The name game

Disclaimer, I enjoy photography and enough web design to throw my site together. I’m far from an expert at either.

Late the other night I was checking web stats and got an idea. That led me to just flat out Google “eb photography” to see what happens when someone searches for my page instead of just typing ebphotography.com like it is on all my stationary, promotional materials, sample albums, etc. (This is an oddly high way that traffic reaches us when people search for a web address isntead of just type it in the address bar.)

My business’ name is far from unique, I’m very aware of this. I was required to make a business name and logo from my name or initials for a typography class and… hated the idea. When I wrote my initials together it either looked exactly like a video game store‘s logo or a butterfly. Then I scribbled something and fired up Illustrator and made the logo I have today, it stuck immediately. And so the slanty slashy figure 8 was born. I didn’t however, want to name it after my full name and make anyone try and pronounce my last name the way I do (Americanized German pronunciation I presume).

Here’s some of the other “EB Photography” listings that came up.

ebphotography.net – Emma Barnard

Mentions Reading and British English so I’m thinking Great Britain / UK across the pond. I had to look up the website registration to find any name, which totally puzzles me. Wouldn’t you want a prospective client to know who they’re contacting? “Hi is… EB there? Ebb, are you a photographer?” Hey there’s a Nikon camera on the home page!

ebphotography.org – Emily Bitterman

Denver, Colorado is mentioned a few places on the site. I gathered her first name from the email address listed. Script fonts are pretty till you have to read a paragraph of them. Also Photoshop comps with text are completely useless to search engines if you want your info to be found. Once it’s found keep it readable. Also had to look up registration info to find a name.

ebphotographyonline.com – Elizabeth Breakey

Raleigh, North Carolina – finally, a NAME and a LOCATION on the site. Big points.

Attack of the music! I started shutting browser tabs to find out which site was creeping in on my already-playing music. At least it’s bearable. (EDIT: I left this site open the longest so the kids could enjoy the calming music.) The scribbly scripty links were a bit to read at first. Nice flash site a little scrapbook background feel. Nice work too!

http://ebphotoanddesign.com – Elissa Barela

Santa Ana, California phone number lookup. Nice clean site, the “about” page text was miniscule to read though, and I already have glasses. Love the Nikon camera again. I’m no bride but if your “wedding” gallery consists of only ONE posed photo I’d be a little leary. Blog but it hasn’t had an update since last year. Had to get name off registration again.

http://www.ebphotodesign.com – Ellen Burke

Again, the registration info. One working link, and no contact page. Looks like the site was abandoned. Still pops up in the listings so I wanted to check it out.

Tips (Freebies!)

For starters, list your name & location if you want to be found! If people don’t remember if you’re EB Photography listed under ebphotography.com, ebphotography.net or ebphotography.org they can surely remember if they see your name and location.

Make it searchable. Might have to abandon the Photoshop comps, which brings us to …

Make it readable. I’d probably skip 2 of the sites if I hadn’t really, really, wanted to see what they were about.

Keep it fresh. Good reminder to me to keep adding new photos, posts, and interesting bits.

My turn! eBphotography.com

So it’s nice to at least know there aren’t any EB Photography photographers from these sites in this area. Wouldn’t want anyone to get confused. This began as a search to see if visitors who just searched for “eb photography” would know which one to choose if they were looking for eBphotography.com and turned up some really intriguing results.

So for all things equality… rip on my site http://ebphotography.com, it’s only fair. Hit me with your best shot… of constructive criticsm. Since these other EB Photography pages aren’t direct, area competitors there’s no reason I should slack on my work and not get an earful about the good bad and ugly of my own site. Tell your friends, enemies, and your enemies’ friends: it’s open season.

Game on.

eB

Nikon 17-55mm f/2.8G IF-ED AF-S DX Zoom NIKKOR lens

I’m making room in the camera bags again, and am sad to say it’s time to find this lens a home. I used this great Nikon 17-55mm DX lens for portrait shoots and weddings from spring 2007 to June 2009 and it is a workhorse. Awesome for low light indoor shoots, weddings, natural light, reception photography. This Nikon zoom lens is built like a tank compared to kit lenses: metal body, metal lens mount, f/2.8 constant wide aperture so you don’t lose light zooming in like standard zoom lenses do.

