I must, at the onset, tell you that I personally have possession of a range of cameras. These comprise of cameras made by distinct manufacturers. I have two Canons, a Pentax, as well as a Samsung. I should confess that I’m a little partial with respect to a particular company, but I will attempt that this does not cloud any editorial comments I may consequently make.
see the exceptional Casio Exilim EXZ2 Digital Camera
If digital camera sales are any signal of what the top maker is, then according to Amazon.com Canon would be a unmistakable leader. As I write this, the specified business makes 17 of the best 25 bestselling cameras as part of their bestseller list. This ropes in 4 amongst the 5 top ones. Following these are cameras made by Pentax. Konika boasts of 4 cameras within the topmost 20. In the subsequent position are cameras offered by Minolta. Lastly, Kodak enters the fray with its own offerings. gpoz324
Going through a different site showed that Canon led the line, followed by Fuji. The next in the line-up is Pentax , and this is trailed by Minolta; and following these are BenQ, Petri, Bolex, and Yashica. A second camera appraisal site through their hundred best cameras displayed 47 Olympus cameras, 22 Fuji cameras, 21 Kodak cameras, 5 Flip Video cameras, 3 Fuji cameras, 3 BenQ cameras, 2 HoneyWell cameras, 3 Minoz cameras, a Yashica camera, as well as a single Argus camera.
By simply adding up these various outcomes, Nikon scored on top of the rest, Sony followed as second best, and in 3rd position are cameras offered by Kodak. Everyone else accounted for fewer than 10 top rated offerings.
When I promised readers that I was going to do an article on this topic I was scared. For two reasons - firstly, it’s a HUGE subject. I get lots of questions about it, and I see a fair bit of misunderstanding about it.
Secondly, there are already a lot of good articles about it on the web, like this one on luminous-landscape.com.
But I know that trawling the internet for technical information is not your idea of fun. That’s my job! So here’s my attempt at summing this up quickly for you:
DPI - Dots Per Inch
The most common question I get on this topic is, “My client / boss / nephew has asked me to send an image at a size of 300 dpi. What does that mean”?
The answer: Not much.
You see, DPI stands for Dots Per Inch. It’s a useful measure of image resolution (in other words, how much information is resolved in the picture). But if you don’t know the image size in inches (or feet, miles, centimetres, millimitres, or some other measure of size), then the amount of dots per inch doesn’t mean much.
Using DPI to measure size is like using km/h to measure distance: “How far is it from here to the beach?”
“Oh, about 60 miles per hour”. For this to make sense the answer would need to be “about 10 minutes at 60 miles per hour”.
Likewise, the size of an image needs to be expressed as, say, “six by six inches at 300dpi”.
Different resolutions are used for different purposes. The most common are 72 or 75 dpi for screen viewing (Web use or PowerPoint presentations) and 300 dpi for printing.
OK, so to give an example - 1 inch by 1 inch, 300 dpi image would be 300 pixels by 300 pixels in size. A 2 by 2 inch image at 300 dpi would be 600 by 600 pixels in size. Here’s where megapixels and megabytes come into it. Mega!
Megapixels
The term megapixels is usually used to describe the output size of digital camera images. For example, the Canon Ixus 50 produces images which are 2592 x 1944 pixels in size. Multiply these numbers together and you get 5,038,848 - just over 5 million. Hence this is described as a “5 megapixel” camera.
The last byte
On a couple of occasions, I’ve sent an image of a certain size to someone and they’ve said, “that’s no good, we need a 10 megabyte file”. Now, this I’m sure they were well-intentioned but they were also a little misguided.
The size in bytes (or megabytes - millions of bytes) represents how much storage the image takes up on your computer. This depends on all sorts of things, mainly the bit depth of the image and the file format - for example TIFF or JPEG.
So what should I do?
To avoid confusion, when specifying the file size you need, use pixels.
How do you work out how many pixels you need? Well, that’s why I started this discussion with DPI. Work out the largest size you’re going to want to reproduce the image, in inches; and the resolution - for example 72 dpi for or 300dpi for most print applications. Then just multiply the size in inches by the DPI figure you came up with.
Example: I want to reproduce the image A4 size in a printed magazine. A4 is 210mm x 297mm, or about 8.3 x 11.7 inches. The magazine needs artwork at 300dpi, so:
8.3 x 300 = 2490 and 11.7 x 300 = 3510 so I need an image sized about 2490 x 3510 pixels (about 8.7 megapixels)
By the way: 1 inch = 2.54 centimetres. Did you know you can also do conversions on google? Try it yourself.
Happy pixelling!
Steven Pam is a commercial photographer
and founder of Smartshots commercial photography.
