goldengod

Renée C. Byer recently won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography for her feature work on Cyndie French and her son Derek Madsen. Renée documents Derek’s losing battle with neuroblastoma in a series of twenty emotional black and white photographs entitled “A Mother’s Journey.”

I can’t even begin to conceive writing about something like this. Instead, here’s what Renée had to say when asked how she felt about her work:

In a situation like this, your instincts as a person are to try to help. But as a journalist, you have to step back and let things unfold as they naturally would. It can be very, very painful. I was documenting a story that needed to be told, and it was a gift to be allowed to be there. Throughout, I had a bigger vision that — because of what I was witnessing — it would bring hope to other families.

I want to extend my congratulations to Ms. Byer and I want to implore the rest of you to take fifteen minutes out of your day to see this. You won’t regret it, unless you happen to be out of Kleenex.

clouds over hills by vs

Last month, I showed you how to find free photos for your blog using Flickr’s Creative Commons search. I was overwhelmed by the response I got and the enthusiasm for the next part.

Well, here it is. I’m going to show you how to use them to improve the look and feel of your blog, while following the rules of the Creative Commons license.

Ways of Incorporating Photos into Your Blog

There are two common ways to jazz up your blog posts with photos. I call them the ‘article’ method and the ‘front-page’ method. Both are pretty straightforward adaptions of the way images are used in newsprint and magazines.

The front-page method is a bit ‘in your face’ and is best used sparingly. It uses a larger image that takes up the entire width of the article column, with the text starting beneath it. The advantage of this is that with a larger image, it’s more likely to ‘grab’ the reader. Keep in mind that if this is overused, the effect is lost and it can get irritating.

(dis)appearing rooms by pfig

The article method is what I use here on goldengod; smaller images aligned to either the left or right with the article text wrapping around them. I find this method is a lot more pleasing and works better with the overall layout of my site.

I try not to post photos wider than 200-250 pixels. If you’re using my previous advice about Creative Commons photos on Flickr, use the ’small’ size to get this effect. This is not a hard rule for all blogs, you can vary that based on your own personal layout.

Try both methods and see what looks best based on your template.

How to Add Photos to Your Blog

Here is an example of the code I use to add Creative Commons photos into my blog posts:

<div style=”float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 2px”><a href=”http://www.asiteyouwanttolinkto.com” target=”_blank” title=”A relevant title for the link; use keywords“><img src=”Direct link to the source of the image” alt=”Same as title above” style=”border: 2px solid #000000″ /></a>

<div style=”margin-bottom: 3px” align=”center”><span style=”font-size: 0.9em; margin-top: 0px”><a href=”Link to the Flickr individual photo page” target=”_blank”>Title of photo</a> by <a href=”Link to photographer’s Flickr page” target=”_blank”>Photographer</a></span></div></div>

This covers all the bases; it gives you tastefully integrated photos, optimizes for search engines, and provides two photo credit links for the photographer. I have no doubt that there are a number of you out there with better html skills than mine. If you have a better alternative to nested divs, go ahead and add your own code examples in the comments.

This Will Help Improve Your Blog

Following these steps and adding quality images to a blog will help boost your traffic, search engine rankings and add to the overall look and feel of your site. From a technical standpoint, it’s long been thought that outgoing links, image alt tags, and link title tags are all taken into account by Google’s patented SEO magic. The source I’ve provided you with should take all of this into account without being inappropriate.

Wasserspiegel by froodmat

Blogs with images are more popular than text-only blogs. This means that you’re likely to see an improvement in the number of readers you have, how long they stay on the site, and how likely they are to comment or link to you. Compare your stats between a month without images and a month with, with no other major changes to the site and you’ll see the difference.

Got a better way of doing it? Want to show off your shiny new photo-filled blog? Leave a link in the comments; I promise to take a look at each one of them and I’ll comment with feedback for you.

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You Can’t Flickr This by missrogue

David Hobby at the Strobist is writing an excellent four part series about online photo sharing service Flickr and the future of commercial photography.

The first part focuses on the success story of Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir, arguably the most popular photographer on Flickr. The popularity of her stark, surrealist self-portraits attracted serious attention from Toyota.

Rebekka netted a lucrative photography contract and an impressive amount of exposure in the mainstream media. I first heard of this while reading the Wall Street Journal, of all things.

The second article centers on micro-stock photography agencies and how they relate to the commercial future of Flickr. This has been a really hot topic on the more business-oriented photography sites I read. Sites like Thomas Hawk, John Harrington, and Dan Heller’s Business Photography Blog have been writing about this for months now.

Zooomr, a Flickr competitor headed up by Hawk, hopes to add the features of a stock photography agency with their upcoming Mark III update. It will be really interesting to see how this performs, as it will probably give us some insight into how successful Flickr’s inevitable venture into stock photography will be.

The article also addresses the issue of accessibility on Flickr; how to stand out from the crowd by optimizing your photos with proper tagging and descriptions. You can have the best flower photos in the world, but if they don’t show up when people search for ‘flowers’; it doesn’t help you.

