Convention Photography

Convention Photography

Check out Express Digital Darkroom™ [Tips & Tricks - Photographer Spotlight: Professional Images Photography]

Check out Express Digital Darkroom™ [Tips & Tricks - Photographer Spotlight: Professional Images Photography]

Promoting Websites for the Do it Your self crowd

Magic Johnson at Las Vegas for T-Mobile

I recently changed my website and found it a challenge that will live in infamy for me.  I can now relate why all web guys, okay not all but most have stock in Red Bull or Monster Drinks. I am not a web designer but I needed to face my fears, otherwise I will just be forgotten in the world wide web.  I had my first website since 1998 roughly and I needed to change it. It started a few years back and I even signed up with a web company that I won't mention here because they proved to be useless.

Trade Show Photography

I went through a few years of research, forgetting about it and back to research and then I took the last 3 weeks of August and spent on average 12 hours a day just doing it . It has been empowering because I did it and the website is my design. If I want to change something I do it and no need of waiting for the web guy to call me back.

Check it out when you get a moment and tell me what you think or suggest what I could do better. It's still a work in progress but I will continue to tweak and improve.

Promoting my website:


I learned during my process that building a website no matter how good it is will not get you work until you promote it.

Here are some things to keep in mind when you decide to start promoting your site.

Write a Keyword-Rich Page Title which is a descriptive title for each page. Rich in keywords you want to find you with. About 5-8 words. Leave out any filler words like: "the", "and" ect.
The page title will appear hyperlinked on the search engines when your page is found.

Include your Keywords in Headers (H1, H2, H3) Search engines consider keywords that appear in the page headline and sub heads to be important to the page. 


Position your keywords in the First Paragraph of your Body Text Search engines expect that your first paragraph will contain the important keywords for the document. 


Use Keywords in Hyperlinks Search engines are looking for clues to the focus of your webpage. 


So these are just a few of many many things you can do. I could go on but  I just wanted to share a tip of what I am doing. I have learned so much and hope that my hard work will pay off down the road.

What I learned is that to improve your traffic to your site you have to do the work or pay a lot of money for someone else to do it.

Finding an Assistant

Generally, an assistant isn't going to shoot. They are there to help you in other ways that are vitally important to your success.


Setting up and moving lights and holding a reflector, and maybe grabbing lenses. That's all valuable experience with learning potential. You'll also learn a lot just from observation.

With the digital age on us and only getting more evolved the assistant needs to know photoshop, aperture, light room ect. The more they know the more valuable and marketable they are. When I am on a shoot I like to know that I hand off my card to the assistant and they upload, categorize, add metadata, store in external hard drive, make DVD's ect. That is valuable to me and helps keep the work in the studio to a minimum.

But, assistants and even second shooters are a dime a dozen. Actually they're even cheaper to come by usually  with beginners. A good, experienced staffer can make some money. Someone needing experience is going to have a hard time even finding someone to tag along with.

A lot of people don't want to help the newbies b/c they see just how much damage many of those newcomers are wreaking on the industry. Others just don't want to help future competition and are easily threatened. Make the goal to make friends and get to know your peers. I don't see it that way. I see it as an opportunity to teach them to right things. Yes, good assistants will one day be your competition but that's okay too, if you are confident and good it doesn't matter.

HD Video production using Canon Mark II

It's new territory for me and it's been an exciting ride. I was listening this morning about Steve Job's leaving for health reasons with no time frame when he is coming back. The morning show posted this video that Apple produced back in

He will be part of the video that (hopefully) you have just seen. Our greatest inventions were born out of being different and not conforming so as I start this new service I feel confident that even if I fail I still succeed because I am trying and not waiting on the sidelines.

Here is a sample of a job that I did in Phoenix, AZ of former Quarterback Joe Theismann. The video was taken with my Canon Mark II.