As I mentioned last week, this week’s source image comes all the way from Antarctica courtesy of my brother, Chris.

For those of you who might be new to this photo project of ours, each week I post a source image (either my own or user-submitted) that is straight out of the camera without any post-processing whatsoever. Anyone is free to download it, edit it however they like, and return it to me with an explanation of their processing so I can post it with the other submissions.

But why keeping trying to explain it when you can see how it all works for yourself with this week’s source image. Enjoy!

Victoria Pickering:

1.  Reversed the direction of the penguin (cut out a rectangle around the penguin)
2.  Cropped the photo
3.  Blended and cloned the sky and mountains as needed to cover up the seam from reversing the penguin
4.  Cloned out some dark areas in the snow
5.  Used curves and saturation to increase the contrast of the photo slightly before converting to b&w
6.  Used Photoshop’s b&w conversion

Xavier Wallach:

I adjusted vibrancy, clarity & contrast in CamreRAW.
I also warmed it up using the color temperature sliders.
This brought back deteils

Then in photoshop,
I blurred the shy to get rid of the noise.
on a new copy layer, I applied Nikkor color effect (bi-color & contrast color range).
I added a white mask & using my black blush, I revealed back the penguin from the Cameraw version.

Hendrik Demey:

1. Opened image, no changes in ACR
2. Duplicated image, rotated it horizontally and merged 2 layers in order to have a symmetrical pair of pinguins.
3. Noise reduction using nik DFine.
4. nik Color Efex “Pro Contrast” Filter.
5. nik Viveza in order to increase structre in the mountains and foreground ice rocks.
6. nik Silve Efex Pro for B/W conversion using a “warm tone” setting, and vignetting effect.

Joan Hoffman:

Having lived in Canada’s arctic for several years in the 90’s, the simplicity of this image really reminded me of the Inuit artwork, that I so admire.  SO, in keeping I tried to make the image about line and form to emulate their wonderful work

I. opened it in PS8,duplicated,  and applied fine edges (twice), then overlayed and set the opacity to approx 40%.

2.  opened in Lightroom and applied the cold tone preset, and then adjusted the hue and contrast till I got what I wanted

Jason D. Moore:

I tried going in and messing around in Topaz Adjust again this time but I just wasn’t feeling it.

So, I switched over to Lightroom 3 Beta and thought I would take a slightly more traditional approach with the image. I converted to Black and White, added a bit of grain, lens vignetting, bumped the clarity all the way, tweaked the exposure and shadows, bumped up the recovery to pull out more detail in the snow, and finished it off with some split toning.

Nothing too fancy, but I think it works pretty well. I always feel like I could do better.

For next week, with St. Patrick’s Day coming up, I thought it fitting to have us all use an image I took when I was in Portrush, County Antrim, Northern Ireland (where my paternal grandmother’s family lived) for St. Patrick’s Day in 2005.

All you have to do is click on the image to the right, process it, and email it back to me at pov@jasondmoore.com by 8pm EST on Thursday 3/18/10. Be sure to include your name, location, URL, and a description of how you processed the image.

Good luck!

One of the things that will really establish you as an expert and help boost your rankings and overall site authority is by getting quality inbound links from other sites. I say “quality” links here for two reasons.

You want links coming from other relevant sites that are talking about related topics. Even better, yet a bit harder to accomplish, is receiving quality “link love” from higher profile sites than your own. Not only will you see an increase in traffic, but that will also signal to the search engines that you are someone to watch. How do you get these quality inbound links? Well, there’s no sure-fire way of doing it, but there are a few things that you can try:

• Make contact with other bloggers in your field of interest and see if they will write about a really good post you just wrote. If they like your stuff and you develop a friendship with them, they might even add you to their blogroll.
• Contribute to the conversation. Comment on other people’s blogs and in forum threads. Always leave your URL or other quality link in you signature. Commenting also builds up your profile with other like-minded readers.
• Post quality links on Twitter and Facebook.
• Advertise. You can always offer to sponsor or advertise on someone else’s site which would then, certainly, link back to you.
• Produce great content and it will catch on. One of my first experiences with the “Kelby Bump” from being mentioned on his site for reviewing one of his books. I was blown away. I didn’t do anything special, I just wrote a review, posted it, and he found it and decided to share it with his vast readership.

