scott_robertson1

<p>As Q.T. mentioned, I'm one of those photo.net members who has a small scale <a href="http://www.slrobertson.com/scanning.htm">slide scanning service</a> using a Nikon CoolScan 5000. Unlike some other folks, I use a color-managed workflow when my customers send good condition slides of a known emulsion (i.e. Fuji Provia, Kodak Ektachrome, etc.).</p>

Scott Robertson - <a href="http://www.slrobertson.com">www.slrobertson.com</a>

<p>Unless you can code a photo gallery website yourself, database-backed, script-generated or otherwise, I'd do as Q.T. suggests and take a look at one of the PHP- or ASP-based photo galleries. You'll save yourself a lot of time, money and headaches.</p>

<p>To make any non-trivial amount of money selling stock photos on your own web site, you pretty much need to have a very large web footprint - meaning, at least hundreds of marketable images, and ideally thousands of such images. My <a href="http://www.slrobertson.com">travel stock photography</a> site has gone through a couple redesigns over the past two years and I've slowly been adding more content and I'm still only selling prints and licensing images sporadically. Judging from my own experience, I'd say you need several thousand images, all properly keyworded and titled for good search engine exposure, to see regular sales every month.</p>

<p>If you're not ready to take the plunge and build your own stock photo site, you might try one of the stock photo portals like <a href="http://www.alamy.com">Alamy</a> or <a href="http://www.myloupe.com">MyLoupe</a>, but personally, I'd rather keep the entire license fee and do my own price negotiations. It's not easy to build such a business from the ground up, but I actually find it rewarding and I enjoy the challenge. You may too.</p>

<p>Regarding copyright protection, I also subscribe to the notion that if you make things too difficult for your potential customers - only publishing small thumbnails, requiring visitors to register with your site before viewing images, etc. - you'll loose net business. Yes, there will always be freeloaders and infringers who swipe your web images, but these people would probably never have been customers anyway. Moreover, most of the infringers I've caught using my images have used them on private, non-commercial home pages and none have bothered to remove my copyright watermark. A brief email reminding them they should have asked permission first is usually the only action I take in these instances. I did catch an organization using one of my images without permission this year (thank-you images.google.com for helping me check up on my more popular images!), and after the org's president was notified of the infringement, and that I had registered the image in question with the US Copyright Office, they were quite willing to settle for a substantial fee. One lesson here is to always register your images before publishing them on the web, or anywhere else for that matter.</p>

<p>

Ron: At one time I had a thousand or more images from my site indexed by Google's image search engine (images.google.com) but all were dropped around the time when all of my "slideshow" pages were dropped from the text index. My recent experiment - shortening the URL of my <a href="http://www.slrobertson.com/ga-atlanta.htm">Atlanta, GA photo gallery</a> slideshow pages - has proved acceptable to Google. All of the image pages in this one slideshow are showing up in SERPS and are cached in the index. I'm also back at the #1 position for a search on <a href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=photo+atlanta+skyline">'photo atlanta skyline'</a>. It would be a lot of work to transform my entire site to this new URL scheme, so I'm going to wait a while to see if Google doesn't just pick all of my slideshow pages back up eventually. Who knows, maybe I'd get dropped again after making such a change site-wide!

</p>

Scott Robertson<br>

<a href="http://www.slrobertson.com">www.slrobertson.com</a>

<p>Well, for those still listening on this thread, I have an update about my site's Google index issue. As I said in a previous post, Googlebot has been furiously spidering my site, including my large image pages, over the past few weeks, but until the last couple days, none of those image pages have been re-inserted into the index nor given any PageRank.</p>

 

<p>Last week I experimented with one gallery, my <a href="http://www.slrobertson.com/ga-atlanta.htm">Atlanta, Georgia stock photo gallery</a>, primarily by renaming the slideshow photo pages from URLs like /images/usa/georgia/atlanta/slideshow/photo1.htm to URLs like /usa/georgia/photo.usga0001.htm. Every page under the /images directory had been dropped from the index, so this test was intended to see if shortening the URL path and removing the "images" directory name might make a difference. I didn't change the content of the pages other than to remove the prefix "Stock photo of" from the page "title" tags. I thought perhaps the repeated phrase might appear to be spam, though I suspect such page titles are common and not always used to spam the Google index.</p>

 

<p>Anyway, this evening I found that the first three image pages of this slideshow sequence, beginning with this <a href="http://www.slrobertson.com/usa/georgia/photo.usga0001.htm">photo of the Atlanta skyline at night</a>, have been put back in the index. They all have "Atlanta" in the page title and in the page text, as does the parent gallery page. If the remaining pages don't eventually appear as well, it looks like I may have to give up on Google for now or re-engineer my pages, though it may be futile to keep doing this every time there is an algorithm change with a popular search engine.

