It’s bland. It’s boring. It tries to cram everything relevant into one picture so that customers don’t miss anything. It’s taken by someone who knows little to nothing about photographic composition, so it’s shot square on with no sense of depth, perspective, or anything. It is, in other words, a typical photo.

That photo is your standard, typical marketing campaign. This is what most marketing is – a long feature list of stuff, much of which may not even be helpful if you don’t already know what the product is. There’s no clear benefit to prospective customers, much of it is confusing, and because it’s so boring and bland to look at, your customers’ mental ad blocking software bounces your campaign out before they even get a chance to investigate.

Here’s the same coffee stand, the same location, with a slightly different look:

Look how much is missing. All of the extraneous features are gone from the photo. In place of “cram everything into one photo”, we see an intense focus from a radically different perspective. The lens blurs out all the details that aren’t really helpful anyway, and leaves just one or two things in focus. The change in perspective lets you see the coffee stand in a different perspective that you normally would, and makes for a more compelling photo.

This is what your marketing can become. Look at that photo. What’s the central focus – the features of the coffee stand and all the different things you can do at it? No. The central focus is the benefit to the prospective customer – a cup of coffee. The background hints at all your different options, but doesn’t overwhelm you with long lists of stuff.

What could your marketing become if you took away the endless feature lists, if you stripped down your campaigns to focus on just one benefit, if you went at that one benefit from a different perspective than what the committee of marketers usually comes up with? What if you took the risk of focusing only on what was essential – the benefit to the customer – and put away everything else?

It’s not easy, either in photography or in marketing, to take away until only the essence is left. It’s counterintuitive, especially when you have a great product or service that has tons of features and really cool aspects, to want to exclude most of them from the customer’s first look. The rewards, however, make it worthwhile – a much more compelling photo that draws in the eye, and a much more compelling marketing campaign that draws in the customer.

What will your focus be in your next marketing campaign? Whatever it is, I hope you take the risk, take your shot, and show the world just the essence of what you have to offer.

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Believe it or not, cameras can be an incredible tool for helping you reclaim your life and get more out of every day. How? Nothing helps you practice mindfulness and being in the present moment like looking for something to take a picture of.

By the way, far too many folks focus on gear, thinking they need the best possible camera in order to take photos. Like many things human, it’s more about the person behind the gear than the gear itself. There’s a group on Flickr called Cameraphone that demonstrates some amazing photographs taken with relatively poor quality cameraphones (compared to, say, full DSLRs). So put the gear question out of your head for a moment.

So how do you use a camera to get more out of life? Simple: look for things to take photos of. Be very specific and aim for themes rather than subjects. Here are some examples:

- intersecting lines
- light and shadow
- contrasting colors
- complementary colors
- moving objects
- things that are blue
- food
- circles
- squares
- kids playing
- triangles

The subjects of your photography can be endless. Pick a theme for a day, commit to taking X number of pictures that day, and then go walk around life trying to take those photos. You’ll be amazed at how many examples of your theme suddenly reveal themselves when you go looking for them. It doesn’t matter whether the photos are good (in a commercial sense) or not as long as you do the exercise.

Why? Because looking for subjects to photograph requires presentness, requires awareness. You can’t phone it in – you have to be present, you have to be aware, you have to be alive and awake enough to look for the subjects you want to shoot. That’s something my Zen friends call zanshin – mindfulness.

Once you’ve got your brain trained to be aware, awake, alert, and alive, extend the exercise. Look for more difficult items to photograph, things that are rare. Learn composition.

When you’ve got the hang of mindfulness, you’ll find that your brain starts to do it more frequently, even without a camera. Keep training your brain to be mindful and aware of things you want to be aware of. Suddenly, life becomes richer. You notice more things. You’re present in more conversations. Little moments, little details that completely passed you by suddenly appear – and isn’t that the joy of a rich life?

