)

MOO comes to the USA!

I’m a big fan of the MOO business cards – especially the ‘MiniCards’, in fact I did a previous post about the MOO MiniCards too…

So it’s good news to hear that they’ve just opened up a MOO US store. Located in Rhode Island, it sounds like good news for people wanting these little networking gems who live in the US (and a bunch of other countries benefit too by the looks of it).

1. Faster shipping (no more Royal Mail!)
2. Lower shipping costs
3. Ability to track the package

Every single time I’ve handed out one of their MiniCards to someone, they’ve commented about the card, and it’s been a conversation starter.

I usually upload hi-res files to my Flickr account, and make them private, and then import them into the MOO card making process straight from Flickr. I like the fact that I also have full control of the crop of the image in their card maker tool, and the zoom etc. Printing quality is excellent, and the size means you can keep double the amount of cards in any regular-size card holder!

Top Picture:

Canon EOS-1D Mark III
1/30 sec at f/2.8
ISO 200
70mm

Related posts:

MOO Cards

Finally got around to finishing off this book on a flight the other day. Flights seem like the perfect time to concentrate on books – especially when you’re stuck in the middle seat of a night flight…

I read the first one (The Moment It Clicks) and loved it, so I figured that I’d pre-order this one as soon as Joe mentioned that it was available (on Joe McNally’s Blog). Small flash – in my case the 580EXII – is where I’m at at the moment (no $$$ Octabanks yet…) so it seemed a good fit for a read.

Quick summary is – Great Book. Even though a few of the stories and photos in the book have come from his previous blog posts / talks etc and seemed familiar, there was enough new material and extra detail to easily justify it. The Nikon thing is really pretty easy to get over too – he’s a Nikon fan, and he uses 100% Nikon as far as I can tell, so it’s fair enough that he talks in Nikonspeak. It’s the theories and methods (not necessarily which button to press) behind the images, and the anecdotes that he’s talking about which are the key to the images – and these translate to any camera system on the planet.

It’s also an excellent book if you want to be able to look at a picture, guess the lighting method(s) he used to take it, and then read on and see if things match up. The stories behind the photos are pretty amazing too. Gives a little hint into his particular brand of life-as-a-photographer.

Luckily I’m left-eyed too, so I’ll be making sure I take note of ‘Da Grip’ on page 41 – a ‘yeah, that makes sense’ way to make sure you hold the camera without camera shake. It’s amazing how many people you see using the ‘wobble’ technique instead.

Chapters like ‘How to Light an Elf’ and entries in the index like ‘childbirth’ or ‘creepy guy in the alley’ make the whole book into an informative and entertaining page-turner.

Check out my About Tim Grimshaw page for a ‘Book List’ with other photography book suggestions…

As I mentioned in my first post about ordering an iPhoto book (part I) I received the paperback version of the iPhoto book (part II) and was pretty happy with it! I landed up giving away the paperback version, and still wanting a copy for myself to have around the house, I decided to order a hard back version…

First up, my first impression was that this is a real book. Even though I was more than happy with the paperback version, this one just seemed a whole lot more professional.

Seems extremely well made too – there’s an outer jacket which has the front and back designs that you specify in the iPhoto application. The jacket also has the book title on the spine. Then the cover itself (the hard cover) is a sleek matt black with silver text on the front with the book title and byline. Actually looks really good, even without the outer jacket.

On the inside of the hard cover is the brushed-metal-effect that you see when you’re designing the book in Apple’s iPhoto application.

The rest of the book is as you design it in iPhoto. Again, the printing quality seems excellent. Colour quality also excellent.

Bottom line – if you’re going to order one of these books, I think it’s well worth spending the extra dollars and going for the hardcover book.

Picture above was taken with a tilt-shift 45mm lens (ts-e 45mm) tilted in order to get as much depth of field as possible on the page of the book as it goes from foreground to background.

See this link for part I of the iPhoto posts (the ordering process and using iPhoto).

See this link for part II of the iPhoto posts (the paperback version review).

Canon EOS-1D Mark III
1/800 sec at f/2.8
ISO 320
45mm (tilt-shift)

Strobist info: One Canon 580 EXII flash with white umbrella (shoot-through). Positioned above and to the right of the book pointed downwards, 1/8 power.