</p>

<a href="http://www.slrobertson.com">Scott L. Robertson Photography/slrobertson.com</a>

<p>Well, It's been over two weeks and none of my image pages or images have been put back in Google's index. Traffic to my site referred by Google is down more than 50%, but interestingly, traffic from Yahoo is up by at least that amount over the same period of time. In fact, Yahoo traffic has almost made up for the drop in Google traffic these past couple weeks. I have also noticed that Googlebot has crawled literally hundreds of my image pages during this period, but none of them have appeared in the live index. This makes me wonder if my pages are now triggering some new algorithm or filter, like a duplicate content filter - most image pages are substantially the same except for page title and image title. I have a lot of duplicate links (navigation links) on these pages, for instance, but one would think Googlebot is smart enough to figure out that navigation links shouldn't be considered duplicate content (i.e. spam), else most of the web would be penalized. Oh well, I'm still hoping to be picked back up eventually.

</p>

<a href="http://www.slrobertson.com">Scott L. Robertson Photography</a>

Check out PTLens at <a href="http://epaperpress.com/ptlens/">epaperpress.com</a>. This free Photoshop plugin includes a human-readable database of lens "Correct" filter parameters for PanoTools.<br>

-Scott

<p>

<a href="http://www.slrobertson.com">Scott L. Robertson Photography - slrobertson.com</a>

<p>David S Wrote:<br><i>

You still are appearing near the top of Yahoo image searches for many of your chosen keywords. I suspect that the Google ranking change is because that engine now prefers a larger amount of natural prose than it used to. Unfortunately the folks at Google have a huge incentive to keep tweaking their algorithm: it forces businesses to run a pay?per?click advertising campaign to bring in traffic.

</i></p>

<p>

I really hope that's not what is going on. If that were the case, I would have expected my photo pages to simply get buried in the search results for various keywords, but it seems Google has dropped all of those pages entirely from the index. Other pages on my site, like thumbnail gallery pages which don't really have much natural prose either, have not suffered any reduction in PageRank. Curiously, both <a href="http://www.slrobertson.com">my photo library site</a> and <a href="http://www.danheller.com">Dan Heller's</a> have had every single page under the "images" folder removed from the index. At least, that is my reading of the results of the following searches on Google:<br><br>

<i>allinurl: images site:www.slrobertson.com</i> = zero pages found<br>

<i>allinurl: images site:www.danheller.com</i> = zero pages found<br><br>

I still hope to be re-indexed on the next deep crawl of my site.

</p>

<p>I have had a similar problem with Google recently. A week ago several of my image pages (big images with H1 titles, long descriptions, proper ALT tags and keywords for my own site search function) were still appearing near the top of Google searches. A search on "photo of atlanta skyline", for instance, had placed my <a href="http://www.slrobertson.com/images/usa/georgia/atlanta/slideshow/photo-1.htm">Atlanta Skyline at Night photo</a> at #1 for months, maybe even the past year or more. This weekend I noticed a sharp drop in traffic to my <a href="http://www.slrobertson.com">stock photography site</a> and decided to check Google keyword searches and sure enough, ALL of my big image pages have been dropped from Google's index! A week ago I had virtually every one of the 2-3K pages indexed, and now they've all been dropped. In fact, when I try "site:slrobertson.com" and then "repeat the search with the omitted results included", Google reports 2,370 pages indexed, but will only list 154 of them. I haven't made any changes to most of my site in a long while and many pages have been indexed with decent PageRank for months. It's most frustrating, to say the least.

</p>

<p>

Just for fun, I checked another site with similar content and structure: <a href="http://www.danheller.com">danheller.com</a>. I swear Dan used to have most of his big image pages indexed as well, but I can't seem to turn one of them up today. I'm hoping that this is just a transient problem with Google's index and cache.

