Tag Archives: African Tuesday

Connect

Hi everybody,

You may have noticed that over the last few weeks I have not been uploading an awful lot of my own work to this site and the related FaceBook page. And there is a reason for that. Apalled by the self centredness of many pages and accounts in the hunt for likes and follows, … I decided to contribute more to other sites and to share some more of other people’s work. One of these contributions was my contribution to Wild Eye’s weekly behind the frame post, which by the way generated a perfect example as per how not to provide feedback (yet more about that soon).  As I mentioned before, it’s all about giving and taking, a post that created some nice exchange in the recent past, coincidentally (or maybe not) with Marcelle Robbins whom also contributed to last week’s behind the frame post. Which brings me to another aspect, which has been raised many times before: it’s not about the amount of connections you have, yet about the quality of your connections, since those are the connections that give you the boost to keep on going.

Point is of course that all these interactions take time and that you have to weigh your time investment properly. For that reason it is important to have your social media linked. A great way of doing this from your FaceBook account is with Tradablebits. You may have noticed the new Twitter link and the RSS blog feed at the top of my FB page, great stuff and all for free, or at least, there are 4 aps you can install for free, well worth checking out.

I’ve also been creating a Google+ account, have contributed to several G+ themes (FYI today is African Tuesday and the shot in this post was my first contribution to that theme) and created a theme myself: Wild Kenya a visual ode to Kenya, it’s wildlife, landscapes and people and a way of sharing great shots from Kenya. More about Google+ in one of my next blog posts. All going well, the next one going live will be a guest post.

Canon 350D, 55mm, f/5.6, 1/800 ISO 200

And all that being said, in the near future I will keep on uploading stuff here, yet I will also work on trying to get some return on time investment, by adding an online shop to the site, creating a shutterstock account, trying to get some work to the newspapers (you may have noticed my cheetah shots in the Daily Mail), getting some nice business cards, …

And guess what: without it being the goal, giving back to the community by commenting on people’s posts and by sharing their work has actually earned me more likes and follows than I would have ever reached by just focusing on my own work, … think about it!

Warm regards,

Guy