And yet I still have managed to accomplish nothing…

The title of this blog post may be a bit misleading! I actually have accomplished some things, but in terms of the big picture nothing has been done at all. Needless to say I have a lot of work in front of me on all fronts.

I must admit however that I did lower my expectations a bit for the month of September. For most of the month it was mission get myself back into shape. I’m getting there quickly through a very intense program that I have designed myself. So building in extra time to accomplish this took time away from almost everything else.

The change in schedule for my personal life is causing a serious adjustment in my sleeping and eating times as well. I’m in bed later each night, so that means I am up later in the morning which means I’m losing hours of daylight that I need to work on some things. It’s a bit of a shame because I have honestly thrown away the best two weeks of the year weather wise while my body adjusts to the change.

Since I wasn’t able to apply myself physically I shifted gears slightly although to probably the wrong project. I had a few ideas based on some conversations I was having and I ran with them while they were fresh in my head. I’m still on the works on those for now. Testing the waters and compiling some data to see if taking the plunge was worth it. So far it looks good and I may pull the plug elsewhere once I’ve had enough time to test things thoroughly. I followed my heart instead of my head a bit on this one, thinking it through as I go. It has helped me to adapt and see a few holes in my process. Holes which can either be repaired or eliminated in the future to help streamline some things.

Perhaps it is the redundancy of this whole process that makes it feel as though I have gone nowhere when in fact I have taken some strides. Still I took time away from other projects that I am working on with other people to pursue my own goals. In a way it feels kind of selfish. Generally I don’t put myself first like this. That simply is not who I am.

Don’t get my wrong I do fit somewhere into my own big picture yet I believe that in order to truly accomplish what you want in life you have to help others get to where they want to be. I simply have not worked for the greater good of anyone but myself recently so that must be why I feel the way I do.

In any event I am not down on myself about it. Tomorrow is a new day after all and comes with new opportunities!

Shameless self promotion, how much is too much?

I have often wondered where the line is drawn when it comes to self promotion. How much of it is tolerable and at which point is it no longer promotion and nothing but a desperate plea for attention? I’m venturing into such territory now.

Now granted many of the entries or photographs that I do share on various channels through the internet gets cross posted automatically to another service. For instance this very entry, once completed will be posted to my Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Tumblr accounts. One would think that by creating a single entry that gets linked to five different services would be sufficient.

My own research has shown that within minutes of my post going live in addition to cross posting to all of these services at that same minute that my work is virtual y only going to be buried behind the millions of posts happening simultaneously. I have a hard enough time trying to find my own posts in my own news feeds, so imagine anyone else looking for it. Blink and you may miss it forever.

So one solution to the problem is to promote your links often except I don’t want to become that annoying guy that only clogs up your news feed with the same stale information multiple times per day. So now here I am faced with a conundrum. When do I promote my work? How many times per day is acceptable?

I don’t know what the etiquette is for such a thing or if there is really any etiquette for it at all. I mean there is no such thing as bad press right even if it is just you talking yourself up to the masses. After all no one is a better salesman of your own material than you!

Of course the tolerance for such a thing varies from person to person. I mean we are already inundated with way too many advertisements as it is in our news feeds and on videos. I have even seen advertisements on advertisements! Because of this have people become preconditioned to seeing the same information over and over again even if it is from someone they know? Does it bother a person to see what amounts to self advertising versus some crappy algorithm that a software engineer has come up with to pair targeted advertisements to your recent searches and comments?

So back to the original question. When it comes to shameless self promotion, how much is too much?

Welcome to the internet, but what have you done for me lately?

I have spent the last few weeks standing on the sidelines observing the internet and some of it’s idiosyncrasies. Content is still king, but nearly as important these days are the timing of your posts and the number of people it reaches. You could write the best articles or take best photos, but if you have no audience or choose the wrong time of day to post them your content will get lost in the shuffle. Do you ever wonder why you most witty status updates and tweets can go unnoticed in a heartbeat? That is all due to timing.

You need content to gain an audience, but you also need an audience or else your content will go unnoticed. In order to gain an audience, or followers as they are called these days, you need to interact with other peoples content. So basically you need to do some networking a build up the circle of people that will be exposed to your own content. Despite even a large audience often some of your best content can still go completely unnoticed.

So the way I see it there are two ways to ensure that people are engaging with your content. You can either flood their news feeds with posts at any and all hours of the day or you can take a more scientific approach and gather some data about your target audience and time your posts accordingly. Both are acceptable ways of going about it. You can blindly throw as many darts as possible at a dartboard and hit a bullseye or two or you can take your time and aim your darts to increase your percentage of bullseyes.

It’s all about the timing. What have you done for me lately?

Me, me, me, me, me, I, I, I, I, I…

Generally I am able to get through most of my days with a good attitude and a positive outlook, but every once in a while there is this reoccurring thorn in my side called human nature and it sickens me.