</p>

<p>I have the Nikon Coolscan 5000 and bulk slide loader which I use to scan my own stock library as well as for my <a href="http://www.slrobertson.com/scanning.htm">slide scanning service</a>. I can say that the bulk loader works very well for most plastic-mounted slides and perfect-condition cardboard slides. However, if your slide mounts are warped, are frayed or damaged they frequently jam in the loader. The design of the SF-120 just isn't that great, frankly, but I wouldn't think of attempting to scan 15,000 slides without it.</p>

<p>In spec'ing out your PC, if you haven't already bought it, get as much RAM as you can. I have 1.5 GB in mine and sometimes I still wish I had more. I scan my own slides at 4000 dpi, 16-bit per channel and this results in 125 MB files. You'll run out of disk space quickly as well with only 200 GB (mirrored) of HD space. Plan on adding external drives as you go.

</p>

<p>For image cataloging, I use iMatch and I really love it. I'm a software engineer by training so I appreciate and use the embedded scripting language to do all sorts of things like exporting groups of cataloged images to my web site. It can keep track of off-line media, like CDs and DVDs, and you can create your own image property database to store things like slide box numbers and such. The dynamic category system is much better than simple keywording as well.</p>

Scott Robertson<br>

<a href="http://www.slrobertson.com">slrobertson.com - Travel, Editorial, Assignments, Prints & Slide Scanning</a>

Here are a few things you can do to drive more traffic to your photo site via public search engines like Google: 1. Design your site without URL parameters (i.e. URLs like www.site.com/page.php?param=43). This implies having a plain, static HTML site or, if you really must use a database to host your images, rewrite your URLs to appear static. 2. Use HTML meta tags for page descriptions and keywords. 3. Showcase lots and lots of your best work and include proper titles and keywords for each image. 4. Get other important sites to link to yours. You might define "important" as having a high Google PageRank. 5. Include other interesting content in addition to images. Write articles or reviews, for instance.

<p>You should probably make it clear that you sell prints and/or license images and you should have some sort of inquiry form, even a simple email form, if not a shopping cart and virtual light table. Be diligent about responding to your visitors' questions and comments. Reading up on "search engine optimization" and, as QT says, hanging around webmasterworld.com will help as well.</p>

<p>I used to get a lot of "free use" requests, but ever since I implemented a licensing request page and list the conditions under which I will license images, I get far fewer of these. I still get the occasional request from a student working on a paper or presentation, in which case I always grant free use, but most everyone else at least expects to pay something, though not everyone has a realistic notion of what stock photo licensing fees should be :-).</p>

<p>I haven't tried a Google AdWords campaign to promote my prints or stock library, and I'm not convinced it would help much anyway, but I have recently tried it to promote a new slide scanning service I'm offering. The enormous time sink of scanning slides on my old, slow Polaroid scanner and then cloning out dust spots in the scans has been a great impediment to populating my site with more images so I finally broke down and bought a Nikon Coolscan 5000 and bulk slide loader. In order to help pay for it (my print and licensing sales are just "noticeable" at this stage) I decided to try offering to scan others' slides for a reasonable, but profitable, fee. In a month's time with the AdWords campaign I've landed enough slide scanning jobs to more than pay for the scanner. The problem now is that I'm spending more time scanning everyone else's slides than my own!</p>

Scott Robertson

<p>Yes, you can make a little money selling prints from your web site. Mark is absolutely correct about the need to drive lots of traffic to your site if you have any hope of making sales - assuming you have saleable photos to showcase. Using <a href="http://www.slrobertson.com">my own stock photo web site</a> as an example, I currently sell a print for about every 30,000 unique visitors to the site. That's .003% sales conversion. At this rate I will need to increase my site's traffic by another order of magnitude in order to get steady monthly sales (ie. 8-12 prints per month). I think this is entirely possible, but it's hard work. See <a href="http://www.danheller.com">danheller.com</a> and <a href="http://www.terragalleria.com">terragalleria.com</a>.</p>

<p>

Scott Robertson<br>

<a href="http://www.slrobertson.com">www.slrobertson.com</a>

</p>

<p><a href="http://www.slrobertson.com/cambodia.htm">I visited Angkor in December 2001</a> and shot mostly Provia 100F and Velvia 50. The skies weren't as hazy then, I think, as you will probably encounter this time of year. There are lots of details to focus on around the ruins and for wide landscapes including sky, aim for pre-dawn and the hour or so after sunrise to experience some glorious light. If were to return, I'd try shooting either B&W infrared film or using an IR filter on a digital camera. If you're going to be staying in an air-conditioned room at night, be sure to take your camera and lenses out of their cases during the ride to Angkor so they warm up to the ambient temperature (you probably know why since you've been traveling around SE Asia for some time already). I made the mistake of keeping my chilled equiptment in their insulated bags until I arrived only to have the lenses repeatedly fog over for 20 minutes in the hot, humid air during sunrise the first morning.</p>

