March 8th was International Women’s Day. Where we mark the inequalities that still exist in our society.

Sarah Everard is not the first woman to be murdered by a man this year. There have been 118 others since the last International Women’s Day in 2020. All women murdered where the prime suspect is a man.

Women tried to hold a vigil last night at Clapham Common near where she was taken. A peaceful protest to show solidarity to all women who have ever felt unsafe on the streets and to try to get the message across that almost all women suffer because of injustice in our society. The pictures and videos emerging that show the Met’s response is deeply shocking, with male police officers manhandling women at what was effectively a protest against male on female brutality.

What does this have to do with photography?

I have never been quiet about the fact that female photographers are not equal to male photographers in our society. We are not taken as seriously as technicians, as creatives, as teachers, or as consumers. We have women only spaces in photography for a reason, because it gives us a chance to play on a level playing field, and to learn and grow away from sexist attitudes.

So much photography requires operating in situations that are remote or alone. Getting up at 3am and trekking up a mountain for the perfect landscape shot. Spending five days camping out in a remote hide in the woods to get the perfect wildlife picture. Seeking out the bright lights of the city late at night. Photographing models one to one. All while having thousands and thousands of pounds worth of equipment on display.

When I worked as a product and fashion photographer in London I was based away from the main company HQ and was working primarily on the design floor of a large clothing brand on Regent Street near Picadilly Circus. I wasn’t allowed to leave my camera gear in the studio because we didn’t have a safe, so every night I would take the tube, then the train, then walk the few miles home at night with several thousand pounds worth of camera and lens in my rucksack. In the morning I would do the reverse at 6am, in the dark.
I remember a male colleague commenting that he didn’t understand why I carried my gear in just a normal looking rucksack rather than a camera bag. Well, that’s because I was afraid, as a 5ft tall woman, that I would be more likely to be attacked if I did that. The men I worked with shrugged that statement off as if it was nothing. But the woman all agreed that they usually carried their camera in their handbag rather than in a branded camera bag.

The only difference between her and us is that we made it home.

Just let that sink in. Sarah Everard is all of us. We are her. We are all at risk from the behavior of men. I’d suggest that almost all female photographers have felt vulnerable at some point, or perhaps not taken the kind of photographs that they would like to. I know I’ve looked at male photographer friends photographs and wished that I had the freedom to just be able to go and take the pictures that they do without any thought for safety or welfare.

What about the police? Won’t they protect us?

What the police told female residents of Clapham should strike fear into the heart of every woman photographer who likes a solitary adventure. They advised women to “not go out alone” as if the primary problem is women exercising their freedom, rather than male perpetrators stealing the freedom of these women. We should also remember that this is the same advice given to women when Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, was at large. It seems very little has changed, as far as the police are concerned, in the forty-five years since those heinous crimes were committed.

As I’ve already said, photographers love to get into situations where they are alone in order to seek the thrill of the perfect photograph. So what does that mean for us as women photographers?

I’m going to share something that I’ve shared in a few places before. But I feel that it’s relevant in the context of this discussion. Anyone who knows me will know that I love photographing men in various states of undress. In fact I am so interested in the portrayal of masculinity in art that I made it the subject of my PhD that I’m currently researching.

I don’t photograph male models anymore. I abruptly stopped and people sometimes ask why. This is what I tell them.

I was photographing in my home studio one day – it’s not uncommon for photographers to have a home studio space. I was working, one on one, with a male model. Nothing unusual about that at all since I lived alone and enjoyed photographing male models. We were photographing him in his underwear when he assaulted me. He didn’t try and steal anything, he just assaulted me. For fun, I assume.

That evening I went to my local police station and was taken into a room with two male police officers so that I could describe to them what had happened. They told me that there was no point in officially recording it, because there would never be a conviction. I asked why and they said it’s because nobody would look kindly on a young woman who invites men into her home while alone, gets them mostly naked, and takes “that kind” of photograph. It was the photographic equivalent of “she was wearing a short skirt so she deserved it” or “she was out, alone, after dark.”

Just to be clear, I had his name, signature, address, telephone number, car registration, and bank details. I knew exactly who he was. They could have recorded that information.

What I learned from that encounter with the police is that women can never believe that the police will be on their side when they are the victim, and that the police will uphold the kind of structural sexism and misogyny that is prevalent in our society. And of course you could say that I shouldn’t generalize about all police from a single encounter, but it’s not a single encounter. It’s a structural problem within the policing and legal system. Sure, there are some good police officers. But they are trapped within systems that are actively working against them.

I deeply regret the fact that other female photographers may have been assaulted by this male model and that I didn’t try harder to get the police to take me seriously. He could have been stopped, but the police chose not to try.

When I left a negative review about him on a model portfolio website saying nothing other than the fact that I did not recommend him to others, he threatened to sue me. I knew he had money, and he was older than me. I took the negative review down. I am ashamed, to this day, that I did not stick up for myself and try to protect other women. I do not know how many other women he intimidated in this way. Or how many other women he has assaulted.

What should we do?

The truth is, I don’t know. I don’t have any answers.

I do think that it’s important to talk about these issues and how they affect female photographers. I think it’s important to talk about these issues specifically in photography communities so that we can try to make the issue a “local” one rather than just one that affects women than nobody knows personally. We need to make our male friends and photography colleagues understand that this affects all of us.

We need to facilitate these discussions to happen in photography groups, on social media, and in our camera clubs. We need to talk about how we can broaden the world for women and how we can work towards a safer society where women aren’t at risk from going adventuring with their camera.

Unfortunately yesterday I was banned from posting for a week in a film photography group when I tried to bring up the fact that some comments being made by male members were sexist and unwelcoming for women. The male administrator’s response was to tell me that the group was to be “apolitical” and a safe space away from the politics of every day life. I pointed out to him that as a woman and a female photographer evey space where sexist comments are made is political for me. A ban, for a week, for my trouble. His attitude towards me reassures men that it’s ok to keep making those comments and assumptions, and so the men in his photography group will feel validated to continue their behaviour.

But this is nothing new. It’s probably over a decade ago now that I was banned from the popular model and photographer portfolio site PurplePort. My crime? I kicked up a fuss when a prominent and popular male photographer on the site made a “joke” about the gang rape of women in India. They temporarily banned my profile so I made a comment about it on Twitter. They banned me from using the site forever in response. Because I stood up and said “hey, it’s not ok that you treat your male photographers with impunity when they make public jokes about women being gang-raped.” This is, of course, set to a background of the norm for the site being young female models going into the homes of older male photographers and taking off their clothes. For context, there have been quite a few cases, in the last decade since I’ve been following, of male photographers being charged for sexually assaulting models. And we all know that the public love to blame the female victim – going to older men’s houses and taking her clothes off for money would never put her in a favourable light in our society.

What can we do?

Speak out. Loudly. Tell people how you feel about the issue. Remind those around you of the structural inequality that takes place in our society.

Change the way we think about “genius” photographers. Instead of the myth of the lone genius who stalks their prey, instead celebrate collaborative work.

If you’re a male photographer and you are not speaking up when other male photographers say something sexist then you are actively part of the problem. If you think that women’s issues in our hobby are “political” and therefore should not be discussed then you are contributing to spaces where sexist attitudes are harboured and validated.

Join a female photography group. There really is strength and solidarity in numbers.

Respond to the UK Government Consultation on Violence against Women and Girls. It closes on the 26th March. Tell them what you think.

Make yourself big. Take up space both in person and online. Don’t concede your voice to men.

Believe in yourself.

The post The Difference Is, We Made It Home appeared first on Charlie Moss.

