Seems easy, so I created a Facebook “Page” in order to accomplish this, since we don’t want to mix our personal profiles with the business, and FB says “Pages” are for businesses.  Problem is, Pages have Fans, not Friends. They can’t invite Fans. They can’t tag their Fans. They can’t send Messages. So there’s no way to alert the bride and groom to the Page other than to email them a link or message them from my personal account. But that wouldn’t work anyway, because as far as I can tell, images posted by Pages can never be tagged, even by People.

I would be happy to pay Facebook for the privilege of sending an invitation to the bride and groom and the privilege of tag-ability, but that’s not possible.  All I can pay Facebook for is an ad targeting a demographic – say, engaged women in their 20′s in Savannah. (Yes, we’re trying that too.)

So the reason I say Facebook doesn’t get small businesses is that it’s clear these rules exist to prevent giant corporations from spamming Facebook accounts. That’s great. But small businesses have actual relationships with their clients. If the local coffee shop wants to proactively reach out to me on Facebook, that wouldn’t piss me off, because I actually do know the owner. (Hi Kristin!)

The upshot is that I think this is a good idea for local wedding and portrait photographers to pursue, but you’re going to have to create a secondary personal page to do it. That’s what we did, and it is working – in 24 hours it generated 19 hits to our website.   FYI, you cannot call your new Person “Joe Smith, Photographer” or anything like that, because the algorithms catch that. So you’ll have two Facebook identities. (Which reminds me of the time my friend created two online dating profiles – one sexy and one quirky – and judged guys based on which they responded to, but that’s another story.)

Corporations are not people, but small businesspeople are. Facebook is missing out on a huge market by not allowing us to network directly with our clients. I feel bad not paying for for-profit use of the site; I think it’s akin to copyright violation, but I don’t see an alternative.

-Michelle

Update 1/16/12 – The answer may be a “Community Page”. Still probably technically against the rules, but at least it’s not a personal page.  Someone can tag photos on community page once they like it.

Newsweek launched its app over the holiday weekend, and created an image-heavy, ad-free, issue about the Obama presidency to show off its iPad bells and whistles. In theory, the idea was to show readers how fabulous magazines will look on the iPad, and the issue was made up entirely of old photos of Obama, old Obama cartoons, some captions, and one letter from the editor crooning a love song to Steve Jobs, “the Gutenberg of a new age.” Not a terrible idea, in theory.

In practice, it didn’t occur to anyone that they needed high-res images to pull this off. It looks like they took some old stock photos they had lying around, licensed at a lower-res for web use, and stuck them in their iPad mag. The photos look horrible. They’re a blurry mess. And that’s before zooming in with the neat iPad pinch function. Do that, and they really fall apart.

And that’s assuming you can even get them to load – there’s a black screen and a “loading” animation every time we turn a page. Well, advance to the next page using the thumbnails at the bottom, because there’s no easy way to advance by tapping on the side of the page or turning the corner, like you would with an iBook. The loading takes so long, it has made the iPad hang a couple times. AND, the thumbnails are so small, there’s no way to browse content and know what you’re turning to in advance. There’s not even a table of contents, interactive or otherwise. They even screwed up the kerning on one caption so that the letters overlap. I’d show you, but there’s no way to share or take a screenshot or anything.

I’m still hopeful that smart use of this thing by publishers will help imagemakers by revitalizing the market for our work, and I’m excited to check out the new Wired for iPad later this week. For now, I’m actually embarrassed for Newsweek. I hope other publishers get their magazines really ready for this rather than rushing them to market, because the last thing we need is for the public to turn away from this before it has a chance to realize its potential.

-michelle

The basic issue is that Apple has conceived of the iPad as something that relies on having a computer around all the time to sync with, whereas I want to use my iPad as a stand-alone device. I want to add and remove content to it as needed, but I certainly don’t want to stuff my entire photo library on there – that’s a laughable idea. Since there’s no USB port or card reader, I had to sync it with a computer in order to get content onto it. I’ve got it set up to sync with my laptop, which is of course not where we store Greg’s archives, but it will only sync with one computer. So first I had to load the photos I wanted onto a jump drive, then upload them onto my laptop, then sync the iPad with the laptop to get them on there. OK, I can live with that, but here’s the real problem:

I tried to do a manual sync and load the albums one by one, but when I loaded the second one, it erased the first one. Turns out, when you do a manual sync, you have to sync *everything* that you want to keep on the iPad, otherwise the new content just overwrites the old content. So you have to sync the new content *and* the old content. This is a huge pain from the POV of a photographer, because for instance, that special album I just made for that client – I don’t want to keep that on my laptop. But if I don’t keep it on my laptop, I won’t be able to keep it on my iPad.

Another issue was that in addition to showing the clients the iPad albums, they asked to see some web content, and that website wasn’t optimized for the iPad. Ick.

Score one for just bringing along a laptop.

-Michelle

We’ve talked about this before in the context of young photographers not realizing that promoting themselves can cost $20k the first year out, but I think it bears repeating in a message directed at Art Buyers, I guess just as a plea to realize that all the efforts we make to get in touch with you and show off our work, we pay for that. We invest a lot of money in the promotion of our businesses, as well as in creating great images. That promo you got in the mail, the book hand delivered to your office, the bagels sitting on the conference room table – those come at a dear cost to photographers.

-Michelle

I love the Jepson’s art ed classes for little ones, because they always include a visit to the galleries and the introduction of a new concept. There’s an art project too, and a fully stocked art room, so it’s lots of fun. And it’s important for me to be reminded that Oliver, even at 3.5, can learn some of the basics and not just do arts and crafts. He already likes to use our family snapshooter (Canon G9, currently disabled by beach sand) to take photos of Greg and I, and he loves using the Mac’s PhotoBooth to take photo and video of himself – it seems a small leap from there to introduce the concept, and I will try to remember to do it.