A New Round of Self-Promotion

As a photographer I find myself regularly working on self-promotion of myself & mywork. As I have several years of experience as a webmaster for various models, my promotion efforts are generally oriented online. And my efforts tend to take a slightly different direction because of my webmaster background.

Good web promotion goes beyond just submitting your site to the search engines. Building a good name recognition factor requires increasing the relevancy of your name to the key search terms and phrases that you choose to associate yourself with. And increasing relevancy in search engine results also requires making an effort to associating your name with other relevant/similar types of sites.

For myself, I focus my photograpghy services in the areas of fitness, fashion, glamour & erotica. One thing that I do myself is constantly search out directory oriented sites that are strongly built around my chosen themes.

In the last few days I have done another round of web searching and built up a list of over 50 websites that concern themselves with erotica art & photography, glamour, fashion & modeling. So I am going to being the process now of going to each of the sites on my developed list and begin creating profiles on these sites. Increasing the number of web profiles through these sites will in the long term strenghen my name association to the key themes that I want to connect with.

As I begin this process I will update here on the specific sites that I am submitting too. And also discuss the quality of the sites that I submit too.

My New Toy

My newest toy was delivered this afternoon by UPS. It happens to be a digital camcorder that my mother ordered for me as an early birthday gift. (My birthday being July 24th) She allowed me to begin using it when I got it. Actually its arrival today was a bit of a shock being that she ordered it on the 5th from HSN.com. We werent expecting it for a few more days.

So which digital camcorder did my mother order for me? The latest special offer from HSN.com which is for the DXG model # DXG-5C8V-HD. It records 1080 HD video in a device that is as thick as a dime is wide, and small enough to fit inside a shirt pocket easily. A nice little digital camcorder to add to my photography tools.

BUT, this afternoon's efforts at setting up the camcorder and trying to get the provided editing software to install left with some frustration. After I got the camcorder battery charged up and the device itself operational learning to record my first video clip was fast & easy. The ArcSoft Total Media HDCam 2.0 software on the other hand has so far proved worthless since I still am unable to get the software to install on my Toshiba laptop which is less than 2 years old.

Every time I tried to install the software I kept getting an error msg that no device was connected, and that was with the device connected to my laptop via USB port. In fact I connected the camcorder to my laptop via every USB port it had. And rebooted the laptop with the camcorder attached and still got the same error msg each time I tried installing the software.

After several attempts at trying to install the software I finally broke down and went to the company website and registered my camcorder. During the registration process I had to identify my model # and found that my model wasnt even listed among the product models. I guess its that new.

After the registration was done, I sent a support email. Within a short while I did recieve an email response. That allowed me to successfully get the device drivers installed on my laptop. But not the editing software. During the process of getting the device drivers installed, I wound up downloading a Canon codec file which allowed me to view the video test clips I create through Windows Media Player. So that got me a level of basic success with my new camcorder. I can now create new videos and view them.

But I still need to have some editing software, and so far the provided software that came with this camcorder just aint working for me yet. I hope to see if I get more info from the company DXG on that problem. And I will continue to keep you all alerted to my experience with using this model camcorder.

My Online Interview with ArtHash

I just recently completed an interview with ArtHash, an online art oriented blog.

My interview can be viewed at:

http://arthash.blogspot.com/2010/05/artist-interview-david-m-nienow.html

From The Archive: Diana Dennis

Here a couple of new images of fitness competitor Diana Dennis. I shot Diane in Las Vegas several years ago during one of my Vegas trips. I just re-scanned these images over this past weekend. So check these images out.

From The Archive: Sherry Gideons

I just completed another round of new scans from some old photo shoot material. So here are some selected pics from a shoot with Sherry Gideons that took place at a dry lake bed outside of Las Vegas and in the studio during the same visit to Vegas. I hope you enjoy these images.

A Suggestion for Canon

In professional photography photographers tend to associate themselves with the camera brand that they choose to work with. You're either a Canon Shooter, a Nikon Shooter, an Olympus Shooter, etc. For myself, I happen to be a Canon Shooter and have been since I took up photography as part of my web design business.

And during all the time that I have been shooting, it's always been a common thing to see your camera bodies in Black, Silver, or a combination of those 2 colors. But in the last couple of years as digital cameras have become much more common for the consumer, additional colors have become to make their appearance at least in digital compacts and digital consumer camcorders.

And in fact, Canon and Panasonic are 2 camera brands that I am familiar with where at least in the category of digital compacts camera body colors have increased in selection. With the Canon Powershot series of cameras it is possible to purchase camera models in Blue, Red, Brown, Green, Pink, Orange, Gold, and Purple. In addition to the traditional Black and Silver.
Canon also offers digital consumer camcorders in at least Blue & Red colors that I am aware of.

In the Panasonic line of cameras, you can find camera models in Blue, Red, Green, Pink, Orange, Yellow, and Violet. In addition to Black and Silver. Also, it happens that Panasonic also offers the G1 series DSLR bodies in Blue, Red & White.

As a Canon shooter, I am here to register my only true complaint to Canon that I have. And that is to ask them why they cannot add color bodies to their professional line of EOS cameras? Personally, what I would like to see in the Canon EOS body line is the addition of White/Black Trim, White/Silver Trim, White/Gold trim bodies to complement the White "L" series lenses offered by Canon. And in addition also offer EOS bodies in Blue & Red at least.

Adding a bit of color spice to the Canon EOS body line would just help to make things a bit more fun in handling the equipment. At least for me it would. OK, that completes my 1 and only complaint that I have with Canon.

From The Archive: Jamie

I have completed some more re-scans of old photo shoot material. Today I am posting up a couple of images from a shoot with a local girl who at the time of this shoot was actually working as a fashion designer. Jamie enjoyed designing and making dresses for renaissance fairs. So we did a fantasy oriented shoot and a fashion shoot. Enjoy these images.