I’ve recently signed up for the PhotoShelter Personal Archive. I’ve been thinking about doing so for a while – I first met PhotoShelter at ‘shoot the day’ – an event in New York run by them. And I also had a (very) few number of photos in their stock collection, which has since been shut down in favour of concentrating on the Personal Archive….

To be honest – I’m glad I went ahead and took the leap. For those who don’t know, it’s a service like smugmug or one of the other photo storage type of sites, which allows you to (a) store your photos securely off-site, and (b) allows you to do a whole load of stuff with them once they’re up there – like display them and sell them.

Things I love about PhotoShelter:

1. Having just gone through the sign-up and set-up process, I can honestly say it’s pretty easy. Easy Peasy to be precise. Following along their almost ‘setup-wizard’ type of process was really simple, and I was quickly up and running. Everything from uploading the photos (and I think there’s now a Lightroom plugin which allows you to upload directly – I haven’t tried it yet – but i think this is the link), to organising them, to linking to my own paypal account for sales etc was all quick and easy.

2. As well as being easy to set up, it’s easy to tinker with too – customising to get a particular theme, or changing galleries around, or changing pricing structures on groups of photos or individual photos.

3. You can get as technical as you want to. Within the manual customisation feature, you can actually get down and dirty with page templates etc, and design your own theme, insert your own google analytics codes etc and probably much much more.

4. Customer service rocks. From seeing staff in PhotoShelter answering queries on random forums around the internet, to my own experience where I had a problem upgrading my account because of a particular coupon I’d used – everything seems to be dealt with quickly and efficiently.

5. It’s local. That counts doesn’t it! I guess it’s like the fact that tomatoes from the local farmers’ market always taste great!

Things that I think could be improved:

1. It’s not free. ok. Joking. I decided to shell out the money to get the full customisable version of the Personal Archive. Personally, I think it’s competitive with the prices of other similar services. But yeah, wouldn’t it be nice if everything that we wanted was free.

2. I’d like to be able to choose from more ‘back end’ suppliers – for the prints, if you want these to be automatically fulfilled, then you have to use ‘ezprint’. I’d love to be able to select e.g. the ‘mpix‘ profile, and allow people the options offered by mpix – like regular prints, as well as gallery wraps, standouts, canvases… etc. I know you can choose to ‘self-fulfil’ the order – i.e. the order comes through and the seller prints it themself, but still.

3. Choosing a print size. I’ve noticed this issue on a lot of sites, so it’s not limited to PS, but it’d be great if, when a user is selecting their picture size to buy, it highlights the sizes which make more sense. e.g. for one picture, a 16×20 might leave white space, but a 16×24 might be a perfect fit. It’d be great if it worked out that the best proportion out of those two would be the 16×24, and highlighted it for the buyer. Just something a little more user-friendly for the customer…

Not really a lot of niggles, considering I managed to set up the entire thing, link it to my paypal account, set up customisation, set up pricing profiles, upload images and set up galleries all within a day.

Down the road I’m going to be looking to customise the Personal Archive site even more (probably to coincide with my main site re-design), and probably add a bunch more galleries and photos!

Also, considering how many new features the PS people seem to come out with on a regular basis, I’m probably going to be constantly incorporating the new ideas as they come out – like the ‘one click’ create-a-slideshow-from-the-gallery… or the ‘one click’ create-a-search-box-for-your-homepage-that-searches-all-your-images features… like this one below. Try doing a search for ‘new york’ and see what’s returned from my archive site.

Anyway, please feel free to check out my orangeblob Archive, or take a look at more of the PhotoShelter features here.

Related posts:

PhotoShelter Review Update
National Geographic Photo of the Day
Business Cards (Moo Cards)

It arrived! Ok, so I know that FedEx is on their game ‘n all, but the explanation for the 4 hour gap between the last post and this one is just that I posted the last one waaaay after I thought I would. It’s no magic 4-hour printing/binding/delivery feature…

The shot above is of the finished book. (see here for the first post about creating the book)

First impressions? It’s really cool seeing pictures printed professionally! I think it’s going to make a great present, and I’m thinking of doing another one for myself as a coffee table book. Also seems skinnier than I was expecting – not sure why, but at 36 pages I somehow pictured it being slightly thicker. Might get the hardback version next time.

The quality of the printing is really good, and the paper (glossyish and feels hard-wearing) is excellent. The covers seem well made as well.

