Strictly Business Blog

This is one of those difficult decisions when designing a new website. You want your work to look it’s best and be presented in an impressive manner, but you also want your work to be found through search engines. Wouldn’t it be nice to have both? Unfortunately in many cases a compromise may be required. Many different techniques are used for top search engine rankings but it often involves tactics that may take away from…

Your website is your most important marketing tool. Are you investing in it (both in money and thought) to make it the best it can possibly be? Too often photographers try to cut corners and save money on their sites, but if you have to limit your budget, this is not the place to trim. While simple and clean websites are preferred by buyers of all stripes (stock or assignment) that kind of design sensibility…

I decided to do my first website partly because my studio manager at the time was getting a bit bored, and I thought doing it might engage him. So I said, “Let’s do a website.” He said, “Great! …What’s a website?” And I said, “I don’t know.” Back then no one really knew. There was no way everyone did it, because pretty much no one had done it. So we had to think about what we wanted…

If your studio were to catch fire right now, would your digital photos be safe? Many photographers make the mistake of backing up to two separate hard drives, only to leave both hard drives sitting on their desk. This protects against a hard drive failure, but does nothing to protect against fire, flood or theft. To ensure you’re adequately protected, store your files in at least two physical locations. One option is to rotate a…

Have you ever seen a vertical TV?  I haven’t, but I wonder with the hybrid cameras that look like still cameras and shoot video, will we all be turning our TV’s on end? The point is that just because the camera shoots video, doesn’t mean the operator will be thinking like a video shooter.  As one who still shoots in both mediums – still photography and video – I have to turn a switch in…

After shooting digitally for many years, many photographers have amassed prodigious collections of digital photos, often surpassing 100,000 or 200,000 images. These photographers now find themselves struggling to organize, manage and backup this immense image library effectively. Unless you’ve invested tens of thousands of dollars in an enterprise-level asset management system and server system, you’re likely to find any database program slow, unwieldy and crash-prone. All-in-one applications like Adobe Lightroom and Apple’s Aperture begin to…