The other thing I mean when I say “quality” inbound links really stems from what we now know about using keyword rich content. The last thing you want to do is say “Click here to read a post I wrote over on my blog about…” where the words “Click here” are your link. What the search engines will do is associate the words “click here” with your site instead of the keywords you want to rank well for. See the difference between:

• Click here to learn how to enter my next contest.
• and… Find out how you can enter my next monthly photo contest.

They both go to the same place, but the second one looks better, SEO-wise, and also informs your readers a little more about where they will be going once they click on that link. And you don’t always want to use your blog’s name or your name. Most people already rank pretty well for their name – go ahead and search for Jason D. Moore and you’ll see me all over the place (though I’d like to get higher up for “Jason Moore”) – so you should try and get some links that are more keyword-based.

If you notice a link back to you on someone else’s site, feel free to contact them and ask if they’d be willing to change it to something that is more beneficial to your SEO goals.

It works both ways too. Search engines like to see quality outbound links as well. If you link to other quality sites (that are more popular than your own) that are relevant to your subject matter you will gain some “SEO Juice” from that as well.

The next linking strategy that will help you out comes from the same concept of “what’s good for your readers is good for your SEO.” Many bloggers will refer to previous posts and pages as they go but it’s not always the case that they will link to them – or use a keyword-based link when they do. So build on that idea of quality links and apply it to your own posts as well.

Having quality internal links will setup a stronger web of interconnectivity within your blog that will help both your readers find their way around – and spend more time on your site, which is a huge plus – and the search engines to index you better. All of which is great for your SEO.

Something you may not have thought about is how you have things setup in your blog settings for when you create a new post. I believe, by default, most blogging platforms create new URLs for your posts based on a series of numbers identifying a given post or page. You will want to change this right now! Make sure that your post/page URLs are generated using keyword-rich text, be it the title of your post or something else you put in yourself (with words separated by hyphens, not underscores or spaces). If your URL is correlated with the page/post title the crawlers will be more likely to provide you with a favorable ranking.

That’s it for this time. Give these strategies a try and let me know if you have any questions about this stuff – it can get pretty confusing sometimes. We’ll pick up this series again on Monday with a final piece of the puzzle that will pull everything together and help you make informed decisions about your SEO.

Anyone who knows me will tell you that I’m not a morning person. That you have to shout to get me to even open my eyes, and that I move kind of slowly any time before 10 am.

Let’s put it this way: I don’t think I’d be gainfully employed if coffee had never been invented.

But I think we all know that the edges of the day are best for photography, because the light is just pretty blah any time else. This is news you have probably heard before, but if you’re like me, maybe you haven’t been listening really well. For a while, I relied on the fact that there are two edges in every day. So what if I missed dawn? There was always dusk to fall back on. Same pretty light, but none of the soul-shattering pain that comes with waking up before 6 am. It seemed like a pretty easy call.

But I was wrong.

Dawn is better, and I will tell you why. First, I’m not the only person who’s allergic to waking up early. Most other people are too. So that means if you do make the trek out of bed, you’ve got the place to yourself. You don’t have to shoot over anyone’s shoulder. Or plan to Photoshop them out later. This is particularly nice in areas that are usually heavily trafficked, or overrun with tourists.

Second, dawn is calmer. Lakes or ponds will be glassier, with fewer ripples. You’ll get more morning mist. More drops of dew clinging to leaves and petals. And maybe some more wildlife that hasn’t been scared into hiding by the racket we bipedals make.

I woke up for dawn last weekend, and it was amazing. Magical. An hour or two of shooting and I had four or five new favorite images, plus the rest of the day ahead of me. Then I ate some delicious brunch, and pretty much could have died happy right then and there.

I recommend you try it.

Below, some more shots from last weekend:

If you enjoyed my post today, please feel free to mosey on over to my blog, Quotidian Photography. I try to post a photo plus a few thoughts there every day.

Search engines love blogs and, if you do it right, you can make some good progress just by making a few key changes to what you’re doing already.

Search engines love blogs for three reasons:

• Blogs are generally updated regularly, producing fresh content.
• Bloggers are passionate about their topic areas and posts will be filled with “quality” content (by quality I mean, relevant).
• And blogs are, by nature, setup to make the content easily searchable, organized, and interconnected (which we’ll talk about in a later post).

