“Facebook is a waste of time. I don’t need to know what you had for lunch today” is a common response that I hear when I speak with people about why I am involved in social media – hmmm, what did I have for lunch today … but back to the point of this post: I wanted to share with you how I got booked to shoot a video shoot from my facebook post in less than an hour.

I have been getting into shooting video over the last few months – you can check out some of my films on vimeo – and I have been seeing that there is a lot to learn from a photographers perspective. I purchased my first HDDSLR 3 months ago and got booked on my first paid video production last week, so I posted a blurb about editing this shoot on my facebook page.

I tagged my wife (the beautiful model in the photo) and left it at that. I also did not design the post to be anything special my comment on facebook merely read: “Spend most of the day editing a commercial movie project, while learning Adobe Premiere, incidentally the client was very happy with the rough cut :)”

That was late Thursday night (around 10:30 pm), I was ready to call it a night, take the dog for a walk and go to sleep. On that walk I get a comment on my facebook post – 24 minutes after uploading the screen shot – from one of my photography clients. I answered the post and that exchange ended with: “Hey….I got a movie project we should talk about ; )” at 11:23 pm, 43 minutes after my original facebook post. I called the next morning and we are looking at producing a series of half a dozen short movie clips for this client in May.

“So an existing client contacts you to shoot for him” you say, “big deal.” – but wait this is where the facebook story really starts getting interesting. A few months ago, my wife (remember the lovely lady from my video shoot :) sees a post on facebook from one of her friends, Katja, who had posted a few images of a recent job photographed for some yacht building company on location in the Bahamas – beautiful photographs by the way – anyway my wife sends a facebook friends request to the brand manager of this company, who accepts based on their mutual friend, the model Katja, with me so far? Good. Turns out that the brand manager is friends with one of my good friend Hugo, whom I have known since college, he is also one of my wife’s facebook friends – she knows him through me and Hugo showed up a mutual friend when my wife’s friend request got accepted by the brand manager. So I friend the brand manager as well and based on our mutual friend he accepts my friends request.

The beauty of facebook in this instance, is that a couple of total strangers in real life, get connected based on relationships that we all had with friends of each other:

Yes you are right, facebook does not replace old fashioned relationships. It is not a magical machine that provides work out of the blue, but in this instance it showed me a relationship that I had through an old college buddy, who is best friends with a brand manager, who hired a model that is friends with my wife.

And that’s how you get hired on facebook in 43 minutes.

2. Pack it

Packing for the shoot

An overview

Now you know where you’re shooting from. You know how many shots your taken. You got the power and storage issues figured out. It’s time to pack. If you’re shooting a time-lapse sequence for fun, this will seem a little over the top just remember we’re talking about a commercial professional application. Redundancy is the name of the game, although I want to be able to walk into my time-lapse set up in one trip.

Everything I needed for this project fits on this one cart. I like this specific one, since it can double as a shooting table, once it’s unloaded.  I’ll go through each bag in detail with everything that’s in it, but here is the overview: slung over the back of the cart (on my back when I go to location) is my grip pack: extension cords, data cables, clamps, rigging gear, some snacks, coffee mug, velvet and black fabric – more on those later – gaffers tape, ect. They are packed in a old computer back pack, just in case I want to bring a computer to shoot the ‘B’ camera tethered as well. On the very bottom is my computer case that holds computer, hard drives, card reader, data cable, power supplies, … on top of that is my camera bag that holds cameras, lenses, CF cards, video cage, filters, moregrip gear, batteries, credentials, business cards, … behind that is my tripod (Bogen 3058 with a Gitzo Ballhead 1576) for the time-lapse ‘A’ camera and my sticks for the video work (Manfrotto 547 with 701 HDV fluid head).

The dolly is one I picked up at Home Depot a while ago, I like it because it folds into a table once you got all your gear off the dolly:

The camera bag

Over the course of many years of professional photography you accumulate a bunch of little tools, tricks and hacks that end up living in your camera bag. I took a bunch of them out for this assignment, like radio slaves, flash meter, sync cords, … As you’ll see there is a lot of gear that comes on a shoot with me, so I love my camera bag (ThinkTank AirportInternational 2.0). It’s a rolling case that fits on an international flight as hand luggage at least what dimensions are concerned. Now if someone could make it fit the weight restrictions too … but that’s another story. This case has no issues rolling, even if it’s fully loaded. It also features a lock on the case and a cable lock to secure the case to a stationary object.