I don’t know exactly what my aims and objectives will be for this thesis will be yet, I am at the stage where I’m going to read the literature, begin a literature review, and see what questions jump out at me. I expect I’ll know more in a few months time when I’ve read some books and made some notes.

So here, below, is my initial reading list. It is partially created from my own research and partially created from the generous help of participants in the FlakPhoto Network.

Andre Bazin. ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’. In What Is Cinema?, 1945.

Barrell, John. The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt: ‘The Body of the Public’. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986.

Bell, Clive. Art. Charleston, SC: CreateSpace, 2012.

Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Translated by James Amery Underwood. Penguin Books Great Ideas. London: Penguin, 2008.

Campany, David. On Photographs, 2020.

Cavedon‐Taylor, Dan. ‘The Epistemic Status of Photographs and Paintings: A Response to Cohen and Meskin’. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 67, no. 2 (2009): 230–35. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6245.2009.01350_3.x.

Cotton, Charlotte. The Photograph as Contemporary Art. Third edition. World of Art. New York, New York: Thames & Hudson, 2014.

Danto, Arthur C. What Art Is, 2014. https://archive.org/details/whatartis0000dant_a5q0.

Dyer, Geoff. The Ongoing Moment: A Book about Photography. Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2012.

Flusser, Vilém. Towards a Philosophy of Photography. London: Reaktion Books, 2012.

Galassi, Peter. Before Photography: Painting and the Invention of Photography. New York : Boston: Museum of Modern Art ; Distributed by New York Graphic Society, 1981.

Gaut, Berys. ‘“Art” as a Cluster Concept’. In Theories of Art Today, edited by Noël Carroll. Madison, Wis: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000.

Gaut, Berys Nigel. Art, Emotion and Ethics. Pbk. [ed.]. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Gelder, Hilde van, and Helen Westgeest. Photography Theory in Historical Perspective: Case Studies from Contemporary Art. Chichester, West Sussex ; Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.

Grundberg, Andy. Crisis of the Real: Writings on Photography, 2010.

Grundberg, Andy. How Photography Became Contemporary Art: <br>. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021.

Habermas, Jürgen, and Thomas Burger. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Reprinted. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008.

Handy, Ellen, Brian Lukacher, and Shelley Rice. Pictorial Effect Naturalistic Vision: The Photographs and Theories of Henry Peach Robinson and Peter Henry Emerson. Norfolk, Va: Chrysler Museum, 1994.

Hatt, Michael, and Charlotte Klonk. Art History: A Critical Introduction to Its Methods. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006.

Jones, Amelia, and Erin Silver, eds. Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories. Rethinking Art’s Histories. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2016.

Maynard, Patrick. ‘The Secular Icon: Photography and the Functions of Images’. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 42, no. 2 (1983): 155–69. https://doi.org/10.2307/430660.

‘On the Invention of Photographic Meaning’. Accessed 28 February 2021. https://www.artforum.com/print/197501/on-the-invention-of-photographic-meaning-37302.

Arnheim, Rudolf. “On the Nature of Photography.” Critical Inquiry 1, no. 1 (1974): 149-61. Accessed February 28, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1342924.

Panofsky, Erwin. ‘Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures’. In Film Theory and Criticism, edited by Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen, and Leo Braudy, 4th ed., 233–48. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Reilly, Maura and Thames and Hudson. Women Artists: The Linda Nochlin Reader. London: Thames & Hudson, 2020.

Reynolds, Joshua, and Robert R. Wark. Discourses on Art. New Haven: Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art (London) Ltd. by Yale University Press, 1997.

Sealy, Mark. Decolonising the Camera: Photography in Racial Time, 2019.

Sontag, Susan. On Photography. Pearson Always Learning. London: Penguin Books, 1979.

Stieglitz, Alfred, Sarah Greenough, and Juan Hamilton. Alfred Stieglitz, Photographs & Writings. 1st ed. Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1983.

Tolstoy, Leo, and Aylmer Maude. What Is Art?, 2014.

Traub, Charles, Steven Heller, and Adam B. Bell, eds. The Education of a Photographer. New York: Allworth Press, 2006.

Walton, Kendall L. ‘Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism’. Critical Inquiry 11, no. 2 (1984): 246–77.

Warburton, Nigel. The Art Question. London ; New York: Routledge, 2003.

Weaver, Jane Calhoun, and Paul Avrich Collection (Library of Congress), eds. Sadakichi Hartmann: Critical Modernist: Collected Art Writings. Lannan Series of Contemporary Art Criticism 1. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.

Williams, Val. The Other Observers: Women Photographers in Britain 1900 to the Present. Repr. London: Virago, 1994.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte. Philosophical investigations. Rev. 4th ed. Chichester, West Sussex, U.K. ; Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

The post New Research on Photography as Art appeared first on Charlie Moss.

I’ll preface this by saying two things:
1. I am not a particular fan of Harris. While I recognise that she is a historical choice for the role, many of her ideological views do not align with mine. So I’m not writing about liking this portrait purely because I’m a fan of hers.
2. I am currently researching a PhD in art history, and I’m focussing on eighteenth century portraiture. This will undoubtedly inform the way I see the image as I don’t come from a “pure” photography background.

Background choices in portraiture

I was interested in the colour choices and the inclusion of draped fabric in the background. I found it interesting because it seems almost a dated choice for the front cover of Vogue magazine. I don’t regularly buy Vogue, but I don’t remember a cover using this kind of draped background for a long time (although of course I may have just not seen it).

To me, the draped fabrics signal a particular heritage. Several centuries ago Joshua Reynolds (and others) preferred painting women dressed in drapery (literally, draped fabrics in a quasi Roman/Green style) because he viewed it as more classic and timeless. Indeed he talked about it in one of his speeches to the Royal Academy. It also recalls the sumptuous, draped fabric backdrops of much historical portraiture, and to me seems a direct reference back to these depictions. The luxury of being able to drape your walls with fine fabrics portrays the subject as a person of wealth, but more important a person who belongs to this world where portraits are made to commemorate special occasions.

The draped silk and brocade backdrop says that Harris is here. She is a member of the social class who are important enough to have grand portraits made of them. She belongs in this institution. This deliberate indication of inclusion is crucially important in her depiction. She has as much authority and right to be in her new job as any man does, and as any white person does.

Full length vs head and shoulders

The full length choice makes sense to me too. I don’t think it’s solely about her fashion choices, or about her standing on sumptuous fabrics in trainers as a signal of rebellion as I’ve seen others say (although I do like that reading). I think that this is another reference back to historical portraiture.Vogue rarely puts a full length portrait on the cover these days. That’s strikingly unusual. But historically, full length portraits were much more expensive than head and shoulders portraits, and were therefore only really commissioned when there was a specific purpose for their existence. While you might commission a head and shoulders portrait of you as a gift for a friend, you would only commission a full length portrait when you had somewhere to display it – these were substantial objects often almost 3m or so in height. They made a particular statement.

Everything about a full length portrait, both photographic and painted, takes more time. It requires more thought. More technical skill. More style. More money. You have to style a person from head to foot. You have to pose them. You need a larger studio, more lights, with bigger backdrops. At an estimation (historical costume making is my hobby), there’s probably two thousand pounds worth of fabric making that backdrop. At least.And then there’s the colours. Apple green and salmon pink. Unusual enough choices (although not particularly shocking) that I looked it up. Her sorority. The first African American sorority to exist. I mean wow. I don’t know much about sororities, but I do know that’s a big deal.

So what?

So here we have a photograph that says she belongs to the upper echelons of society, that cost thousands to stage in backdrop fabric alone, and that references the women who have lifted her up to get her to this place today.

