Taking great photos for your blog

One of the great things about blogging is that it’s not just a display of written content, but also provides a place to showcase photos and video.

I’ve blogged a bit about the potential for video on our VPN blogs and I must say, Proxy has taken the cake so far with their Mt Baker promo video. I ran into Dustin Nickerson, Mike Johnson, and other Proxy leaders last night, with a video camera and various props and paraphernalia in tow (including a giant plastic Norseman helmet). Not sure what that’s all about, but I look forward to seeing it via YouTube on their blog sometime soon.

Alright, enough with that, now to the real point of this post: to encourage all of you to start shooting and incorporating photos into your blog posts. It’s is as easy as taking your pocket-size digital camera with you to an event your covering and getting some shots to include with your words.

Mars Hill has a Flickr account, so you can upload your photos there and then link to them in your blog posts. What’s even cooler is you can create photo albums of events that you can link to in your blog so people can see more than just the few images you include in your post. Check out the photo album for the Red Hot Bash, which I linked to in follow-up post I did on the Ballard blog.

A few things that may prove helpful to you:

1. Take LOTS of photos. It’s reasonable to think, “Oh, I’ll just get a few shots - that’s all I need for my blog post anyway, right?.” WRONG. I hate to offend you, but most of your photos will suck. If you take lots, you’re chances of getting a couple good ones are a lot better. They’ll look so pretty next to your words, too.
2. OR, don’t take any photos at all. Yep, you did hear me right. If you’re looking to spice up some of your written content with something cool or you think maybe there are already some photos taken of something your blogging about, peruse our Mars Hill Flickr photo library. You may find something worth putting alongside your written content.
3. Here’s a video I came across from Kris Krug, a famous Flickr photographer, giving amateurs a lesson in taking good photos. The first 11 minutes he’s talking pretty technical (I say skip it), but by the 12th minute he starts directing his expertise at us common folk, sharing on how to take good shots with your average-joe kinda camera.
4. You can forfeit words for photos. There are lots of bloggers out there who may take a great shot of something and then just include a description or title of the photo. If it in some way pertains to your campus or ministry, I say go for it. Here are some bloggers that do a good job of mixing up their content - some written posts, some photo post, and some with both.

• The Reformissionary by Steve McKoy McCoy - Steve’s a Baptist pastor in Woodstock, IL. Every Friday he posts “Phriday is for Photos” and shares some shots he’s taken over the past week.
• Dustin DeKoekkoek - Dustin is a Mars Hill member who has a great blog and also has taken to doing a Friday photo thing. Check a few out here and here.

I must admit that I am 1) not a photography expert (by any means!) and 2) also in need of taking my own advice about posting photos with my content (I know, Blog Poets is pretty photo-sparse, isn’t it?). You can count on seeing more exciting photo content here in the future.