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Get a Blog:
One Photographer’s Insights
By Ethan G. Salwen
Flynn Larsen
Please visit Flynn’s blog at: www.theyouarehereproject.com.
ES: What was the genesis of your blog?
FL: I produced this blog as part of a personal project that I did in collaboration with radio producer Blue Chevigny. It is not a traditional photo blog — if there is any such thing — because it came out of a specific project, and it’s not necessarily an on-going thing. While we were traveling over this past summer-photographing and recording sound for the project-we blogged about the trip. But now that we’re back the blog has changed quite a bit and the main focus of the project has become the project Web site. Our photo-audio blog was really a way to connect with an audience during a specific time while we were in the field doing the You Are Here Project. We still blog, but we use the blog more to post announcements about our main site, which is constantly changing as we add new audio-visual slideshows city-by-city, from east to west. We use the blog a little bit to talk about the post-production process, as well as to present thoughts and ideas about the project.
ES: Do you promote the blog?
FL: We promote our blog and our Web site with bi-weekly emails to a large mailing list of interested people, both personal and professional. Those people, in turn, have forwarded our link to others. For example, one of the people in our project (Patrick from St. Louis) has started using our blog and Web site as a teaching tool with his high school students, as a way to talk about “place.” All the kids in his class will serve as a hub that will lead to new and interested people.
ES: Have you tied your blog into your professional marketing efforts?
FL: The project has been a nice thing to talk about with clients and potential clients. In my experience clients are always interested in the personal projects I’m working on. It gives them a sense of what drives me as a photographer and what I can potentially offer them on a paid shoot.
ES: Have there been personal or creative benefits to keeping a blog?
FL: Photo blogging is a great way to explore new ways of taking pictures in a venue that’s not necessarily all about your portfolio. It’s a very freeing way to work since you can really just experiment and put up whatever strikes your fancy, without over-thinking things too much. You can tap into a different part of your “photographer-brain” and get back to the essence of what drove you to take photos in the first place. For me, that was just my curiosity and the fascination with images, without any of the usual commercial stresses.
ES: Tell me how your project’s main Web site and the blog site interrelate.
FL: At this point I don’t think the blog drives that much traffic to our main project Web site. It’s probably more the other way around. But on www.theyouarehereproject.com we have set up Google Analytics, which helps track who looks at your site, where they are, how often, etc. So that’s been really helpful in seeing if we’re getting any real momentum going or not. Traffic definitely spikes when we send out update announcements about a new slideshow going up. And little by little we are getting more traffic in general in between announcements.