Here is the case open and packed. Remember that there is a second 5D that lives here, but it’s being used to photograph the images for this blog post.

Let’s go through some of the gear that came with me. Much of this is personal preference, this is my kit, use this example to build your own.

Cameras:

Two Canon 5D Mk II’s. Awesome video camera and still camera. We shot one for the stills in the time lapses and one for all the ‘B’ roll – video and time-lapse.

I used my Canon 5D to shoot some stills and behind the scenes photos. This particular job had 3 cameras going.

Extra batteries and chargers. 8 camera batteries, 3 chargers.

Canon on camera speed light – never left the bag. That was there just in case I needed it for some of the still images.

Lenses:

Canon 24-70 mm 2.8 L. Most of the video was shot on this lens as well as all the ‘B’ roll time-lapse.

Canon 24-105 mm 4.0 L. The lens for the ‘A’ camera’s time-lapse. Focus and zoom got taped once we got the camera set.

Canon 100 mm 2.8 macro. I love this lens, but it never came out of the bag.

Canon 70-200 mm 4.0 L. Love the Image Stabilisation on this lens for shooting video.

Mamiya 500 mm 8.0 mirror lens. Just a fun lens to have. It’s big and heavy.

Mamiya 70 mm 2.8. Never left the bag. The Mamiya lenses are attached with a mechanical adapter.

Filters:

Lee ND 3 gradated filter

Circular polarizing filter

LightCraft Fader – essential for shooting video out doors. Unless you want no shallow depth of field – but then why are you shooting a MkII?

Canon lens hoods and Lee compendium. Use them. ‘nough said.

Grip:

Manfrotto Magic arm with Super Clamp and camera plattform. If you hang your camera 40 feet over a concrete floor, you want to be sure that your support does not fail. So are you really gonna trust that $10.- deal you got on Ebay? The arm preformed flawlessly. It articulates to where you want it and then locks down solidly with one big knob.

The white fabric next to the lens shades is a rain coat for the camera and lens – it lives in my bag and only comes out when it needs to protect the camera. The black bag next to it is the raincoat for the Camera Bag that comes with the rolling case (thank you ThinkTank!).

Flashlight. Grey balance card. White balance card. Business cards. Press Pass. Credentials for all access at show.

Video:

Zacuto Z-finder. You’ll want one to pull focus. Get the anti-fog version – or upgrade to it. You’ll need it.

Follow Focus. Essential for smooth focus pulls. More an art than a science. Don’t forget the wet erase marker for marking the points your pulling to and from.

Easom Cage. Protects the camera and follow focus assembly, allows you to attach audio recorders, monitors, ect. to the rig. The other great design detail is that the camera plattform and the tripod plate move independently from each other so you can balance the camera on sticks for pans and tilts.

The computer case

I love these cases – I have a few of them. This one (Hardigg’s storm case) is like a armored briefcase for your laptop. I also have a shock mounted rack case for the bigger shoots, but again – that’s another story …

These guys are basically bomb proof – well at least water proof and crush proof they do an awesome job protecting your fragile electronics. I like these because of their unique latch design – they don’t bust your knuckles like other cases. Like the photo bag, there are a lot of little details in the case that get added over the years.

Computer:

Mac Book Pro with a 2.53 MhZ processor, 4 GB of RAM and a fast 320 GB harddrive.

We also used a Mac Book Air as the computer that the ‘A’ camera was tethered to.

Harddrives:

1.5TB drive in a Wiebetech enclosure. These enclosures rock. I have the single one that I travel with and then dual and quads at the office. You can slide the actual HD’s out of the enclosures. They’re interchangeable and pretty cool. Great Product.

2 750GB bus powered HD’s

Power supplies, lock, CF card reader, another set of USB data connections for the camera, firewire cables, eSATA card and cables.

The grip pack

You can go over board packing for the unknown – that’s why scouting pays off – good scouting that is. Where o you have power? Is it enough power? Who is in charge of the location that you’re in? Who can override their decision? How do you secure your gear or do you want to sit next to it for 10 hours a day; other than being boring that means you won’t be able to do anything else.