Here’s one last point, one last idea: you’ll find that what you look for, you find. Look for sharp contrasts of shadow and light and you’ll find them. Look for any subject, any theme, any idea and you’ll find it. Some topics and themes might take longer than others to find, but you will find them in time. You’re also guaranteed NOT to find them if you’re not looking for them…

… which extends to life as well. Looking for reasons to be happy? You’ll find them. Looking for reasons to be dissatisfied? You’ll find them, too. Training your brain to find what you seek works whether you’re looking through a viewfinder or your own soul. Decide what you want to look for in your camera and in life, and that’s what you’ll find.

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Flags by Hryck.

It’s interesting that so many of the July 4th holiday photos on Flickr have a ton of political commentary rabidly espousing a viewpoint with them. Independence Day at its core celebrates freedom from someone else’s tyranny. Have your viewpoint, of course, but have a willingness to find what’s right in someone else’s viewpoint as well, no matter how else you may disagree with them. The willingness to be able to see how others view the world with an understanding heart – that is freedom too.

Whatever your beliefs, I hope your holiday weekend is a happy, safe, and inspiring one.

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Bonfire by Dominic.

This one is just… impressive.

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Clouds in Quebec by Michel Fillon:

Victoria Glacier in Alberta by Laszlo:

Vancouver Island by Zedzap:

And new media friend Angela Misri, shot at Podcasters Across Borders 2009:

5 most recent Financial Aid News articles:

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By Koshyk.

This is a photo of Harmandir Sahib, the Golden Temple, a Sikh site. I love the light in this picture.

I look forward to seeing your Week With A View entries.

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Did a search for hiking. Saw this:

by Adam Baker.

What I really like about this photo is the very strong path my eyes follow through the photo from the hiker all the way up the mountains. In that respect it’s very similar to a lot of Chinese landscape paintings, with pathing that guides your eyes.

Tag: #wwav

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There’s an impressive amount of photography on Flickr. There are some amazing photos on there from amateur and professional photographers. Here’s a blogging exercise I’d like you to try this coming week. Find a beautiful photo licensed for Creative Commons use, a moving photo, a stunning, stirring photo each day this week. Tag it #wwav – Week With A View – and post it on your blog with a short description of why the photo is beautiful, then share the heck out of it so that we can all see some of the best, most beautiful photography available online.

General Guidelines & Suggestions

• Yes, absolutely they can be your own photos as long as they’re Creative Commons licensed.
• Post a photo a day from June 29, 2009 – July 4, 2009.
• Link and give full credit to the photographer!
• Ideally, they should be Creative Commons commercially licensed so that you can post them on a corporate blog, too.
• Search for keywords of things that YOU personally find beautiful. Everyone always seems to search for sunsets. What do YOU like?
• TAG YOUR BLOG POSTS! TAG YOUR TWEETS! The whole point is to see what OTHER people find beautiful.

Here’s a set of screenshots from Flickr’s Advanced Search.

Ready? Show the world.

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First, I want to take photos of flowers in Boston in the spring. Logically, I should be able to look at prior year data to see when the most photos of flowers in Boston in the spring were taken. This is where APIs fit in. Flickr and other photo services offer API interfaces. They don’t necessarily provide them very obviously because only a small minority of users make use of them, but for those of us who do, they’re invaluable. Here’s the Flickr API.

Take note that you can query the API by tags and formats in a series of GET variables:

http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?variablesgohere

So I figured, let’s add the tags boston, flowers, and spring, and get the API results as an RSS feed:

http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?tags=flowers,boston,spring&format=rss2

We’ve got data!

I know what you’re saying. That’s really unhelpful, and in raw format, it really is. Enter one of the many free timeline web services out there, xTimeline. I threw the RSS feed results into xTimeline and…

Now I have visualized, clustered data. What does the timeline tell me? The people who took photos in Boston of flowers in the spring took a lot of them in the second and third weeks of April in years past. That, based on crowdsourced data, is when I should suggest mine.

