The Terra Galleria Blog – QT Luong

A lot of plan changes occurred in 2011, so that I have not really accomplished what I set out to do, yet I’m still lucky that I got to go around and experiment a bit. Here’s a chronological selection of some favorites taken during the year 2011, which also serves as a kind of (*) “year in review”. Most of them were shot at 24mm on Canon 5Dmk2. Links point to blog entries where you can see more images and read background about them.

Most popular blog entries in 2011: Six-part series about my photography business on the internet (start here), Best ISO for low noise on Canon 5D mk2.

February. I traveled to Jackson, Wyoming, which I had never visited in winter. In Grand Teton National Park, I got to see the Grand Teton only for a few hours during my week and half stay, leading me to more minimal and tighter compositions than I usually seek.

In Yellowstone National Park, the sky cleared up only during one night, when I made this moonlit exposure of Old Faithful. But getting there was already quite an experience.

April/May I spent a week on the island of Kauai. I revisited the Na Pali Coast, however from a photographic point of view, the most interesting was the realization that I could create beautifully flowing seascapes in mid-day.

One of my main emphasis this year was on night sky photography (thanks to a recently acquired EF 24/1.4 II) and time-lapses. On this visit to Hawaii, I rented a Jeep, which made it possible to visit the Mauna Kea Summit, home to the finest telescopes on the planet. This also saved a long walk to the Green Sand Beach.

I returned to Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, mostly for the new Halemaumau vent which wasn’t present during my past visit. This exposure was made unattended, a first for me. I also photographed the rainforest, using flash techniques rekindled by attending a Flashbus McNally/Strobist presentation.

The third Hawaiian island I visited was Maui, for Haleakala National Park, where I photographed in stormy conditions both the Haleakala Crater and Kipahulu, linked by a drive on South Maui that I haven’t done before. However, the highlight was to see this group of Nene birds. The world’s rarest goose, it came to the brink of extinction in mid 20th century, when only 30 birds remained. Since then, the species has rebounded, but it is still a rare an treat to spot them.

June. Since my Yosemite book was published, I decided to spend more time in Kings Canyon National Park and adjacent Sequoia National Park, where I caught this grove of Giant Sequoias trees behind a veil of dogwood blooms.

August. We took off for a family road trip in the Northwest, visiting the eastern part of Oregon (including the Lake Owyhee area and Hells Canyon) and the three National Parks in Washington State. The lower water conditions at Marymere Falls in Olympic National Park gave rise to divided channels which created a totally different liquid effect than when I previously photographed there in the spring.

September. I returned to Acadia National Park for a third straight consecutive year, but in different seasonal conditions, as it was still summer (it was early in the month).

This was on the occasion of an invitation to lecture at the National Heritage Museum. After the event, I spent some time to photograph Lexington, MA. I supplemented moonlight with a bit of light painting to create this new view of Louisa May Alcott’s house.

(*) I haven’t yet processed the images created during the last quarter of 2011, which focused on cultural subjects mostly absent from the rest of the year: a stay in Vietnam was followed by a wide-ranging trip to South Korea, where I visited 9 out of the country’s 10 World Heritage sites. This was bracketed by trips to Kings Canyon National Park and Reno.

That situation was the same in previous years, which is why I hadn’t made such “year in review” posts. I prefer to let images sit a bit after a trip, so that I can look at them more objectively. The proximity of a trip makes it more difficult to distinguish the excitement of the experience from the visual strength of images. I process images in block, as my work is often about a story rather than a single image. Because of those two reasons, I rarely post images which are less than a quarter old, but this year I realized that 9 months was already plenty of images for such a short selection.

Let me know if you have a favorite!

I wish everyone a year 2012 full of happiness, health, and success. My sincere thanks for your continuing readership and interest in my photography.

On the occasion of a return to Lexington, I walked the Freedom Trail and the Black Heritage Trail in Boston, before taking again a trip to Acadia National Park – for a third consecutive year. As I set up my camera bag on a slope on the shores of Jordan Pond, it toppled, a lens spilled out, and I could only watch as it rolled down into the lake! Later, as I was getting ready to set-up a time-lapse, I downloaded hurriedly a 32GB memory card on two hard drives in order to free-up the space, then reformatted it. Normally, I visually check images, but it was already 11pm, and I was going to get up for sunrise. When I returned home, I realized that I had downloaded the wrong card. My images were overwritten, so no recovery was possible from the card: four days of photography were wiped out. The only images remaining from that Acadia visit are almost all from the last day. Lesson learned! This post presents photographs from my last day in Acadia, the one that followed the memory card incident and therefore was the only one preserved in pixels.

