HBCM July 4th, originally uploaded by photographybydepuhl.

Happy birthday America! We had a great weekend of the grid – so to speak with my family – which culminated in a wonderful forth of July celebration with our friends. We had a great time watching the local fireworks from our friends pier, overlooking the canal.

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 just had the opportunity to speak with Rosh Sillars, the new media photographer, about my experience with Social Media – especially SEO, local search in my advertising and marketing strategy for my photography business. You can listen to our interview on his New Media Photographer podcast.

We discuss how photographers traditionally market their services and how we market and advertise our photography today. What still works and does not work today. We talk about SEO and how important good Search Engine Optimization is to be found in search. We speak about Yelp, Foursquare and Google places.

One of examples we look at is the location based services of Google, where Photography by Depuhl is a “Favorite place on Google” and how that effects search and why I believe having a presence on Yelp, Foursquare, Google places and other location based services.

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!

Website grader is a great website that helps you track your website and gives you a good idea on what you need to continue to improve your site. They have a bunch of other (free) grader products, this blog has been graded and has received a

We’re just getting started on yelp, and I will blog about my experiences with this plattform. So far you can read some of my reviews.

Recent reviews by Pascal D.

What's this?

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!

Capture One allows you to process all your RAW files, be they captured on Phase One backs, digital SLR’s – such as Canon or Nikon and even your TIFF and Jpeg images that were converted somewhere else. It is a powerful program, but always has been lacking the ability to catalog and database image libraries.

Expression Media, on the other hand, does no image processing, but is fantastic at keeping track off all your images in it’s library. Peter Krough, introduced me to this piece of software in his book ‘The DAM book’ and I had – at the time – purchased iView (before Microsoft purchased it). When that purchase happened, I was afraid that this program was just going to fall into obscurity, as Microsoft had not done much in terms of upgrading it in the years that followed their purchase.

Needless to say I was thrilled to read on the ASMP blog this morning, that Capture One had acquired Expression Media. I look forward to a nice integration between the two products giving Capture One the cataloging features that it was lacking when compared to Adobe’s Lightroom or Apple’s Aperture.

The marriage of these two software suites, will blow their competitors out of the water.

To find out how you can get a copy of Capture One for free (you must own Expression Media or iView) or how to get a copy of Expression Media for free (when you own Capture one), click here to be taken to their special offer page.

I create images for a Miami based company, that creates a variety of high end cosmetic products for men and women. The product photography for their packaging needs to be clean, simple and strong. And shot on a black set and a white set (black for the web, white for print).

Take today for example – a new product line launches and they need all 8 products shot on white – and on black. What I would do in the past is shoot on white paper and plexiglass for the white set and then reset up the shots on black plexi with a black background – 8 products x 2 set ups =  16 styled shots.

But I want to show you a trick, in this mini tutorial, on how to set up the shots one time and shoot the white set and the black set within 3 seconds of each other. First of all here are the two shots we’re talking about:

Same product – same set up – 3 sec set change. Find out after the jump how it’s done

I had shot some test concepts for the client a few weeks ago, while we  were waiting for the samples to arrive, so I already have my camera angles, distances, lighting … finished and documented.

This is a page in my note book that lives in my shooting bag to write down (and later on be able to find) my shoot notes. Back to turning white into black. Let me show you the set up from the point of view of the camera:

In the foreground is my Sinar X large format camera (my favorite camera) with a Phase One P45+ digital back that’s gonna produce the 100+MB files this client wants. In the center of the shot you see the product standing on plexiglass (see the reflections?) and the white background paper. So far so good you say – I know how to light a white set I want to know how to make it black! Well here’s the trick: the sheet of plexi that is product is standing on is black. But you say – wait a second (actually if you wait 3 sec it’s gonna turn black) – I see it white in the photo above. Remember your high school physics class: angle of incidence = angle of reflection. What does the black plexi mirror? The brightly lit white background paper, i.E. the camera does not see the surface but the reflection inside the surface, the white paper. So let me show you what this looks like from the top:

Now you see the reflection of the light on the bottom (the half round reflector) the reflection of the product itself, … but how do you get the white paper to be black? That’s the easiest part of the whole set up. The light you see on the shot above is directly overhead of the product and does not light the background. The Two lights that light the background are on a switch, so CLICK one shot on a white set (turn of background lights) CLICK shoot photograph with no light on backgound = black set. Time elapsed: 3 seconds.