This isn’t a portrait of just Harris. This is a picture that honours the women who have struggled before her, who have not had their day in the spotlight. It tells us that she stands on the shoulders of other women who have blazed trails for her to follow.I mean, just wow. Vogue is telling us that here is a woman who belongs to this part of society who have important, full length portraits made, and they’re also telling us to remember that other women have not had this same opportunity in the past when perhaps they should have done.

Everything about this portrait is bold and revolutionary. And I’ve not even talked about her fashion choices yet.

(Writers note: this blog post is incomplete, there is more to come.)

The post Kamala Harris’ Vogue Cover is Everything I Would Expect appeared first on Charlie Moss.

With that in mind, here’s my roundup of some of my favourite finds on Etsy for photographers. Because like I’ve said before – no photographer really wants a mug that looks like a lens in their stocking.

Minimalist Leather Camera Strap

I adore this gorgeous leather camera strap by Clermo on Etsy. I recently bought myself a big, chunky medium format camera and I think that this would be just the thing to replace the horrible early 70s strap that it came with.

Some leather camera straps can be over fussy and chunky, but this one is perfect for people like me who like to keep things simple. Plus, dare I say it, this would look great with a summer dress next year when we’re all allowed back outside at photography meet-ups again!

Brown Leather Print Envelope

These print envelopes by LambAndRaccoon are meant as a stylish way for wedding photographers to present their prints. However I think they’d be a lovely way to store a treasured print collectiion of your own.

A small, handmade photo album would probably fit inside the larger of these leather print envelopes and could be a beautiful way to hold on to a set of memories from a trip abroad, or a family celebration.

A Retro Camera Print

I think that most photographers feel some nostalgia towards beautiful, retro cameras even if they were never film photographers in the first place. There’s something satisfying about the mechanical clicks and thunks when you use them that digital cameras just don’t quite have.

So this retro camera print by SamOsborneStore is a wonderful way to bring some bold graphic illustration into a photography studio, or even just into a study or living room at home.

Cute Fabric Camera Strap

You might have noticed a theme… I’m really in love with the colour mustard this year. My winter accessories wardrobe is mostly full of mustard coloured scarves, headbands, and masks!

This light fabric strap by OliveAndRyeIndustry would be perfect for my little Fuji camera that I shoot most of my work on. It’s so much nicer than the standard, boring straps that come with cameras in the box (and which you never get round to upgrading. I also love the floral print, it’s right up my street!

Leather Camera Patch

I do actually have one of these camera patches by HORD carefully sewn onto a rucksack I own. They are the most adorable way of displaying your love for photography and make a wonderful gift for camera-lovers who already seem to have everything.

Sterling Silver Camera Necklace

This gorgeous, graphic sterling silver camera necklace by inkonk would make a wonderful gift for many female photographers. The design is beautiful and understated, and is absolutely tiny which means it’s suitable for day to day wear.

So if you have a female photographer friend who likes to show their love for photography in a slightly more subtle way, perhaps this one is for them!

Nerdy Camera T Shirt

Most nerdy photography t shirts leave me a bit cold, but this one from CallumHallStudio is super cute. In care you don’t know, it’s a graphic based on the shutter speed selector dial from a retro camera!

I like clever design like this, it’s much more interesting than the tired t shirt designs with pictures of cameras, or quotes about how you shoot people for a living.

Photography Planner Stickers

I love stickers. And I love my planner. Unsuprisingly, I also love putting stickers in my planner to denote the things that I want to do on various days. I have a set of these cute little camera stickers and I slap them in my monthly planner whenever I want to dedicate a day to getting creative with my camera.

These little round rainbow camera stickers from Plannerface are just the job for reminding you to take time out to enjoy your photography hobby.

Don’t forget that Etsy has more than just holiday gifts for photographers. There are thousands of small businesses and artists with shops on Etsy that are selling just about anything you could imagine. A handmade gift is so much more thoughtful than something mass-produced, so take a look at this Etsy gift guide and see if you can get the rest of your Christmas shopping done too!

AFFILIATE DISCLOSURE
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The post Holiday Gift Guide for Photographers 2020 appeared first on Charlie Moss.

I didn’t want this to just be a page of advice with no real-world examples. So I set up a new page on my website to act as a case study for the advice I’m going to give you. I’ve wanted to offer my personal branding photography services more formally for a while now (I’ve been doing them but by word of mouth referral rather than my website) so this is a really good way to demonstrate the ideas behind local SEO.

What is local SEO for photographers?

Local SEO is the practice of optimising your website to attract more potential customers from local searches. So for example, I am a photographer based in Oxfordshire, so I might want to capture people searching for “portrait photography in Oxfordshire” or “pet photography in Banbury.” Realistically, very few people are going to pay me to shoot their portrait or their wedding if I’m a thousand miles away. Especially if I’m relatively new to the world of photography and without an established reputation.

By adding content to your website based around the local search terms that you want to rank for you can begin to let Google know that you serve people in this area and that you want them to look at your website. Google has no idea how good your images are or that you offer great customer service, all it knows is the words that you write on your page (and some additional data that you might give it).

So with that in mind, it’s important to start creating content that Google will believe is relevant for the searches that you think your potential customers are going to make.

Start with the basics

Identify the first search phrase that you want to rank for. I’m starting out with “personal branding photography in Oxfordshire.” Remember that this is a starting point and you’ll evolve your website and SEO in time as you respond to what works. I created a brand new page on my WordPress website with a couple of photos and some copy about what personal branding is and what services I offer as a photographer. I made sure to throw in some locational keywords near where I’m based so that I can also begin to capture local traffic from nearby counties as well.

After writing some basic copy and adding a few pictures I reviewed my SEO results from the Yoast plugin that I use. If you have a website that runs on WordPress and you aren’t using Yoast SEO then you need to get that installed right away. This is the WordPress plugin that I cannot live without, and best of all, it has a free version that works totally fine for most people.

It lives under the box where you write your blog post on WordPress. All you have to do is enter your keyword phrase that you want to rank for, and I’ll anlyse your post and tell you what else you should do in order to improve your chances with Google.

Here’s the result of the first pass of my post and what Yoast SEO makes of it – it’ll do for now!

Analyse your post in SEMrush

SEMrush is a great tool for anyone who wants to take their online marketing seriously. It’ll tell you exactly what you need to do in order to rank higher in Google’s search results for your chosen keyword. It can also help you identify new keywords to try and rank for, and help you sort out which keywords are worth trying to rank for and which ones are just going to be too difficult. If you’re a complete beginner to SEMrush head over to my blog post about getting started with it. If you’ve never usedSEMrush before, take a look now. When you sign up you get a seven-day free trial to decide if you like it or not.

Once you’re inside SEMrush and you’ve created your project as I detail in my blog post above, find the “On Page SEO Checker”. This is where you can start to get real feedback on the page that you’ve just created and begin fine-tuning the SEO to capture more and more local searches. And hopefully, in time this will turn into more and more local clients!

In the top left-hand corner click the green button labelled “Import keywords and pages” and select “manually” from the drop-down menu. This is where you can add the new page that you’ve just created, and the keyword that you’d like it to rank for.

I added three variations to my keywords that I’d like to optimise, and there’s no reason why I shouldn’t get this page to rank for all three keyword phrases that I’ve detailed here. Once the report has run, you should be able to “View all pages & ideas” at the bottom of the page, where you’ll be able to find the pages and keyword phrases that you just entered.

My report shows me that I need to focus on creating more informative content and make my text content more readable. These are both reasonable things to suggest. The page is quite short and it was only a first draft so it does need improvement with the phrasing.

