Power of Online Photo Events-RIT Reunion

I was just running the numbers on how wildly popular my web site for the RIT Reunion Photos was this year. We create a custom web site for the event and upload to it live all weekend. Here are some of the numbers.

So you understand… we have two things:
The Reunion Photo Site that people visited first as the home page, then the Photo Galleries themselves (on another site).

(photo by Natalie Best… see web site linked below)

And the photo gallery site stats are pretty impressive:
A total of almost 322,000 photos from the event were viewed.

What was most popular (rounded)?

107,000 President’s Ball Candids
62,600 Ball Couples & Elvis with Couples
52,000 Campus Receptions & PM Candids
48,000 Hockey Event & Receptions
29,000 Athletic Reunions

It’s hard to quantify just how huge this event was… But on just one day the Reunion Photo Site  served 1.22 Gigabytes of material.

This is the main photo site, not including the photo galleries with the big photos… but just the small stuff on the home page of the photo site.

That’s 15 times the volume that people normally see on my entire, main photo site in a day.

The photo galleries served 27.2 Gigs of photos total since they were put up.

Where did they come from?
1700 came from RIT.edu
400 from Facebook: This is the big news.

I can’t promise those were all RIT people… but Facebook didn’t even show up on my incoming links list last month… so I’d guess it’s mostly RIT.
The rest would have been directly coming to the site via the cards we gave out and notes in our slideshow at the Ball, etc.

So I’ve got to say, I’m really excited about the impact of our HuthPhoto Web Event. And the web site stays up for at least a year, continuing to be viewed by visitors. I’ve even see some of our web slide shows from events googling higher than the client’s official web site. What a great way to promote next year’s event, by using the previous year’s photo galleries, web site or slide show.

Thanks to everyone involved in making this happen!
Rob Grow and Kelly Redder @ RIT Alumni have given me free reign over the past 5 years to create this idea.
Peggy Glitch, Rachel Pikus and the other staff work to get it all linked up and promoted to Alumni.

Bob Finnerty at RIT News Services gives us massive play with a prominent link to the photos on the main RIT homepage (this is *critical* by the way, if you do this for your events!)

And my amazing photo team that helped cover over 17 events for 4 days:

Brady Dillsworth
Natalie Best
Richard Baker

Out of work and wanting to try photography?

Ah, so my friend just told me he’s been out of work for 7 months and he’s wondering about photography for money… but money is tight. (We’re just getting back in touch thanks to FaceBook).

If money is tight… start with the low end on cameras and make shooting earn the next steps… but you do have to start with something like the Rebel and lens and a flash, so still around $900-$1000. Too bad you weren’t around here, I could loan you some older stuff like I do with some of my young associate shooters.

No matter what you end up doing full time in the future, it’s great way to make money here and there…

For now, take any digital camera you have and shoot tons and learn lots online.

Here are a few good sites:

Strobist : Great lighting with inexpensive Flash

Tips From the Top Floor Podcast : Creative Photogaphy

Start to talk to people about wanting to get going and see what they say. If things are just right, maybe you can get the first couple hundred from a good shoot with someone that will prepay (like a family person needing some family portraits… or get creative and have like 2 or 3 families who have kids in little league pay for you to come to 2 or 3 games and you’ll give them all the photos… maybe rent a long lens.

There are lots of ways to start. BUT you have to have the eye and some talent. Also sign up for free online stuff so people can see your photos quick… like Flickr and a Wordpress blog.

Good luck man!

Best way to make a web site… CSS!

I got a message from John at the Wayne County Arts group and he’s been tasked with updating their web site. It had been created a while back in Adobe GoLive. He commented on liking my site (above) and so here’s what I said. This mostly applies to small organizations and self-employed folks like me. It also requires some interest in graphic design, or you can make a crazy-ugly site… and we really don’t need more of those, do we

Here’s a good site about what’s possible with CSS, CSS Zen Garden. Both examples above have the exact same content, but use CSS to style them radically different. On the Zen Garden site, you can click to see for yourself all of the submitted CSS designs. It’s amazing. An example of CSS on this site is the design squares at the top left. Clicking on those change the background design, and could change the entire site if it was coded to do that.

I had used GoLive before I switched over to a CSS workflow. GoLive is gone and Dreamweaver is the current product from Adobe.

Now, those pages can be as beautiful or as ugly as the person’s skill. The two aspects are using a good graphic artist in the design and then someone who can make stuff happen via the options and coding (sorry if you already know that, just trying to be thorough). So to do it with Dreamweaver, you can work visually, not just hardcoding… drag images in and use the options/code to create links with images, etc. I’d guess that’s what was done with the county site.