So, if you’re game and the weather is game, let’s go for a walk with your digital camera if you’re in the Boston area on Sunday, April 19, 2009 from 4 PM – 7 PM. Bring your digital camera of any kind – iPhone, point and shoot, mammoth DSLR, whatever – out to Nobscot Reservation in metrowest Boston and let’s take some spring pictures and share what knowledge we have about how to take better photos!

This event brought to you by RSS, APIs, and nerds. By the way, you can do this kind of research with any RSS feeds or APIs that can generate RSS feeds. Give it a try sometime.

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I started with my phone in normal daylight, no flash. This was shot with a Nikon D90, aperture priority, 65mm f/5.3, no flash, on a tripod.

Not phenomenal, but good enough for a basic auction site. Next, I added two sheets of white paper beneath it.

So far, still not breaking the budget. The white background does help isolate the phone from its surroundings, but it’s still not quite what I want. I got a dirt cheap acrylic photo frame – the kind you can buy in the office supplies section of Walmart for 3 for $1 – all clear plastic, L shaped – and taped a piece of paper to it. I put this behind the phone to filter some of the daylight.

All that screen glare and reflection has now gone away.

With a bit of judicious cropping and a quick auto adjust in iPhoto, my phone looks far better than it really is:

The actual cost of this project? Literally pennies for the paper and call it 50 cents for the acrylic frame as a light filter. Now, is this as good as professional lightbox system? No, not at all. Is it good enough for what most people need to put up an item on an auction site? You bet. Do this and you’re ahead of 99% of the crowd that takes a picture with a handheld and a way-too-close flash. You can add more lighting and photo frames as needed – you’ll probably end up buying the pack of 3 anyway.

Disclosure: any Amazon links in this post go to my employer, the Student Loan Network, and earn a nominal commission.

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One of my absolute favorite times of year. One of the best photo opportunities during the year for really great photos.

That said, I’m still a newbie at photography. Yeah, I own a decent amount of gear, but I’m still getting the hang of it.

Here’s what I’m currently using:

- Nikon D40
- Nikkor 18-200mm VR lens (the ultimate walkabout lens!)
- Nikon SB-600 speed flash with Omnibounce in pocket

Here’s my question to you, fellow foliage fans and photographers:

What tips, tricks, locations, and methods do you use for great fall photos that would help a relative newbie? (I know one of them is just play around and try lots of different things, since DSLR “film” is effectively free)

Please feel free to leave links to your own photos in the comments!

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As I continue to learn more about digital photography and graduate from clueless hack with a nice camera to somewhat clueless hack with a nice camera, one of the lessons I’ve learned so far is that very often, representing the whole can be done through representing the essence.

What the heck does that mean?

Here’s a few photos from my recent trip to Block Island. The island itself is 6 miles long and conveying a sense of the culture and energy of the island is difficult in whole. Here’s a picture of the beach:

Tough part is, this is such a broad picture that it could be any beach in the world.

This photo conveys a lot more about the spirit of the island:

Notice that it’s using fonts and layout that are reminiscent of a 1950s ice cream shop. Here’s another shot:

What I’m learning is that sometimes just a picture of something as seemingly inconsequential as a sign in a shop or a wood fence on a dune conveys a lot more feeling about the place than trying to take a giant panoramic photo of it all. The small picture brings out the essence of what’s different about the island, what sets it apart from the thousands of other islands in the Atlantic ocean.

Likewise, look at your social media efforts. You can try to be as broad as possible, trying to keep up on every network, running around like crazy on every platform, but that ultimately makes you the equivalent a collection of wide-angle, subjectless photos. You see everything but nothing’s interesting. Sure, take a few panoramas at the start, but then dig in and find the essence of the kind of social media experience you want to have, and focus your efforts where you want to be. Find out what’s different.

If there is one feature that distills the essence of social to you, what is it? That will tell you what network you need to be on. Is it presence? Twitter and its clones. Clubs and groups? Facebook. Exploration of people’s interests, one on one? MySpace. Career-focused, professional networking? LinkedIn. There are plenty of others, and other ways to perceive each of these networks – these are just how I use the properties.