He is based in Melbourne, Australia, and specializes in people, aviation and music
photography. Steven has over 10 years experience working with clients in the UK,
USA and Australia, from small businesses to national publications and publicly
listed companies. For Steven’s free 20-point smartguide to organising a commercial
photo shoot, visit http://www.smartshots.com.au
So you’ve got a photography web site and want to get it to the top of the listings in Google, Yahoo and MSN. The first thing you need to know is to forget Yahoo and MSN. They are losing the Search Engine War and their share of SEARCHES is on the decline. GOOGLE is king and looks set to dominate the market for some time to come. MSN’s attempt to build their search feature into Windows has not done anything to increase their market share, rather MSN’s share of Search fell to 10.9%, Yahoo had 21.4% against Google’s 49%
So lesson number one concentrate you SEO efforts on Google.
Next thing, forget FLASH. FLASH packages a web site in lots of code that Search Engine Spiders/robots cannot read. When a Spider crawls a site it is looking for content text written in plain old HTML. FLASH - forget it.
2nd build your site with Keywords. First thing to do is decide what your keywords are going to be. In the case of SDBPHOTO.COM our keywords are: “hong kong photographer/photography”. Now the most important place to use these Keywords is first in the TITLE HEADING of the page. So many photographers title their pages “Jo’s Photography Gallery”. Now how many people do you think would search for this. Use keyword terms that people will search for. If you are a wedding photographer in Santa Maria. Title your page “Santa Maria Wedding Photographer”.
You will then want to repeat these keywords again in the metatags: Keywords & Description. While not given very much weight in the SERP’s these days, they are still important. Take two sites with the same PageRank, one with MetaTags, the other without. The page with the MetaTags is going to rank higher…
Then use your keywords again in the actual body text of the pages. Beware not to use them too many times. This is called Spamming and will get your site booted out of the SERP’s, you don’t want that. Use a Keyword Density Analyser to check the density of any given keyword in relation to the rest of the content on your site.
When building your internal links, the text you use in the anchor is also important. Try using the page title as the anchor text when you create your links.
And a few more tricks I have up my sleeve that I am not going to give away as my competition is sure to be reading this.
Internally the structure of a site is very important to the way a SPIDER crawls your site. Built properly a site with a lower PR will outrank a page with a higher PR, purely due to the structure of the site.
The most important determination of PageRank is how the site is linked to the rest of the web. INBOUND LINKS are king. The more the better. Trading links with other sites is a common way to build links and many SEO specialists spend lots of time and effort cultivating links with other sites. But not all links are created equal. Link Farms are sites that have been created purely for the purpose of achieving higher PR, Google does not like LinkFarms and sites have been know to be penalised for participating in LinkFarms. Be sure to screen your link partners carefully. A well optimised site with a number of good quality inbound links is what we are aiming for here. Linking from sites with higher PR will result in a higher PR for your site. It is all based on the theory of “votes” to your page. Google, how de mo crat ic (dont want to get censored) of them… now if they only could get the Chi knees to vote…
Of particular interest will be how you tag (file name) the photos on your site. The logo on my site which appears on everypage called from the server is named with my keywords. If you have a gallery site with many pages, you should have each page linked back to the index page of your site with your keywords as the anchor text.
Good sources of SEO info, forget any books, by the time they get to the presses the info they contain is dated at best, obsolete at worst. The web has a wealth of SEO sites and user forums. Good ones to check are:
http://www.searchengineworld.com/
http://www.seochat.com/
http://www.webmasterworld.com/
Of particular interest to photographers http://www.webmasterworld.com/ has a section on PPC (pay per click) advertising. PPC for photographers will be covered in the next chapter.
With your site ranking high in the SERP’s people will be able to find you and your business will grow.
Since achieving #1 position for my keywords about a year ago, this site has gone from 80-100 visitors a day to currently receiving 250-400 visitors a day. Most importantly our non-web business has increased by at least 50%. You could not buy the publicity that #1 in Google brings to a site in a highly competitive market such as Hong Kong.
To close. My site has been live for a little over four years. It was only late in 2004 that I took an interest in SEO and started the climb up the SERP’s, it took a little over six months to hit #1 in Google, we stayed there for about 6 months and then were bumped to #3, a reworking and revision of the site as well as the cultivation of some more links and we were soon back in #1 where we have been for the last 9 months. This site is PR 4 and has over 500 inbound links, and has indexed more than 3000 pages and building…
Sean David Baylis is a Professional Photographer working in Hong Kong and around Asia. http://www.sdbphoto.com is a labour of love for Sean. In addition to a keen interest in Photography, Sean has fallen in love with the art of Search Engine Optimization. “Its like chess with 1,000,000 pieces”. If you would like to hire an SEO expert to optimise your site, please contact me sdb@sdbphoto.com.