Scott Robertson<br>

<a href="http://www.slrobertson.com">Scott L. Robertson Photography - slrobertson.com</a>

I was on a <a href="http://www.slrobertson.com/new-zealand.htm">photo trip to New Zealand</a> for about a month this past December. Both islands have superb landscape photography possibilities, so be sure to have the wide angles covered (don't know how wide the G2 lens goes). I took so many photos, in fact, that I've only edited through about half of my digital shots (most of the digital image selects from the North Island are on my <a href="http://www.slrobertson.com">stock photo site</a> with the South Island to appear within days) and still have 40 rolls of slide film waiting to be developed and scanned. Even though we had a lot of rain, especially while touring the North Island, the scenery was still spectacular. Bring a tripod if you can, and a cable release if the G2 accepts it. A set of graduated neutral density filters can help tame bright skies, though by using print film you will have more exposure latitude than with the slide film I was shooting. 100 ASA print or slide film should work well on sunny days, 400 ASA on rainy days. Keep in mind that film is generally more expensive in NZ than in other parts of the world, such as the USA, so you might want to bring plenty with you. Remember not to pack any undeveloped film in your checked luggage, however, or it will most likely get fogged by the baggage scanners.</p>

 

<p>My favorite part of our trip was an overnight cruise on Doubtful Sound. We visited Milford briefly, and while it is beautiful, Doubtful Sound, actually a fiord system, is much larger, more remote and not nearly as crowded. We were the only ship on the water.</p>

 

Scott Robertson<br>

<a href="http://www.slrobertson.com">www.slrobertson.com</a><div></div>

<p>According my my pricing sources (Fotoquote), you're in the right ballpark, though for an unsigned band and a small pressing of CDs, you might have a hard time getting such a price. I've seen more than one stock photographer's web site list fees for such a use at something more like $50, for instance. In your negotiations you may have to take a lower fee, but definitely limit usage (with a good contract) to the initial pressing numbers mentioned and make it clear that use beyond that will incur additional licensing fees. Good luck!</p>

<a href="http://www.slrobertson.com">Scott L. Robertson Stock Photography / slrobertson.com</a>

<p>Besides having good business sense and skills, probably the second most important ingredient in Dan Heller's particular recipe for building a photography business using the web as your primary, if not exclusive, marketing vehicle is having a critical mass of <em>marketable and varied</em> images presented on your site. This probably means not dozens or even hundreds but thousands of saleable images. Furthermore, your image pages should be easily indexable by popular search engine 'bots like googlebot, a huge subject on its own. Designing such a site isn't particularly difficult, but it can be incredibly time consuming, especially if you are currently sitting on a mountain of unscanned film as your source material. What Dan Heller has built, over a period of years I might add, is essentially a small online stock agency which just happens to represent only one photographer.</p>

<p>From personal experience with my own <a href="http://www.slrobertson.com">stock photography site</a>, I can attest to the fact that once I achieved a large enough footprint on the web I started to get license requests, print orders and even an odd assignment, though I haven't yet reached that <em>critical mass</em> of content to produce consistent sales week after week. I'm not expecting to replace the income from my day job, at least not any time soon, but I do believe that following Dan's example can result in a nice side income at the very least. Good luck with whatever approach you take with your own business.</p>

<a href="http://www.slrobertson.com">Scott L. Robertson Photography / slrobertson.com</a>

<p>I'm pretty sure that cans of compressed gas are prohibited. I always bring along a packet of Pec-Pads, Eclipse Solution and a modified, plastic knife to clean my D1X's CCD (see <a href="http://www.bythom.com/cleaning.htm">Thom Hogan's cleaning recipe</a>). Technically, the flammable Eclipse Solution is probably also prohibited, but I figure it really can't be any more dangerous than your typical bottle of perfume or liquor, either of which seem to be allowed on planes regularly.</p>

<p>I don't think using a ziploc bag will work very well since the compression forces of a heavy camera and lens would probably keep popping the seal. For another low-cost solution, just buy a bag of beans and use it as-is, or place the unopened bag inside a ziploc for extra protection.</p>