A decade and half ago, I photographed on Ocean Drive the first rays of sun illuminating granite slabs, then afterwards noticed a beach covered with large round pebbles. Since then, I had waited quite a few times there for the light of sunrise – even in the rain. That morning, with a bit of color on the horizon, the dawn was promising.

However, the sunrise time turned out to be misty.

Acadia National Park is known for its jagged coastline of granite, but the park actually includes a sand beach, simply named … “Sand Beach”. I guess there aren’t too many of them around, and being in New England, that’s normally a popular spot, but in early morning, it was totally deserted.

I hiked on a short, but rugged trail to one of the tallest headlands, the Great Head. Just half a mile away from the crowded (and often traffic-jammed) Ocean Drive, the small peninsula has retained its wild character.

By the time I returned to Sand Beach, vacationers had arrived.

I headed towards the quieter part of the Park, along the carriage roads. The weather was cloudy, but looking towards the East, I could see a clearing, so I decided to try and find a wide scenic view.

I hiked to the top of South Bubble, but the view wasn’t great. It was much more interesting from North Bubble, as I could see the Ocean beyond Jordan Pond. I arrived there just in time for some sunset colors. Due to the late hour, beyond the trail junction of the two Bubbles, I didn’t see anybody. I stayed until dark, hiked down, and drove south as I had to be at the museum at noon the next day.

More images of Acadia National Park

As explained in the previous post on my internet-based photography business, the goal which drove the design of the terragalleria.com site was to license images and sell prints of photographs already created during personal projects, directly from that website. This has been my sole path to a full-time photography career which supports me and my family. This, the final installment of my series about my photography business (1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 ) discusses how I managed to generate the amount of internet traffic I needed to pull it off.

This approach will not work for everyone. When designing your site, you need to define clearly your own objectives, because some goals are just orthogonal. Assignment-based photographers often just want to refer potential professional clients to an online version of a portfolio. A fancy Flash-based site showcasing their specific vision with an extremely tight edit of images and a matching design (the kind that wins design awards) may be the best way to impress a client, but such a site will never pull a large amount of traffic by itself. Others may have intermediate goals: for instance a wedding photographer tries to book jobs with a specific clientele, but this clientele consists of the general public, and there is a good chance that they could find him on the internet by stumbling onto his website, so some of the ideas in this document would apply.

There are three ways for someone to land on your website: they can visit it directly (typing the URL, using bookmarks or lists), follow a link from another website – including a social media site, or click on search engine results after typing in keywords.

The first way is most beneficial to you, because it is conductive of repeat visits. Repeat visitors are the audience that you are trying to build, those who truly appreciate your work and are most likely to buy something from you. Artwork is not a commodity, therefore priced accordingly, and seldom bought as an impulse purchase. On the other hand, search engine users are fickle. In my case, the majority of them stay less than a minute on the site. The majority do not visit any other page than the one they landed on, returning immediately to the search engine page (this is called a “bounce”). You can see on the graphic below (Google Analytics) that a substantial portions of the visitors to terragalleria.com are returning visitors.

Terragalleria.com has been around for a decade, which is a long time on the internet. If your site is relatively new, your traffic will come almost exclusively from search engines, and maybe social media links, if you are very active. Yet, designing your site so that visitors will want to come back time and time again should be your highest priority. The only way to do so is to repeatedly create a great user experience. This means high quality content (images plus text) and great design (beautiful and easy to use). The often repeated “Content is King” has never been truer, but delivery is also essential, because most photographs do not function best individually: images have to be organized in a coherent and pleasing way, with an easy navigation (including an internal search function) which makes the site attractive and useful. Photographs are useful for what do you ask ? Many visitors have told me that they use the terragalleria.com site to help plan their vacations or even photo shoots. The good news is that making your site user-friendly will also often make it search-engine friendly. If you love your visitors, the internet will love you back. The bad news is that it takes a lot of work over a long time.