Assuming you have your blog setup and your main topic decided upon, the best way to start improving your rankings in the search engines is to post. And post often.

In a field like photography, there are so many blogs and websites out there devoted to it that you can easily get lost in the sea of search engine results with the likelihood that you’ll never get noticed. The bright side of that, though, is that most bloggers out there – or professional photographer’s sites, for that matter – don’t do everything they can to SEO their sites. So, if you play your cards right, you can push yourself up a few slots by doing a few things that others aren’t.

So, the first thing you need to do, as I said before, is write. The more you write, the more the search engines will crawl and index your site, the better your chances for moving on up. Now, you don’t need to write a lot in each post (though, that will certainly help too) but you should write often, and regularly. I started off just writing here and there when I came across a cool site or had something to say, but I would often go days or even weeks without writing. I then made the commitment to myself that I would post something new every weekday (when possible). And that made such a difference! I saw my readership go up, my status within the community, and my traffic from search engines began to rise as well.

Now, you don’t need to go all out and post something new everyday, like I do. But it is a good rule of thumb that putting up a new post 3 times a week is a good goal to shoot for, especially if you’re just starting out. It will help get you into the rhythm of writing and it will show the crawlers that there is consistently new content to index.

While attending the Internet Retailer conference in Boston last summer one of the presenters said (and I’m paraphrasing) “what’s good for your readers is good for SEO“. Meaning, if you are posting regularly, your readers will have something to keep coming back for and the search engines will start to see you as someone to keep checking back with as well.

When writing a blog post or posting a photo, the words we use are very important for both conveying the message to our readers and for getting the right information picked up by the search engines.

It is easy to slip into patterns of writing as though we’re talking to someone that is already somewhat familiar with the subject. What I mean is, say we’re talking about a camera. I could easily say something like “I have a D200 and I think it’s a great body that is very reliable whenever I go out on a shoot.” Most of you followed that pretty well, right? Imagine, though, that you don’t know anything about photography and have no idea what a D200 is or that the “body” is referring to the camera. Notice how the following sentence says essentially the same thing, but makes it very clear: “I have a Nikon D200 DSLR and I think it is a great digital camera body that is very reliable whenever I go out on a photo shoot.”

The edited version serves two very different, but equally important purposes. First, it makes sure that your readers are well-informed and helps any newcomers catch up a little. Also, it introduces keywords and phrases that people will actually be searching for. Think about when you search. You use brand names and not just model numbers/names, right? So it follows that if you use them in your content, it will tell the search engines that they should pick up on that content too. Same with other phrases. You wouldn’t show up in searches for the word “body” but you might have a shot for searches for the phrase “digital camera body”. At least it will add some context to your content.

Where you place your keywords and phrases is also important. You want to put your most important keywords towards the beginning of your posts because the crawlers see earlier phrases as being more important. Also, without flooding your posts with too many instances of the same phrases (called “keyword stuffing”) you will want to repeat the most important keywords a few times throughout the body of your post. To draw it out even more, use bold and italics, even underline, to draw attention to your most important phrases. Use it sparingly, though, because you don’t want it to look hideous to your readers.

For many of us, imagery is key to what we’re doing. And photos are an excellent place to throw in some good keywords and phrases. Every image should have “alt text”, or “alternate text”, applied to it. In blog platforms, like Wordpress, you have the option to add it in when uploading or inserting your photos into the post. If you know a little HTML, you can insert it manually within the image tag like this:

<img src=”FILENAME.jpg” alt=”Keyword rich descriptive text goes here.” />

Anywhere that you can put in relevant keywords, you should. And that includes tagging your posts.

Many people will add their posts into categories to keep things a little more organized but many won’t even tough the tags. A tag is simply a keyword that you want to apply to a post. It’s another way of telling the search engines that these are the keywords and phrases that are the most important ones to pay attention to when looking at the post. For example, for this post I will probably tag it with the following list of phrases (separated by commas) with the most important ones first, and it would look something like this:

SEO Tips for Photographers, SEO Tips for Bloggers, SEO Tips, SEO for Photographers, SEO for Photobloggers, SEO for Bloggers, SEO for Photo Bloggers, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Photography Keywords, Photo Keywords… and so forth.