Lately its people with their me first attitude. What’s in it for me? What am I going to get out of it? I want it my way! This is important to me!

Completely selfish and self serving. Go out of your way to help someone only to have them complain that you didn’t help more. Give people an inch and they will take a mile.

I guess that is OK if you are only looking out for #1.

Honestly that’s nothing but a bunch of #2 to me!

Flavor of the second.

Building my online photography presence is not without its challenges. I upload my work to multiple websites to try and gain as much exposure as I can. It is very easy for your work to get lost in the ten of thousands of pictures that are being posted each minute. Facebook claims upwards of 200,000 pictures being uploaded every minute. Those numbers are simply staggering. How will anyone ever see what you are posting? How will anyone discover you photos?

The whole idea behind many of these websites is all about networking. Make as many “friends” in the community as you can otherwise your work will get buried without so much as a single view. Join groups, participate in discussions and share your work within smaller subgroups within the larger groups. Comment and like other photos to build your network and your audience. I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine!

You need to have good work in order to get noticed, however you have to work equally hard at networking or you will never get noticed. It’s a double edged sword and finding the right balance of time is very tricky.

Other factors go in like the timing of your post and the metadata you include with it. I’m talking tagging. Tag everything and anything relevant to your photographs on the odd chance that someone actually does a search for that information through that particular service. Again it’s a tricky game and one that requires a bit of practice to be successful.

If you should happen to be lucky enough to get one of your submissions noticed realize that exposure will not survive the minute. You might get a like, a favorite or a comment and just like that whoever discovered your work is on to the next flavor. Even if you interact back, chances are your flavor is already gone and forgotten.

Flavor of the second, be sure to savor every one you get!

From snapshots to photographs.

I have spent some time recently looking back through a bunch of photos that I have taken from the year 2007 up through today. I can only really go back to 2007 because that is when I started taking pictures with anything other than a cell phone and back in those days cell phone cameras were just awful! I started out with a Fuji E550, a decent point and shoot camera that got the job done. Soon after I upgraded to a Sony DSC-W80, another point and shoot camera which captured much clearer images and much better video.

From 2007 until 2008 most of the photos I took were basically snapshots. Cool stuff that I would see around and document by taking a simple picture. There was to occasional gem in there that was something more than a just picture, but those were few and far between. I played around with some photo editing here and there as well, but nothing much to enhance the quality of the photos. Mainly just things that I though would look cool. A color filter here, a vingette there and maybe a focal blur. Nothing special, just nice.

I fell off the map in 2009. Virtually no photos taken at all until I picked it back up early in 2010. I started off taking more of the same except I was getting decent shots in much more often. I was still using my Sony at this point, but I was experimenting with different perspectives and angles. I also got more into photo editing. Enhancing colors, contrast, tinting, shifting the hue and manipulating the details a bit. Mostly subtle enhancements, but enough to make certain things pop. The composition was certainly better as well, still most of it was basically pictures of stuff, places, people and events.

In the fall of 2010 we finally got our first DSLR camera. A Nikon D3100 which I’m still using to this day. I was taking much better photos right away with this camera. Sure there was still the occasional snapshot, but everything was very composed and needed little to no editing. I was finally taking photographs! And after a few months I stopped, life got in the way.

I finally picked it back up again this year and I haven’t looked back. This time around I know what I am looking for before I compose the actual photograph. I can see the finished product in my mind before I look through the viewfinder of the camera. I can see how I will enhance the color, what I might crop out and how I am going to edit the photo to get the final result that I want. Somewhere in my head despite all of that time away a light bulb turned on and suddenly I am able to get results.

Like all things in life photography has certainly been a journey. I’ve come a long way from 640 X 480 self portraits from a VGA camera!

Taking two steps forward and twenty-two steps sideways!

I have been at this digital and social media business for long time now. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, Instagram, YouTube, various blogs, and tons of websites for sharing pictures, articles and videos all over the internet. I’ve set up cross posting, links, tracks backs, ping backs and basically weaved a messy web of connected profiles and websites all over the internet!

Now that I am moving forward I have been cleaning up a few of these places. I needed to get rid of the excess profiles on the blogging websites and change the info on important accounts that I am still using. I also needed to clean up or in most cases completely clean out some of the links I was giving for all of my work online. Actually the mess is not nearly as awful as if first seems and getting rid of some of these profiles is the easiest step in most cases. Now the major players that I have listed above all need to be cleaned up and updated for sure and I am making some good progress at this time.

The good news is that despite the apparent haphazardness of it all I managed to actually lay a bit of the groundwork for building my name and my brand along the way. However until I get everything running like the well oiled machine that it needs to be I will still be doing the cleanup in aisle 10!