So why sell it? Last summer I bought a Nikon D700 full frame DSLR and have been using more prime and FX lenses instead of this DX beauty. It worked wonderfully on the Nikon D70, D200, and D300s I have. I kept it in a separate bag as a backup at weddings but never had need of it after last summer.

This spring I sent it to Nikon to replace the zoom ring grip and give it a clean and check. They gave it a new bayonet mount and replaced some autofocus gears to make it good as new. It was mounted on a camera ONCE since then and has been capped and stored since it returned.

>> INCLUDES

77mm UV filter, petal hood, original soft case, retail box and packing with all the paperwork.

>> Specs from Nikon

• The world’s first constant f/2.8 3.2x zoom lens developed exclusively for use with Nikon’s DX-format.
• 3.2x zoom covers from a wide angle of 79 degrees and is ideal for architecture, landscape, groups shots and portrait work.
• DX design enables a combination of wider angle-of-view with optical characteristics that are optimized for Nikon digital SLR camera sensors.
• Nikon DX design produces a smaller image circle (the size of the image that is projected by the lens on to the sensor) enabling smaller lens diameter, lighter weight and optimal image quality from center-to edge-to-corner on the image.
• 3 Extra-low Dispersion (ED) glass elements for minimized chromatic aberration providing higher resolution and superior contrast.
• 3 aspherical lens elements for minimized distortion.
• Lightweight and compact design (similar to 17-35mm f/2.8 lens).
• Exclusive Silent Wave Motor (SWM) enables ultra-high-speed auto focusing with exceptional accuracy and powerful super-quiet operation.
• M/A and M modes allow rapid switching between AF and MF operation.
• Internal Focusing (IF) design for smoother focusing and great body balance.
• Rounded diaphragm to make out-of-focus elements appear more natural.
• G-type DX Nikkor is designed exclusively for use with Nikon digital SLR models.

Check out Nikon’s page HERE

I’m asking $975 on Craigslist, within the average eBay sold price for this lens in this shape. Let me know you saw this post on our blog (or through RSS feeds) and I’d gladly accept $950. Contact us here to check out this lens!

With weekend events to photograph and mix, lots of final touches to the house, early Thanksgiving dinner (yay!), and scheduled c-section with hospital recovery in the coming week I wanted to put a notice out early to let everybody know I might be out of touch for a few days.

We’ll be back at full speed Tuesday, December 1st.

To everyone that’s going to ask, Sara’s doing well, looks great, and is more than ready to have our daughter soon. Last month soon. Adrian likes to put his hand or head on Mommy’s tummy and say “baybee” and I’m pretty sure he knows something’s up but not that he’s about to be ousted as the youngest in the house. There’s also that sharing thing to get used to.

You needn’t remind me to take lots of photos. I’ll have the exclusive since it looks like Madeline’s holding off for early Thanksgiving dinner this weekend and staying in her nice cozy hideout till Tuesday’s scheduled c-section delivery. We’ll announce when it’s ok to have visitors, keep in touch here, facebook, twitter, and faxes. Just kidding. We keep it old school, telegraph time.

Be back soon! – Eric, Sara, Adrian and Maddie

The century would change and they would each hit the road and live abroad on separate continents. And then one summer afternoon back in Indiana in 2002 they would meet up to share travel stories and photos and start to fall in love.

In 2005 he asked Sara to shoot with him at a friend’s wedding… and they were hooked.

In 2006 they would stand in front of the cameras out in the green grass to celebrate the ceremony they have photographed together… a wedding day. Our wedding day!

The rest, as they say, is history!

To kick off our 5th year photographing together, this March we’re proud to present our Photography Gallery Debut.

Come celebrate with us Saturday, March 7, 2009 as we kick off our very first Gallery!

Saturday, March 7th, 2009 – 7:00-10:00pm
Ugly Mugs Coffee & Culture
102 N Main Street, South Bend, Indiana

Click HERE for directions!

We hope to see you there! Click the photo or Click Here to see and add the FaceBook event page!

