You are a photographer and you have heard that social media sites can help you increase your business, but how, and which ones? Many of you are probably already using Twitter but have you heard of Squidoo, and how it can be beneficial to you and your business?

What is Squidoo and how can it help your Photography Business?

Megan Casey, Editor in Chief and one of the Founding Members of Squidoo states:

“Squidoo is the popular publishing platform and community that makes it easy for you to create “lenses” online. Lenses are pages, kind of like flyers or signposts or overview articles, that gather everything you know about your topic of interest–and snap it all into focus.”

Marketing your Photography Business with Squidoo

Since you've mastered your photography niche you know it was work. It took time and work to learn the artistic and technical aspects of photography, as well as how to market yourself and your skills.

Squidoo is the same thing, it will take work, but it is a great way to market yourself and your photography skills. You can get an idea of some of the Lenses written about photography here. How you use this great platform is up to you, but many people actually make money from the lenses they build.

How Squidoo can help you Market your Photography?

1. First you have to sign up

2. Write about what you have experience in and what your target market is interested in.

3. You can write specifically for your zip code –Google will find you, and so will your customers.

4. People go to Squidoo and use the Search Button to find lenses on the subject they are interested in; why not let them find you?

5. You can search for topics similar to yours, and by including that lens (article) you are giving your readers a variety of information which is good for business, and helps you get known in the community.

6. If you use Flickr to showcase your photos, then you can easily move sets, or individual photos onto your Squidoo Lens. (tag the pictures first for Google). Here is a good Squidoo Lens that explains Flickr, and an idea of how to use your knowledge to make a Lens.

7. Just as in blogging, original content works best. Write about what you know or are passionate about, from your perspective. Give people a reason to read your content and call you. You are building relationships which again can translate into business.

8. Use your Squidoo Lenses to link to your other sites, or photos – better Google Juice for you.

9. There are different Modules, like Amazon or Ebay, that allow you to monetize your lens. You can sell your own work, or others.

10. And last but not least is people do business with people that are like them, and that they trust. Participating in the Squidoo community helps you let people know more about you, and vice versa.

Here again is the link to sign up for Squidoo. Go ahead, what do you have to lose?

This post was guest authored by Kathy McGraw. Visit her blog. Follow her on Twitter. She is an awesome resource on all thing Squidoo.

KODAK sells most cameras in India
Business Standard, India

“For the US-based imaging major Kodak, India has become the largest market
for cameras, bigger than China and the US.”

The NYTimes is rightly fascinated by the blind making photographs. Read All About It Here.

And if you don't have a NYTimes account, you can read the article below.

Photographers Make Art as Another Way of Seeing
By ERIN CHAN

Ben Paige cannot see light; he cannot see anything. But to create photographs — his pictures are haunting, in black and white with light that swirls and sways and sprays — Mr. Paige does not need to see. Besides, in a certain sense, he already does.

Mr. Paige relies on concepts he has already visualized, and on what he hears, touches, smells and tastes, as well as what he remembers from the three decades before his sight went away. Sometimes, he has an idea days before he creates a picture. Other times, inspiration hits him as he walks into the photo studio.

He is part of Seeing With Photography Collective, which works out of the basement studio at Visions at Selis Manor, 135 W. 23rd Street in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, a community center for people who are blind.

Among the others in the collective are Sonia Soberats, who, like Mr. Paige, takes the Access-a-Ride shuttle to the studio every Thursday, and Ed Bassuk, who has cataracts. He shuffles in each week from Chelsea with his assistant, usually toting a Peruvian felt hat as a prop and a disposable camera for candid shots.

When Ms. Soberats, 65; Mr. Paige, 67; Mr. Bassuk, 86; and others arrive, they navigate six sets of doors and a staircase to reach the studio in the basement, where they find other members of the collective and some sighted volunteers.

To people in the collective, photography is more than a hobby: it is a chance, in a way, to see again. “I put all my heart and soul into it,” said Mr. Paige, who lost his sight to cataracts 35 years ago. “It means everything to me.”

The collective has put together a 54-piece exhibition called “From Within: A Photographic Exhibit of Work by Visually Impaired Artists,” which runs through Oct. 24 at the Hudson Guild's Gallery II at 119 Ninth Avenue, between 17th and 18th Streets. Last week, several in the collective headed to Arnheim, the Netherlands, to talk about their methods with the sighted and the blind.

The instructor, Mark Andres, started teaching photography to people with impaired vision 17 years ago at Lighthouse International, a nonprofit organization focused on vision rehabilitation. Five years ago, after experimenting with photograms, which are produced by exposing objects on photo paper, Mr. Andres started leading the collective in a technique called light painting. So far, the group has embraced light painting with the zeal of a thrill seeker trying a new roller coaster.