I do not design for search engines, but rather for humans. Whenever I am faced with a design choice, I think first about visitors. Let me give a few examples. I have an image category titled Waterfalls. That page includes all of my 400+ images of waterfalls. I could have used multiple keywords such as “waterfall”, “waterfalls”, “water fall”, “water falls” to try to target more, but decided against it, because it would have made it more difficult to browse. On my National Parks page, I could have repeated the word “National Park” with the name of each park. I decided against it because that would have cluttered the page. The visitor already knows he is looking at National Parks ! Yet try a Google search for images of national parks using a variation of keywords and constructs, and see who comes on top. On a page such as Olympic National Park, I could have placed tons of legitimate keywords just by writing captions below the photos (they are in a toolip instead). However, this would have prevented images from filling the page at all window sizes. Also, I find that words get in the way of the images – which is why many fine-art photobooks do not print any words at all next to the images, and instead place captions in a separate section. So in this case, I’ve broken on purpose a cardinal rule of SEO (which I’ll discussed later).

After people type keywords in a search engine, typically thousands, if not millions of results are returned – see the example below, which involves a particularly competitive query. However, studies have repeatedly shown that most people will look only at the first page of results. There is absolutely no way to guarantee that your page will feature on this first page based on organic (unpaid) results. Anybody who tells you otherwise is simply a crook. On the other hand, it is possible to guarantee a top placement with paid results, by buying advertising space on search results pages (the right column in this example). However for a photography site this could be a costly approach. You are not amazon.com. Most visitors do not come to your site to buy anything, so you would be paying for a lot of clicks that do not generate business.

Sound SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a web page by making it higher ranked in organic search results. Because of examples such as those shown above, people sometimes assume that I am a SEO expert, who has mastered complicated and obscure secrets.

There are no such secrets. The reason why it is easy to feel confused about SEO is that, within a decade, an entire industry has grown around it, which often relies on smokescreens and hype, if not on sneaky tactics that would be better described as Search Engine Abuse. I do not rely on any such trickery and do not recommend that you do so. Abusing search engines reduces the effectiveness of the very technologies you’re depending on. Whenever someone thinks of a way to artificially improve their web page rankings, every SEO “expert” does it, making the field level again. Not only that, but if you attempt to cheat, the search engines have become so sophisticated that eventually you’ll be found and penalized, sometimes heavily. Google has often dropped entire websites from its search results. I do not wish to give negative examples here, but I’ve seen several photography websites that looked to me built more for search engines than humans plunge dramatically and suddenly in traffic after doing very well for a period of time.

The most important thing is to understand that the “rules” of SEO aren’t magic. They are simply based on any search engine goal, which is to return relevant and trustful results. Once you’ve understood that, the fundamentals are common sense, although the results themselves can almost never been predicted with certainty. I am often puzzled by search results. I’ve read that the algorithms used by modern search engines are some complex that even the software engineers who created them cannot predict their outcome.

Because these days Google is so dominant, all the technical details you need to know are listed in Webmaster Guidelines from Google that you should study carefully. I also recommend to open a (free) account with Google Webmaster, as this will provide you with a lot of data relevant to your SEO. In the rest of this post I will concentrate on the big picture, because there are a number of other articles about SEO for photographers which do a good job at commenting on technical details. Some of the most useful are listed at the end of this article, but study the Google document first.

The importance of text

I mentioned earlier that one should design for humans, not for search engines. For photographers, there is one important exception: while humans (and, to some extent, artificial intelligence programs) can understand images, search engines cannot: they are text-based. For a human, an image is worth 1000 words by itself, but the search engine explicitly needs those. That’s why Google image publishing guidelines explicitly asks you to “tell as much as you can about the image”.

That’s also why I advice against the use of Flash as a main platform for the purposes of SEO. Flash is a visual technology: the text is mixed with the rest of the design, you cannot cut and paste it, nor can search engines make sense of it. Flash designers claim that there are workarounds, but I have yet to see any Flash-based webpage achieving high ranking for a competitive search. On the other hand, if you treat Flash content as an image, making it only a portion of a page and surrounding it with text as explained next, you should be OK.

What should the text be ? Anything that you think is relevant. Remember that search engines reward relevance: it is easy for them to figure out that pages are irrelevant by counting bounces. However, since search engine users enter just a few words in the search engine boxes, you have to think which of those search terms (“keywords”) each webpage is going to target, which simply mean include in a prominent manner. The main trade-off with keywords is popularity (how many people search for them) vs competition. The more popular the keyword, generally the more competitive it is. You can compare specific keyword popularity across time and places by using Google Trends. The Google Adwords Keyword Tool provides a measure of both competition and popularity, so that you could try to target popular keywords with less competition.