You will see that this is also where I would insert variations on the same phrases. Not only did I mention “SEO for Photobloggers”, but I also inserted “Photographers”, “Photo Bloggers”, and “Bloggers” into the mix. This is a good practice within your content, too, to make it more keyword-rich but it also helps your post show up in a wider variety of search results. If there are words or phrases that are often misspelled or spelled differently (like Photoshop vs. PhotoShop or Photo Shop), include those in the tags as well.

In our next SEO for Bloggers post, we’ll talk about links and how they play a vital role in building your page rank.

One of my main tasks on the web side of things, aside from general site maintenance, is to implement various strategies for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) purposes. With that experience, I felt as though you all could benefit from some tips and tricks that will help raise your own rankings and drive some more traffic – and, hopefully, more customers – to your site or blog.

There is a lot to SEO and I think it’s best to break it up into a series of 4 posts to make it more easily digestible. Posts this week will include:

• What is SEO?
• Foundations – Quality Content, Keywords & Consistency
• Links – Internal & Inbound
• Analytics – Is it all working?

So today, we’ll hit the basics, What is SEO?

Like I mentioned above, SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization”, essentially, the art of making your website/blog more accessible to search engines so they are able to have a better idea of where you should show up when users search for words and phrases relevant to what you are doing.

Search engines employ processes called “crawlers” or “spiders” or “bots” that examine websites and index their content based on what they deem to be the most important words and phrases shown on a given page. Most search engines, especially Google which is notorious for it, keep their processes close to the vest to keep anyone from taking too much advantage of the system. Because of that, we don’t have much control over what the crawlers will determine to be important. However, there are methods we can utilize (which we will discuss further in the coming days) that will help direct them to the content we want to rank well for, which will then help bring more visitors in.

There are companies out there that will claim they can get you up to #1 in Google (for a price) but, to be honest, with a little know-how, a little time, and a bit of effort you can move up in search results more organically and, at the same time, provide your visitors with a more content-rich experience that can only help bring in more sales.

Tomorrow, we’ll start off with some key elements to your overall SEO Strategy to help you hit the ground running.

This week we are fortunate to have a source image from Friend-of-the-Blog Marc Benton of the Columbus Skyline. Thank you Marc!

We have 6 versions for your enjoyment this week! I am excited for the continued growth of the project and I encourage you all to give it a shot for next week. We have a special image at the end of the post that comes from my brother, Chris, from his recent trip to Antarctica.

So have a look at what we all did to process this initial photo and, who knows, you might learn a little something too!

First from Marc Benton:

The image was taken last October in Columbus, OH.  I had just bought my 50mm 1.4 and went out to see what I could see during a business trip there.  The shot was taken handheld around dusk.

Here’s the exif:
Camera – Canon 40D
Lens – 50mm 1.4
Shutter – 1/125
Aperture – f/1.4  (yeah I know I should have upped it but I was like a kid with a new toy so I don’t think I took it off 1.4 all day )
ISO – 400

I believe I did all the processing in Lightroom and did not export it to Elements like I normally do.  First I adjusted the levels slightly then applied a preset to it.  The preset was Matt’s Vintage New York-01 (http://www.lightroomkillertips.com/2009/presets-vintage-new-york-look/).  I liked the Gotham feel this preset gives but it needed something more so I added a little more vignette.

Thats it, nothing more was done except resizing.  No cropping.

From newcomer, Xavier Wallach:

In CameraRAW:
push up fill light & blacks, clarity, sharpness + graduated filter
then in Photoshop CS4:
played with levels, light & dark tones, curves + unsharp mask
finished with noise reduction

Welcome, Xavier! I hope you’ll continue to contribute to the project!

From one of our regulars, Andy Smith:

In Photoshop:

Adjusted Curves in LAB color mode, then returned to RGB.
Adjusted image with Shadows and Highlights.
Adjusted Curves.
Added a homemade texture layer and adjusted opacity.
Adjusted Shadows and Highlights again, then added a feathered border with a color sampled from the photograph.
One more Curves adjustment.

Here’s mine…

I started by making some adjustments to the Photo Drama preset in Topaz Adjust.

I then duplicated the layer and set the blend mode to Screen to bring out the highlight areas a bit.

Next I added a vignette to the background layer to help keep your eye in the frame.