Members of the collective incorporate one another in their photographs, turning friends, many of whom they have never seen, into art. They capture scenes and concepts they have already constructed mentally — for example, confinement in a doghouse, a metaphor for the difficulties of being disabled in a world built for those who are not.

For his part, Mr. Paige wants to evoke fear in his photographs. On a recent Thursday, Mr. Paige set up to shoot a subway ride with three passengers reading newspapers, their heads on the seats beside them.

“It's the train from hell,” Mr. Paige said. “I do very scary pictures. It makes people stand up and pay attention. When people say `Wow!' that's when I know I've accomplished what I'm looking for.”

As Mr. Paige sat on a chair that would soon become a row of subway seats, Stephen Dominguez, a photographer for 16 years who has only partial sight in one eye because of glaucoma and cataracts, helped him set up.

Using the collective's usual method, Mr. Paige left the shutter of his Speed Graphic open so that he and Mr. Dominguez could manipulate different aspects of the scene. That way, they could capture multiple images on a single frame.

Handling his flashlight as deftly as a laser pointer, Mr. Dominguez highlighted human torsos, subway poles and rubber mice. He muted other items, mainly people's heads. As the lighted items' images were recorded on the film, the nonlighted heads remained dark. Mr. Dominguez lighted them only when the passengers shifted positions and their heads rested on top of the makeshift subway benches.

When the lights came on, there on the film were the headless newspaper readers with their lost heads on the seats beside them. But when Mr. Paige heard Mr. Dominguez describe the photo, he was not fully satisfied. He started over. After four tries over two weeks, Mr. Paige finally heard a description he liked and declared his photo done.

Ms. Soberats's intentions are different. She seeks beauty rather than fear. For her, creating photographs has not only instilled a sense of pride — she insists on doing all the lighting — but also serves as a form of therapy. In 1991, glaucoma took her sight, a few months after Hodgkin's disease killed her only son and a couple years before ovarian cancer killed her only daughter.

Ms. Soberats worked through her grief and found an outlet in photography two years ago. She first came to the class to learn how to take pictures of her family, and eventually found a form of self-expression.

“When I tell people I do photography, they don't believe me,” she said. “When a person achieves something that others think you can't because you are blind, you feel it much more.”

The New York Times (read the extended post for the entire article) reports that Mr. Dupret, a Belgian photojournalist, has embarked on a project to document registered World Heritage Sites (including the Taj Mahal). His take on things is interesting in that the images are panoramic and online viewers get a very true sense of the place he has photographed. The World Heritage Tour Web Site is a must see. Dupret plans to be in India, Pakistan and Nepal over the next few years. We'll be watching.

Also check out Peter Murphy‘s web log showcasing some of his panoramic photography and Jook Leung‘s social-documentary panoramic work.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/25/technology/circuits/25virt.html

The Sweeping View From Inside a Digital Bubble

By MATTHEW MIRAPAUL

BORDERS don't bother Tito Dupret. When Mr. Dupret, a Belgian photojournalist, travels in his homeland, an hour's drive in almost any direction will put him in another country. “A border is something I don't really understand,” he said in a recent telephone interview.

So when Mr. Dupret embarked on an international mission to photograph the 754 sites, from the Statue of Liberty to the Taj Mahal, that have been registered as World Heritage sites by Unesco, it seemed apt that he would document them as interactive panoramic images. These digital pictures, which offer online viewers a 360-degree view, are essentially photographs without borders.

Since Mr. Dupret left Belgium in July 2001, he has visited 52 places and posted more than 270 panoramas at his World Heritage Tour Web site (www.whtour.net), including 10 images of the Forbidden City in Beijing that were added this month. Online viewers can explore an Egyptian pharaoh's tomb that has been closed to visitors since 1991 or take a literal spin around Angkor Wat in Cambodia.

Mr. Dupret hopes the immersive nature and universal accessibility of his photographs will stimulate interest in the World Heritage sites. Given that his travels are largely self-financed and the number of World Heritage sites is growing, Mr. Dupret, 32, expects his quest to take another 20 years. But if he still has a long way to go, his site demonstrates how far online panoramas have come in recent years.

Initially the panoramas were the province of enthusiasts who snapped a careful series of photographs, used a computer to assemble them into a horizontal array, and then displayed the results in a small portion of a browser window. Viewers could rotate these cylindrical images from side to side, but not up and down.

Several factors have combined to broaden the appeal of online panoramas. High-resolution digital cameras have reduced the need to build panoramas from scanned photographic prints. Image-stitching programs, which automatically align adjacent and overlapping pictures into a continuous field, are more adept at combining photographs seamlessly.

