Shot for Wire Image tonight, red carpet stuff at the Ivy Hotel in San Diego, which was celebrating its one year anniversary. Afterwards they made sure I drank a little Dom Perignon. This group here enjoyed a glass (or two or three) of the good stuff also. My love and taste in photography comes with shooting athletes and people in a controlled environment, one on one stuff. But this stuff pays the bills also, so I’ll do it…

For red carpet stuff, most of the guys use a flash bracket, so you can put the lens on the same axis as the lens, and it really minimizes those ugly drop shadows behind the subjects. Bracket looks something like this.

As soon as Kiefer Sutherland rolled in the women went berzerko. It’s sometimes interesting for me to watch people watch stars. They get giddy. Lose all sense of time and place. Stare. I should have shot these people…

“First impressions are important.”

“Presentation is everything.”

“Start on the right step”

When it comes to a website, all of these axioms are especially true. I’m often working for a client who I have never met face to face, and the first impression they will get of me often comes through my website, www.robertbenson.com.

So, like other photographers, I want something that showcases my work in a professional, clean and efficient way.

I have a flash template website from fluidgalleries.com. I’ve had it about two years and am fairly happy with it. It’s easy to edit, delete and add images, or modify the layout in minutes or less. Still though, there’s little bugs that keep me looking for more.

I want BIG photos, I want more backend features. I want to add video and bio photos. Want to upload more than one photo at a time. Fluid gallery doesn’t offer this. Others do. So I’ve been keeping my eyes open for template websites for the past five years, reading forums on the subject and listening to other photographer’s opinions. I’ve compiled here a listing of companies that offer template HTML and flash websites that cater specifically to photographers. Hopefully it will help you if you’re at the stage where you need a website.

I think the benefits of a template site are the cost (usually cheaper then getting something custom made), they are proven (bugs are usually worked out before they go on sale), and the backend allows for simple editing (you don’t have to go to a webmaster to add or delete a photo).

This list is pretty comprehensive, but I probably missed a few. If so, let me know, and I’ll add them. The companies listed below primarily focus on doing one thing: providing template websites for photographers.

Also, for whatever it’s worth, I contacted each of these companies with a few questions and told them I was putting together a little comparison story. If they responded, I quoted them in the reviews below. If they didn’t respond, well, you can draw your own conclusions!

APhotoFolio.com

• Price: $1017
• Monthly/annual fee: $17 to host on his servers
• Set up fee: none
  
• Web hosting: They host the site. Seems like he may be able to install on your own server, or may be making plans to offer this service
• What I think: best looking thing out there
• Sample website: http://72.32.9.12/~bcashphoto/

This company is new, and run by Rob Haggart, the former Director of Photography for Men’s Journal and Outside Magazine. He runs the popular blog “AphotoEditor” and is the founder and President of A Photo Folio. He calls what he created “websites that get your hired.” In addition to consulting services, looks like he offers two template designs. I like his look because the photos are HUGE. Obscenely huge, as big as your monitor in fact, if you choose full screen mode to display the images.

Says Haggart: “I started APhotoFolio for several reasons. I wanted to work online with photographers because I’m very interested in the future of photography. I felt like there was room in the market for another
template based website for photographers. I knew that my experience as a Photography Director and blogger gave me an advantage over the other companies and I want to be a part of figuring out what’s next for
photography online.”

The cool thing about APhotoFolio is that it isn’t a huge company. You call or write and you get a human being. “My number one priority is customer service,” said Haggart. “I’ve always loved working with photographers so answering questions, solving problems and improving our designs is a big part of my day.”

This appears to be true. When Haggart first announced his new business, I immediately became interested in getting one of his websites. I found though, there was a bug which prevented it from working correctly on my browser. I wrote Rob and notified him of the problem. It was fixed a day later. He responded to all my emails and kept communication flowing. For me, that’s huge!

MANY other companies compared on jump

(more…)

Came across some video of photographer Carlos Serrao doing a photoshoot of LeBron James. Check it out here.

The American Society of Magazine Editors will announce its magazine cover of the year in a couple weeks, on Oct. 6.  You can see a list of which covers are in the running, the nominees, here.

For the past 22 years, a group called the Graphic Design USA (GDUSA) have been studying trends in stock photography. They call their study the Annual Stock Visual Survey, and in analyzes trends, facts, figures and opinions from more than 1,200 graphic design firms, advertising agencies, corporate inhouse departments, publishers and other creative businesses.

In short, they find out what these picture buyers really want.

The group has recently released preliminary information from its 22nd annual stock visual survey of picture buyers. There’s a lot of juicy info in the report, and you can see last year’s report here.

For 2008 the top dozen categories (in other words, the most sought after types of photos) were:

1 - People/Celebrities
2 - Business/Industry
3 - Lifestyle
4 - Abstracts/Backgrounds
5 - Medical/Scientific
6 - Food/Beverage
7 - Nature/Wildlife/Agriculture
8 - Travel/Tourism
9 - Music/Entertainment/Sports
10 - Fine Art
11 - Historical/Vintage
12 - Homes/Interiors

I really dig good portrait photographers, and I think Frank Ockenfels is one of the best. I always enjoy seeing or reading about portrait shoots and getting a glimpse at the behind the scenes. When I find something good, I’ll post it here.

This blog shows some images taken during a shoot with Ockenfels.

Alan Taylor, a web developer at the Boston Globe, is compiling semi-regularly picture stories and showing them on their website at http://boston.com/bigpicture. The images seem to be the best the wires have to offer, and the pictures are run LARGE on their website (hence the name “big picture”). The website says the pictures are “Inspired by publications like Life Magazine (of old), National Geographic, and online experiences like MSNBC.com’s Picture Stories galleries and Brian Storm’s MediaStorm, The Big Picture is intended to highlight high-quality, amazing imagery - with a focus on current events, lesser-known stories and, well, just about anything that comes across the wire that looks really interesting.” It’s worth a look.

Shot San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders and his daughter last night for Advocate magazine. A year ago, on Sept. 20, 2007, Mayer Sanders announced that he can no longer oppose same-sex marriages because he does not want to deny justice to people like his daughter, who is a lesbian. The photos will be run in conjunction with an update story the magazine is publishing.

I talked here about a unique assignment I had, where I was imposed with some shooting limitations, but not too many. My name came up for Aurora Photos Action Reaction event three days ago. Action Reaction is an event Aurora came up with to mark its 15th year anniversary.  Read the link above for clear explanation. Or visit the action reaction website here.

Anyhow, on my assigned day, I happened to have a shoot with a nationally ranked power lifter, Eugene Chang, in San Diego. Chang is a 6 foot, 270 pound behemoth, built like a tank. He squats 585 pounds and can dead lifts 710 pounds. Most people use a forklift to pick up something that weighs that much.

It so happened that some of the weights he was using were yellow, the same yellow as the plastic yellow bird in the photo bleow, which I was told to build from. So I submitted a couple images from this shoot, and the one which was selected is below (the horizontal image of the weight lifter).

Just came across this and wanted to share. It’s video of a man trapped inside an elevator for 41 hours. The video was time lapsed, condensing the 41 hours to a couple minutes. During the 41 hours, the man sleeps, tries to escape, sits, turns, re-sits…. he doesn’t even take off his shoes or shirt for the whole two days! C’mon! Check out the video here.