Blinq Photography

Sure Everyone’s Got A Camera…

Shawn — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 09:48:25 +0000

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 Plumbers

I don’t think we have to. By all means, it’s getting harder to become a professional photographer. You’re competing against everyone else who wants to enter the same space. But then again, I step back and think of my friends who are still in I.T. Their profession is getting harder too. All of this technical stuff is. That’s just the way the world is moving.

Now that more and more people are taking more pictures than ever, more of them are taking the time to learn the right skills. They’re sharing their photos with their friends, and when they run into gold, they figure out how to reproduce it. Just look at all the photography oriented smartphone apps on the market. People want to learn this skill. In a few minutes between a meeting, they’re making art with the tap of their fingers.

There are more amateur snapshots than ever. They are riddled with too many errors to count. Every day you log onto Facebook, you see them. They pass by our eyes without us giving a second thought to them.

But then there are the images that, despite their imperfections, still speak to us. Honestly, who cares if this one was overexposed if the emotion is there? What does it matter that it wasn’t totally cropped correctly? The value of an image isn’t its technicality. The river runs deeper than that.

So what do we have to worry about? We’ve seen the return of the Holga and the insane popularity of the Hipstamatic app. We’re intentionally trading quality for something else, and photography is still coming out okay. Just because there are a gazillion Hipstamatic prints out there doesn’t mean people won’t be able to find the really really good ones amid the so-so.

The way I see it, photography has always been a choice. What subject am I going to shoot. What light am I going to pull out of the world and commit to film? Which of these 500 images on my memory card deserves to represent my client? Having more to choose from doesn’t make us poor. It makes us incredibly fortunate.

The value comes from the curating, not from the capturing.

No related posts.

Sure Everyone’s Got A Camera… is a post from Melbourne photographer at Blinq Photography

SEO For Photographers: Handling Images

Shawn — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 09:00:46 +0000

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 also have alt and title tags. By saying something relevant to the image in either of these tags, you ensure that Google knows what your image is about. You don’t need to jam every possible search query into these tags. By merely using them at all, you’re miles ahead of the crowd.

So, do you want to know how I got traffic just by posting an image? I put the following description into its alt tag:

subaru HDR 3 by exxx2005 HDR Photography Tutorials by Paul Stamatiou

This description hits on a lot of different searches people might enter into Google. Maybe they want to learn more about HDR photography. Maybe they’re interested in Paul Statmatiou’s work or Subarus. By placing these keywords in the alt tag, I’m giving myself the best possible chance of ranking high for these common HDR-related search terms.

Here’s where you need to enter it if you’re editing the HTML directly:

You’ll want to place the description in the “ alt = ” section. If you’re a WordPress user, you can place the same description in the Alternate Text box of the image editor. Be sure to fill in the caption and description sections too. The more written content surrounding your photo, the better.

Surprisingly, that was nearly all I had to do get the image to appear whenever people search for the term HDR photography. Want me to prove it? Here are the recent stats from my website’s search engine analytics.

As you can see, the search “blinq hdr” counts for nearly 3% of my total traffic. Imagine that! All I did was put an image up on a website and properly describe it. Easy.

Do be careful, however. You still need to follow all of the other rules of SEO. You need to write solid content around the images you’re putting on your website. That means writing an article that’s at least 350 words long. Don’t forget to provide your audience with substantial content, not just a bunch of images with links.

Here’s the big takeaway. Google can’t read images any better than you can read binary code. They’re one big blur of pixels. Help Google out. Properly describe your images by using the alt text and other tools WordPress offers. You’ll soon find yourself getting a lot more traffic from the images you post.
Melbourne Directory

SEO For Photographers: Handling Images is a post from Melbourne photographer at Blinq Photography

Your photography clients will be wearing top hats

Shawn — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 09:27:13 +0000

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.

Photo By Steven Depolo

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 just need to instill curiosity. When you think about it, this is exactly what the news does all the time. They’ll often tell you something like this:

“An unexpected dip in temperatures is headed our way. We’ll tell you how cold it’s going to get at 10.”

This is a pretty basic setup. You weren’t particularly worried about the weather before, but now that they’ve planted the idea, you know you’re going to keep watching just to get your question answered. I rarely say this, so here goes. Copy the media. Setup the question so your content can be the answer.