But the most interesting page of suggestions is found by clicking through to the “Semantic” report. This will show you related keywords and phrases that are cropping up on your top ten competitors pages. If you can find a way to get some of these into the page that you’ve just written, you’ll be competing across a wider variety of search terms, and ultimately that means you’ll be capturing more local search traffic.

The list above shows you what SEMrush says I need to think about including on my page. Who knew that there was such a demand for yoga photography? Although actually, I think I know five Oxfordshire yoga teachers personally and we have a yoga studio in town, so maybe it’s not such a bad idea to include this in the keyword phrases for my page!

I can see that I missed out some really obvious keyword phrases. business owners, initial consultation, branding photography session, photo shoot, Banbury Oxfordshire, and website and social media all need to find their way onto my new website page about personal branding photography. So the first job is to update the text that I initially wrote and add in paragraphs about these different elements.

Rinse and repeat

Don’t forget that you can rerun these reports after you’ve made some initial changes. In fact, you can keep rerunning the reports time and time again to ensure that your competitors aren’t getting an advantage over you with their copy. Each time you make changes and then rerun the report it’ll suggest different keyword phrases that you might want to incorporate into your website in order to capture the search habits of your ideal clients.

Do more local keyword research

There are two main ways to do local keyword research to improve your SEO rankings. The first is to think about which keywords people are using to find local photographers in your area, the second is to work out which keywords your competitors are ranking for (and then swipe their positions in Google searches). Both of these types of research can be done in SEMrush, so let me show you how.

Keyword gap research

This is one of my favourite tools in SEMrush. It allows you to compare the keywords between your site and that of a known competitor which is really helpful when it comes to local SEO for photographers. Once the report has run it’ll give you a list of keywords that your competitor is ranking for in Google’s search results, but that you do not. It’s quite simple to use as well – just enter your website and your competitors’ website in the Keyword Gap page and ask SEMrush to compare the two sites.

Now I have blurred out some of the search terms because I don’t think it’s fair to spread the SEO info of my competitors all over my blog. It seems like a professional privacy invasion too far! However, you can see that there are a whole load of search terms that I might want to consider trying to rank for with my page.
Terms like oufc (Oxford United Football Club) and Oxford Mail are great local businesses that I could somehow think about incorporating to my site which would give me more “local juice” for Google to read. If I’m writing about established local businesses, then Google will know I’m operating in this local area.

But the more interesting ones to me are things like “commercial photographer Oxfordshire,” “photographer Oxfordshire,” and “photography courses Oxfordshire.” All of these are things that people are looking for and might consider me a relevant local search result. Certainly, a photography course is something that I’ve been looking to put together at some point, so at least I know people are searching for it.

The numbers in the green column are where my competitor is ranking for that search phrase in Google’s GB search results. Anything off the first page is rarely clicked on, and ideally, you want to be appearing in the top three listings returned for a Google search.

Keyword overview research

You can dive deeper into the research, clicking on the search term in order to bring up an overview page telling you more about it. Let’s take a look at that “commercial photographer Oxfordshire” keyword phrase.

So here’s what we learned about this keyword:

• On average, 90 searches a month are being made for the phrase “commercial photographer Oxfordshire.” That might not seem like very much, but if you could get all 90 of those people searching to click on your website, then that would be three enquiries a day! For sure you wouldn’t be able to convert all of them to be paying customers, but all of these people are looking for commercial photography in Oxfordshire so it’s a great start.
• It has a keyword difficulty ranking of 34%. The higher the percentage the harder it will be for a new website to rank for this keyword. 34% isn’t impossible, but it’s also not going to be easy. It’ll take some work to get there other than pure SEO optimisation on your site. You’ll also want to think about how you’re going to get relevant backlinks for instance.
• The CPC is $0 on average. That means that very few if any, photographers are paying Google to rank for this keyword. So you could think about paying for some advertising in order to shoot you to the top of the search results in the short term while working on your SEO and backlink strategy in the long term.

There are two SERP features available. SERP means Search Engine Results Pages and it’s shorthand for a collection of features that you can rank for. For instance, on my post about diversifying your photography income, I not only rank top for a keyword phrase, but I also have the “featured snippet” on the Google results page because my page is considered to answer a lot of questions related to that search. This search for “commercial photographer Oxfordshire” has a location-based map feature available, and reviews available as extra bonuses to rank for. Not all search terms have all SERP features available, but if they’re there then you want to try and rank for them. SEMrush has tools that can help you try to rank for these features. It’s a really helpful set of tools to get on top of local SEO for photographers.

There are 12 related keywords that I might want to rank for. Clicking this box takes you to SEMrush’s “Keyword Magic” tool where you can start to explore these related keywords in more depth. While terms like “baby photographer Oxfordshire” aren’t relevant to my business, I really should be ranking for both “photographer Oxford” and “Oxford photography.”

This exploration of other keywords have given me ideas for other pages that I might like to create, so I can now set aside time in the coming weeks to work on these new topics in a similar way. In time, and with work, my photography website can rank for many more keyword phrases than it currently does which will help to drive potential clients to my small business.

Keep refining and improving

The key to getting great local SEO is to keep using tools like SEMrush to refine and improve your website. It won’t happen overnight, and it’ll take a few weeks for Google to actually pick up your new pages and their keywords. SEO results do take time to grow. Most SEO experts will tell you that it’ll take around 4 to 6 months to start seeing good results. And these results should improve over time – the results you see after twelve months will be better than the results you see after six months. It’s a gradual process of improvement and change so you need to be in it for the long haul.

Ideally, you should set aside a little time regularly (ideally each week, but if not then perhaps once a month) to work on your SEO and improve your rankings. And while improving your SEO rankings you’ll be building more content for your site that will serve your customer well. Focus on building informative webpages that answer questions your ideal customer has about your business. The most successful SEO strategies focus on people as much as search engine mechanics.

I’m hopeful that in another few months I’ll be able to come back to this post and tell you how my local SEO strategy has worked, and provide a great template for local SEO for photographers. But for now, you’ll just have to try the strategy I’ve written about here for yourself, and let me know how you get on in the comments!

Results

Week 1

• Added Personal Branding Photography page
• Improved visibility by 4.99%

Week 2

• Keyword “personal branding oxfordshire” moved to position 5 in Google search results.
• Keyword “personal branding photography in oxfordshire” moved to position 4 in Google search results.

Related Posts

• 
  SEO for Photographers: How to Get Started with SEMRUSH
• 
  The Ultimate Guide to Diversifying your Photography Income

AFFILIATE DISCLOSURE
I may earn commissions for any links that appear in blog posts on this site. There is no change in pricing if you click through an affiliate link.

The post Local SEO for Photographers [Case Study] appeared first on Charlie Moss.

But SEMrush is a big, unwieldy beast. It’s built for social media professionals who really know what they’re doing. So how can you get your head around SEMrush when you’re a photographer? The same way you’d eat an elephant – one bite at a time!

Sign up for a SEMrush account

First things first, you’re going to need an account. Head over to Semrush and sign up for their seven day free trial. The SEMrush free trial allows you to do everything a basic paid account would do, so you really get to experience the tool and discover if it’s going to be what you need to improve your website rankings. They offer lots of step by step advice in the reports that is great for SEO for photographers.

Once you’re in, check out the side bar for the “dashboard option. You’re probably all there, but just in case you’re not it’s in the “management” section on the left hand side. Scroll down until you find “My Projects.”

Your project is where you manage everything to do with your personal website and domain. It allows you to generate and run regular reports and keep tabs on some of the historic data to do with your websites SEO rankings. So go ahead and enter your domain name and give your project a name.