Each combination of words is different. You cannot try to win by “optimizing” for many of them at a same time, as search engines detect “keyword stuffing”. Try for instance a Google search of “america pictures” and compare with the above. If you will allow me a short digression, I’m very pleased to see Jacob Holdt‘s work so well placed, since I think it is important. However I suspect that what got it there is not only its cultural, historic, and artistic importance, but also the fact that the body of work is so extensive (more on that next).

Where should the text be ? The brief answer is everywhere ! However the single most important element on each page is the TITLE tag (this is the text you see on the top of the browser bar). Each of your images should be on its own HTML page, and have a brief but keyword-rich and unique title. If all of your image pages have a title such as “My Name photography” (as I often see), you’ve wasted the most precious real estate on your website. Next in importance is the ALT tag text, which is the surest way for you to associate words with a specific image. Search engines rely heavily on the ALT tag, but it is barely visible to humans, so you also need a descriptive caption next to the image. Although far from ideal, it’s OK to use the same text for those three elements – that what I’ve been doing to save time. Then, you’ll also want keyword text in your navigation links, headers, description tag text, URL, and image filenames. Here again, I made the mistake of ignoring the last two ones, for the benefit of the convenience of using just an image number instead. What does the fact that I’ve done well in spite of not following some “rules” tell ? That those technical details are merely tweaking.

As an example, here are the essential elements of the page http://www.terragalleria.com/parks/np-image.olym11123.html

The footprint

One of the two most important factors in high traffic numbers – one that I rarely, if ever see mentioned in SEO articles, is what I call the “footprint”. I like to use the following analogy: the internet as the earth, and your visitor as an asteroid from space. The chance that it will land in your country is proportional to its surface. Likewise, everything being equal (which is obviously not, more later), the chance of a visitor landing on your website is proportional to its number of pages, which is more or less the number of images in the case of a photography website. I am convinced that no matter how great your images are, if you do not have massive numbers of them, it will be very difficult to achieve high visibility through SEO. That’s why, for the purpose of selling work on the internet, it often isn’t productive to show only the very best of your work on your website. A portfolio is necessary for client meetings. It doesn’t hurt to have it on your website (although I’ve done well without one myself), but if your website consists exclusively of a portfolio, just do not expect to draw any significant amount of traffic.

As of this writing, there are more than 27,500 images on terragalleria.com. While some redundancy is inevitable for stock photography sales, I am making sure that each image contributes something a bit different to the whole. This was not built in a day, or even a year. As you can see from this site timeline, for the past ten years, I have strived to post at least 200 images every month. Having fresh and varied content is important to hold your visitors interest, and to signal to search engines that your site is not stale. If your website structure is not amenable to frequent updates, use a blog. SEO is simply not a short-term endeavor. It takes several years for it to pay off, because besides a large site, what you need to build is trust.

Besides the footprint analogy, how does in practice having many images help you ? This has to do with keywords. It makes it possible for you to organize your website in a layered way so that you can satisfy searches both for popular and less-frequent queries. First, let say you are trying to rank high for a popular keyword (such as “Pictures of America”). If site A has 15,000 relevant images, and site B has 50 of them, who do you think will be identified as most relevant by search engines ? I am not saying that all images should be on a single page. A nested structure is the most natural and gives many options.

Second, when you use very specific keywords for an image (“Raspberry cultivation in Watsonville”) there will be very little competition, so that you have a good chance of coming on top, but also very few searches. Yet all those searches can add up to a decent traffic number if you can satisfy a large number of different ones, which you can do if you have a large number of images. This phenomenon is similar to the “Long Tail” described in the book by Chris Anderson “The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More” as the retailing strategy – applied by amazon.com and netflix – of selling a large number of unique items with relatively small quantities sold of each. Because of a change in the indispensable Google Analytics interface, I haven’t figured it out yet how to pull out similar statistics, so I’ll illustrate this point with numbers from Oct 2010:

• top 10 keywords account for 13,891 (4% of visits)
• top 100 keywords account for 36,363 (12% of visits)
• top 1,000 keywords account for 86,912 (28% of visits)
• top 5,000 keywords account for 135,700 (45% of visits)
• keywords 5,000-133,000 account for 165,000 (55% of visits)

Trust and incoming links

The other important factor in high traffic numbers is trust. Factors that contribute to trust are the time your domain has been on the internet, as well as possibly its expiration date. However, these are insignificant compared to incoming links – although it could be argued that receiving links is a byproduct of long tenure on the internet. The breakthrough of Google was to make use of the link structure of the Web to calculate a quality ranking for each web page. The original research paper co-authored by Sergey Brin and Larry Page (shorter version) is an excellent read if you want a good understanding of that algorithm. Nowadays, all search engines use that idea: the more websites link to your website, the most popular and therefore the most trustworthy it must be.