Don’t neglect your META descriptions
Meta descriptions can help. They are the text the appears under the title of your page on your Google listing. If you don’t write one for each page, Google will select text from your article and write it for you. Sometimes Google does a decent job and picks a good snippet, but you’ll do much better if you write the snippet yourself.

To fill in a snippet, you simply need to create a meta description tag and place it in between the and tags. If I were to write one for this page, it would like look like this:

Nothing groundbreaking there, and that’s the point. Keep it simple, but also keep it interesting. Bold predictions, points of curiosity, and even logical paradoxes, they are all okay. If your article is a “how to” type article, you’ll want to be pretty direct about it. Oftentimes, just saying “how to” is enough to engage curiosity.

Can this tactic be taken too far? Definitely. Hence all the criticism the media receives. Having said that, it does work. People are genuinely interested in controversy. They want answers to questions they didn’t even know they had. If you can setup the question right, they’ll beat down your door to find out what you’ve got to say.

You don’t have to write an extremely hooky title for every article. That’s overkill. In fact, it might get you branded as a bit of a sensationalist. If you read this article and felt disappointed at the fact that there’s no information on top hats, you could accuse me of being one myself. There’s a careful line you have to walk between engaging your readers and outright lying to them.

That bold prediction at the beginning? It was a lie. I dismissed it right away, but it was a lie nonetheless. You can only do that a few times before people get tired of it and stop trusting you. Use curiosity sparingly. Use it when it really matters.

As for the rest of your titles and meta descriptions, the trick is to avoid answering your reader’s questions. If you can do that, you’ve come a long way. Don’t give them the answer in the first paragraph. Use that space to setup the question. Once you’ve got people reading, they’ll want to keep reading. If you answer their questions right away, they’ll have no reason to stay.

Some of you might be wondering how this is an SEO tip. It sort of is and isn’t one, but here’s my reasoning. If you can increase your reader engagement, your chances of getting people to link to you goes up. If you can get more incoming links, your pages do better on Google.

A lot of people think SEO is about coding and keyword densities. It is, but what’s the point of having the right keyword density and ranking on Google if your own visitors don’t want to stick around to read the rest of what you have to offer?

What you say on your photography website is just as important as what you do to get people to visit it.

Your photography clients will be wearing top hats is a post from Melbourne photographer at Blinq Photography

WordPress SEO For Photographers: Internal Links And XML Sitemaps

Shawn — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 10:46:08 +0000

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 pages hidden under several layers of links. At least, that was the old way. These days, Google scans through the web so fast that you don’t really need to submit an XML sitemap to them. You just need to generate one and tell them to come and look at it. That’s what we’re going to do.

If you just check the boxes I’ve checked and click “save XML sitemap settings,” you’ll be good to go. By doing this, you’re doing everything I said earlier. WordPress will generate an XML sitemap every time you make a new post. It will then get Google to come and look at your website right away. This is the best way to ensure that as soon as you make a post, it will become available in Google’s index.

Next, we’re going to have a look at some of the internal linking settings, namely breadcrumbs.

Breadcrumbs make it easy for your visitors to navigate through your website from wherever they happen to be within it. They also show up in Google’s search engine rankings, making your website listing appear more clear and understandable. Instead of seeing a bunch of gobbledygook, your visitors will see a clear path to the page being displayed.

By default, you should enable breadcrumbs. For most of you, that’s all you’ll need to do. You can also customize your breadcrumbs however you want, adding in your own kind of separator ( a || instead of a :: for example), anchor text, and prefixes. It all depends on how you want them to look.

For a more professional perspective, let’s have a look at Yoast’s own breadcrumbs. Here’s what he does.

Those are Yoast’s breadcrumbs at the top of the page. You’ll notice that he uses the prefix “you are here,” before launching into the actual breadcrumbs themselves. The same breadcrumbs also appear when you search for his plugin on Google. Let’s have a look at that.

It’s pretty much the exact same thing. When you enable breadcrumbs in the WordPress SEO plugin, they’ll appear on your website and on Google. The text you use in your breadcrumbs isn’t what matters. It simply matters that you use them in the first place. Yoast, by the way, organizes his breadcrumbs by category (you can pick this option from the “taxonomy” dropdown menu). For most photographers, that’s exactly what you’ll want to do as well.