Back to packing – my grip/rigging bag is an old computer laptop back pack (Targus Computer back pack). I specifically chose this bag for this assignment, because I had to shoot up in the catwalks 40′ above the ground, with the only access being a small spiral stair case. That means no cases, no tripods and no carts up there. I need to be totally mobile – so camera in hand and grip/rigging gear on back – and I can slip the computer into this case, if I had to.

Since we are shooting a long day we need to get power to the computer that’s running the time-lapse camera. A few hundred feet of extension cords do the trick, along with some surge protector strips – since we are charging camera batteries, running lap tops, ect.

Rigging gear, i.E. webbing, carabiners, ratchets, clamps, … for securing the camera when it gets suspended from the catwalks and boat railings. Some coffee (gotta have coffee – no that’s not a canon lens – it’s a canon coffee mug :) thanks Trevor).

The black cloth in the foreground is a 3′x3′ piece of velvet. When I scouted the location, I saw that we were going to shoot through the glass of the restaurant we were shooting from and that we needed to eliminate the reflections for the time-lapse. Gaffer tape this piece to the window, lens goes through a hole in the center – secured by a rubber band. No more reflections. Make sure that the fabric does not vignette in your lens.

The other black fabric is a large piece of canvas to put down on the super dirty catwalks (that no one has EVER cleaned), so I can lie down and place equipment on a clean surface.

Now that you’ve finished planning and packing it’s time to photograph your time-lapse project.

Go on reading how to photograph a commercial time-lapse project on Friday.

I just finished shooting a four day time-lapse project at the Miami Boat Show for one of my new clients Meridian Yachts. Our goal was to show the 3 day set up process, which no one visiting the boat show gets to see. It’s fascinating to watch the Miami Beach Convention Center transform from an empty cavernous warehouse to the biggest boat show in the States. In my research I have found numerous video tutorials, examples, web posts, … on time-lapse projects; but I have not found one that speaks about the process of preparing to shoot one in detail. This blog post will talk about how I planned, produced and photographed a commercial time lapse and how I put it all together after all the pieces were been shot.

1. Plan it

Scouting the location

I’m gonna assume that you already have a project in mind. So the first thing I do is to scout the location that I will be shooting in. What is the subject that you’re going to be shooting? Where will it be? Are there vantage points that will become obstructed in the course of your time-lapse? Is your location accesible? Do you need to get to the camera to change batteries, cards, … Is there a way to get around power and storage requirements? Is access restricted? Who will guard the equipment for the duration of the time-lapse (in our case it was 4 days). Shoot photographs and look at your field of view.

Click for a larger view

Now you’re ready to have an intelligent discussion with your client. Why have you picked the location that you’ve selected? Remember once you start shooting, you can not change your location or you’ll ruin the time-lapse, so be careful where you set up. In our case there where 3 possible locations:

• a business center that was too far away to get a good angle on the clients booth

• a restaurant that was not going to be in use during the time of set up, but was directly behind the booth

• the cat walk directly above the booth

But I still checked all 3 possible locations to make sure that I was picking the correct one. The restaurant was going to give us power and a place to keep our set up overnight, without the risk of someone disturbing our set-up. The client had coordinated with the show’s organizers to get me access in these restricted areas. Get to know the person who is in charge of security and the access to the off limits portions of the building and become their friend. They will be invaluable during the project. (Special thanks to Venus from the boat show, by the way who was never to busy to get me security, engineering, access, … she made this project run smooth. You rock!)

Do the math

You’re gonna have to figure out how long the finished piece is going to be. What frame rate will in play at? In our case it’s between 2 1/2 min to 5 min. I suggested shooting enough photographs to run at 60 fps. [5 min * 60 sec * 60 fps = 18,000 images].

Now take a look at how long your event it going to be. In our case 4 days. The first day will be 10 hours, the second and the third will be 8 hours and the last one is 4 hours. [10+8+8+4 = 30 hours * 60 min = 1800 min * 60 sec = 108,000 sec].

No all that’s left is to divide the number of seconds in your event by the number of images needed in your project and you’ll know how many seconds you have in between shots. 108,000 / 18,000 = 6.