Once you’ve added your project here you’ll see a table with a series of boxes that say “set up.” You’ll want to work along them one by one setting up all the different aspects of the SEMrush project management tool.

Site Audit

Site Audit is a tool from SEMrush that will scan your website for technical and SEO mistakes. This tool is going to be the foundation of how you improve the content that is already on your site. The Site Audit tool will regularly scan your website and send you email reports letting you know about any mistakes you can fix. Some of these mistakes are real quick fixes, just a few minutes of your time, and they can be extremely beneficial to your SEO rankings.

Set your “limit of checked pages” to a higher number than you think that you have pages on your site. Don’t forget that there can be lots of hidden pages too that you never see. I put it up at 10,000 for mine, even though I know my website doesn’t have anywhere near that amount of pages. You want your crawl source to be your website. Don’t set it to sitemaps or similar unless you have a good reason to do that.

The only other option you might want to consider is your schedule. Schedule your crawl for a low traffic day to your site. I have it set to Monday every week because that’s usually my quietist day.

Once you’re done with configuring the too, click the green “Start Site Audit” button at the bottom and let it start running.

Those are my results. 73% isn’t the worst result it could be, but there really is room for improvement! Lots of the problems are very technical and might be tough for a novice website manager to get into themselves, but there should still be things that you can fix quite easily. Head on over to the “issues” page to see what you might be able to fix quickly. SEMrush provides a handy “why and how to fix it” beside every problem, which can help you on your quest to getting a perfect website. Having a good and well functioning website is key when you’re considering SEO for photographers.

Many of my problems are related to HTTPS protocol, and I think that this is a problem with my WordPress theme. It’s something I’m going to query with the developers of the theme and see if they have any suggestions. I know that my web hosting isn’t very fast either (it hosts several of my websites) and that’s not something I’m going to change right now. Meanwhile, I can see something that I should be able to fix! An internal image is broken – lets check that out.,

It looks like, at some point, I have deleted a photograph from my website that was displayed on one of my gallery pages. It’s a quick and easy fix – I deleted the broken image out of the gallery page it was on. I also made a note in my todo list software that I should go back and review that page with some newer pictures.

One of the big problems flagged up on the “Warning” list of errors was that lots of my pages have a low word count. This is often the case with photographers websites as we think the images can speak for themselves. However Google isn’t really smart enough to interpret the content of a page from its images so it often needs a bit of help. Make sure that you’re adding a couple of paragraphs to each page, and that you’re filling out the description of a page in the metadata. This will make a huge difference to how Google understands your site. Try for 300 words minimum if you can, but something is always better than nothing.

Position Tracking

The Position Tracking tool is a handy little thing. It checks the search rankings of your website, compares it to your competitors, and shows you new ways that you can get into the top Google search results. SEO for photographers relies on understanding what your competitors are up to.

To use this tool you really need to have a think about which keywords you want to rank, and if you want them to be local or national. Many photographers rely on local Google searches to bring them new customers, so this is a great tool for monitor how you’re doing with your local SEO.

I live in quite a small town, so I wanted to look at local county searches. With that in mind I entered my Location as “Oxfordshire” and opted to show local rather than national data.

On the next page you can choose the keywords that you want to monitor. You can always come back to these settings, so don’t worry too much about getting it right first time. Think about the kinds of words that people would use to find your business. For instance if I owned a high street photography studio people might use the terms “pet photographer Oxfordshire” or “wedding photography in Oxford” or “engagement session Oxfordshire.” I’m going to go ahead and enter those terms right know, knowing that I almost certainly won’t rank for them! I added a few more for good measure.

pet photographer Oxfordshire
wedding photography in Oxford
engagement session Oxfordshire
Oxford portrait photographer
Oxfordshire product photography
Pet photography Oxford
Oxfordshire wedding photographer
portrait photos Oxfordshire
branding photography oxford
personal branding oxfordshire

I went ahead and added some more terms that I know I already rank for, just so that I could see how I was comparing to other photographers.

All that’s left to do after you’ve set your keywords to track, is to click the Start Tracking button and let it run the report! After a short amount of time, SEMrush will show you a report telling you what your “rankings distribution” is. This is essentially where the keywords that you’ve entered into the tool rank in Google searches for those terms.

The goal is always to be in the top three for each search term. Anything below top ten and you’re really going to struggle for that keyword to bring you traffic, especially in local searches. Your aim is to improve your rankings over time so that all of your chosen keywords that you want to rank for are appearing in the top three Google search results for that term or phrase.

One of the great features of this SEMrush tool is the ability to add up to 20 competitors. If you look along the top of the Position Tracking report you’ll see the option to add some competitors. If you open this window it’ll suggest websites who rank for the keywords that you entered into the monitoring settings. SEMrush has identified these websites as your competition based on the search terms that you want to rank for. SEO for photographers sometimes requires you to borrow some intel from the competition – don’t be afraid to do it!

You can add up to twenty, but be selective. For instance, SEMrush suggested that I might like to add Digital Photography School as a competitor to monitor, however there really isn’t much point. Not only are they my client (go check out the articles I’ve written for them) but they are such a massive and vast site that it’s going to give me no helpful data because they rank for thousands of keywords. They’re also not a local website, so they’re irrelevant for my local ranking campaign. (But shout out to Oxford Dog Photography who appeared in my suggested list of competitors – I think you have my dream job).

Over time you’ll be able to track your rankings against your competitors. It’ll give you the opportunity to see who is moving up and down compared to your own site, and then you can investigate what they’ve recently changed on their website (perhaps a new blog, or a rewritten ‘about me’ page). This kind of insight is vital for learning how to improve your own site, and capture some of your competitions search traffic. There are lots of reports here to explore in this tool, so make sure you spend some time learning about each one. Keeping an eye on your competitors is key to SEO for photographers.

On Page SEO Checker

This tool allows you to add pages and their target keywords for the tool to analyse and tell you how to improve your SEO for that particular page and keyword combo. You can allow the tool to auto import keywords and pages, but you can also add keywords and pages manually. I suggest using the auto import to improve what you already have (but delete out suggestions that aren’t useful to you) and then add some of your own manual suggestions. Here you can see I’ve added keywords to the manual tab that I would like to rank for but currently don’t. This is also a good time to think about restructuring your website – for instance, it might be better for me to add a new page about personal branding photography, and attempt to rank for that in google searches.

Sure enough, the report has run and it’s given me 81 optimisation ideas and suggestions that I need to optimise all 14 pages that I told it to check. Turns out my SEO maybe wasn’t as good as I thought it was! Just proves that SEO for photographers is tricky!

Do take the time to work through these suggestions, they can really improve your search rankings and can help you analyse your website and make improvements. It’s probably the part of the tool that I use most on other sites because I can log on just for 15 minutes and make a real difference to the search traffic that my website is generating.

The screenshot above shows the report for my homepage, for a search term that I’ve never tried to rank for before. It’s essentially an “idiots guide” to how I can start to rank for the search term that I’ve selected. If I followed all of the advice on this page I would pretty quickly find myself ranking for the term “personal branding Oxfordshire” and potentially rising past my competitors. It’s a step by step tutorial of exactly what you need to do. No guesswork needed.

I particularly like the “Semantic” section further down the page. This part of the tool analyses the ranking data of your rivals and suggests other related keywords to include in your page. Just an extra paragraph or two could provide the kind of information that visitors to your website are looking for, and could also help you rank for those additional search terms too.