Years back I set up shipping accounts for shipping all kinds of goodies in eBay auctions. I worked in shipping and receiving for a while before being shipped out to live on a ship. I like logistics.

One of the sites that makes keeping track of our album orders, customer orders, eBay goodies and things boxed and stamped in general from pretty much any carrier delivering in the US is TrackThePack.com

Today I saw this unusually fun list of European cities one of my boxes is visiting, and I’m jealous.

Any guesses? It’ll be here this week… expect a big announcement soon!

Truth in photography and business from WhatTheDuck.net

(Trouble seeing the photo in your subscription? Click HERE)

One photographer replied that the buffet is her favorite Chinese Restaurant. It didn’t occur to me till I began a reply that my favorite Chinese restaurant is directly across the parking lot. So how, then do two similar restaurants stay in business? Here’s my reply that got ME thinking while I wrote it.

- – - – -

Should you get the chance, drive, walk or take a rickshaw across the New China parking lot north toward Ireland Road and walk downstairs to China Garden. Same great fried goodness, less sitting-in-a-buffet-bin texture. Order your food, not scoop it.

Disclaimer: Sara and I frequent China Garden. Probably 25% of the time that we have their food we order it carry out. We’re hooked. I won’t pass up a buffet meal with friends or family, but given the choice between these two Chinese restaurants within a fortune cookie’s throw of each other, I’ll be found at China Garden.

Small business lesson here? Two restaurants, pretty much same ingredients. Two different approaches to serving similar* foods.

Differences?

New China / Buffet: (Been there at least since 1998)

• U-Scoop – eat as much as your digestive system allows.
• One price and you get everything in the bins
• Great to try different dishes that at your leisure, good for picky eaters too.
• Staff takes payment and takes away dirty plates
• Conversation: Hi how many?” and “Are you done with that plate?”

China Garden / Sit-down: (25+ years in business including restarting after a building fire)

• A greeting where, if followed by “How many?” is to determine your party size not your order total upon entry
• Meal courses (appetizer, entree, dessert) served individually and not all available simultaneously. Timed delivery keeps the food coming a portion at a time.
• Portions are generous and I often take home leftovers
• Servers take your order at table, bring food, and in most of my experiences there, conversation.
• Did I mention an experience?

My first time eating at China Garden with Sara was not long after her mother had passed away, not two months into my dating days with Sara. When we arrived the staff asked how Sara was and how her family was doing. When Sara told our waitress that her mother had recently passed, the waitress broke into tears. I didn’t realize how long Sara’s family had been visiting the Garden and how they had gotten to know the staff.

Their chef, Jimmy, has come out to our table to see how our meal was (always tasty!). The exact date escapes me but within the last year or so he lost his wife. More than once he’s had conversations with us and with Sara’s dad about lost loved ones.

Once the fried goodness digests and tiredness subsides, what are you left with? A rumbling stomach, perhaps. Smelling like deep fried Chinese food, most certainly. What’s the experience that will get you talking?

What’s your business’ experience that will get your customers talking?

* Foods similar to American tastebuds and relatively safe to assume isn’t intestines, dog, or anything too “weird” for Americans to eat. Fellow China travelers can you agree?

PS This is certainly my most introspective and cohesive Tuesday Thoughts post yet. Thanks for reading.

So anyway, enter British chef and TV crew, restaurant makes its own mozzarella cheese and specialty dishes, everyone’s thrilled so…

Chef Gordon gives Anthony a ring to propose to his girlfriend in front of the packed restaurant, including food critics from Bon Appetit magazine. Everyone’s thrilled, teary and Gordon drops another surprise: he’s arranged for them to get married THAT NIGHT. And the couple looked stellar.

I didn’t even get a chance to give the guy my card.

Geeky as I tend to be, I’m not an über geek, but with some help from friends I built my own custom PC tower. It did what I needed it to do and hauled pretty well for photo editing and design work. But it had bugs that took a lot of time to update, fix or… reformat to eradicate. When in 2006 my desktop took a dive that required a reformat, it was time to make the switch.