Double check your math, for real.

Now for the important part: TEST YOUR CAMERAS SHOOTING SPEED! How large of a file writes to what speed of card in what length of time. You don’t want the buffer to fill up and mess up your time-lapse project. In our case we’re shooting sRAW (~10 MB) tethered to the computer using a software to fire the shutter, more about all that later; but it turns out that the speed from one frame to the next is 7 sec for that set up. Which is fine, since we are shooting for a 2 1/2 – 5 min project that will have B-roll to intercut with the time-lapse. But you want to know that before you begin shooting. If you’re shooting to a card, you’ll want to figure out how many images can be stored on the card before it is full and messes up your time-lapse. What about power? Did you think of that? How long can the camera run on one battery or two batteries in a vertical grip or do you have a power adapter for your camera?

How much power do you need?

One battery is going to interrupt your time-lapse. You’ll have to stop shooting to replace the battery. A power adapter is great to have, but we couldn’t get one in time. The vertical grip doubles your battery life, but when you open the door to switch batteries, that shuts off the power too, however thanks to a little research on google and melandercl on the timescapes.org forum there is a hack on how to keep the door open and the power on. Read the post for all the details, but the short version is open the battery door, find the little button on the top left side of the battery grip that gets engaged by the door, push that (the cap of a ball point pen works perfectly) and turn on your camera. Voilá! Camera is powered up with the open door. Now write “DO NOT CLOSE” on a piece of tape and stick it on the inside of the open battery door, I’m just sayin’ old habits die hard. Thanks to the battery door hack (thank you melandercl!) we have unlimited power, because the third battery in the charger is charged much faster than the two batteries in the grip will run out of power. Have a system in place to know which is the last battery you swapped out (right in the morning, left in the afternoon) or what ever works for you.

Power savings

Even with the battery solution we want to limit the amount of power the camera draws. Here are some settings you can change to prolong the battery life:

• Turn Live View off. Although it’s cool to watch each shot as it comes in – nothing drains the battery more than having the LCD screen on for 4 days. Just don’t turn Live View on. If you’re software (like the one I used) defaults to Live View on – disable it.

• Turn Image Review off. You’re not going to be watching the camera screen, so why have it fire up every 7 seconds to display an image. You can do this in the first camera screen of the menu under review time. Turn it to ‘OFF’.

• Turn the meter off – unless your shooting in AV mode (more about that later as well). If your on Manual exposure – the light in the scene I was shooting did not change, so why would you want to meter something that you know. The closest you’ll get to this is in the ‘Live View/Movie func. set.’ in the second wrench window of the menu. Inside there you’ll find ‘Metering Timer’ – set it to 4 sec. the shortest time available. If you don’t hit the shutter button, the meter should stay off anyway.

Will you run out of storage?

Once you have the amount frames figured out, you can extrapolate your power and storage requirements. How much fits on your storage medium (in our case a 1 GB external USB 2.0 drive) more than enough. But know how many hours it will take the camera to fill up your card, if you’re shooting to one. In our case it would have taken almost a week of shooting 24 hours to fill up the drive. We did shoot to two separate drives Day One to drive One, Day two to drive Two, Day Three to drive One and Day four to drive Two. That way you can back up the previous day to a separate hard drive that lives somewhere else – in our case that was a 1.5 TB HD.

Go on reading how to pack for a commercial time-lapse project on Wednesday.

How many times a day do you need to show a client a file, concept, video, photo, …? If you’re anything like me, it’s all the time. Many of our files are pretty big or proprietary and confidential, so it’s hard to send them through email or over a social network like facebook (I mean do you really want to be discussing the terms of an upcoming shoot on your fb wall?)

Would it not be great to have one place that is like facebook, just secure? A social network for business that is more personal than LinkedIn? A timeline like Twitter that shows your whole team what is happening in your business? A place were you can work together with your vendors, clients and crew to produce, review, share and comment on the projects that you are working on?

Find out how you can do all this for free after the jump.
If you read my blog, you know that I use SalesForce for my customer relationship management and that it is tied into my website. They introduced a “facebook for business” about a year ago, where you could do just that inside your SalesForce account, which is great for a company that has many people using this CRM, but does not do much good if your by yourself.