The first two parts of the series are available here and here. Part three of the series on photo sharing is due later this week. Speaking of sharing photos, I’ve just uploaded a couple dozen new shots to my Flickr account a couple nights ago. Go check them out; I crave your approval!

Apparently I’m completely unable to read a calendar when I’m setting posts to publish in the future. Today is the 26th; not yesterday. Belatedly yours:

• Create Your Own Custom Bokeh - This is easily the most innovative photography project I’ve seen all week. You can use cutout cardboard overlays to change the shape of your bokeh. It really needs to be seen to be believed, the final picture is great.
• A Moment on Earth - A mosaic of single frames of video shot all over the world.
• 1994 Stanley Cup Riot Video - Videographer Darrell Patton captures an hour’s worth of footage from the 1994 Vancouver Stanley Cup Riot. Hopefully this won’t happen again after Anaheim kicks our collective ass.
• PhotographyVoter - Pretty easy to sum up; Digg for photographers. Not the most original name in the world, but it’s a new way for me to find interesting articles and tutorials. I like it. Feel free to add me as a friend if you join.
• Epic Edits Weblog - The latest addition to the ‘Photography’ category of my RSS reader. Lots of good tips articles and breakdowns of how the author took particular shots. Designed for the hobbyist, with a focus on available light photography and post-processing.

After my winter hibernation, I’ve begun regularly posting new photos to my Flickr account once again. Head on over and check them out.

Humble Voice is a recent addition to the online artist’s communities scene. The site launched this past December and offers a new community for photographers, musicians, filmmakers, writers and artists.

Target Audience

HV is divided up into five major sections: Music, Video, Art, Photography, and Writing. The site structure for profiles is modular, so each individual profile can have any amount of content mixed and mashed together from all five categories. I like this a lot because it makes the service open to a broad spectrum of multi-talented artists.

The site seems to be aimed more at the ‘hip’ end of the artist wedge. I’ve seen more than a few high quality professional designers on the site; most notably Pete Harrison of aeiko.net and funkrush.

User Interface

The interface for browsing and navigating the site is simple, quick, and easy to use. I had no problems finding interesting stuff in all categories in very short order. I could just as easily perform member activities (add to friends, etc) as I could browse as a non-user.

On the other hand, the interface used for creating and modifying your own pages is clunky, hard to use, and works in arbitrarily strange ways. It uses drag and drop page elements, so it’s not hard for those without experience to create simple, elegant artist profiles.

I found it very difficult to arrange the individual little sectionlets of each page without having an object snap to somewhere I didn’t want it to go. Often tricky rearrangements of putting the same objects right to left, then left to right were necessary to get things to go where I wanted. I was also a bit disappointed that there didn’t seem to be a more ‘advanced’ framework for knowledgeable users to customize their page in.

You’re best off creating a multi-page profile to get around the awkwardness of attempting to unify everything into a single-page. You can definitely create some great galleries of your work with this, but it takes a bit more work than I feel is necessary.

Artist Rights

One of the first thing’s I noticed was that the sites terms of service did not mention anything about artists retaining their copyright. After the MySpace Copyright Debacle, I was a bit worried about posting my work on a site that didn’t make the terms explicit.

After getting in touch with them, I’ve been assured that the artist retains all rights with their work. Humble Voice doesn’t swipe any rights either while your content is up or afterwards. They are currently working on a revised ToS to reflect this.

Overall

Humble Voice is a decent artist’s community with a lot of growth potential ahead of it. It’s a welcome change from having to browse the dank dungeons of MySpace and DeviantArt. I’ve posted a few photos, but overall I find the interface to be limiting and awkward to use when building your sections. I use the site far more for browsing other people’s sections than maintaining my own. I find the ratio of amazing to crap much better than on a lot of other sites, Flickr & Zooomr excluded.

Feel free to stop by and ridicule my profile on Humble Voice.

I managed to actually span four of my five categories this week; I only missed Vancouver. Here is my attempt to keep you busy for this week:

• Nigerian Students Power Up Their Laptops - It makes me really happy to finally see classrooms of students powering up their OLPC’s.
• (VIDEO) Advertising’s Image of Women - Honestly, I haven’t watched this yet. I’ve received a couple positive recommendations and it’s in my queue. I’m posting in order to get it up before I forget.
• Computational Photography @ Science News - The future of digital photomanipulation. Also, check out Brian Larter’s post on the same topic.
• Display Online Panoramic Photos with CleVR - A decent alternative to Quicktime VR for displaying panoramas online. The interface is flash-based and similar to YouTube.
• Fotowoosh - Transform any 2d photograph into a 3d image. The site is currently in alpha, but you can signup for a beta invite.

I’m thinking about moving all my weekly link roundups to a separate category. I don’t really think there’s much of an advantage either way; it’s just my digital OCD kicking in. Don’t be too surprised if you see the categories shifting a bit in the coming weeks.