Be mindful of some themes.
Not all themes allow you to use breadcrumbs. Let me rephrase that. You can still enable breadcrumbs, and they’ll show up on Google, but they won’t show up on your website. Whether you pick a theme with breadcrumbs or not is an aesthetic choice you’ll have to make on your own. I’ve been known to pick a better looking theme over one with breadcrumbs, but that’s my personal taste.

It wasn’t that hard, was it?
If you’ve done everything in this guide, you should be completely sorted for SEO. Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin truly is the culmination of his work. It’s every plugin put together, and it does a lot of the technical stuff for you. Just tick the settings I’ve mentioned and have a closer look through your individual posts as I detailed in the first Wordpress SEO for Photographers post. So far as SEO is concerned, there isn’t much more you can do but that.

I hope you’ve found this useful, and as always, if you have any comments or questions, please let me know.

WordPress SEO For Photographers: Internal Links And XML Sitemaps is a post from Melbourne photographer at Blinq Photography

WordPress SEO For Photographers: Duplicate Content And Indexation

Shawn — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 09:05:04 +0000

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 analysis tab to see how well our individual pages were doing. Once we nailed every issue, it was on to the next page. But what about the Advanced tab? Is there anything useful in there?

For most pages, the answer will probably be no. But that’s not always the case. The sitemap priority menu is important if you want a particular page to get visited and crawled first. I tend to give a higher priority to the pages that have links coming in from higher ranking sources. Generally, those are my most popular and well-liked posts.

Tools for handling duplicate content:
Duplicate content arises when you have two pages that are very similar to one another. In photography, this can sometimes happen when you’re selling your images online. Some of you might end up creating many similar pages for the same photo in different sizes, print styles, or formats. If you don’t tell Google about it, Google will assume the pages are duplicates of the same page.

Duplicate content isn’t a bad thing. It doesn’t harm your rankings. There’s just one problem. If you start getting links to all the slightly different pages, it effectively dilutes the overall ranking for the photo you want to sell. You basically lose links you could have gained by having a single page.

So, if any of your pages are just a slight variation of one page, set the canonical URL to the main page. That way, Google will understand that any links to this particular page are really meant to go to the main page. It’s a nice clean way to consolidate your links and improve the rank of your main pages.

301 redirects do something similar, but they actually redirect your viewers to the URL you specify. You’re probably not going to use them as photographer, so they aren’t really worth looking at.

WordPress SEO Plugin Settings. Which are important?
The awesome thing about Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin is how much it handles on its own. You really don’t need to interfere with most of what’s going on, but there are a few settings you should check. The most important ones are indexation, XML sitemaps, and Internal links. We’ll skip over the rest.

You can access the WordPress SEO plugin settings from your Worpress Dashboard. They are at the bottom of the toolbar on the left.

Indexation.
This list of settings controls how Google will index the pages on your website. Interestingly, you don’t want all of your pages to be in the index. To explain why, we’re going to talk about water pressure and Pagerank.

Pagerank is what Google uses to determine the placement of a page in its index. A page with a lot of incoming links has a high Pagerank, and a page with zero incoming links has a very low Pagerank. The interesting thing about Pagerank is that it flows from high Pagerank pages to low Pagerank pages much like water flows from a high pressure source to a low pressure area.

As you know, a pipe with a lot of holes in it loses water pressure pretty fast. The same applies to websites with a lot of unnecessary outbound links and links to pages that don’t contain any content. By shutting off some of those links, we can improve the overall Pagerank of your photography website. That’s the basic premise behind the indexation settings Yoast provides with his WordPress SEO plugin.

Open up your indexation settings and scroll down this section:

Most of you should check the ones I’ve checked. There’s simply no need to have your login and registration pages in Google’s index (they provide zero content). Admin pages aren’t necessary either. They only siphon away valuable Pagerank. The others are up to you. But as Joost says, if you already have a thorough sitewide navigation system, there really is no need to put subpages of subpages into Google’s index. Keep them out and keep it clean.

Let’s move onto the next set of indexation settings:

You’ll want to check all three of these. By nofollowing the links, you ensure that they don’t “leak” Pagerank. The same goes with comments. If you get too many comments on a particular page, and they all have outbound links, you stand to lose a little bit of Pagerank per link. Every link you add adversely affects your Google ranking. Be highly selective of the links you decide to include. Make sure they add value to whatever is being discussed.