Pick the conferences and events you want to attend based on the essence of the experience you’ll get out of it. Want a “fishbowl” new media event? Podcasters Across Borders. Want to meet a never-ending flow of new people? PodCamp. Marketing? Look to MarketingProfs. Inspiration? TED. Each conference and event has an essence, and if that essence is what you want, then when it comes to making hard choices about what conference to attend, you’ll have a better idea of where to allocate scarce time and money.

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Reality is a harsh mistress.

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Take your iPod touch or other iPod out (this won’t work with an iPhone). Turn it around so the mirrored back is facing the flash. Now hold it right in front of the flash at a 45 degree angle and you’ll bounce the flash off the ceiling. Bang! Instant flash reflector, and chances are I’m more likely to have my iPod with me than the speed flash.

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Lots more on the Flickr page.

I’ve been asking about the Nikon D40 and accessories on Twitter, and with the number of responses I’ve gotten back, it seemed appropriate to put it on a blog post instead. Here’s what I’ve got on my list of things to add:

- more memory cards.
- spare battery.
- speed light plus omni-bounce
- 50mm f/1.8 lens
- 50-200mm VR zoom lens
- polarizing filter

The detailed list is here.

DSLR experts – what would you add? What don’t I need, or what am I overlooking?

Thanks in advance for all your advice!

With 2 megapixels, you can print a reasonably nice 4 x 6 photo at 300 DPI.

Think about that for a second.

HDTV. 4 x 6 photo.

What does this mean? It means that the age of the still photographer may be coming to an end, at least in the way that we know it, where you try to click the shutter at just the right moment, in just the right light, to capture just the right photo.

As technology improves, as video goes from 1080p to higher and higher resolutions, at some point you won’t ever need to worry about clicking the shutter to capture a great photo. You’ll simply open the video stream, find the exact moment in the video that you want to print as a still photo, export that frame, and call it a day. Imagine what that will mean for portrait studios – just tell someone to come in for a minute, make a bunch of faces, have fun, don’t worry about posing, and then after 60 seconds of video or so, go to the studio display, scroll through the video stream, and get the photo you want.

Where will we be in 10 years? I remember the maximum resolution a consumer could get for reasonably money 10 years ago was 640 x 480 in the Sony Mavica and the Apple Quicktake. Today, you can get a 12 megapixel camera for about the same amount of money – 40 times the resolution. If we’re today at 2 megapixel VIDEO stills, and technology manages the same rate of improvement, we’ll be able to print mural-sized photos from our videos in the next decade.

We in new media have enjoyed access to smaller, lighter, less costly equipment as the years have gone by. I remember when my father got our first VHS video camera. It shot at 320 x 240, 30 fps, weighed 17 pounds, sat on your shoulder, and cost a thousand bucks. Today, I carry a small handheld Sanyo VPC-CG65 camera that shoots at 640 x 480, 30 fps, weighs a third of a pound, fits in my pocket, and cost $363 on Amazon.

The downside of gear this small and light is that it’s extremely unstable. Human hands are not known for stability, and gear that light doesn’t weigh enough (and therefore have enough inertia) to self-stabilize. What to do? Well, some folks have come up with very innovative products to do things like stabilize video or enable hand-held distance pictures. Two such products are Manfrotto’s Fig Rig, and PixPal’s camera extender. The Fig Rig will set you back about $300, and a camera extender another $30.

This, then, is how to do it all on $7.

First, go to the hardware store and pick up a 5 foot length of PVC, two 90 degree elbows, one 45 degree elbow, one T junction, 2 female-female pipe connectors, 2 1/4″ x 3″ carriage bolts, and 2 wingnuts, 1/4″. You’ll also need a drill with 1/4″ bit and a saw. The pipe can be any width that feels comfortable, but make absolutely sure you buy connecting pieces to fit that width, and buy them all at the same store, since some piping systems are – yes – proprietary.

Note: the 2 connectors are NOT shown here.