Not all links are equal: the only ones that help are genuine links from important sites. Links from authoritative sites count more than links from obscure sites. The main metric used to assess the importance of a web page is Google PageRank (PR), a number between 0 and 10, named after Larry Page. The scale is exponential, so a link from a PR 5 site is worth maybe 10 links links from a PR 4 site and 100 links from a PR 3 site. terragalleria.com has a PR 6. You can examine the PR of a given page using a number of PageRank checker websites, although by far the most convenient is to install the Google toolbar if your browser supports it. You can also check the site popularity with tools such as Alexa. What also distinguises links is the text. Ideally, it should be matched to your keywords, but in general you do not have much control, since you are not creating the link. Take advantage of the few instances when you can control it, such as links from your other websites, family, friends, and associates.

Obtaining links on other sites is getting harder. The web used to be more open, unfortunately abuses from link spammers are rampant: my blog receives about 400 spam comments daily. Those spammers have ruined it for everyone, forcing every site owner to control more tightly external links. In general, the links that come with contributions/signatures on blog comments or forum posts are automatically tagged as “nofollow” by the site software. All links from the Wikipedia (which have been cleaned-up considerably), Flickr, and even Linkedin (!) are now “nofollow”. This makes them secondary for SEO purposes as they are not followed by search engine spiders, and do not transmit any PR. The exception to all those sites that provide only “nofollow” links would be directories sites, starting from general directories such as Yahoo down to photography and local business directories. The main limitation is that pages on a directory site have tons of links, resulting in the dilution of the value of your link. A webpage page has a fixed PR to pass. If it links to 100 sites, then each of those sites receive only 1/100 of the PR. The same problem, dilution, reduces the usefulness of links from social media sites, maybe unless you manage to get a “viral” propagation. A strategy that I see more and more is to offer content (such as guest blogs, feature articles) in exchange for a link. Such content is often produced by cheaply paid writers. I receive such requests, as well as link exchanges requests daily. But why should someone link to an irrelevant website of inferior PR ?

The problem with some of those strategies is that you are trying to mess with the ultimate organic mechanism of the internet, creating links that are not genuine. Google explicitly warns against artificial linking. They do not indicate trust, but rather manipulation. The widely used practice of “exchanging links” is actually detrimental, especially if the other site is irrelevant, or even worse, part of a “bad neighborhood” such as a link farm. I don’t think you are going to create a link farm, or a network of false blogs, but maybe that’s what the “SEO expert” you are hiring may do. Needless to say, this would very risky to you. If real people are linking to your site, it is because they had a great time there, and think it is worth showing to others. Instead of trying to create incoming links yourself, it is preferable to create awesome content, that make people want to link to you. It can often be easier to attract attention by writing about a photography-related subject such as a technique, gear review, business tips, esthetic considerations – opinionated and controversial topics seem to work well – than by posting photographs. There’s nothing wrong with that, as it indirectly helps you find an audience for your art. However, as a photographer, your ultimate goal should be to create superlative photographs, lots of them, that are good enough to make people want to link to you. So it comes down again to great work: the best you can do to improve your SEO is to go out and photograph.

Other great articles on SEO for photographers

There is a great deal of material on the web about SEO for photographers. The authors below have demonstrated that they can not only write, but are also outstanding webmasters who have achieved great SEO results for themselves or their clients. In particular, the two first entries are good examples of personal photography website that generate business for their owners.

• Dan Heller’s book chapter on Web-based photography business: includes remarks on design and SEO from a pioneer, travel photographer, photography business consultant, and creator of the most extensive personal photography website.
• Phillip Colla’s SEO tips: great collection of ideas from a nature and marine photographer with a website which is a model of organization.
• The Photographers SEO pyramid (part 2, part 3): excellent and concise guide from promising photo hosting company Photodeck whose founder JF Maion has a personal experience with SEO on a personal photography site.
• The SEO cookbook for photographers from the leading photo hosting company PhotoShelter, well researched, like the rest of their growing collections of guides.