Remember that a page doesn’t just have to rank for one search term, it can rank for lots all at the same time! Just don’t stuff your keywords needlessly or write absolute gibberish – Google doesn’t like that and will penalise your site.

What now? SEO for photographers is an ongoing job!

That’s the first three tools in the SEMrush dashboard that are useful to photographers. Already you should be able to enact some serious change just based on the information given to you by these tools. In fact, you could probably spend the whole week of your SEMrush free trial just making the changes suggested by the On Page SEO Checker! It wouldn’t be a bad thing to do, and could improve the volume of traffic driven to your photography site. And what does more traffic mean? More potential customers!

Let me know how you get on in the comments!

Related Posts

• 
  Local SEO for Photographers [Case Study]
• 
  The Ultimate Guide to Diversifying your Photography Income

AFFILIATE DISCLOSURE
I may earn commissions for any links that appear in blog posts on this site. There is no change in pricing if you click through an affiliate link.

The post SEO for Photographers: How to Get Started with SEMRUSH appeared first on Charlie Moss.

The nature of writing for multiple websites. magazines, and blogs means that there’s no central place to find everything I’ve written on a subject. I’ve been asked now several times if I offer tuition in product photography, but here’s the next best thing – a roundup of all the articles I’ve written on product photography and still life.

The Gear List

The first thing to talk about is my gear list. Product photography does rely, to an extent, on gear and technical knowledge. I’m not going to talk about e-commerce white background photography here (the summary is: use strobes, light your background two stops brighter than your subject and then send it to a retoucher or cut it out yourself with a pen tool).

Here is my gear list for natural light photography (these links are affiliate links, I make a small amount on each sale and it doesn’t change the price you pay). It’s a short list; you might be suprised.

Fujifilm X-T20

This is quite an old camera now, but I wholeheartedly recommend the whole Fujifilm range. A couple of years ago I changed system and went from a Canon 5DMkII (which is a full frame dSLR) to the company Fujifilm system. I will write a blog post one day about how liberating and freeing it was to change to a smaller camera, but I think it’s the best thing I ever did for my photography.

When it comes to product photography I particularly like the liveview on the back of the camera and the iPhone app that is available to control the camera (useful for when you’ve got a flat lay setup and you’re short like me).

Fujifilm XF 35mm f1.4 R Lens

The Fujifilm 25mm f1.4 lens is a real thing of beauty. I recommend all Fuji camera owners try and get hold of one. Note that if you are looking for an equivalent lens for your own camera brand, this is effectively a 50mm lens on a full frame camera.

I have this lens on my camera for probably 95% of the time and I shoot most still life images with it. It can get reasonably close up to your subject, but if I need to get closer then I tend to pop some close-up lenses on the camera. If I need to shoot small objects with more clarity then I have my old Canon 100m Macro lens and the 5DMkII body (which is also what I use for “scanning” film).

Photo Boards Backgrounds

These backdrops were a revelation when I discovered them. You see, I longed for the amazing elaborate setups that I had seen in product photography studios. Beautiful, weathered old tables and work surfaces just waiting to be the foundation of the most beautiful product photography and still life images.

Well, since I don’t yet have my huge photography studio with attached farmhouse, I had to improvise. I started by painting backdrops myself (squares of plywood that the local DIY store cut into 60cm squares for me) but these Photoboards were what I really wanted.

Lindsey James is the genius behind the company. She found a way to reproduce textures that she’d photographed 1:1 scale and with such high resolution that they look real in your images. I have probably a dozen of her PhotoBoards and, quite frankly, I wouldn’t buy from anywhere else right now.

Other companies often offer a paper backdrop which just just aren’t as good. They aren’t durable, they don’t always look realistic, and they get damaged if your studio is anything like mine. PhotoBoards on the other hand are thin foam board which keeps them light and easier to store without damage. I know lots of wedding photographers use them for their detail shots, and I take them to clients premises if I’m doing branding work.

Manfrotto Tripods

Unfortunately Manfrotto doesn’t make the exact tripod that I have anymore, I bought mine quite a long time ago. For studio photography I reccomend the heaviest tripod you can afford, and a three way head rather than a ball head. If you want to do flatlays you will either need a tripod where the centre pole converts to horizontal, or an additional boom arm (Manfrotto make a really nice one).

The best thing about Manfrotto in my mind, is that you can buy spare parts from them. That means when the tripod inevitably breaks (as they do in time) you can just replace that part. It’s much better for your wallet than buying a new one, and it’s more eco-friendly too!

Product Photography Tips

Let’s start at the beginning then, right? Here’s a roundup of things that I would consider “tips and tricks” when it comes to actually shooting the images. But first I want to show you a picture of my studio space. I rented this Victorian townhouse because it had a great bay window. However you don’t need such a big and bright window to shoot great product photography or still life images.

By using the same approach as me you can shoot product images that will look great on Instagram or in wedding photography albums just about anywhere. All you need is a window, some light, and some creativity.

Natural Light Product Photography Ideas

This was the first article I wrote on product photography. I wanted to show that you didn’t need to invest in loads of gear in order to shoot images that looked great for brands. At the time I was very much trying to move away from the sterile white background e-commerce photography that I’d been shooting so much of in a previous life.

Window Light Still Life Photography: Getting Started

Here it is. The behind the scenes shots of my little setup. You might be surprised at how basic it is – just two boards on a camping table next to my window. I control the light somewhat using reflectors and the curtains.

And if you’ve not signed up for it, A Year With My Camera is an absolute banger of a course.

5 Product Photography Tips to Improve Your Images

In this article for Digital Photography School I discuss the basics of product photography. Tripods, good lighting, different specifications and angles for social media, and don’t forget the packaging! It’s basic, but it’s a good place to start.

How to Create Fine Art Images from the Mundane

Food for thought if you want to take a fine art approach (and I use those beautiful PhotoBoard backdrops), but mostly here I want to direct your attention to the use of the Fujifilm iPhone app.

Having a camera with a phone app available is brilliant. I really do suggest that when you upgrade you consider this feature.

Simple Methods for Creating Better Still Life Images

In this article I talk about how to use colour and texture for mood, as well as storytelling in your images. The way we present products with different accessories and approaches to photography can really make a difference to the kind of audience that responds to those images.

How to Achieve Dark and Dramatic Food Portraits

You don’t have to keep these natural lighting and processing techniques just for food, I think they’d look pretty mega for a dark and dramatic bridal bouquet, or a little coffee shop scene for Instagram. These images were shot with just natural light, a piece of tin foil wrapped around some cardboard, and two backdrops from PhotoBoards.

Sourcing and Creating Props

Props and backdrops can make or break an image. I’ve already talked about the fact I’m in love with PhotoBoards, but here are some more articles I’ve written about sourcing and creating props for product photography and still life.

Sourcing Props for Natural Light Product Photography

I love browsing antiques stores and second hand shops. This is where lots of my props come from. I take real joy in finding the perfect scrap of antique french fabric, or an old bottle that will look amazing for some stock photography shots.

DIY Food Photography Props on a Budget

You don’t have to use them just for food! This blog post contains my mini-tutorial on painting your own backdrops, including a rather charming one with pink stripes that I love. Don’t forget to shop the orphan tiles section of your local DIY store, and teach yourself some basic sewing to make custom linens and textures!

Both of the above backgrounds were created for less than £15 in total. One is the painted pink stripes I mentioned above, the other is a chalkboard painted piece of plywood that you can actually draw on with chalk for a menu effect!

Still Life on a Budget

This article has even more photographs of my still life photography setup that just involves a window and some PhotoBoards! You’ll see in this article how I flag the light for darker images.

