I’ve been looking at local search for a while now, being listed in Google places has helped my business tremendously by being ranked well in a Google organic search results, so much so that my business is a favorite place on Google. (I got the fancy QR code sticker and everything.) In the last few months I have been studying other local search such as foursquare and yelp. I have been asking experts in the photography field about how local search affects photographers online and had an interview with Rosh Sillars, co-author of “The Linked Photographer’s guide” on his podcast the new media photographer. Yesterday I got a call from a very kind and knowledgeable sales rep from Yelp and I had a long phone call with him this morning. I learned a lot about Yelp and thought I’d share it here.

the free business profile on Yelp

Yelp’s business listings let your customers write reviews about your business and also give you a chance to add some basic information about your business, similar to a profile on Google local. It includes your address, contact info, link to your website, map of the business location, room for a special offer, your opening hours, some options for sharing this listing and writing a review and a space for an add of your competitor (more on that later).

Below the fold your business listing continues with your reviews and some more information about your specialities, your businesses history and a brief bio of you the business owner. (more…)

I am a commercial photographer. I don’t shoot the portrait session with the 4 wallets and the 5×7. I shoot mostly models, i.E.people that have been hired to represent the company, fashion line or product that we’re shooting. Often there is a crew of art directors, fashion stylists, hair and make-up artists, clients, assistants, product stylists, prepers, caterers, …

However I have been getting more and more requests lately to photograph people for the people themselves, where the person is the hero of the shot and everything else becomes secondary. This genre of photography requires you to take photos of the person that’s being featured. You can’t use a stock shot for this. It needs to be this human being that has to be in front of your lens.

Grammy award winning producer, composer and conductor Julio Reyes.

Take for example this environmental portrait of Julio Reyes, the grammy award winning producer for Mark Anthony. Julio had asked me to photograph a recording session a few months ago and I had a great time documenting 35 musicians laying down a beautiful track for the new album. Mr. Reyes had asked me to photograph him for his media collateral at that point and we got our schedules lined up a few weeks ago to shoot in his sound studio. So what’s the secret ingredient that you always need for a great portrait?

(find out after the jump)

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I wrote a blog post about Capture One acquiring Microsoft’s Expressions Media a few weeks ago about a great offer they were making through the end of June: If you bought Capture One for $129.- they would give you Expression Media (Retail $199.-) for free!

That deal just got better, for one week Phase One is selling Capture One software for half price, so you can get Capture One for $64.50 – but only to June 18th.
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Phase One just announced the acquisition of Expression Media.

Phase One is a company based in Sweden, that creates the worlds greatest high end digital backs and a phenomenal RAW image processing software. In my opinion it is the best digital processor available today. I have use their software for years now and am thrilled at the results.

Expression Media, formerly iView, is one of the best image cataloging systems available. It was bought up by Microsoft a few years ago, but has been sitting around their proverbial shelf – just try to find a page that let’s you download an update to Expressions Media – and you’ll know what I mean. Expression Media however keeps track of your digital collection (photos, videos, files, …) and knows where every file is – be it online = connected to your machine – or offline = detached from your computer. It manages all of your metadata, comments, rating, keywords, … all the things that Capture One did not do.

Find out how to get FREE Expression Media or Capture One software!

If you own either Capture One or Expression Media, Phase One has a special offer that gives you the other software package for free until the end of June. So if you own Capture One, you get Expression Media for free and vice versa.

How do you get the free software? Find out after the bump!
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If you’ve been reading my blog, you know that Photography by Depuhl was one of the 100,000 businesses that Google selected to be a ‘favorite place on Google‘. I got a nice sticker from Google that includes a QR code, which links to my website.

Well I just saw a cool way of using this bar code on a site I’ve just discovered. Rosh Sillar’s new media photographer website. He has his QR tag on the front page of his blog, so I figured I should also include mine on my blog – for an easy link back to my site.

QR Code

Social media exploded onto the web in earnest in 2009, with facebook having more hits than Google on Christmas, twitter becoming an interesting method of communicating with each other. What is in store for 2010? I believe Social networking is going to go B2B. With products such as Chatter from Salesforce and Wave from Google being tried out right now, collaboration between clients, partners, suppliers, … will look different then before.

If you already use wave, you will be able to see a wave that is inserted into this blog. If you are not take a look at the following introduction from Google and see if this looks interesting to you.

Now more than ever being a professional photographer is more than capturing an image. Technology has changed the way we capture photographs from a photochemical process (film) to a electronic (digital) one. This shift in technology has also caused a shift in responsibility. A commercial photographer has to do much more than just take a picture. He has to become an IT specialist (or hire one) to do everything that today’s clients expect.

We are able to manage our business online, which begins with building our website, how we deliver our images to our customers, the way we manage our clients and business contacts, how we track the performance of our web presence and ads online and where we actually host our website.

Before you read on I do have to make one disclaimer, this post is inspired by Jeana Lee Tahnk‘s mashable post “5 Essential Sites for Professional Photographers” and were her blog gives you the turn key solutions to some of these needs, the sites that I have listed here, require you to do a little more work – be it learning a new software, re- interpreting how a cloud can be used for your business or figuring out how to bounce data through a few services to make it work for you. The upside of this is that you do save money. Here are the sites in no particular order: (more…)

I am going toward a convergence of design in my website, blog and social media platforms like twitter. I have been working hard on branding my business in the real world over the last two years and now it is time to translate that into my online presence as well (thanks to Bob from Bob Buchanan Design for helping tweak the website version).

www.depuhl.com

blog.depuhl.com

www.twitter.com/photosbydepuhl

Photography by Depuhl is cautiously testing the waters of paid advertising. The first ad began running on December 16th, 2009. Although I have been creating photographs for clients since the late 1980′s, the way of selling yourself as a photographer has drastically changed. You used to have to purchase expensive ads in printed annual professional directories to have your work seen, have an agent that had all the connections – a route that I just could not afford as a beginning photographer. Today I can determine down to the $0.01 how much an ad costs, which search phrase triggers it, when and where it is displayed, …

Screen capture of the first paid ad for photography services

Paid advertising is the logical next step for our online presence. Back in 2007 I made the decision to put a professional website up online. It is created with an awesome photoshop plugin called sitegrinder. This is my first step in a concerted effort to use the web as my primary sales tool for my fashion and product photography.

In 2008 Photography by Depuhl pursues its online network in earnest … (more…)