Any questions after reading all this material ? Just ask away, as this entry is my Christmas gift to the (pro) photo community.

Part 6 of 6: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6

As seen in the two previous posts, there are plenty of sights and views in Saigon – more “interesting” than “spectacular” – however what interests me the most in that city is simply to observe and capture simple moments of life.

In many places, I’ve been threatened verbally for taking photographs of people. In my native France, the birthplace of street photography, current privacy laws apparently require prior permission before any pictures are taken in public spaces. After a few shots of a street market, or a carousel, I was confronted with suspicion. Not in Vietnam – or most of Asia – for that purpose. Almost nobody cares that you are taking their photograph. If there is any feeling, it is mostly of curiosity. As far as photography is concerned, one of the last communist countries is actually wide open.

Cong Vien Van Hoa (also known as Cong Vien Tao Dan) is a urban park, originally designed as a recreational and sporting ground for the French colonial elite. A French Colonial clubhouse in the middle of the park reminds you of this past, but now the amenities are very affordable, making the place popular with all age groups. Just a few blocks from Central Saigon, the park provides them with a welcome respite from the hustle and bustles of the city.

At first, kind of like most of the city, the park appeared unremarkable, but after a while, I began to notice scenes that one doesn’t see everywhere. Toddlers and very young children individually take to a podium to sing a song, a girl pulls out her mobile phone and uses it as a boom box to direct the dance of two other girls, a trio hits a badminton shuttlecock only with their feet, passing it around dozens of time without letting it touch the ground, a group practices Tai Chi with swords, a soccer match is played under the watchful eye of a political leader deceased more than 40 years ago. As those, and many other condensed narratives show, the human comedy is alive and well in this modest park.

More Saigon park images

Interested in traveling to Vietnam ? Check the Vietnam photo tour that I will be leading in Fall 2012.

I am always drawn to high viewpoints, because they provide an entirely new perspective. The immediacy and chaos of the street immersion gives way to a more detached experience where greater urban patterns emerge.

Just one decade ago, there were not too many high viewpoints available in Ho Chi Minh City, but since then a number of rooftop bars have opened. Although the price of a drink there is sky-high compared to the street, it remains reasonable by Western standards. Here are three of my favorite finds in central Saigon.

The highest of the downtown rooftop bars (23 floors), the Sheraton Saigon is a great place to see the new Saigon skyline, central Saigon, and get a perspective on the size of the metropolis.

The Caravelle offers a closer view of landmarks such as the Opera House, Hotel Continental, and the Cathedral.

The Rex, situated right above the Le Loi traffic circle, one of the busiest intersections in the city, is a great place to watch the traffic patterns. I was impressed by how fluidly everybody moved despite extreme crowding and no traffic lights.

More Central Saigon images

Interested in traveling to Vietnam ? Check the Vietnam photo tour that I will be leading in Fall 2012. Please note that, listening to feedback, we have been able to significantly reduce the cost of the tour by (a) using 4-star hotels instead of 5-star hotels (b) having possibly only one tour leader (me) instead of the originally planned two.

The temples and pagodas of Ho Chi Minh city provide an oasis of calm and tradition in a sprawling metropolis with mostly nondescript architecture. In general, they are be quite dispersed, and best explored by motorbike-taxi. The exception is in Cholon, the Chinese district of the city. There, more than a dozen temples can found in a compact area which can easily be explored on foot. Those Chinese-style temples, with their rich decoration (dominated by the auspicious color red) and incense coils are some of my favorites in the city.

More images of Cholon Temples

Interested in traveling to Vietnam ? Check the Vietnam photo tour that I will be leading in Fall 2012.

My previous trips to Vietnam have been during the dry winter season. Although the bulk of the monsoon season is in summer, during my last stay in November, there were a few days when in the late afternoon the sky would all of the sudden become ominously dark. This was a sure sign it was going to rain soon. An when it rains, it pours ! In the more upscale central District 1, the streets drain out fast, but in this slightly peripheral area of the city, they remained flooded for some while in the evening. When I was making those images, away from the main tourist areas, everybody around assumed I was a photojournalist and that images would be used to urge to municipality to fix the local drains faster, but I was in fact just capturing a slice of life.

