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Dear all,

It has been some time, yet most of you will know I have a good reason for that: Ronja Maj Dekelver joined us on 11/06/2012, and she was born an ace in advanced parent sleep deprivation techniques 😉

Canon 5D, Canon EF 50 mm f/1.8, f/1.8, 1/400, ISO 320

As for the blog, three weeks ago Stephen Earle provided a great guest blog, which I presume you enjoyed as much as I did. Once again a big thank you Stephen for this great contribution to Pics from the Wild and I hope it also got some extra traffic your way. In my own last post, I talked about connecting and in this blog post, I want to go one step further, since once you are connected, it is in my opinion all about sharing and about taking that mantra a step further than focusing on sharing your own work only.

In that context, I want to say a few words about Google+, which I started exploring a few weeks ago (for those of you on G+, the link to my profile is taken up in the sidebar). What I like about it is that in a short timespan, people took the effort to check out my site and to share some of my shots, in FB f.e. that doesn’t happen too often, I guess the difference lies in the fact that G+ is geared to photographers for photographers. It is also worth noting that you easily reach more people through G+, where I am in 1 month part of more circles than I have followers on FB in the timespan of 1 year! There’s one downside to G+ and that is the fact it takes some time to get your head around sharing meaningfully (there they can learn a thing or 2 from the likes of FaceBook, …). It is well worth cracking the nut though.

All that being said, a great way of sharing in G+ are the themes that are being created/curated. In that context, I have created a theme called Wild Kenya and I welcome those of you with shots portraying the beauty of Kenya (people, wildlife, landscapes, …) to contribute. Mike Gaudar was the first one to contribute and I am sure more great shots are to follow. Just check out the quality of the contributions here, I absolutely love it, so A BIG THANKS to the contributors: Albatros Travel Africa, Barnita’s Photography, Andy Bitterer, Diego Cattaneo, Mike Gaudaur, Robyn Gianni, Russell Johnson, Nicolas Lotsos, Wayne Marinovich, Maggy Meyer, Winston Mitchell, Sandy Schepis, Nicole Sharpe, Gerry van der Walt and myself.

The first G+ Wild Kenya contribution, with a big thanks to Mike Gaudaur

Then, to allow others to share my work, I added a G+ button to all my posts and pages on this site, allowing people to share things they like on their Google+ site without leaving Pics from the Wild.

Here’s one of my recent shots, since of course, besides creating exposure for others it is key you contribute to the community yourself, otherwise people will loose interest!

Canon 7D, Canon 300 mm f/4 L IS USM, 1/1000, f/8, ISO 800

Finally, you may also have noticed that I added a link to my instagram account to the sidebar of the site. Another great way of sharing, much in line with our modern day visual orientation and hence suiting photographers to share bits and pieces of their life and work through the medium they know best. On top of that there are also interesting small competitions going on that can help you big time in getting your work out there: #spectacular_works being one of them, where I got my rhino reflection shot selected amongst the many entries.

I’ll keep it at that for now and look forward to your thoughts.

Warm regards,

Guy

 

Some Pinteresting thoughts

Hi all,

In my last blog post, I explained why I prefer 500px over 1x or any other photo sharing site I’ve come across till now. At the same time I was still undecided as per what I thought of Pinterest as a tool to share the work of others. Meanwhile I have made up my mind, since as things are organized now, I feel that in general, people only care about their own collections, e.g. they make use of other people’s work to make interesting galleries, and this more often than not without properly refering to the photographer. And this makes the site useless to create exposure for others. Most of the time you cannot trace back the name of the photographer, nor the link to his or her site. At first instance I told myself I would do it differently, which I did, yet also this is useless, since if somebody repins you without bothering to properly reference, the next person will still be at a loss as per the creator of the shot, …

So far, my reflection on Pinterest, welcoming thoughts of others on the subject and leaving you with anoher reflection for this week.

Canon 7D, Canon 70-200 L IS USM f/2.8 @ 200mm, f/2.8, 1/8000, ISO 200

Warm regards,

Guy