<p>You will probably find yourself shooting many more images with a DSLR than you ever did with a film camera. Since shooting digital images is essentially free, you tend to experiment more, which along with the ability to instantly check and review shots, hopefully helps improve your technique and composition skills faster. On the other hand, I still love the look of a properly exposed frame of Velvia! On my most recent photo trip (<a href="http://www.slrobertson.com/blog/new-zealand">New Zealand - images to appear soon</a>) I shot nearly as much slide film as digital images, using the film primarily for landscape and wide-angle shots and long, bulb exposures and digital for everything else.</p>

<a href="http://www.slrobertson.com">Scott L. Robertson Photography - slrobertson.com</a>

<p>Not having used either a D100 or Fuji S2, I can't help there, other than to say thay I'm sure either would work well. The more important issues for a photo safari are, in my opinion, bringing big glass (on a 1.5x crop DSLR, <i>at least</i> 300mm), enough extra batteries to shoot all day since you may not be able to recharge during your daily outings, enough storage to shoot all day, a beanbag, a plan for dealing with dust (its everywhere in that part of the world) etc. For more specifics and info, please see <a href="http://www.slrobertson.com/article-digital-desert.htm">the short article on all of these issues</a> and more that I wrote up after returning from a trip to Namibia with my D1X last year.</p>

 

<a href="http://www.slrobertson.com">Scott L. Robertson Photography</a>

There are URL rewriting ISAPI filters for IIS which do pretty much the same thing as Apache's mod_rewrite, but my web host doesn't have one installed. One issue to watch out for when using a URL rewriter is directory-relative links in your dynamic pages: Since a URL like /mysite/remap/ID.100/showphoto.htm will be remapped to somthing like /mysite/showphoto.php?ID=100, any relative links in showphoto.php will break since the two URL paths are different. You have to use site-rooted links (/mysite/images/photo.jpg instead of ../images/photo.jpg, or whatever).

 

Yeah, I think I'm going to rebuild a static site, with galleries and slide shows generated by scripts.

I think you're right, Q.T. I originally wrote my DB-backed web site as an excerise to learn a little ASP and web-DB programming and displaying images for friends and family seemed like a good application. It has since morphed into a side business and I'm now seriously considering scrapping the dynamic pages for all the reasons you listed.

<p>Thanks, Quang-Tuan. I figured as much. My issues regarding search engine traffic are: 1. Not enough content (yet) and 2. Can't get Google and others to index each individual photo page. Problem 1 is just a matter of time and digitizing. Problem 2 is, I'm sure, a result of having built a database-driven site which makes heavy use of query string parameters.</p>

 

<p>I found a reference somewhere which said that Google tends not to like multiple querystring parameters (i.e. multiples '&'s if you're writing ASP pages), so I rewrote my pages to use a single parameter. This didn't help. I also read that while Google will eventually visit a dynamic page linked from a static one (or one without any parameters), it doesn't like to visit any second-level dynamic links. In other words, Googlebot will follow one level of dynamic links, but no more. So, I've tried making a static site map with (dynamic) links to every image in my database to see if I could get Googlebot to index them, but it hasn't worked. Googlebot has spidered the sitemap dozens of times, but has never followed a dynamic link to any of my image pages. I'm now thinking that the actual length of my (now) single querystring parameter is making Googlebot wary. The implication could be that I have potentially hundreds of thousands of database-generated pages. My URLs now look like this: <a href="http://www.slrobertson.com/photo.asp?photo=025213-M-28">http://www.slrobertson.com/photo.asp?photo=025213-M-28</a>. That ?photo=025213-M-28 business is what I suspect is causing problems, since my gallery pages, which have a single parameter like '?slideshow_id=10', get spidered regularly.</p>

 

<p>So, I may end of having to bake my lovingly-written dynamic web site to all static pages if I really want search engines to spider my entire site. Sigh....</p>

Question for Quang-Tuan: Do you have any tips for promoting your personal web site? I'm sure that having thousands of high-quality images online, with good titles/keywords, helps drive search-engine traffic to your site. Do you market directly to photo buyers as well? I've just begun to populate <a href="http://www.slrobertson.com">my own site</a> and I get a trickle of traffic every day, have sold a few prints, but photo editors are, of course, not knocking down my door.