First I’d like to thank John Greene for the question he asked me the other week, which gave me the great idea to write this blog post. John is also another keen photographer like myself; so I introduced him to the photo sharing website Flickr, as he was keen to get his photos noticed. He asked me what was the best way to get lots of people to see your photos online? Well John, here is the blog post I promised.

I feel there are two main ways that people will come across your photos online. The first is when people are searching for a particular photograph of something and your image appears in the search results; this could be on Flickr or a search engine like Google. The second is when people stumble across your images or links to your images while browsing photo websites. Below are some useful and simple ways to get more out of Flickr, which will hopefully lead to more people viewing your images. Most of these techniques can also be applied to other photo sharing sites like Picasa and Photobucket to the same success.

1. Meta Data

Metadata is basically data about data. In terms of Flickr, it’s the data that you put with your images to describe to others (and search engines) what is in the image. So get typing! Give all your images titles, give them descriptions and tag your images with relevant keywords.

2. Organise

For a start it just makes your life easier and second it makes it easier for anyone else that might want to browse through your photos. Group your images into sets, and if you can group your sets into collections. By doing this it means if someone does find an image of yours through a search they will also able to find similar images quickly and easily.

3. Interact

Yes posting your images on Flickr will get them on the web so others can see them. However, Flickr is not a one-way kind of place. To get yourself noticed out there you need to interact with the other people in the community. Search the groups for topics you have taken photos of, places, landmarks and styles of photos are a good place to start. Join these groups, post your photos onto their photo pools and interact with others in the group on message boards and by commenting on other photos.

I added my photos from a Pendulum gig to the their Group Pool on Flickr. Because the bands website had a feed from this pool on the official website, this image has been viewed 3,265 times to date (Not including myself).

4. Comment With Links

While out on your mission of interacting with the community, leave a little link back to your work. I’ve found a good way to get started is to use the explore section of Flickr to find images your interested in. Or find images of places, objects or events you’ve taken photos of as you can easily relate to these. Write constructive comments don’t be spamy but there is no harm in leaving a thumbnail of a photo which includes a link back to your images. This can be done easily with a little html in the comment box, with the URL of the page your image is found on. Use the preview comment button to check the link or thumbnail works before you post.

5. Share

Now didn’t your mum always tell you to share, well it’s the same with photos online if you want people to find you. The best way to do this is to remove the copyright from some of the images you’re happy for others to use for free. There are free licenses for creative people at creativecommons.org to help you share your images the way you want to.

So if you don’t mind people using your images for a profitable use, be it on a website or billboard, yet you want noted credit for those images, there are licenses out there to cover you. These licenses can be applied to your photos from within Flickr when viewing the image by clicking the ‘Edit’ link next to ‘All rights reserved’. You can also batch edit a whole group of photos to a different license when using the organise section of the site. You’ll find the licenses under ‘Permissions’–’Change License’.

Hope this has been helpful John.

Alvis Silver Eagle Mascot

The other week I was back home in Felixstowe and decided to go out for the day taking photos. It had been a while since I’d been out on a good photo session so I tried to make the most of the day. The best way to do this in Felixstowe is to head either down to the ferry, the docks or the beach. I was lucky as it so happen the annual vintage car rally from Ipswich to Felixstowe was in town, which offered me even more targets to point my camera at.

I started by walking the whole length of the prom past all the cars and through the crowds of people. I was really looking for an armoured personal carrier that had passed me on the road; so I took the chance to eye up the other cars for later while I continued my search. What I did not realise at the time was the APC I was looking for was at the other end of the prom from where I’d stared.

Classic MG Car Badge

On my way back I started to take photos of the cars and the other vintage vehicles they had on display. But I was finding just taking photos of the vehicles a bit tedious as I had done this before in previous years. So I set myself the small project theme of “Close Ups” and proceed to take lots of close up images of the interesting aspects of the cars. As I went along the collection of cars this soon turned into a more focused theme of car badges and logos until I ended up with the collection of photos I have loaded.

If you would like to view the rest of the 2009 Classic Car Rally set you can do on my Zerospin Flickr Profile.

Teapot On The Shelf

OK, so I’ve started a new job and forgot to tell the world about that, ops. It’s a job at Pay Per Click Agency doing all forms of online advertising but manly PPC which is based in Newmarket, Suffolk. I’ve not done much PPC before and I don’t even intend to explain the ins and outs of it here and now.

What I consider the hardest part of this new job is making the tea and coffee. You start with around a dozen people in your office, so that’s twelve drinks to make; that’s a lot of drinks when it’s not your full time job to make tea. Next is what drink and how they have it. Some will have tea some will have coffee, some will want sugar (one or two), some like it black some like it white. Can you see that it is all adding up, if every person in the office was to have a different drink I’d need a notepad and pen to keep track of it all. Don’t even get me started on the people who have one drink in the morning and a different one in the afternoon. Luckily for me I’ve worked in a tea shop and can handle making good tea for large amounts of people. However, I’ve been at my new job now for four weeks, and I’m still asking people how many sugars they have with their tea.