All that changed on Sunday though when SalesForce opened Chatter up to everyone. (You may have seen their ads in the Superbowl) – here is a quick video that gives you a Chatter overview.

Let me give you an example of how Chatter works in practice. I shot a video for one of my clients last week and needed to get the rough cut approved. Usually I would upload a small version to YouSendIt or to DropBox, wait for the client to download it and sometime get a call or an email about what they though about the project. However today I uploaded the video to Chatter, invited my client to Chatter and placed the video in a private group that only they and I can access – and SalesForce knows how to do security, believe me. So I can upload proprietary information to the cloud, for them to review and to comment on – directly in Chatter! (Which shows up in my Chatter feed – similar to your facebook wall or twitter timeline.)

Pretty cool stuff. You can check Chatter out for yourself – it’s free and it’s pretty cool.

We spend a lot of thought and time on advertising, promoting, website design, SEO, CRM, email marketing, … to be on top of mind of our potential client at ‘the moment of relevance‘, as Google calls it. So now you’re on the phone with him – what do you talk about? Obviously there’s the information you need about the production of the shoot, how many images, how they’ll be used, … but all photographers should be doning this. So what sets you apart? What makes you the guy or girl that this potential client is going to hire?

I mean apart from the obvious: that your work is first rate and that you can deliver and that your style communicates what the client wants to images to say (you know the 1,000 word bit). I had a phone call today with a new client that drove this point home for me (hence this post).

He had found me online, liked my work, contacted me through my website and was captured in my CRM tie-in, got an immediate email response from my website (read more about how automation on my website lets me do all this). So through the captured phone number and email address I contacted him back to discuss this job.

The conversation ended up turning to another photographer that he had spoken about this project with. “I like the way you are thinking about my product, the other guy was only interested in talking about who he had photographed for in the past.”

Our conversation had moved from the details of the current shoot (how many images, what background, usage, …) to the next shoot – thinking through how this product needs to be displayed in an editorial fashion to explain and show case how it is to be used.

That’s what made the difference. I was thinking about how to make his product look good, how to help him, how to drive more sales from his website to his pocketbook; instead of making me look great (some of my clients are national brands: Mars, Tyco, L’Oreal, Frontgate, Boston Proper, …), but I was more interested in offering him a solution to his company than making me look good.

Do you think he will spend more money on my shoot than on my competitors? Do you think I will be shooting for him for the second editorial shoot? Does he trust that I will deliver images that make his product look great? You betcha!

I will be photographing for him next week, because I took the time to listen to what he wanted and needed, I offered suggestions of photos and solutions that he had not thought about, and I want him to succeed in his new venture. Why? I want to grow with my clients, so that they will hire me for all of their upcoming work. And recommend me to their friends and business associates, because word-of-mouth advertising for my photography is far better than any email blast.

(I just read an article “Make People Love You Madly: The No-Fail Framework for Marketing Yourself” by Colleen Wainright on the Adbase blog.)

Over the last few weeks I have been thinking about my involvement in the photographic community in Miami. I am an active member in ASMP, and I attend events that are held in South Florida, but I asked myself: “What do I give back to the photographic community?” This introspective was caused by reading Chase Jarvis’ blog, who challenges photographers to share their knowledge of what goes on inside the ‘black box’ of photography with the world. In a recent panel discussion at Photo Plus Expo, Chase had a group of his photographer and blogger friends together in a pannel.

One of the members of the pannel in the end of this video is Vincent Laforet, who’s blog I’ve been reading for the past few days, where Vincent is interviewed by Marc Silber. Long story short Marc had this idea a few days ago about something he calls “Advance your Photography”.

Since I am looking for a way get involved in the local photography community in South Florida and Marc was looking for pros that were willing to launch the AYP (Advance your Photography) Club pilot with him, this seemed like a great match.

We will be launching the Miami Chapter of the AYP club soon and we’ve put up a facebook community page to encourage people to keep in touch with us on this opportunity. If you know someone, who is a photographer (amateur or pro) that want’s to learn from Marc’s library of interviews with the best photographers in the world, as well as have a commercial photographer critique their photography, with the intent of advancing their craft – please share this with them. I’m looking forward to our first meeting …

Miami AYP club

Promote Your Page Too

[Listen to my interview on the new media photographer podcast this coming Monday, as Rosh and I talk about the basic building blocks of your photography website(s) that you should have - stay tuned to this blog on how to save some money!]

