Sunday Morning Bagels and Blogs

Today, we feature 4 wonderful photography blogs from the submissions received over the weekend. Our photography selections include square picture, 10mmgalore, 18mm, and parallax thinking.

Since Sunday is one of our slower days of the week, I typically take a break from my normal blogging schedule to kick back and enjoy a couple toasted bagels and read non-photography related sites. If you are in the market, here are a few quality selections from my planned reading list today…8 Totally Awesome Time-Lapse Videos at 10000 words, 90+ Essential Social Media Resources at Mashable, How to Stay Focused at Problogger, and The Most Important Blog Post You’ll Probably Never Read at Viper Chill. These sites are tremendous resources for any blogger and I highly recommend subscribing to each. Hope you enjoy!

9 Sure Fire Tips for Better Photo Blogging

fire 150x150 9 Sure Fire Tips for Better Photo Blogging picturesListed below are 9 sure fire tips to improve your photo blogging success. Whether you’re a hard core photo blog publisher along the lines of Eric, Sam or Dave, or just enjoy crafting the occasional post, we all like to steadily improve our offerings and enhance audience size.

These 9 tips cover many topics beyond just photography tips, but are important elements to expanding your photo blogging horizons. With the new year already upon, now is as good a time as any to look for ways to distinguish your presence online.

  • General Knowledge – When it comes to blogging essentials, Darren is in a class by himself. His candid approach and informative posts have helped launch the careers of numerous bloggers. With over 128k daily subscribers and a best selling book, Darren features posts on a wide range of topics every blogger can benefit from reading.
  • Web developmentNettuts+ is an excellent resource for web developers and designers, offering tutorials and articles on technology, skills and techniques to improve how you design and build websites. Even though some of the topics covered on this site may be a bit advanced for many bloggers, the tutorials are broken down in easy to follow steps. I always look forward to receiving this feed!….Just interested in jazzin’ up your WordPress blog? Here are a few places to start, Hongkitat, Lorelle, and of course, Matt.
  • Inspiration – It happens to all of us, sooner or later, if you continue photo blogging, the time will come when you run out of ideas. What do you do? Why read more photo blogs, of course. Without a doubt, StumbleUpon is my greatest weakness. Be warned, this site is highly addictive! Simply sign up (it’s free), download their toolbar, select your topic preferences, and you’re off and running… Smashing Magazine covers a lot of ground in the graphic design/photography field; always a source for great “Top xx” type features. Also check out photoblogs.org, FFFFound and coolphotoblogs.
  • SEO (Search Engine Optimization) – Perhaps the most over-used web phrase ever..however, you do need to know something about this topic to succeed online. If you are just looking for a general overview of SEO, check out this recent article by James. If you’re looking to take your SEO knowledge to the next level, start here.. SEO Book.
  • Photography Lessons – You can gain photographic knowledge from a variety of ways, such as reading tutorials, like DPS and Aaron, watching a professional photographer, like Chase, at work or even invest in private workshops, i.e., Jason, Don, and Jerry. Regardless of the avenue you choose, continuing education is not only important in developing your photography skills, it is a great way to network with other photographers!
  • Monetizing your photo blog – Without going into too much detail, if you are looking to make money with your photo blog, here’s is where to start your research; John, Darren (yes, again), and this single post from Steve
  • Marketing – In a word – Seth
  • Creative Design – In addition to killer content, web design comes in a close second in determining the success or failure of your web venture. To this point, using free WordPress templates alone is not the way to web success. Learn and understand the basics of great web design and implement these elements into your web presence. Three of my favorites? Check out Jacob ,Chad, and Gino.
  • Improve your writing skills – Let’s face it…all photographers think they are great writers and all writers believe they are awesome photographers. Truth be told, most photographers are not great photographers and most writers, well, struggle. Although I do write a lot, I acknowledge my limitations in this field. Looking to improve on your writing skills? Spend some time here…CopyBlogger, Daily Writing Tips, Editor Unleashed, CopyWrite, 10000 words and Writing Forward.


Hope you enjoyed our post and please RT and share socially….

The Occasional Odd Crop

dayattheraces45051 300x235 The Occasional Odd Crop pictures

Welcome to the newest member of our photography blog community, The Occasional Odd Crop, by Mark A. Dodge Medlin. I located this facinating photo blog along with several others in a post over at 10000words.net.

In reviewing Mark’s portfolio, I am struck by the range of his images. Most photographers concentrate and specialize on a few specific areas of photography, however, his works cover everything from street photography, portraiture, aerials, and much more. Not only does he do a lot, he does a lot very well!

Here is a short excerpt from his bio:

About me

I’m a journalist living in San Diego, California.

Unless noted otherwise, I shot the photos in this blog with my Canon PowerShot A620. I used to own a Canon SureShot 105 that I bought for a trip to England in 1998, and a Nikon FE2 that I got as part of my first daily newspaper job in 1986.

Block out some time to peruse his vast collection of striking images!