Boxed by hawksanddoves

Advertisers are up in arms over the recent decision to ban advertising outdoors in the city of São Paulo, Brazil. For years, advertisers have refused to follow municipal guidelines and are now suffering the consequences.

Tony De Marco has excellent photos of the advertising ban available in his Flickr account. The photos are simple, sparse and I love seeing the rusted out remnants of where ads used to be. Take five minutes and go see what the city looks like underneath the ads.

There are large arguments on either side of the ban, but according to the government, the people have spoken. Advertisers will continue to fight for the ability to advertise, but public opinion seems to be overwhelmingly in favour of the ban.

The law is “a rare victory of the public interest over private, of order over disorder, aesthetics over ugliness, of cleanliness over trash,” Roberto Pompeu de Toledo, a columnist and author of a history of São Paulo, wrote in the weekly newsmagazine Veja. “For once in life, all that is accustomed to coming out on top in Brazil has lost.”

(Thanks, Jhayne)

The Arcade Fire by ckemp

Some of my friends on the east coast asked what kind of exciting events were happening in Vancouver. The answer; a bunch of kickass concerts. Here’s a short list of the Vancouver concerts I’m headed to in the next two months:

• Regina Spektor on Apr 21st @ The Commodore Ballroom
• Explosions in the Sky on May 5th @ Croatian Cultural Centre
• The Arcade Fire on May 24th @ Deer Lake Park
• (CSS) Cansei de Ser Sexy on June 6th @ Richard’s on Richards
• Architecture in Helsinki on June 14th @ Richard’s on Richards

I’m also considering buying tickets to see Bjork, Interpol, Dimmu Borgir, and Seu Jorge. The Sasquatch Festival down in Washington is also very tempting, but I think the logistics of it all have defeated me.

Feel free to get in touch if you feel like meeting up at any of the shows listed. I’ve been considering putting in a request to do some concert photography at either the Explosions in the Sky or CSS shows. I just recently read Thomas Hawk’s guide to getting permission to shoot concert photography. It’s got me all jazzed up again to try this out, so I might give it a shot.

Has anyone out there done any concert photography themselves? Do you have any advice for me? You know where to put it.

This week I’m focusing on photography workflow and other processes surrounding it. I’ve gotten my hands on an old beat-up copy of The Joy of Photography and the darkroom section is really getting me jazzed about postproduction. Here’s what I’ve come across this week:

• A Pro’s Approach to RAW Workflow - Photographer Carl Ebrey shows us a glimpse into how his workflow for processing RAW images works over at Digital Photography School.
• ‘Evidence of Things Unseen’ by Simen Johan - Intensely creepy photographs of children. They’re very dramatic and easily the most interesting photoset I’ve seen all week.
• Computing Photographic Forgeries - A short article in Science News about developing software to detect photographic forgeries through mathematical examination.
• NYT on The Future of Stock Photography - Two pages of history and information on stock photography giant Corbis and where stock photography is going.
• Lightpainting at Instructables - Quick tutorial to get you started on lightpainting with any digital camera that lets you use a long shutter speed.

I’ve adjusted my RAW workflow to incorporate steps from Carl’s process. I’m finding the batch export to TIFF much more efficient than my previous ‘Edit copy as .PSD’ method for moving from Lightroom to Photoshop. If you’re currently using something similar to my old method, it’s well worth giving Carl’s procedure a shot.

Ads From Apple by kamikura

I’ve been paying more and more attention to the different methods of advertising I see on my daily commute. I admit to being disappointed in the variety of Vancouver transit ads, but PingMag’s collection of ten great advertising tricks used in Tokyo subways is top notch.

Public transit is supersaturated with advertising. In order to stand out, advertisers must really think outside the box. Breaking out of the standard medium of the 2′x4′ ad poster is the easiest way to grab attention and that is reflected in these examples.

Train Jacking (buying the entire advertisement space inside a whole train for a certain period) or Train Wrapping (covering the entire outside of a train) are extremely popular in Tokyo. If you ever found yourself in one of these trains for a few stops only, you will know why people are willing to pay so much at once. An entire train telling you the same thing is impossible not to notice.

Companies such as Bell and Colgate have done station jacking here in Vancouver, completely saturating the Granville Skytrain station with their ads. I haven’t personally seen any full-on train jacking here, though. Some companies will buy the outside of an entire train, but that’s as far as it seems to go.

I admit to being unfamiliar with the concept of “QR codes” mentioned in the article, but from the context it sounds like they’re barcodes that can be scanned by Japanese camera phones. Scanning the QR-code gives you more information on the product and/or takes you to their webpage.

Articles like this cement my belief that the only remaining way to penetrate through to the consumer is clever and original advertising. The Cannes Advertising Film Festival draws crowds all across the world, year after year. Stop and think about that; people are paying money to watch ads. I try to make it every year because the ads shown are that interesting.