Finally, I added a Curves adjustment layer to make the contrast pop a little more.

From Hendrik Demey:

PP done in Lightzone:
- White balance
- Relight tool
-Saved file as .tiff

PP done in CS4 based on the resulting .tiff:
- preliminary work in ACR
- several nik Color Efex filters: Pro Sharpener, Monday Morning, Darken/Lighten Center
- Output sharpening with nik Sharpener Pro, using -22% structure and -10% local contrast

And, finally, from Will Dickerson:

made a small selection of city, flipped it Vertacally and that became my reflection….

removed the dull sky and added a texture file as the new sky and reflected sky…

added a little wind and desat’d it….

added some flying birds…via  a Brush i found on web…

added window frame …..

Nice work everyone!

And now, for next week! Click on the image to the right and download it to your computer. Process it however you like and send the final version back to me, along with the steps you took, your city/state/country, and the URL for your blog, site, or Twitter so I can properly credit you. Email everything to me at pov@jasondmoore.com by Thursday 3/11/10 at 8pm EST.

Also, if you would like to share a source image (straight out of the camera, no processing) for use in an upcoming week, please send it along to the email address above.

Looking forward to your interpretations!

It’s a project called the Society of Photobloggers and it’s aim is to help drive traffic to your blog as well as help you build your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) so search engines will rank you better.

From Dave’s post:

Imagine a day when, the content of your photoblog (say four or five posts), suddenly appears in 50 other photoblogs as the latest post.  The lastest content from your photoblog is suddenly all over the internet.  People are discovering your photos wherever they go.  As the day goes on, other posts begin to appear in the 50 photoblogs, and slowly the post with your wonderful content drops down a notch… and eventually becomes another archived post. But since the post is through an RSS feed, it still changes as you add new photos to your blog.

Still, every so often, since you’ve been featured in 50 photoblogs, you still get a better ranking in search engines, and your traffic goes up.

Might be something worth looking into to help raise your profile within the photoblogosphere.

You can check out what they have to say over on a new page called “Photo Quotes” in my “About” section. It is, by no means, a complete listing and I’m sure I’ll add to it as we go.

Thank you to everyone who has shared such amazing words of encouragement and support over the years! I truly appreciate it and it keeps me going – especially when I fall into a rut that I don’t think I can get out of.

It’s that time again to announce the winner of our Monthly Photo Contest here at Jason D. Moore Photography! There were a lot of excellent photos entered this month and I have definitely seen some growth in the work coming from many of the regular submitters this time around. Nice work!

I have enlisted the help of the January winner, Chris Stern to help in the judging this month – as we will do from here on out with the winner serving as guest judge for the following month. Thank you Chris!

Don’t forget to scroll all the way down to the bottom of the post to see what’s in store for the March Photo Contest!

And so, the winner of the Canvas Gallery Wrap from IGT America is…

“new york city at night” by edlifeguard09

From Chris Stern:

“The use of black and white was very appropriate for this photo and I enjoy how you were able to capture the conversation between the two gentlemen at the food stand surrounded by the busy night life of NYC.  In addition, I like how the lighting around the food stand cast some great shadows along the sidewalk.”

And, as always, we have selected a number of other photos that are most certainly deserving of a mention here (in no particular order):

Nice work, everyone!

And now, on to the March Photo Contest! The rules are the same: anyone can join, enter up to 3 photos of your choice by 11:59pm EST on the last day of the month.

What can you win? This month, the winner will receive a copy of Scott Kelby’s The Digital Photography Book, Volume 2! In addition, the winner will be invited to act as a guest judge for the following month’s contest.

Good luck! I’m looking forward to your shots!

Some of you may be familiar with Adobe’s Public Beta programs with Photoshop and Lightroom, but this is something entirely different.

With the private Beta program, those of us who have received an invitation (thanks NAPP!) are asked to follow Adobe’s testing procedures so that we can provide them with specific functionality reports when the program is placed in more real-world situations.

Now, as much as I would love to share all my findings and insights with you all about the coming version of Photoshop, I’ll be signing a non-disclosure agreement preventing me from doing so. It sucks, I know, but I really don’t want Adobe’s lawyers breathing down my neck, you understand.

I should receive my official notification from Adobe soon if I’ve been accepted into the testing program. Keep your fingers crossed!