Programs like Apple's QuickTime VR Authoring Studio and the free PanoTools have made it possible to create spherical panoramas in which a viewer can look up and down as well as around. These images are so much more absorbing that Mr. Dupret, who made cylindrical panoramas at his first stops in Warsaw and St. Petersburg, feels compelled to return and reshoot them.

Meanwhile, viewers have become more comfortable with video-game environments, making them less likely to careen sideways as they navigate a virtual image. And faster Internet connections can now deliver lush, detailed, screen-filling images of scenic vistas and urban landmarks. The Danish photographer Hans Nyberg, who maintains a Web site (www.panoramas.dk) with links to 400 sites containing 30,000 panoramas, features a new full-screen example every week.

Jook Leung, a commercial panoramic photographer in Englewood, N.J., frequently shoots panoramic images in Manhattan (www.360vr.com). Because the scenes are often crowded with a diverse population, he said, “these are people landscapes.” Mr. Leung also captures more intimate moments among friends seated around a table in a restaurant. There is always a bottle at such gatherings, Mr. Leung said, so he built a camera bracket that rotates inside the neck of a wine bottle.

Peter Murphy, a commercial panoramic photographer in Sydney, Australia, started a Web log showcasing panoramic work (www.mediavr.com/blog) in March. He said that working with such images had changed the way he looks through the camera. He is now more conscious of what is omitted from conventional photos. “You become aware of what's behind you all the time,” he said. “It's kind of like being a paranoid cyclist.”

Mr. Murphy is keen on the photojournalistic potential of panoramas taken at public events, sometimes hoisting his camera on a pole 20 feet over a crowd and spinning in place while he triggers the shutter. Such images are different from conventional photographs because they capture more than an instant. “The end product has this illusion of the single moment,” he said, “but in fact it's cobbled together.”

Not everyone is awed. Fred Ritchin, director of the online magazine Pixel Press (www.pixelpress.org) and an associate professor of photography and communications at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, said the full potential of online panoramas has yet to be realized. “Nobody's really explored what the panoramic can do on the computer,” he said. Mr. Ritchin said that viewers – and photographers – are still accustomed to the conventional photograph's single viewpoint. He said he would like to see the panoramic image present multiple viewpoints to better effect.

Because panoramic images can contain links to other panoramic images, Mr. Ritchin also imagines their use in elaborate nonlinear narratives. For instance, a family portrait taken at the dinner table could contain links to panoramic portraits of each person's circle of friends. When the panorama is used this way, Mr. Ritchin said, “it becomes sort of a giant hypertext.”

The site that is perhaps closest to his notion of how panoramic images might be used is 360degrees (www .360degrees.org), a social-documentary project. To raise questions about the nation's criminal justice system, individual cases are told from multiple perspectives. As prisoners, judges and family members are heard in audio clips, cylindrical panoramas depict their cells, offices and living rooms.

Mr. Murphy and others are experimenting with video-like transitions between panoramic scenes. (His demonstration can be viewed at www.mediavr.com /bronte1.htm.)

Others are working on methods to pack greater detail into a scene. At the moment, viewers who zoom into a panorama will often see the image deteriorate into blurry blocks of oversize pixels. At least one company, Zoomify, has developed software that streams additional detail into a scene as needed. When used in renderings of the cathedral and baptistry in Parma, Italy, paintings and frescoes remain distinct, if a bit fuzzy, upon close inspection (vrm.vrway.com/projects/parma).

Others are exploring augmented panoramas, which add animated characters or streaming Webcasts of real people to panoramic photographs. These experiments are welcomed by Erik Goetze, a Web designer in Palo Alto, Calif., who maintains a blog about panorama technology (www.vrlog.com). “One of the things about panoramas is they're fairly static,” he said. “They typically just show a place; they don't tell a story.”

Augmented panoramas can bring those scenes to life. In one online demonstration, animated bicyclists zip around a Beijing street (click on Beijing at www .throbbing.com/bikerace). In another, a woman stands in the middle of a room talking (www.fieldofview.nl /spv.php). And Mr. Murphy is working on a panoramic version of an Australian museum gallery so that viewers can look around the room while a curator describes each work.

Mr. Dupret will have to wait for these advances to catch up with him. He travels with a small backpack, half of which is taken up by his camera, monopod, laptop computer and other electronic gear. To produce each panorama, he usually shoots 10 horizontal images, then 9 more pointing up and another 9 pointing down. It can take him up to two days to stitch the final image.

For now, Mr. Dupret intends to focus on World Heritage sites that are not often seen online, which means he hopes to spend much of the next year in India, Pakistan and Nepal. Nor is he daunted by the prospect of spending the next 20 years crossing borders. “The more you eat roads, the more you want to eat them.”

NPR's Morning Edition announced today an interesting photo exhibit designed for the blind. The images are tactile and apparently depict the horrendous events of 9/11/2001.

Via Sangeetha Raghavendra.