I was just reading a good piece over on Chase Jarvis this morning and thought what will this Melbourne photographer do or say? We knew this day would arrive. It was only a matter of time before everyone, rich and poor, got access to a camera. Now that the snapshot is so ubiquitous, we wonder if we can go back to a time when photography had more value. Do you remember when taking a photo was a “thing?” Someone had to “get the camera.” It’s gone now, and we live in a world flooded with snapshots. We are bombarded with photography every day.

So what of it? Is there too much noise for there to be a signal? Do we laugh at professional photography as it collapses under the weight of these mountains of snapshots? I’ve taken random shots as a Melbourne photographer. Sydney…

Let me tell you a story. Not too long ago, I wrote a quick post talking about HDR photography. I put some HDR photos on my website and wrote a quick description about them, thinking little of it at the time. A few months went by, and much to my amazement, those images had grown into a significant source of traffic for Blinq’s website. How did I do it? There were no programming tricks or hacks, no smoke and mirrors. I just paid attention to the rules of image SEO.

Pictures are something that we humans naturally “get.” We look at them and instantly understand what they’re about. The same can’t be said for the programs Google uses to search the web for useful content. They can’t “decode” an image in the same way we naturally can.

Put simply, we need to help the programs figure out what’s in our images.

That’s why images…

A bold prediction, I know, but there’s something more important at stake here than what people are or are not wearing on their heads. I just said this for one reason. It got your attention. Why on earth would all of your clients be wearing top hats? There has to be a reason for it. You want to know the answer, and that’s why you’re still reading this.

A clever title and an interesting description can go a long way toward boosting your site’s ranking on search engines. Content often gets read or passed over based on the title and the title alone. If you can create something interesting, a title that makes people perk up their ears, you can get them to click through the link on Google. Now you’ve got them! (well, sort of…).

Most of the time, you don’t even need to say anything profound. You…

We’ve almost fully utilised the power of Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin. Last time, we went through some of the more advanced individual post settings and discussed why it’s important to keep certain pages and sections out of Google’s index. In a nutshell, you want Google to see the pages with lots of written content and few external links. Other pages, such as your login page, are like leaks in a faucet. They siphon off your total page rank, ultimately harming your chances of ranking well for certain photography related search terms.

Now we’re going to switch gears and have a look at internal linking and XML sitemaps. You can find those setting in the same toolbar on the bottom left of your WordPress dashboard.

What is an XML sitemap? Without getting too technical, it’s a list of all the pages on your website. You send this list to search engines so they don’t skip over the…

In the last post, we installed the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin and got to work on tweaking our blog posts for the purpose of SEO. We learned about the importance of picking the right focus keywords. This is all in an effort to bring in more traffic from our local area. After all, that’s where we’re most likely to get new clients.

I gave you a homework assignment in the last post. If you haven’t done it yet, please don’t continue to read this. What we covered in the previous post is more important than what we will cover in this one. You need to get it done first. The rest is important, but it’s mostly the icing on the cake. You’ve got to get the fundamentals down before you can use it.

What’s left to adjust on the individual pages?
Let’s go back to the post we were working on. You’ll remember that we looked at the page…

Photography and SEO. The two are rarely uttered in the same sentence. Photographers and other creatives often eschew the technical stuff like maintaining websites so they can do the awesome stuff like taking amazing pictures and pleasing their clients. I can’t blame you. I am you. And that’s why I’m so excited about Yoast’s new WordPress SEO Plugin.

This plugin helps you spot all of the little SEO mistakes you might be making on your WordPress website. The concept is simple. You tell the plugin which keyword you want to focus on, and it tells you whether you’re hitting the mark. If everything checks out, you’re good to go. But if there are a few bumps in the road, you’ll know about them.

With Yoast’s plugin, you don’t have to spend a lot of time wondering what you’re doing right or what you’re doing wrong. As long as you know which searches you’re trying to target, the…

It’s 5 A.M and cold in Melbourne. I’m wide-awake, drinking my first espresso of the day, and I suddenly feel like I should be doing something else. I’m going through photos from yesterday’s shoot. Sure, it’s productive, but maybe a different approach, a different angle, that might bring in more clients.

It’s a thought that’s not uncommon among photographers and creative types. Sometimes you feel like you’re targeting the wrong audience with your work. Perhaps your work only speaks to a tiny fraction of people on this planet, and if you could just widen that slice, the business would boom. I often wonder if my photography is too niche, too specific for the mass market. Maybe I should photograph something different today…

And then I sit back, take another sip, and say to hell with that! The feeling of doubt and uncertainty is never any fun, but do you want to know…

We’ve been an avid supporter of Xero for a long time. A few months ago, we wrote a piece on Xero’s online accounting system and why it works so well for us. I think online accounting is still a touchy issue for a lot of people. They’re mostly concerned about security and what might happen in the off chance you lose Internet service. People are talking because the potential benefit is huge as long as they’re willing to put their trust in the system.

It wasn’t too long before the Sydney Morning Herald got ahold of it and interviewed Nicole and I. We mostly dispelled peoples’ worries about using a system like Xero, discussing why it works for us and why we’re never going back to the old way. The article appeared on May 6th of 2011.

Click here to read the article the Sydney Morning Herald wrote about Xero and Blinq.

We just want to thank the…

We just posted the video from our photo shoot with 220 Triathlon Magazine. Being a Melbourne based sports photographer, it seems like I barely ever get to capture the athletes just sitting down and being themselves. This shoot was a nice change of pace.

As we setup shop in the restaurant, we noticed quite a few interesting backgrounds and pieces of furniture to use in the shoot. We were primarily looking for a wide range colors and textures, going from bright reds to shiny silvers while incorporating smooth leather and burberry surfaces. We found that certain materials worked really well with the clothing the athletes were wearing,…

I was looking through all the locations and races that we attended this year and its great to see the improvement that we have made over the last year. We’ve been everywhere from Budapest to Thailand and all around Australia. It certainly has been a huge year for us. But of course we are looking at an even bigger year next year.

I want to share with you some images I personally think are some of our very best we have shot.