More images of Ho Chi Minh City traffic

Interested in traveling to Vietnam ? Check the Vietnam photo tour that I will be leading in Fall 2012.

In a previous post, I’ve listed what I consider to be the top ten proven ways to make money from photography. As those who know me may have guessed, I did not use any of those avenues during my first ten years in business. Instead, my photography income is almost entirely based on the sales of prints and licenses of images created on self-assignment, through this website.

The mode of operation of the business was therefore the following: I visited on my own locations of personal interest to me, created photographs there, published them on terragalleria.com, and waited for visitors to find them. This way of doing business worked particularly well for me for two reasons.

On the photography side, this kept the fun and inspiration: functioning as an artist, I was able photograph exactly what I was interested in, in the way I meant to, free of any interferences associated with commercial jobs or external pressures at a time when I was developping my vision. Whether the resulting images would be “saleable” or not was not a consideration, since I feel that all images would contribute something interesting to the website. While peripheral activities such as teaching, writing, and providing other services, can be rewarding on their own, not engaging in them let me devote more time to my photography projects, which were the reason I chose to have a career in photography. This also provided a test of whether my images were strong enough for me to make a living for me and my family from them alone.

On the business side, I have a modest, low-profile personality, which would prevent me from being an effective salesperson. In particular, I am not particularly good at “pushing”, trying to attempt initial contact with specific buyers. This is how most professional photographers operate (top proven ways to promote your photography) because the alternative approach can be expensive. In “pull marketing”, instead of contacting clients, you use mass-media outlets to get clients to respond by contacting you. Traditionally, pull marketing has relied on print, television, and radio. Because of the cost of advertising in those media, pull marketing was used mainly by large companies. That’s where the internet has been a game changer. I was more a mathematician interested in the perception of space than a software developer, but my technical background (CS PhD) still made it possible to create a large photography website using a text editor ten years ago when there were no easy-to-use tools or services for doing so. Although I am not good at coding, I am even worse at cold-calling, having worked in a field where you are judged by your results (science and engineering are areas that use proofs).

The internet has transformed how we access and consume information. Potentially anyone with a computer and a connection from around the world can see your images around the clock, opening up for the first time a line of direct communication between artists and art buyers. People do not visit your website because you handed them a business card, but because they somehow found it on the internet. Yet, this seemingly random mechanism can sometimes provide a number of viewers comparable with traditional media, at an extremely low cost. This makes the internet the first affordable medium for pull marketing. Maintaining and updating terragalleria.com represents a considerable amount of work, however the hosting fees for the dedicated server are less than $250/month.

It’s not just marketing. Unlike in the physical world, it is also inexpensive to own and operate your sales outlet. A gallery would split the sales proceeds, but more importantly, it would carry only a small selection of your artworks. While a gallery does promote its artists, that promotion is split amongst represented artists – not evenly, and not in your favor if you are not a “star”. But the bulk of the promotion effort goes towards the gallery itself. This is even more true of stock photography agencies, with the difference that while good galleries are true partners for their artists, rare nowadays is the agency which has your best interest in mind when making their deals, while many are borderline exploitative. On the other hand, your own website accepts every work you submit: it gives you total control on which work is presented and how it is presented, and no one else is represented there. This was key for letting me publish the images I created by visiting my own locations of personal interest and maximizing revenues from sales. When you sell a product through a third party, most often you need to provide them with an inventory of finished products, such as prints, or fully corrected and keyworded digital files. They can be produced on-demand if you do the fulfillment yourself, saving time and resources.

The bad news with doing business on the internet is that it takes a lot of viewers to make a photography sale. Most people who came to your site just stumbled on it. Therefore, unlike those who go to a shopping site such as amazon.com, they did not come there to buy something. Nor can they be talked into buying something by pushy webpages and a hard sell: those just turn potential clients away. Selling photography on the Internet is a bit like hunting birds by shooting randomly in the sky. In my experience, it requires a considerable amount of traffic, since the ratio of buyer to visitor is only a tiny fraction of a percent. To give some numbers, in the year 2009, terragalleria.com received 5.7 M visits. This was measured using the great Google Analytics, which offers (since 2008) the most accurate site statistics because it automatically disregards numerous visits by the search engine crawlers, unlike for example Webalizer. That year, we sold 267 prints and 148 licenses, which actually generated more revenue than prints. So it took 21,000 visits to sell a print and 38,000 visits to sell a license. True, if we had priced our licenses and prints at a lower point (prints currently start at $350 for the smallest sizes), we would have sold more, but that would have meant more work. We were pleased enough with the balance of revenue and work at our price point, which catered to high-end buyers, but this choice has to be different for each photographer.