Taking it Further

There is more to shooting product photography and still life than commercial work for clients. Here’s some further articles about different ways to use these skills.

Photographing a Still Life Series for Exhibition or a Portfolio

This touches on ideas of coherency if you’re trying to create a smart and coherent portfolio. If you’re looking to create a consistent “style” to your work, then you might find this article useful.

Shooting Stock Photography: Getting the Most Out of a Single Subject

I’ve been shooting stock photography for the past fifteen years and it forms a solid part of my income. Product photography and still life techniques are really useful if you’re looking to build a catalogue of images to sell through a stock agency. This article is about maximising your time. When you’re shooting the detail shots of a wedding, or storytelling images for a branding client, think about if these images could be repurposed for your stock catalogue. In this way you can literally earn while you sleep!

Stock Photography Workflow

Another article about stock photography. This one is about how I manage and keep track of my images for stock photography.

The Ultimate Guide to Diversifying your Photography Income

I wrote this (extremely long) blog post at the start of lockdown when I saw friends trying to pivot their business. This contains lots and lots of ideas for both active and passive photography income, and most of them are suitable for product and still life photographers.

What next?

If there’s something else you’d like me to write about when it comes to product photography then I’m all ears. Please do let me know what you’d like to see.

I’d like to write some pieces in the future about e-commerce photography on white, as well as how to find customers. If you’re keen to read these then do let me know!

And I’m still contemplating adding workshops to my 2021 business plan – let me know if this is something you might be interested in, or if you have a natural light space that I could teach in.

Additionally – when it’s safe, I’m always up for meeting up for a coffee. I’m based just North of Oxford in the Cotswolds and I love to talk photography in person.

The post Product Photography and Still Life: New Ideas for 2021 appeared first on Charlie Moss.

Things are changing. Slowly. And that is a positive thing that we should all remember. But occasionally I am reminded that the world at large is still a difficult place to be if you’re a woman involved with photography.

To run my online blogging income streams, I use a tool called Ahrefs. It enables me to see who is linking to my websites, what keywords I’m ranking for, and what my competitors are up to. It also allows me to explore new ideas for articles through the use of their keyword explorer tool. Essentially I can put keywords into the tool, and it’ll tell me how many people are looking for that term on Google, as well as giving me a whole load of other data about both that keyword and related keywords.

I’ve not written about women photographers for a while, so I sat down at Ahrefs keyword explorer and entered the phrase “women photographers.” I wanted to see who people are searching for, what kind of articles they’re looking for, and if there are any interesting takes that I could use to inspire some articles of my own.

I don’t know why I was surprised at the results of my search query, but I was. Apparently, I am not yet jaded enough. There were some lovely ideas like “women photographers of WWII and their cameras”, and I was pleased to see the term “black women photographers” moving up the ranking. It is good that people are interested in black women photographers now more than they were before. I’m delighted with that.

But then the uncomfortable related phrases started to come. A question asking how to get women to pose for you. Another about if playboy photographers get erections when photographing beautiful women. Then “woman on woman photographs,” “beautiful women photography,” and “pretty girls photography” amongst others. The list goes on.

I know that these lists of search terms that people are using just reflect the wider world, but the point is that they are indicative of what people are looking for and I find that profoundly frustrating. What these related search terms suggested by the keyword explorer tell me is that people are more interested in women as a subject of a photograph than women as the taker of photographs.

I was heartened, at least, by the fact that people seem interested in the percentage of sports and National Geographic photographers who are women. And there were other interesting questions in there too – women photographers (I assume) are searching for how they might take maternity leave and how long they need to wait after giving birth to go back to work.

Honestly, I was hoping for more issues like this when I brought up the keyword tool. These are the real issues that should be coming up when we’re looking for information about women photographers. Not questions about how to get large groups of women to pose nude for you, or where to find nudes of “young girls” [sic – not my choice of words].

Hopefully, in time we’ll start to see change, and this will be reflected in the internet browsing and searching habits of the world. But until then, I guess I’ll be stuck looking at these frustratingly male-centric SEO suggestions.

The post Sexism in Photography: A Story Told Through SEO appeared first on Charlie Moss.

Many of my readers will know, when I’m not running my business I am a PhD researcher in History of Art. My research has historically looked at ways that oppression manifests in art objects, with a focus on women’s experiences. I’m not afraid of speaking up on issues of inequality and very much see my photography writing (and indeed my photography) as a place to do that. Before I get into the nitty-gritty of the ethics of protest photography, I want to urge you to use your privilege well in these situations and to never let racist, sexist, or other oppressive comments go unchallenged either in person or online. Because to stand by and say nothing is to be complicit in the oppression and inequality.

Key links for protest photography

One of the core tenets of good ethical practice when it comes to writing about inequality and injustice, is to amplify the voices of those who suffer rather than simply repeating their message in your own voice. I believe that the same is true of photography too.

I intend to keep adding to this section new links to resources as and when I find them. These links, especially the second one, should be your starting point if you intend to photograph protests.

Do No Harm: Photographing Police Brutality Protests

Link
“Recognize that there is a history of photographing Black people in ways that are used to subjugate and dehumanize them, adding to the justification of violence toward Black people and communities. The constant circulation of images depicting violence on Black bodies adds to the desensitization toward Black suffering, while white bodies are photographed with dignity, subtlety and nuance.
“People who fail to recognize imbalance and inequity are most often those who stand to benefit from it. Because political structures work for them, it may be hard to imagine the insidious ways that forces of power are enacted on the vulnerable.”

Resources for Photographers and Beyond on Anti-Racism

Link
This is a living document of resources, compiled by Authority Collective.

When the Camera Was a Weapon of Imperialism. (And When It Still Is.)

Link
“The anthropological photographs made in the 19th century under the aegis of colonial powers are related to the images created by contemporary photojournalists, including those who embed with military forces. Embedding is sometimes the only way to get a direct record, no matter how limited, of what is happening in an armed conflict. On occasion such an arrangement leads to images whose directness displeases the authorities, but a more common outcome has been that proximity to an army helps bolster the narrative preferred by the army.”

Scenes from a New York City protest of the police killing of George Floyd

Link
These are a wonderful set of photographs of the police brutality protests in New York City by Chris Facey. If you want to share work by a black photographer, and amplify creative black artists, then this is a great set of images and interview to share.

Have you thought about your ethics?

I think I’ve mentioned it before on this blog, but I went to a study day last year at the Tate Modern on Ethics and Images. During the study day we worked with various guest facilitators (a Magnum Photos nominee, a research curator at the Imperial War Museum, and a photography lecturer) in order to think about our personal code of ethics when it came to taking photos. This was a study day that was designed in conjunction with the Don McCullin exhibition that was showing at the time.

We talked a lot about how images can change context when they’re used in different settings. So for instance, a documentary photograph from a war zone takes on different meanings when shown in a glossy Sunday magazine, a war museum, a newspaper, or an art gallery. And this I think is true also when it comes to protest photography.

There is a tendency with photographers to believe that they have the right to photograph anything they want. And legally that is true – if it happens in a public place then we have a legal right to photograph it (with a few exceptions). That means Black Lives Matter protests, women’s marches, and Pride events are all legally fair game for photographers.

The problem is that in our increasingly digital world, it becomes slippery business to hang on to an image and control where it goes and how it’s used. And that means it becomes very easy for your photograph to fall out of your control, and for it to be used in ways that you did not intend it to.

