Blog moved...

I've decided to move the blog to my website... and due to difficulty in moving the content across all the historical content will remain here, but everything new will be added here: http://www.t8photography.com/blog

So, please update your newsreader :)

New T8 Photography Blog
Web: http://www.t8photography.com/blog
RSS: http://www.t8photography.com/blog/feed

Aiman

I visited my new nephew on the weekend, Aiman. Here's some photos of the little guy with his proud parents :)

Panoramas at the coast

Had a great weekend at the coast, and some time to take some photos for me! I have recently upgraded one of the D300 bodies to a D700, so had a new camera to play with. And with the D700, I also needed a new FX lens to go with it, so I bought the 24-70 f/2.8 :)

One thing that I haven't done much of before was stitched panoramas.


Derelict wharf on the Moruya River. This was 6 shots stitched together and a few minor adjustments made in Lightroom first (like a bit of extra saturation and some graduated filter for the sky). Click the pic for a bigger image.


Broulee Beach. 10 shots stitched. Has some interesting details in the photo, like the woman on her bike looking at the beach, various people on the sand, and Broulee Island in the background. Pity it wasn't a nice sunny day...

Some more panos to follow.

Emma & Jeff

Congratulations to Emma and Jeffrey. Married on Saturday, 21st February 2009 at the Anglican Church in Queanbeyan.

Here is my favorite photo from the day:


I've also set up a page on my website for Emma & Jeff. This page has a small summary of their wedding as well as a link to the slideshow and an embedded video slideshow. I've also enabled comments on the bottom so friends and family can leave a message.

Canberra Wedding Expo

I exhibited at the Canberra Wedding Expo on the 1st of February. There was a huge turnout, I heard there was around 2000 people turn up. There were heaps of booths, especially photographers and everyone was pretty busy all day.

I created a stop-motion video of Brent and I setting up the booth, check it out here.

On the tables I had a range of Photobooks from previous weddings which were very popular. I also had brochures made up, a pull-up banner, logo on core-flute and of course the LCD TV with a rolling slideshow of images and marketing messages. On the wall I had my packages pricelist and a range of testimonials.

Was it worth it though? Always a hard question to answer. I do know that I have had a few bookings by people I saw on the day, so probably was worthwhile for me. On the other hand, the cost of a booth is a lot of clicks in Google... Also, it's hard to have an in depth conversation with people at the show because it's a very noisy environment and most people seem to be in a bit of a rush or a little overwhelmed.

I'm going to alter my booth setup for the next expo slightly, but overall I was pretty happy with how it all went.

Advertising

About November last year I stopped advertising on Google. Reason was that my website was in a mess, resulting in people coming to the website via the ad and then leaving straight away - ie. money down the drain. So, the task over xmas was to redo the website. Well, it took longer than expected, but it's done now. No done as in "completely finished". Websites evolve over time of course, but it was done in the sense that I was ready to start advertising again.

Advertising works - everyone knows that, but it's also working for me. A large percentage of hits to my website are via google ads, and while it's much more expensive than it was, say, 3 or 4 years ago, I suppose it's not too expensive. I've set my budget to around $5 a day, and bidding around $1 per click. So that's more expensive, but not too dissimilar to magazine advertising of about $1400 for a full page ad over a year. At least with the Google ad I know that I'll get hundreds of visitors - with the magazine ad it's very hard to measure.

One thing that caught my interest last night was Google Insights for Search. Typing in a search term shows how frequently that term was searched for over time and also broken down into geographic region. The main thing I learnt was that most people research for their wedding in the beginning of the year.



So, for me, when my website was in a mess and no advertising, I was missing out on the most popular time in the year for wedding planning (and therefore bookings). Whoops... won't make that mistake again :)

Another thing I found interesting was that of the top ten most popular search terms relating to wedding research, Wedding Photography doesn't rate a mention!



The above table/graph is for the Canberra region. The Australian wide set of top searches is very similar, but also includes the terms "wedding hire" and "wedding reception", and still no "wedding photographer"! No idea why this is, maybe it's because brides find it difficult to choose the right dress and have to keep searching for the perfect one... almost unbelievable! :)

New Years at Kangaroo Valley

This year we had New Years at a property called Yeola in Kangaroo Valley. Huge house. Four families. Lots to drink. Lots of fun. And a bit too short...



Photos here: Slideshow or Video

Goals for 2009

There's some stuff I don't want to be public information, but the stuff that I don't mind is:

• Book a lot more weddings (need to do more advertising)
• Get a new Mac (faster, more storage and bigger screen)
• Update the office furniture as the current stuff is pretty horrible
• Upgrade one body to full frame, probably a D700
• Add a couple more lenses to the collection, hopefully a 24-70mm f/2.8 to go with the D700
• Get a good portfolio of landscape and nature photos, and possibly have an exhibition
• Do some more camping and travelling
• And of course: keep regularly posting to the blog!

Photography Diploma

Today I got my Diploma in Photography from The Photography Institute.

Good stuff:
- taught me quite a bit of history and theory
- kept me motivated to learn
- has given me a Diploma (ummm, yay!?)

Not so good stuff:
- content was a bit light on
- assignments weren't challenging enough

Anyway, glad I did it and glad it's done!

Working on the beach

The xmas holidays this year for me were a bit different - I scored a job for Coca-Cola in Wollongong for 13 days taking photos of people having surfing lessons on the beach. Yep, it was a dream job :)



The campaign was run by Urban Media for Coke. The campaign was free beginner surfing lessons on the beaches of Australia. It was run on heaps of beaches Australia wide (probably around 20), with six lessons a day, for most of January. At each beach there were branded surf-boards, two surfing instructors, two admin staff, one photographer, Coke tent, and of course free Coca-Cola for the participants when the lesson finished. The photographer had to take photos of everyone learning to surf and having a good time - the photos were then uploaded to Facebook that evening and the participants could tag themselves in the photos to win prizes.



I used my 80-400mm lens for the shots of people in the surf, which, combined with the D300 and 3D live tracking turned on, was a fantastic combination. Hopefully they run this campaign again; I'll be definitely putting my hand up for the job!