Tag Archives: sharing

Share

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

 

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