•••

You have to be online. No one questions that. But how do you go about building a website? Now before I go any further, I have to remind you that I am a photographer first and foremost, not a coder, not an HTML pro, not a webdesigner, … but my business (in one form or another) has been online  since 2004 and the majority of my clients find me on the first page of their search results on Google.

Sure you can hire someone to do the work for you. This post will talk about a do-it-yourself approach. It will require you to be willing to hack a few things, to find work arounds to what people say is not possible and do be willing to learn, but it will also show you a few short cuts, save you some money over the custom website design or the high end services.

1. A stake in the ground – hosting your photography website

First you need a place where you’re website can live, an internet service provider. Once you have that (and registered your domain name of course), you’ll need to build your site and I’m gonna assume that your not a proficient HTML or CSS coder, so you’ll need some help. Oh and don’t forget to set up your email @yourbusiness.com with your web hosting service – the one I’ll recommend here will give you 1,200 2 GB email accounts – that should last you for a while. I’ll also show you how to get up to a year of hosting for free.

2. Constructing a place online – building your commercial website(s)

I’ll introduce you to an awesome Photoshop plugin that will do a lot of the heavy lifting for you. So now you have a server that hosts your website at  your URL  you have the website up, people are finding you and visiting your site.

3. Minding the store – fulfilling your clients orders

Once you’ve gotten your first client through your website and photographed the assignment, you need to get the photos to them and get paid. I’ll introduce you to a service build by photographers that does an amazing job at this. I will also show you how to save $40.- on your subscription.

4. Knowing who you’re dealing with – managing your customer relationships

Now you need a place to keep track of them, their contact info, discussions you’ve had  with them, leads that have been converted into sales – You’ll see how you can use the same company that Google, Dell, Satchi & Satchi and Starbucks use to manage their customers. I’ll show you how you can do it at a fraction of what they pay.  I’ll also show you how to get 30 days of free CRM.

Read about the first service you’ll need to claim your place on line (will be posted on Monday, 08/30). Over the next four days I’ll be looking at four must-have products that will help you build a strong, flexible website.

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.

All this information can be entered by you on Yelp, where all you need to have is a personal profile in order to claim your business listing (or to write a review for that matter). Once you claim your business, Yelp verifies your information with an automatic phone call that prompts you to enter a code.

The organic search algorithm in Yelp is based on a couple of factors, reviews, completeness of listing, age of listing (I assume all this – since it’s secret), but it also takes into account the reviewer. When I do a search for photographer in Miami there are listings that have higher rankings, although they have less and worse reviews, but the reviewer is a top reviewer on Yelp with many reviews.

Yelp provides a lot of information about the reviewer how many reviews, how many 5-star, 4-star, 3-star, … reviews how many reviews of what type of businesses (‘x’ number of restaurants, ‘y’ number of bars, ‘z’ number of hotels) and it seems that if you have a person that writes a lot of reviews on Yelp reviews your business that this pushes that business listing to the top of the pile – even if the reviews are not good. For instance, my company – at this point I have 2 5-star reviews came in behind 2 3-start reviewed businesses – although one of the companies had only one review, but the reviewer had written many reviews on Yelp. Yelp also does not seem to be able to differentiate on what was reviewed, so if an expert reviewer that has 500 restaurant reviews for instance (and would arguably be an expert on reviewing restaurants) – if that person reviews my photography business, and that review is the only photography related review, it would rank higher than a listing that is reviewed by photography experts that have not reviewed an aggregate of 500 businesses, although their opinion should carry more weight.

However Yelp also has another method of advertising:

the paid business profile on yelp

Yelp has a paid advertising program, that has a lot of benefits over their normal business listing. Let’s start with the Search Page Ad. The business listing with the yellow background is the sponsored result. Yelp places this on top of the search when people search for related topics, Yelp says this is not keyword driven, but more concept driven, i.E. this listing for a photographer would pop up when someone is looking for photos, photography, images, …

So is it worth the money?