Start by drilling a hole in the bottom of the T junction. You may want to use a kitchen knife to pare off any bits of plastic left over.

You’ll also want to drill a hole in the elbow. Aim the drill for the center of where the pipe will be.

Saw the pipe into 5 equal sections.

Assemble the pieces as shown below:

Now attach your camera(s) using the carriage bolt and wingnut. Do NOT overtighten or you’ll wreck your camera. Tighten until the camera doesn’t easily rotate, but not so tight that it won’t budge.

You’re ready to go. Use the video stabilizer to walk around and shoot video, and the camera extender to take pictures of yourself at a distance.

The best part of all this is that this all breaks down into small segments and transports easily in a suitcase or backpack.

And that’s the new media DIY project for the day. And the cost for this project, assuming you already own a drill and saw?

And a quick video field test:

Demonstration at Boston Media Makers: (hat tip to David Tames)

There’s definite, noticeably less jitter on the stabilized ones. Now I just have to become more competent with a camera.

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1. Use a tripod, always.

Using a tripod will guarantee blur-free photos. My photos are NOT blur-free because I did not use a tripod.

2. Learn to use white balance, and turn OFF your flash.

Here’s the thing about most realtor photos. Most photos are bad, and the number one thing about them is that the lighting is wrong, wrong, wrong. Compare these two photos of the kitchen:

This is with no white balance and a flash. See how dark the cabinets look?

This is with white balance and NO flash.

White balance is easy – point the lens at a white object in the room (a wall) and use it to set the lighting levels.

If you use a tripod, you can avoid using a flash, and that’s a HUGE benefit because it shows the rooms as they’re actually lit, if not a little brighter. Using a flash also tends to throw photos towards the blue end of the lighting spectrum, which feels cold. Most of the time, in most house photos, you want to go for warm, and that means tripod, no flash.

3. Learn the rule of thirds.

Simply put, if you shoot a room square on, you end up with flat, dimensionless photos that don’t give a feel or sense of space.

The rule of thirds is well explained in this wikipedia article.

4. Shoot from hip level or non-traditional angles.

Nothing will make a house feel smaller than shooting from eye level, or higher. Shoot from hip level, low level, or unusual angles to capture more of a sense of space in the house. Sure, you’ll have to adjust your tripod and bend over to take the shot, but the result is WORTH it.

Bottom line: more and more people are browsing on the Internet. Those few digital snaps you take can either entice a prospective buyer, or turn them off entirely. How many sales are you losing with bad photos and you don’t even know about it?

Of course, one look at the web site and it looks like Flickr had an accident on the way to the toilet, but the branding of the property as the domain name was a good idea.

What tools do we have at our disposal for helping to sell a house when we really want to? Your average realtor, no slight on the profession, doesn’t have the time or history to be able to explore and understand a property beyond its most superficial characteristics, which is why the descriptions of real estate listings are repetitively bland and uninspiring.

So let’s play a bit with some new media tools and a house listing. Since I don’t know if C.C.’s house is listed, nor do I have his permission to reveal where he lives, we’ll work with my parents’ house. I went out to GoDaddy and bought 15CambridgeDrive.com (use code HASH3 for $2 off) and will repoint it to this blog post tomorrow when DNS finishes updating.

Suppose you want to know more about 15 Cambridge Drive, Annandale, NJ. A Google Map to get there might be nice. If you’re a Google Earth user, I might include a Google Earth KML bookmark.

Without an appointment, obviously you’re constrained to just drive by, but you can schedule an appointment with realtor Beverly Attinson.

Office: (908) 735-8140
Fax: (908) 735-8372
Mobile: (908) 578-3902
Email: Link here

To see the MLS listing, visit MLS Listing ID 2397426 in New Jersey.

The house is for sale at $619,900. A quick check on Zillow shows not enough data beyond a tax assessor’s estimate, but that price is definitely in the ballpark for the area.

