Lately I’ve been realizing how much of a great investment my new website I launched in January has become. A reader asked why, so I thought it may be a few cents to throw into a post. By investment, I mean a large chunk of change(5 figures worth), countless hours of work, and the thoughts and strategy behind the functionality of the site. Each piece of the site from the loading, to navigation and overall experience were carefully planned out. Obviously costs vary depending on what features you want integrated into your site and who creates it. When I launched the site, I wrote an indepth post breaking down each feature. Here is that post if you haven’t read it yet. Here’s another post by FolioRevolution.com reviewing my site’s features.

I worked with Knowawall, and in my opinion the agencies that specialize in photographer websites at this level, they are the best that I’ve seen. They have a clean graphic tight aesthetic and integrate flash programming seamlessly with the design. Since I have a design background, this is very important to me. Why flash you may be asking? There are still features that HTML 5 just can’t handle quite yet. Transitions, full screen images, preloading. It’s getting there, but for the me those subtle things just aren’t quite there yet. I also don’t care about being searchable because the clientele that I work with don’t find me through google.

The digital revolution of the world wide web has changed and drastically evolved how our world operates, and my goal was to adapt to it. The world of printed books still exists, but is dwindling. My physical portfolio is getting called in less and less for jobs as Art Directors are primarily pitching photographers through our websites. I believe the older generation of art buyers and art directors still are wanting to see books when considering photographers for jobs, while the younger gen Art Directors are sticking to the web. That’s why it’s still important to have a strong print portfolio in conjunction with your website. I’m in the process of a big ad campaign, and after talking with the creatives this weekend, I found out they selected me completely off of my website. It’s so much easier to send a client a URL link than a physical book.

A few other features that have really been beneficial are the lightbox and custom gallery features. The site is keyword searchable for the 2500 images in the database It allows me to create custom lightboxes for clients that request to see a certain type of image that may not be on the front end of the site. The custom galleries on the back end I can create specifically for clients with images that aren’t on the front end of the site. (example). The navigation is simple, and the preloading makes it so the impatient people(such as myself) don’t have to wait for the images to come up in between each click. Most Art Directors and Art Buyers, leave sites fast if they have any load time between photos.

Your website is now becoming your first contact to a potential client, and what you’re judged by. Most people filter you based on your website, the content and design of it. Through talks with Art Directors, if your design and branding isn’t as strong as your imagery, it’s points against you as it doesn’t give them confidence you know what you’re doing business wise. A well designed brand helps tell your audience that they can be confident in hiring you to help them build the brand that they’re working on.

The business world is moving to an electronic experience. Invest in your website and give the people hiring you great and simple interactive experience. I feel my website was a great investment in to my business’ future. Will the printed book be gone in 3 years? 5 years? Maybe.. we’ll see. Will Print work be gone? I hope not.

A little underground hip hop, and Brooklyn Local, I shot DJ DP One for a little personal project. I shot out his direction with a few rolls of film and my Contax G2.

Check out DP One’s sound cloud: http://soundcloud.com/djdpone

And his website: http://djdpone.com/

Last week, I was shooting a big 5 day campaign shoot out in San Francisco, and something quite unfortunate happened. After the 3rd shoot day, we went to a studio location to scout it out. We parked our suburban outside for no more than 20 minutes with all our gear/laptop bags. We made sure to lock the doors, but we returned 20 minutes later to find the back window shattered, with my laptop bag/passport, my client’s laptop bag/purse with all credit cards, passports, and ID’s, and my producer’s purse with all credit cards/ID’s, GONE. There’s no worse feeling that getting robbed, thus the feeling of feeling violated. Thank God the really expensive bag of cameras sitting right next to my laptop bag was still there.

This is definitely a good slap in the face reminder that it can happen to anyone, and on a huge job no less. More than the camera gear still being left in the car, thank God that Jeff happened to ride in a different vehicle and took the 3 days worth of our job with him and we didn’t leave the drives in my laptop bag like we usually do. Never the less, on multiple day shoots we always leave a hard drive with a copy of each day’s work in the hotel room. We would have only lost one day’s worth of work had we kept, but when there’s thousands of production dollars riding on a day’s worth of shooting that’s still a lot to lose. It’s a reminder to always split up the production HD’s when leaving set, even back to the hotel. A reminder to always keep an HD of the job on you or in separate rooms. A reminder to not get sloppy and forget to do these things.

Here’s an overview of how we back up on set on a travel job:
1: Jeff(digital tech), is always backing up 2 copies on set, upon download, and a 3rd through out the day. Even if he’s copying cards, we never erase a card until we have 2 copies on hard drive. You never know when something might corrupt.
2: When the day is done, separate the drives and have Jeff carrying one on his person, and/or someone else with one or in the digital bag.
3: Upon returning to the hotel, we create a 3rd/4th copy on the drive at the hotel to leave in the room in case something happens during the day. ie: Getting the laptop bag stolen
4: When returning back home, we split up the copies. Jeff will take one home with him, then ship it to me and I will take the other 2 copies with me.

ChronoSync is a great program to backup/copy/sync copies of jobs. We also use the mini G-Tech 500gb portable drives on set to capture to.

Sometimes we get sloppy and lazy to do these things, but we just got a strong reminder to keep it up.

Now I’m off to deal with the inconvenience of getting a replacement passport and visas.