Not a lot of bad things to say about it really. For the price, and for the total-simplicity, it really is great. I’m sure it’s not top-of-the-range quality, and also bear in mind that this is my first book that I’ve printed… so I might be biased!

Canon EOS-1D Mark III
1/250 sec at f/7.1
ISO 200
50mm

Strobist info: Canon 580EXII into a collapsed umbrella above the book to the right. 1/4 power. No additional strobes were used as I wanted to squeeze all the depth out of the relatively flat book that I could. I’ve also ‘fanned’ the pages, and held them in that position with a lens (the 45 Tilt Shift that I’ve rented, but that’s another post…)

With the holidays coming up, I thought it’d be cool to make a book of pictures for a gift. I’d also recently read Scott Kelby’s article on different photo book options, and as I liked the look of the iPhoto one the most, decided to give that a shot…

Above you can see a couple of the pages of the book.

The process itself was pretty easy – I basically did exactly what Scott demonstrated on the video on his blog:

1. Select all the photos that I wanted in the book (or at least the photos that I thought I wanted… when I started filling the book, I discovered that some photos weren’t really fitting well, and others came to mind that I wanted to include).
2. Drag onto the iPhoto icon.
3. Start dragging and dropping the photos onto the different pages on the book.
4. Press ‘buy book’.
5. Done!

Admittedly, there was quite a bit of faffing around in step 3. Deciding the order of the book pages… and deciding what the captions were going to be… and what the introduction is going to say… and so on. Also, it was magically easy to change a page from two images to one, or from one image taking up the entire page, to one image which has space for a caption also.

Another couple of nice touches which I liked were the front and back cover – the latter where I decided to use my very-under-used ‘about me’ picture of me taking a picture out of a car window. Another cool thing (though I only used it sparingly) was that you could make the background of a page either white, grey, or you could actually make the background one of your pictures. The beauty of the last option is that you can then ‘fade’ the background picture to almost-white (I guess in PS-speak, you can change the opacity of the image). Creatively that’s quite cool – you could have (for example) a faded picture of oak barrels as the page background, and then the main full colour image could be a bottle of Whisky, where the background gives some informational background to the main picture as well.

EDIT: Follow up post when the book arrived, and a picture of the book, is here…

Someone was asking me the other day where I got my business cards from. They’re from a UK company called ‘Moo‘. That’s a picture of two cards above, in Sprite. Don’t ask…

I love the cards – they’re different (half the height of ‘regular’ business cards) and they’re not too expensive either. You can have your own pictures printed onto them (e.g. direct from flickr), and you can print as many different pictures as you want in a set (the one in the above pic is this one). Head over to the Minicards section at the Moo website for more info on them. They also deliver to international destinations.

So now more about the photo. I didn’t want to just take a picture of the cards themselves, so decided to sacrifice two of them (it actually landed up being a few more… oops) and put them in a glass of Sprite. To keep them in place, the card edges were gently pushed into the curve of the glass to ‘wedge’ them in place with a chopstick and a fondue fork. Then wait for a while for suitable bubbles to form (I learned a lot about bubble-forming – like when you first put something in there, it’s covered in tiny bubbles, but to get the more interesting ones, wait a little bit and they’ll start joining up or floating which gives a better random pattern with different size bubbles. I digress…). Then brushed away the bubbles from around the fish’s eyes and took the photo.

Actually one other thing that I used properly for the first time was Live View. It was the first ‘real’ time that I’ve used it, and it worked perfectly. I wanted the eye of the fish to be perfectly in focus, so using live view, and zooming into the eye then using manual focus worked perfectly.

Canon EOS-1D Mark III
1/250 sec at f/8.0
ISO 200
50mm

Strobist info: Large umbrella directly above the glass, pointing down with a 580 EXII at 1/4 power. There was a second 580EXII at 1/32 power to the left of the glass and slightly above the height of the glass, which gave the the distorted ‘flame’ of light (if that’s what you’d call it) to the right of the glass.

The picture is pretty much straight out of the camera, with the exception of some cloning to get rid of my phone number on the card, and also adding the vignette.

Related Posts:

Moo Business Cards come to the USA!

Just updated the list of books on my ‘about’ page listed here (at the end of the page). So I finished a couple more of them, and there’s really not a single book on there that I wouldn’t really really recommend. The present-buying season is nearly here, so no need to hang around.