PhotoShelter

After much research, consultation and deliberation I have finally adopted PhotoShelter Personal Archive to house my stock image collection. Currently I have over 100 photos in my PS archive mainly in the area of women's fitness and travel. In the coming weeks I will be adding more photos, as well as setting up the e-commerce functionality that is available. This will allow me to sell licensing and prints through the site with little or no hands-on involvement.

It took me a long time to choose a partner in this endeavor. Digital Railroad was also an option, as was building my own, but PhotoShelter made me an offer I couldn't refuse: $124 a year for 10GB of storage, including the e-commerce set up option. For the price of ~ $10 a month I can't even host my own site with that many high resolution images. I'm no web programmer, so a pre-built system was really my only option, as I don't have the funds to hire the talent needed to build me a custom site.

So why did it take me so long to make up my mind? My main concerns were that I wouldn't be able to utilize the SEO techniques that I have recently incorporated into my portfolio website. I am consistently placing in the top 10 in Google searches for my images, especially in the area of women's sports and fitness. I didn't want to lose those hits and contacts with buyers. As a result I am trying a hybrid model; one that uses the hits that lead to my web site as a launching point to my PhotoShelter archive.

Another reason I chose to go with a conglomerate image site, is that all current marketing research points to social networking sites as the place where people make connections in their field. I am hoping to get new clients by moving to PhotoShelter and keep existing ones by maintaining my portfolio web site. Hopefully a healthy cross-pollination of clients will occur.

Family Photography Experience

I am excited to now be offering family portrait photography to my clients. It has taken me a long time to admit that I like or want to be doing this kind of photography, but I have decided to officially make it a part of my professional practice. Here is my pitch:

A creative family portrait experience awaits you. Choose your favourite location, whether it is a park or your own backyard. Your family can be photographed in your own special place. Or, go traditional, and set up a temporary studio in your home. The choice is yours. We will create your memories together.

Contact me for further information and pricing.

Keegan

What a cutie! Keegan graciously worked with me for over two hours without crying or falling asleep. He did pee a few times though, mostly on his daddy, but what do you expect from a 6-week old.

This shot was lit with a softbox hanging from a boom over top and using the silver panel of a MultiDisk for fill. Keeg's dad did the post on this image and gave it the nice soft desaturated look.

Noah

I am working hard on the "Boys Project" this week with a couple of shoots booked.

This first is Noah here. He's about 14 months old and he's a real bookworm. This shot captures a genuine moment from our time together, no forced smiles, just Noah being his curious self.

It took us awhile to connect, but once we did, things really clicked, and clicked. Two hundred shots later and we were both ready for bed!

Lighting was an umbrella front left, a 2'x3' soft box up high and slightly behind the right side as a hair light, and a 3'x4' white scrim as fill on the right side. I was shooting from a small space between the umbrella and the fill. This is the lighting set up I usually use for corporate portraits. I like using a soft box as a hair light. It's a bit smoother than a grid spot. This lighting set up also gives one large catch light in the eyes, which I like.

Calgary Cares

A unique print of this photograph has been donated to Calgary Cares, a fund raiser for AIDS Calgary, for their silent auction happening during their big event on March 29, 2008.

About this piece
Photographer: Marlene Hielema
Title: Taylor
Date: 2008
Medium: Giclee on Vinyl
Dimension: 35” x 27” Framed

The first photograph I ever envisioned and captured was of my two year-old brother, when I was six. He was sitting on the front step of our farmhouse wearing dad's cap and holding a box of Ritz crackers. I remember looking at him in that moment and thinking, "That would make a great picture." I ran inside and asked my mom if I could use the camera - a Kodak box camera. That was the start of a lifelong project of portraits of boys.

Why boys? Access mostly. I am the only girl in my family. When my brothers eventually married they also had male offspring. All of my closest friends seem to have boys, and my partner recently became a grandparent to, you guessed it, a boy. As a result I have a comfort level with boys of all ages which allows me to photograph them easily.

This particular photo comes from a portrait session I had with two brothers. They chose the location and borrowed a buddy's truck for the afternoon. It was one of those amazing shoots where everything was in sync: weather, location, and personalities, to provide a memorable creative experience for all involved.

I have been experimenting with printing on metal for the last five years and this presentation is part of that research. This image was printed on outdoor use vinyl using an ink jet (Giclee) printer. I hope to some day compile a show or a book of the photographs of boys that I have taken over the years.

This photograph is also on display at the Alberta College of Art + Design Faculty Show in the ACAD Illingworth Kerr Gallery, which runs from March 20 to April 19, 2008.