In retail marketing, location is everything. On the internet, the equivalent of location is traffic. The good news is that it is possible for an individual photographer website to get high traffic numbers before attracting traditional media attention. Although my images have been widely published – thanks to photo editors finding images on terragalleria.com – my name hadn’t been noticed by a wide audience before the airing of The National Parks: America’s Best Idea which occurred in late Sept 2009. However, by 2004 terragalleria.com had already more than 2 million annual visits (difference between statistics packages factored). The year 2011 is not finished, but the number of visits was 6.4 M YTD, which is 640,000 monthly, or about 21,000 daily. This possibly makes terragalleria.com the most visited of individual photography website this year, although numbers can fluctuate dramatically in way that I cannot predict or understand, as seen in the following graph from Alexa. Unlike Google Analytics, Alexa let you estimate traffic metrics for all websites, not just yours. If the traffic for a target website is above a certain threshold, I have found the statistically-derived metrics to be quite meaningful. Although Alexa provides several statistics, the most significant in comparing different websites is “Reach”. I’ve added for comparison statistics from two other sites. Trey Ratcliff (Stuck In Customs) is the most popular photography blogger and most followed photographer on Google+ at the time of writing, and has a sizeable team working for him. Fotopedia (the publisher of my National Parks App) is the first collaborative photo encyclopedia with more than 750,000 photos, curated by a community of thousands of members, and supported by a VC-backed company with more than a dozen employees.

In the next post in this series about our 10th year in business, I’ll go into some details about how terragalleria.com got that amount of traffic. Part 5 of 6:

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6

Mount Hoffman (10,845 feet, 3,305 meters) is right in the center of Yosemite. For a (relatively) easy to access viewpoint which gives you spectacular bird-eye’s views of the Yosemite backcountry in all directions, it is hard to top this hike. If you do only one high-country summit hike in Yosemite, I would suggest this one.

The hike is accessible whenever Tioga Pass Road is open, although there may be too much snow in the spring. On Tioga Pass Road, about 28 miles from Crane Flat, there is a small spur road marked “May Lake”, which is easy to miss (we did).

Since I planned to hang out on the summit until sunset, Tom (Yosemite Explorer) and I did not get an early start. Moreover, I noticed nice clouds in the Valley in late morning, so we stopped for this photograph from Gates of the Valley.

Since we hit the trailhead well after lunchtime, anticipating few photo stops besides the summit, I had repacked my large format camera in a lighter and more comfortable mountaineering backpack, along with the digital gear (EOS 1Ds mk 2 and 3 lenses). Tom had brought only a tiny day pack, so all I could give him were my 3 large format lenses.

One of the Yosemite High Sierra camps sits on the shore of May Lake, itself a nice sight, only about 1.25 miles from the trailhead, with less than 500 feet uphill. This area is quite busy in summer, so why is that included in a “Yosemite Unseen” series ? Besides the fact that only 5% of visitors venture outside of Yosemite Valley, right at this time of the year – beginning of November, when the Valley experiences the peak of fall foliage color – even the May Lake shore was empty. We did not meet a single party on that afternoon. Although the summit got a bit chilly around sunset, the temperatures were just perfect for hiking uphill.

Above the lake, as the trail became more steep, gaining 2000 feet in the remaining 4 miles to the summit, nice views opened up over May Lake.

Further up the trail, looking South, Half-Dome was seen from an unusual angle. Unfortunately, although autumn atmosphere is normally very clear, the clouds that helped create great light in the Valley caused a lot of haze in that direction.

After scrambling on blocks past the end of the trail, we reached the summit. The view over sheer cliffs on the other side was vertiginous. I asked Tom to stand on the rim to give a sense of scale, as I photographed towards the hazy West.

Looking towards the East, I could recognize all the typical rock domes surrounding the Tuolumne Meadows area.

As sunset was getting closer, ridges in the East became more colored, however the foreground was in too deep of a shade on the North Side for a wide-angle view.

As is often the case, the light softened at twilight. After a last exposure, we hastily climbed down the summit blocks, which would be tricky to navigate by dark.

More images of May Lake and Mount Hoffman

Part 5 of 6: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6

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