In particular, we see this when it comes to the way that protestors have been doxxed, fired from work, or even violently harmed having been photographed at a protest and that image shared online. I’m not being paranoid when I tell you that there are groups out there who will scour the internet for photographs of various protests, and then spend time, money, and resources hunting down people in those images. It’s also crucial to think about the capture of images of civil disobedience. Civil disobedience is a legitimate protest tactic that is used in order to bring about change, however, your photographs of illegal activity could land a protestor in trouble with the law (which is particularly pertinent when considering the Black Lives Matter movement).

So the photograph that you thought was a brilliant pieces of artistry that showed the protests at their most dramatic, could easily have cost someone their job, their mental health, or even their life. Think twice before photographing anyone in a way that could identify them. Blur out recognisable features, including tattoos and scars.

Making money from oppression

Like it or not, if you’re a white person photographing black lives matter protests, a man photographing a women’s march, or a straight person photographing Pride, and you’re selling those images (or otherwise indirectly making money from them) then you’re benefitting from the oppression of the people that you’re photographing.

You might be ok with that. And there are lots of reasons to be ok with that. But before you pick up your camera make sure that you’re doing it for the right reasons. Consider the fact that you are making money directly from a state of oppression for someone other than you.

I suggest that if you are covering events like this as part of your job or income, then you try to set aside some of the pay you receive to donate to relevant charities. I know that isn’t possible for everyone, especially right now. But in my opinion, it should be a consideration for your future when times are not as hard.

If you can’t donate in monetary terms, see if you can volunteer for a community group related to the cause that you photographed. You don’t have to volunteer your photography skills either – just your time is often all that they need.

It’s your choice how you approach protest photography

Ultimately, it’s up to you how you decide to wield your camera at protests and political demonstrations. You can choose to use your photographic skills for good, or you can choose to harm the cause being protested. One thing that I want you to remember though, is that trying to stay neutral and objective will almost always see you landing on the side of the oppressor. By remaining neutral and impartial, your silence demonstrates complicity with the oppression.

Racism, sexism, and homophobia are not issues where an impartial stance should be maintained. If you are not with the oppressed, then you are against them.

I hope that this post has given you some food for thought when it comes to protest photography. Both photographs that you have shot, and images shot by others.

Further Reading

• Photographing Protest: David Hoffman and Lívia Bonadio
• How to Take Photos at Protests Safely—and Responsibly
• Magnum Photos: Protest!
• Photos can show protests’ complexity—or they can perpetuate old lies
• Protest Photography Can Be a Powerful Tool For and Against Black Lives Matter

The post Protest Photography and the Ethics of Photographing Unrest appeared first on Charlie Moss.

The image above was the final image I decided to print from this collection and it’s more or less what I had in my head when I first started shooting. I knew that I had the perfect little tin box that would look great with the asparagus in. Combined with a dark background, it perfectly fitted the style I look shooting in at the moment.

Shooting stock

But actually, while I took less than 20 shots to nail the fine art image I wanted and had pre-planned, I shot over two hundred images in total. Why? Because I knew that there’s plenty of opportunities to shoot a variety of similar image with the same main prop that will sell on the stock libraries that I supply to.

It took just under 40 minutes for me to start testing my settings to uploading the images to my Lightroom catalogue. And I was rewarded with 16 images that I’ll upload to stock libraries, that are all suitably different to deserve their place in the catalogues.

All of the images above were shot in the same space. On a camping table next to the window in my studio. The same place I shoot most of my food and still life images.

I use special lightweight boards from Photoboards for the backgrounds in my still life photography setup. They’re the best photographers backdrops I’ve found, high quality enough that you don’t have to try and hide them or do extra post-processing work. They’re basically full-size replicas of textures that have been photographed and reproduced and they’re not very expensive.

The lightweight backgrounds mean that it’s trivially easy to just swap backgrounds in and out and shoot a wide variety of stock images very quickly on different kinds of backgrounds.

In the images above I’ve used the 60x60cm styles: barn, spotlight, smokehouse, Kyoto, and cosmopolitan. And yes, that’s silver foil taped to a piece of cardboard. I find it the best silver reflector available for tabletop work.

But is this enough variety for stock photography?

Make no mistake – on their own, these images aren’t going to make me a fortune. But if every week I shoot twenty images that are suitable for placing with stock libraries, then in a year I’ll have a thousand images that are sitting in the background slowly earning me a passive income from my photography.

I’ve seen many photographers talk about their own stock photography workflow. They will aim for a hundred or more images per session, and they’ll shoot a whole variety of images. Because everyone tells you that you need variety in order to have a good, profitable stock image portfolio. And they are right, you do need variety. But if each week I shoot twenty images of a different vegetable, that’s fifty vegetable subjects I’ll have at the end of the year.

Do you see where I’m going with this? There’s no need to bust a gut to have a diversity in your stock image portfolio from the start. Instead play the long game. Shoot twenty great and different images of one subject in a session, rather than twenty images of twenty subjects. Take the time to really explore your subject so that you get every possible images that a buyer could want.

I’ll be honest, I’m quite lazy with my stock photography. I could have easily carried on shooting asparagus for another half an hour, used more backgrounds, come up with more compositions and some styled shots and had a greater variety of images to place with stock libraries. I could have also then cooked it and had another set of different images. And if I was working full time as a specialist food stock photographer, that’s probably what I would have done. But my stock photography is a small part of my overall earning plan for me. So I don’t spend too much time on it.

Stock Photography Workflow

So down to the nitty gritty of it. When I finish shooting I plug my camera into my computer and open Lightroom. From there I import my images into date folders on a hard drive with an action I’ve got set up. It takes the files, copies them to my hard drive for working files, adds a copyright template with my name and contact details, and sorts them into folders by date. I also add keywords (like asparagus), because it makes them easier to find in the future.

I’ve always used date to organise my photography files. I tried early on using subjects or theme, but it got messy for me. Like if I shoot both a hammer and an apple in the same session, I have to manually split those files up as I catalogue them. Instead I rely on keywordsand the search function to find things again.

Once the files are in my catalogue I sort through them assigning them star ratings (and for this reason I also tell Lightroom to build large previews while importing). Anything that I should never look at again gets one star. Potentially good shots get a three star rating. If I have a few similar images I downgrade the ones I won’t use to two star. Then I work on the three star images to polish them for stock use.

Once the images are all edited, I have a very basic filing system in the “collections” pane of Lightroom. I have a folder per stock library that I submit to, and then inside that folder, I have collections that are roughly filed by month. So you can see that I have started, this month, a collection called “2020/05” because it’s May 2020. Through the month I’ll drop images into it that I want to upload and at the end of the month, theoretically, I will export and upload all the files. As you can see though, I’m quite bad at doing this every month. After they’re uploaded I rename them “submitted” and forget about them.

Look, it’s not the most sophisticated system, I’ll admit. But it’s simple and robust, and there’s nothing that can really go wrong with my stock photography workflow.

The last thing I do is use an export action that is individually set up for the needs of each stock library I submit to. All stock libraries have different requirements, and this enables me to output the files correctly, but without having to look up the data each time. Above you can see my settings for uploading to Alamy (although I do export to a specific file on my backup RAID server that I then upload from).

Stock photography got so much easier when I started using Lightroom for cataloging my photography archive and using actions/presets at every stage I could. It turned from something that needed a real effort to sit down and do (which I only ever managed once in a blue moon) to something that sits alongside my regular photographic work.

Now, if I shoot an image for an article that I think would also make a great stock shot, then I just drop it into the folder as I go, and then it gets exported and uploaded with everything else for that library. Lightroom, and this workflow/approach, has enabled me to get my images to work harder for me with very little extra effort, which translates into more income.

Let me know if you review your stock photography workflow as a result of this blog post, or even what you do differently! I’d love to hear what you do and why you do it that way.

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