Now, let’s get into some actual media. If I were still living there, I’d obviously go shoot some video, but we have to make do with the photos on the realtor web site. Where new media can shine is to tell the story behind the story. I’d probably create an MP3 that prospective buyers could listen to on an iPod as they walked through the house, but text will do for now. I’d also have key selections of podsafe music loaded up as interludes for people to listen to as well – probably a hefty dose of Rob Costlow, since it’s that kind of house.

The front of the property is a nice, well manicured lawn. Realtors will call it well cared for, and I will call it 45 minutes to an hour to mow with a push mower. The front lawn is fun to play on, and the street, Cambridge Drive, is really quiet, quiet enough that it’d be mostly safe for your kids to play on the lawn safely except maybe during rush hour. The house is located in suburbia, so most everyone commutes to other parts of New Jersey or New York City.

The living room. My parents have always kept this room as a more formal sitting room – there’s an equally large family room on the other side of the wall, just past the stairs, where we’ve always had the TV and sofa set that us kids were allowed to sit on. The living room is BRIGHT in the mornings – full southern sun, so if you want a warm place to sit and read, this is the place.

This picture of the kitchen kind of sucks. It shows the eat in kitchen, but it doesn’t show the tremendous amount of cabinet and countertop space. Growing up, we’d always sit on the counters and get yelled at for the same, but the kitchen food prep area itself is really fantastic. The table in the background there is where we had dinner every night without fail, for as long as I can remember living in the house until I left home for good. It was and still is the hub of the house, as it’s centrally located on the first floor and almost every room opens into the kitchen area. I truly believe that one of the reasons we had such a social family growing up was the fact that the kitchen made it easy for us to always run into each other, sometimes literally. (of course, when you were a teenager who was in trouble, trying to avoid your parents, it’s not so optimal…)

This is the sun porch, probably the crown jewel of the downstairs. This is a three season porch that is fully glassed in – if you wanted to make it four season, you could by opening the kitchen ducts to it, but we never saw the need to do that. The sun porch, which we always called the deck, looks out on the heavily wooded backyard, where we have several birdfeeders hanging from trees. My brother and I would have legos and Construx scattered across the floor from as soon as it was warm enough to open the room for good (usually April) until it got really cold (right after Halloween), and we’d play in there all the time. The deck is right off the kitchen, which also made it easy for my mom to keep tabs on us and make sure we weren’t getting into too much trouble. There’s a sliding glass door behind the camera’s point of view that opens to the rear of the house, so we could run outside if we wanted to.

Another less than perfect realtor picture of the master bedroom. I rarely spent time in there, since it was mom and dad’s bedroom, but it’s big. Really, really big. Cathedral ceilings with exposed beams, and room for just about anything. There’s also a walk in closet and full bath you can’t see behind the camera. When we got older, we always took showers in the bathroom in the master bedroom, because it was the nicest shower – glass with the massage showerhead and all that.

Another weird picture. This is above the garage. Used to be a walk in attic until I was… I think maybe 10 years old. I can’t remember. My parents had the walk in attic converted to a sort of home office, but this room was more than that. Two skylights and those oversize, overstuffed recliners meant the perfect place in the house to read, relax, and more often than not, fall asleep in the middle of the afternoon. The best time, actually, was when it was raining – the sound of rain on the glass skylights inevitably meant nap time. Even when I was home from college, visiting, I’d fall asleep in the attic room.

Where realty often falls short is that it doesn’t tell the story behind the house. Realtors try to make a house as generic as possible, to create as much broad appeal as possible, but when you think about it, that also makes it difficult to emotionally connect to it. As Ze Frank says, which has stronger appeal – Grandma’s cookies, or old people’s cookies?

I honestly look forward to seeing what C.C. Chapman does to sell his house, as he has so many new media tools at his disposal. This blog post is really a pale imitation of what you can do with new media, as it’s just words and static photos. Ultimately, I think new media has the potential to transform realty from just a mere transaction to an emotional experience, and that may help to sell houses in a tough market.

C.C., what do you think?