Here’s something I’ll do if I get a lot of comments on one particular post. I’ll create another post discussing whatever my commenters have brought up. If I find their links relevant to the discussion, I’ll use them. That way, you get the best of both worlds. You aren’t haphazardly giving away external links, and you’re keeping the conversation going.

We don’t really need to discuss the rest of the indexation settings. They aren’t particularly useful for most photographers, so we’ll skip them. In the next installment, we’ll talk about XML sitemaps and internal links, covering what’s left.

If you have any questions or comments about Yoast’s plugin, go ahead and ask away. Seriously, even if you think it’s a dumb question, just ask. This stuff can be difficult to pick apart when you’re seeing it for the first time.

WordPress SEO For Photographers: Duplicate Content And Indexation is a post from Melbourne photographer at Blinq Photography

WordPress SEO for Photographers: Installation Guide For Photographers

Shawn — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 10:27:17 +0000

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 plugin does all of the hard work for you. Plus, with all of the other settings and features it offers, you’ll find yourself spending less time figuring out things like Robots.txt files and more time being creative with your content.

So, without much fanfare, let’s rip open the box one this one. In this guide, you’ll learn how to install, configure, and use Yoast’s WordPress SEO Plugin. I’ll show you all of the features that are important to you as a photographer, and we’ll gently skip past everything else.

Getting Started
If this is the first time you’ve ever installed a WordPress plugin, this part is for you. In the past, you used to have to download a plugin, upload it, and then install it. Now it’s a lot easier. You can install Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin directly from WordPress. We’re simply going to login into WordPress, click on plugins in the left menu, search for Yoast’s plugin, and go from there.

You’ll want to click “Add New.”

As you can see, I’ve already installed WordPress SEO. Click “install now” to get yours up and running. This shouldn’t take more than a few minutes for most of you.

Once you’ve installed WordPress SEO, you’re only halfway done. You also have to activate it. To do that, open the plugins menu again, and click on “plugins.” You should see the WordPress SEO plugin listed. Click “activate,” and you’ll immediately start reaping some of the rewards.

Step 1: Seeing if you’re hitting the mark
If you’re like me, you’ll probably want to see how well you’re doing already. So let’s get right to it. We’re going to view one of my previous posts for Blinq Photography to see if it’s fully optimised for search.

A quick aside about photography and SEO:
As a photographer, my work has to come from my local area, which is Melbourne. Simply put, that’s where all of the paying clients are. Nearly all of my website’s pages are centered around Melbourne, and there’s a good reason for this. I know that my potential clients will by typing “Melbourne photographer” into Google, and if some of those people see Blinq’s website, some of them will book shoots.

You should be thinking along the same lines. There’s no sense in trying to become the number one photographer right away. That’s just not how it works. You need to be strong in your local area first. After that, you can branch out and attempt to become the Walter Iooss of your generation. Start by focusing on searches like “(Your region) photographer” or “(Your city) photography”

Okay. Let’s look at a blog post I wrote about a photo shoot I did with pro triathletes Luke Bell and Matty White. After you’ve installed Yoast’s plugin, the following WordPress SEO information should appear just below every post (well, not exactly the same information. It will be different because it will be populated with different content).

All of this stuff can seem confusing at first, but there’s only one important thing to pay attention to: the focus keyword section. That’s what tells us how well we’re doing. The focus keyword is something you have to enter on your own. I chose Melbourne for the reasons I listed earlier. Like I said, most of your focus keywords will either be your region or your region + “photographer”.

As soon as you select a focus keyword, the plugin does its magic. It tells you how good you’re doing. In this particular case, I’ve pretty much got everything taken care of. “Melbourne” appears in the article heading, the page title, the page URL, the content, and the page’s meta description. If your keywords don’t appear in any of those places, the plugin will definitely make you aware of it.

How to get a more in-depth analysis
Of course, no page is perfect, and we can always do better. To get the specifics, just click on the “page analysis” tab at the top, and you’ll get a laundry list of things to do that will keep you busy for days. If there are any red ones, get those done right away. The yellow ones aren’t as important.

You can see here that I’ve still got a few things that need to get taken care of. When Yoast talks about slugs, he means titles. I’ve got a few unnecessary words in my title, words that search engines like Google will automatically filter out. Yoast suggests I use the kinds of words Google won’t filter out, thus improving my chances of showing up for related searches.