This specific program is based on impressions (the Yelp rep guaranteed me 500+ impressions a month, for roughly ¢70 per impression.) – There is a PPC version available as well, but it is limited to 10 clicks a day for $2.- per click. It does not give you the enhanced business listing.

The second benefit of a paid listing is that your listing is placed in your competitors ad (again see the sponsored yellow link inside the Business Page Ad of another photographer – see I told you we were coming back to the competitors ad in your business profile). At the same time paying for this program guarantees that no competitor ads will pop up in your listing.

Finally you can track your profile views on your business owner’s account page (which looks very similar to the information I get with the un paid version of my Yelp account).

The last big thing difference you get for this paid program is the Enhanced Business Listing. This listing features a slide show with unlimited photos, where the first image is actually a video that is produced by TurnHere.com, a web service that comes to your place of business and produces a 60-90 sec video – actually a pretty cool concept.

my conclusion

I like Yelp. I like the concept. I like the interface. I like the reviews. I like the fact that real people write real reviews – at least that what Yelp is trying to do.

But so far all of my SEO efforts have centered on organic search. I have played with Google adwords for a month with not a single sale and I have done some paid facebook advertising without any success either, whereas my organic (can you say free) SEO efforts have paid off immensely – Photography by Depuhl is a ‘Favorite Place on Google‘ for instance, so I need to confess that I am a little gun shy about paid search. Going from a $0.- search budget to one that would cost several thousand dollars is a little steep for me right now.

However, this paid search on Yelp has some really good benefits, I like the idea of the professionally produced video they throw in – that’s pretty sweet (but also something I can do my self with a couple photographer buddies of mine), I like the enhanced listings, but not enough to pay that kind of money for this. I also like the fact that you pop up in your competition’s profile as an ad – although I almost always completely ignore sponsored results in a search result.

Today I don’t think my target  market (companies that are looking for a commercial photographer in Miami) are looking for that on Yelp. In the future I think that Yelp is definitely a valid resource to be listed on and I like where the company is headed (so does Google, they tried to buy out Yelp  for $500 million but where turned down in late Dec. 2009 according to the New York Times blog).

My biggest issue is the lack of metrics. Sure Yelp says that 1,000 people were looking for photography in Miami last month, but I would assume that most of those are looking for shooters for their weddings, portraits and events. But I can’t see that, I have to take their word for it. They also guarantee me 500+ impressions – and though I can see them on my business owner’s account page, they are very rudimentary from what they look like to me. Since it is not keyword based search on the users part, I don’t know when Yelp would serve up my listing – if someone is looking to buy a camera or for a place to have photographic prints made, will I be listed and counted as an impression?

So the long and short of it is that for me the cost of this profile (although it comes with some really nice features and exclusivity) is too steep. My concern is that my target market is not using Yelp (yet) and I would like to see some better metrics for knowing who is searching for what on Yelp and how my ads would get served up.

That being said, if you want to give me the money, I would love to try this out for a year (Yelp’s timeframe one has to commit to for the sponsored listings) and I promise to report back on it in a year. But for now I can’t justify the expense and the PPC program does not seem to give me good enough benefits – although I may try it on for size. Who knows maybe it will convince me to give Yelp a try with the sponsored profile.

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)

The secret ingredient of a great portrait is trust; of course you need to be technically skilled, able to adjust to always changing situations – after all you’re not shooting in your studio, where you control everything, but you’re shooting in someones home, office, locations that usually have a lot of restrictions from time constraints to limited space. It’s challenging, but when you pull it off it’s rewarding.

Photographing someone on their turf may take you out of your comfort zone, but it puts them right in theirs. And the viewer will see this in your photograph.

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.

Check out Phase One’s announcement and go buy the best image editor today! So what does that mean for your wallet? Spend $64.50 and you can save $64.50 on Capture One’s retail price of $129.- and you get Expressions Media for $0.00, saving you an additional $199.00; total savings 263.50!

The British Journal of Photography reported yesterday, that Phase One’s newest version of Capture One (5.1.2) already includes some of the features of Expressions Media, making sharing files between the two softwares easier. In an interview with the same publication Phase One’s CEO, Henrik O. Håkonsson, stated that his companies interest in making Expressions Media “super efficient”, if they bought it from Microsoft.

Both of these software programs are the best at what they do. I can not wait until this integration makes them even better!