Yukon Sourdough Rendezvous

Hello from Whitehorse! I'm spending a few days "North of 60" in Whitehorse, Yukon visiting a school chum from Ryerson, Cathie Archbould. We're putting our heads together this weekend to work on our businesses, do some information sharing, and come up with some ideas to sell and promote our stock photos. Cathie is also shooting a lot of the weekend's activities for a local magazine called: North of Ordinary, which is available on Air North flights. Yesterday we bombed around town a bit and I took the shots above of a man made ice climbing wall. While being here I've also had a chance to read Dan Heller's book: Profitable photography in the digital age, which is a great resource for anyone considering selling their stock photographs online.

First off, great book Dan! If you haven't read any of Dan's business writing, check out his business blog or his website: www.danheller.com. I know I've mentioned him before, and I must say that his approach to the business of photography and stock photography is realistic and straightforward. I wrote Dan a month or so ago to get his opinion on joining PhotoShelter to sell my stock. He didn't endorse nor dis-endorse PhotoShelter, but he encouraged me to just get started any way I could. So, I did. I started scanning my stock photo collection and naming the files and adding text to my site using the search engine optimization techniques I learned from Dan's seminar I took last October. Just for fun yesterday, I looked up my web usage stats for February. To my surprise I had been found by search string terms that directly matched the text in my file names or the description text within my site. For example: "woman triathlon" was a search term that came up in my stats. So, to find out how high I ranked with that term, I plunked in "woman triathlon" into Google and was not shocked to have 345,000 returns on that search. I was ranked #14! Yes that's right, showed up on the second page! In case you're wondering how long it took to get noticed by search engines, it was less than a month from the time I published the triathlon page of photos. So, my point is, SEO works! - even for beginners, and even on a small scale. If you are planning to sell your photos, either stock or assignment using the Internet, all you need to do is employ some simple SEO techniques and you will get noticed, and probably sooner than you think.

So, next steps? I'll keep loading more and more images and keep using SEO techniques. Another thing I learned from Dan's book was that to make money in the stock business, you need to have a high volume of good quality images. You want to drive traffic to your site so that you will rank high in searches, make a few sales and then build your client base. Right now I only have about 100 images online, but there are a few hundred more high quality images sitting on my hard drives and DVD's. I've got my work cut out for me, not to mention, I'll keep tabs on what the search engines are looking for and make sure I have lots of product in those categories. I'll drop a few shots of different subject areas on my site to test the market. The search terms that come up in my web stats, are the ones I'll bet there is a demand for. The more demand the more images of that subject matter I'll shoot and upload. I'll let the market (the buyers) decide what's important instead of trying to predict it. Pretty exciting stuff for me. I'll let you know if it works.

Stock Photography for Sale

For the past month I have been scanning slides from my 10+ year-old stock collection. These consist mostly of images of women in sports and recreation including cycling, triathlon, running, walking, and golf, along with a smattering of city and industrial images. I have started to put these on my PhotoShelter archive for public sale of editorial or commercial licensing, and prints. I was encouraged by photographer and stock guru Dan Heller who bluntly suggested I just "get started" no matter what form that took. He said not to get too hung up on e-commerce features at this time, as it takes a while to get "noticed" by Google and the online world. I am counting on the search engine optimization (SEO)* techniques that I learned from Dan in a recent PPOC sponsored workshop of his that I attended in Canmore last October. Now that I am done slide scanning, I shall edit and compile my digital stock image files.

As a result of starting this tedious task, I have a new enthusiasm for sports and fitness stock photography. Seeing all my images compiled in one place gave me insight into my style and my way of shooting. I have developed some new ideas on how to improve my work and I am already planning some stock shoots, lining up models and scouting locations. Locations are what drive my work. Looking through my images, I recalled that in most cases I found a location first, and then figured out how to photograph the person in that location second. Adding to the formula a beautiful day, colourful clothing, and a willing participant, results in the iconic imagery I strive to produce.

I welcome your comments on my images. Please pass the word around to photography buyers that you know. I will be constantly upgrading the viewing and shopping experience, but for now I just want to get the work online as quickly as possible.

*What is SEO? Search engines can't "see" a site. They can only "read" a site. Pretty does not talk to a search engine. What "talks" to a search engine are the words, the content, the material in your site that explains, shares, informs, educates, and babbles. As pretty as photographer's Flash sites are, it's best to design your site with SEO in mind so that search engines can read it. You can do both, but make sure your designer is aware of how to design sites with SEO in mind.