Published by PJ on 01 Oct 2008
One Life Church is one of the many growing churches in Middlesbrough that is committed to magnifying the Name and Person of Jesus Christ. The membership consists of many local people in Eston and from across the Teesside area. We all have a heart for revival, a desire to know God intimately and to have His Word dwell in us richly and live in and by the power of God’s Holy Spirit.
Please visit us at www.onelifechurch.org.uk
Published by PJ on 04 May 2008
Canon recently launched the Canon 2008 Euro competition and the voting period for images starts in just a few hours from now at 00:01 CET. I submitted an image of this tree nymph butterfly in the Macro category. If you think it’s a contender, I’d appreciate your vote on the image.
You can vote here or click on the image to take you to the vote.
Thanks in advance to anyone that votes.
Published by PJ on 24 Apr 2008
You may already know that images can purchased at rock bottom prices from the various microstock sites but did you know that many of them offer completely free images to download and use under their royalty free licence?
Try the offerings from the following sites. You may have to sign up to the site to get access to the images but that’s free as well and they change them for new ones on a regular basis.
iStockPhoto - Offers one free image per week
© aabejon iStockPhoto
Shutterstock - Double freebies are available here. Shutterstock give a free photo AND a free vector image every week.
© Sergei Didyk Shutterstock
Dreamstime - Not just one free image but well…. lots of them. Just click on the ‘Free Images’ tab at the top of the page. The quality is variable however so you may have to look through a few.
Fotolia - 10 free images at any given time are available and these seem to change on at least a daily basis.
So there are a few to be getting on with.
Published by PJ on 17 Apr 2008
Wouldn’t be great if the sites selling our images told you what keywords were used to locate the images you sold? With that sort of information, you could streamline your keywords and ensure that only the most efficient keywords were used thus ensuring maximum exposure for your images. That sort of information would give you an insight into the way real buyers find images.
Well there is at least one site Dreamstime that reveals this information and it is proving to be very helpful when deciding on keywords for images. Well in most cases it is….
Look at this illustrated image of a solar eclipse.
Let’s say you wanted to buy this to use in a project. What keywords would you use to locate an image like this? Well, maybe you would start simple with ‘illustration’, ’solar’ and ‘eclipse’.
WRONG!
The actual keywords used to find the image of the solar eclipse were…….. ‘flight’ and ‘geese’. Hmmmm…..
OK, that could be just a one off. Let me think now. I need an image to suggest a good idea. How about a lightbulb or even better, two lightbulbs, yes that would work, it suggests sharing ideas. Start simple and I’ll use the keywords ‘two’ and ‘lightbulbs’ and see what happens.
Success! But apparently, the keywords actually used by someone to find and buy this image were ‘art’ and ‘easter’.
OK how about this image.
Keywords used: Blindfold
Or this one
Keywords used: Strawberry
Or this one
Keywords used: Handshake
Well it seems this keyword thing is a little bit trickier than one would first imagine. I’m just not thinking like a buyer would. It seems the buyers start out looking for one thing and then get sidetracked in to something completely different. I think I’ll just stick my usual approach of keywording for now.
Published by PJ on 29 Mar 2008
Not photography related but it is an important issue. Whether you believe the current theories of global warming and climate change or not. It is true to say that as a species, we do waste a lot of energy and resources unnecessarily.
The politicisation of global warming aside, there is definite evidence that we are causing damage to the environment and destroying the delicate ecological balance that we depend on so much, not necessarily through climate change but through pollution and the destruction of the natural habitat of other species that form part of a complex and intricate web that we, as occupants of this planet depend on.
Visit Earth Hour to see what’s going on and how you can make a difference.