I got a MacBook Pro 15″ notebook, one of the Core Duo 2.16GHz ones I had drooled over for a while before the dead PC helped me decide to just make the switch. (I actually put a photo of the MacBook Pro as my PC’s wallpaper months ahead, just to let it know I wan’t thrilled and already had its replacement picked out.) I maxxed out its 2GB or RAM right away and upgraded the stock 100GB hard drive to 320GB late last year.

So 2 years later here are my observations on running a photography business on the Apple line

• Macs CAN crash, and I can make it happen. More often than not I would just stall it. However it’s from running tons of memory hungry apps all at once and not from constant virus headaches or Windows trying to update / ask me a zillion questions, no.
• “Lose control, gain command” – nice pun on the control/command key naming game. Whatever you call it, it’s much more natural to lower my thumb to hit Command (mac) instead of wrangle a pinky finger out to control (windows) for keyboard shortcuts. I’m all about keyboard shortcuts, so this little key placement swap is a HUGE improvement for me.
• No “Windows Key” or Start Menu was a little weird. Clicking the apple in the upper left corner didn’t do much either. A little puzzling at first but I started with Windows 3.0 so navigating folders / preferences panels was something I could do even if I hadn’t in a decade. The Dock keeps my most used apps anyway, and a Spotlight Search pulls up anything else I need pretty quickly.
• External drives show up on the desktop and in Finder windows. Ever use a drive and have to find the little green arrow in the system tray (windows XP anyhow) then figure out which device it is and THEN safely disconnect it? Since I’ve been running everything off a laptop all the big working files are backed up on external drives, and each shows up on the desktop when conencted. No wondering if I plugged it in, no clicking around “My Computer” to see what’s there, it just is or isn’t. Hooray simplification!
• Two finger scrolling touchpad. This isn’t news if you’ve held an iPhone, iPod touch, or a Powerbook G4 and newer laptop but… coming from a Toshiba Windows machine I love this scrolling innovation. I zip all over the place easily without reaching for the mouse (unless it’s wired up to a keyboard, monitor and drives at the desk).
• Backlit keyboard – awesome help in dim concert, reception, and event venues and rather nice for surfing from the couch in the evening.
• No virus problems. I do have a virus scanner that runs once a week or so. I do have a handful of friends that haven’t stopped forwarding me their latest virus alert emails (probably carriers of the virus, or at least being sent like one). I politely remind them that I don’t want their forwards and I certainly don’t want Windows virus alert emails.
• No reformatting just to “tidy things up.” The only reformatting I’ve done was done when trying out OS X 1.5 Leopard, adding the larger hard drive, and then moving back to OS X 10.4 Tiger.

Things I’m not so thrilled about are usually just familiar Windows apps that don’t have a complete / competitive Mac version out. (For such I use Parallels and run XP inside Mac OSX, sacriligious, I know.) I’m sticking with OSX 10.4 / Tiger as not everything I use for location work wants to run as nicely on Leopard yet. Tiger runs just fine. Sara’s MacBook runs Leopard and the biggest thing I miss about it is the Quick Look preview of just about any file without opening a needed app to see what it looks like, sounds like, or contains. I’m sure there’s a workaround.

Anyway, my 2¢ on the last 2 years of running the photo biz on a Mac.

Mac Switchers, what’s your favorite reasons?

I just got a call from some guy at a call center offering to put my site on Google’s top 10. I told him the truth – we’re booked busy with just word-of-mouth advertising. I didn’t want to go on about how we’ve built our website to be super easy to find or worked on useful marketing where we aren’t just placing links where people aren’t looking or tricking them into visiting our site. I have a spam folder on every email account full of such useless “marketing.”

But I wonder, how did this Search Engine Telemarketer find us? In his introduction he tole me his company has the “best selection of keywords to be found on Google.” I’ve already got *exactly* which ones I want. Had he searched before calling he might see that we’re already high up in Google for certain relative search phrases without paid advertising, spamming, or hiring anyone to get us there.

Here’s a Google search for “South Bend Indiana Wedding Photographer” – see how many times you see us there!

So… how did *you* come to find out about us? I’d love to hear about it in the comments. Thanks!