As you’ve no doubt guessed, all of the green ones are the things I’m doing correctly. For SEO, it’s really important to have readable website copy, keywords in the URL, title, first paragraph, and meta description, and a reasonable keyword density above 1.38%. You also need to be above the minimum word requirement of 300 words per page.

We’ll stop right there. I’m going to give you a homework assignment. I want you to install the WordPress SEO plugin and go through your pages with a fined-tooth comb. Pick a focus keyword relating to your local area and photography. Once you’ve done that, make the suggested changes. There isn’t much more to using this plugin, but I’ll go over the more advanced features and settings in the next post.

WordPress SEO for Photographers: Installation Guide For Photographers is a post from Melbourne photographer at Blinq Photography

What to photograph today in Melbourne

Shawn — Sat, 25 Jun 2011 06:36:22 +0000

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 what’s worse? Feeling like you’re being censored. Want to know what’s worse than that? Knowing that you’re the one who is censoring your own work, preventing yourself from reaching your true potential.

My clients and I are a perfect match. My work is exciting. When I think about what I could be photographing, what’s out there, I don’t want to do anything other than what I’ve planned. Isn’t that what this is supposed to be about? Aren’t we supposed to be scratching our own itch here?

I’m tired of people who go on shoots and try to come up with an image that everyone on the client’s team will like. Yes, it’s important to please the client. I believe that goes without saying. But there’s always going to be dissent. That’s just the nature of the business. If a few people don’t like what I’m doing, then so what. There really isn’t anything I, or my team, can do.

I’m going to do what inspired me as a child. I know it’s the same thing I’ve been doing for nearly 5 amount of years now. I know what the market is too. But if I ever have to sit and think about what I’m going to photograph today, I might as well avoid doing whatever I come up with. Deliberating for hours on end never works. I’d rather go with what feels right.

To hell with the pie. My slice might not be the biggest, but it’s got my name written on it.

VIEW: Inspiration from Melbourne photographer, Shawn Smith

What to photograph today in Melbourne is a post from Melbourne photographer at Blinq Photography

Check Out The Sydney Morning Herald Article On Blinq And Xero

Shawn — Tue, 17 May 2011 03:47:26 +0000

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 Sydney Morning Herald for getting the word out about Cloud Accounting (I guess you could call it that). We’ve had a lot of success with Xero, and we see no reason to think it’s any less secure than handing off a bunch of files to your accountant. For the record, Xero has never had a single breach of its security in the five years it has been live.

If you’d like to learn more about Xero and Blinq, read through the original post. You can try Xero for free at Xero.com

UPDATE: The Age Small business has also mentioned that Melbourne photography Blinq chats to them about what it means to use ‘in the cloud applications.’

Check Out The Sydney Morning Herald Article On Blinq And Xero is a post from Melbourne photographer at Blinq Photography

Melbourne Shoot With Ironman Matt White And Luke Bell

Shawn — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 03:33:50 +0000

We just posted the video from our photo shoot with Matt White and Luke Bell, two of Australia’s finest triathletes. In a rare moment at the No. 3 Station Pier restaurant in Port Melbourne, we arranged a more traditional session, creating images that have a timeless and relaxed feel, all for this month’s cover of 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, so we brought them into the shots.

For lighting, we used a primary “Beauty Dish” reflector and a secondary ProPhoto head with a smaller dish to bring out the colors in our background. We used grids on both dishes to direct the light straight down the middle. Both light sources were powered by ProPhoto Power Packs, and we used a Sekonic L-758D light meter to obtain all our light readings.

The Sekonic is new gear for us, and so far as we can tell, it’s been producing some excellent results. We hooked ours up to some remote Pocket Wizards to fire all of our flashes at once. If you aren’t already using gear like this, we highly recommend you do. Truly great stuff.

At the end of the day, we were pretty happy with the results. I particularly like the contrast we created between the athletes and textures and colors in the restaurant. Once Matty and Luke got a chance to relax, they both opened up. It was nice to see them in this much less strenuous setting.

Have a look at this month’s shots of Matt White –

Got any more questions on how this Melbourne based photographer took the images you see? Leave a comment below, and I’ll shoot you an answer.

No related posts.

Melbourne Shoot With Ironman Matt White And Luke Bell is a post from Melbourne photographer at Blinq Photography

The best images of Triathlon & Ironman for 2010

Shawn — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 08:42:24 +0000

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.

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The best images of Triathlon & Ironman for 2010 is a post from Melbourne photographer at Blinq Photography