The easier way is with CSS templating. I’m on Mac and use RapidWeaver.
You can create some really elegant pages, simply using template they have and that you can buy and add on.

It’s still possible to make a dull page, but you folks should have access to graphic designers that have worked enough on the web to steer you right. It’s more likely to create a site that looks like it’s from a template, so you have to fight that as well. BUT it’s easy to create a pretty powerful site quickly.
I suggest that young photographers look at lots of really great photos to learn what world-class work looks like. The same is true on the web. Search for sites that are in your industry and find the ones that are truly functional, useful and elegant. Then figure out how to steal (ah, I mean implement) those aspects of great sites into your site. Not making your site a rip off copy, but learning from what works and what is beautiful about the design and finding how that can work for you… just like in photography or your personal art!

I’d suggest that people use Dreamweaver because they are pros and want total control and all of the options. They should use CSS based solutions if they don’t want the hassle, or like me enjoy mixing tweaking the code with the ease of design.
Another CSS setup on the Mac is iWeb from Apple (free on every new Mac and wonderful).

There are other options… modifying a blog setup to be your web site (might not be as practical for an Arts site, but it could work, and could allow artists to write in now and then blog-style). Also there are just plain online templates you can buy and fill. One thing not to do is use Microsoft Frontpage if it still exists… it’s know to create nasty sites in many ways.

Oh, one final consideration. One that we bump into with our church web site… the way I create my site is great, but it’s hard to be modified by a group of people. Really it’s just meant for all changes to be made from the computer that created it (there are ways around this, but that’s for another show…). So if the goal is just to create a site that others will change on an ongoing basis, a CSS site sitting on your home computer might not be the best solution. If you are willing to make changes, (or willing to learn and implement the plug-in that allows changes to RapidWeaver sites via the web)… then you’d be OK.

Hopefully that’s a helpful walk through the web maze for anyone interested in creating their own site, or who wonders what tools I’m using to do my site and my blog.

Mac Screen Capture

My friend Paul asked about the best Mac Screen Capture.

Built into the Mac are some pretty good options (Command-Shift-3 for grab screen and Command-Shift-4 to get a selection crosshair to drag around anything you want a capture of.) BTW, when you are in the Crosshair mode, you can hit the spacebar and get the Camera, where you can then just hover over screen windows and they beautifully autoselect (even the dock and menus).

The next step up, which I bought when I started teaching and writing so much is Snapz Pro X. It has a ton of options and you can save other places that then Mac built-in default of the desktop. The big upgrade is drop-shadow on grabs and the ability to grab video, so any thing that can appear on your Mac’s screen can be recorded.

The new software is LIttleSnapper, and we’ll see when it finally releases, how it’ll be different… They are blogging up a store and there’s a demo movie on their site. It’s from the same people that make my web creation software (RealMac’s RapidWeaver), so it’s bound to be good.
Happy snappin’!

Life in a Post-Newspaper PR World

I had a really amazing discussion with a client last week. It started with the fact that the local paper is cutting back in a million ways and that to get out their message, even on great stories is nearly impossible… but how to get out the message in our current world, which is arguably post-newspaper.

Obviously we discussed the web and he said they post press releases online constantly, but how do you become a web site that people want to go to, and then how do you make them want to see your message??

He told me a story about a really exciting blog one expert started on his own, and it was getting tons of hits, until the top people saw it and thought it presented the organization’s message ‘in too light of a manner’… and so they killed it.

This is the challenge today— Promote your organization well and have something people want to see…but it has to start with the vision to be trusting, interesting, valuable and different.

Check out what these guys are doing… different, fun, educational… bet they get lots of hits and I bet their organization’s reputation as a cool place is growing. The main site is here and this is a fun out-takes reel:

Your homework Ms. PR Guru… would your organization run with an idea like this, or run from it?!
I have maybe 10% of my clients that do really interesting things on the web with my photos… but many just don’t have the ability (Web site is created by IT and can’t be easily updated), or vision (don’t realize how many visitors cool, current photos on the site). It’s basically free to do and I know over the next few years it’s going to be a huge growth area… and now with the media doing less coverage of exciting things my clients do, we’ll be helping them get out the message online.

Blog back!

My blog setup had an error for quite a while that wasn’t allowing me to post… but now I’m back! I’ve also updated a few things and maybe I’ll turn comments back on for a while, we’ll see. I’d love to hear your comments and questions if I can just keep the spammers out.

More soon!

Ken