Mike Broadway – PhotoBlog

Three Chairs At the Taos Cow, Arroyo Seco - Panasonic GF1, 20mm, 1/160 f14

The Panasonic GF1 has been a companion for some eight weeks now; the initial “new toy” rush of daily use has settled into a more sustainable balance somewhere in between work and family. The tool has proved to be exactly what I hoped for: allowing images to be seen and collected in contexts in which I could not or would not carry a bulky SLR. Now on vacation, an anual parenthesis in which photography can be woven into my entire day, it has been interesting to observe how the GF1 juxtaposes with my Nikon D300 SLR; which camera I choose to carry for what and why.

It was the SLR that I selected in Santa Fe on Friday, where raising a camera causes no surprise to passers by, and when my sole purpose for the afternoon was to take photographs. Mounted with an 18-70mm zoom (27-105mm full frame equivalent) the Nikon had two important advantages over the GF1 for which my only lens choice is a 20mm standard: zooming to frame exactly the image I wanted and a crystal clear viewfinder. The zoom option is not a limitation of the GF1, just of my budget and my original purchase decision. As I described in my earlier Panasonic GF1 – Two Week Report blog post, I opted for the 20mm standard rather than the 14-45mm kit zoom precisely because I did not want to replicate my SLR outfit but wanted instead to force myself into a more restricted way of looking at the world. But the viewfinder, now that is a very real differentiator between the two machines.

The electronic view finder (EVF) of the GF1 is both a lifesaver and a limitation. As someone who must now wear reading glasses for anything closer than four feet from my face, the rear screen of the GF1 is not a practical option for composing photographs (even if I could get used to the idea of holding the camera out in front of me as if it smelled bad). The dioptric adjustment of the EVF lets me read the settings without having my glasses on – I could not use the camera without it. The EVF works, it gives all the information you need at a glance and it lets you frame your picture, but the resolution and dynamic range of the display is severely limited in comparison to that of the D300 optical reflex finder. With the EVF you can see the edges of your image, align the verticals, avoid the unwanted lampost growing out of someone’s head, but you can’t judge the colors or the details. The color contrast of the EVF is too great to allow the detail to be seen even if the resolution were better.

So, does the weak view finder mean that I will only be using the SLR for the duration of our New Mexico trip? Not at all. When driving across country, the main camera bag holding the SLR is in the back surrounded by boxes and bags; the GF1 is at hand in the front seat. When Tina and I go out for our final dinner for two before Saturday’s family reunion, it is the GF1 that is over my shoulder; easily carried and discrete. When, on Saturday evening, we walk the three blocks from our vacation rental to the world’s best ice cream cafe, the Taos Cow in Arroyo Seco, it is the GF1 that I instinctively grab on the way out of the house.

It was Katherine, my daughter, that called my attention to these chairs; she and her twin sister would both make excellant photographers if they just had the patience to learn an F stop from a bus stop. It was the GF1 that took the photograph. The Nikon could have done it just as well but not better; it would have intruded on our evening and bounced annoyingly on my hip when we walked. The GF1 was there when I needed it and not there when I wanted to just be with the family.

Howls of disagreement from fanatics aside, composing with a Leica rangefinder is appalling when compared to working with an SLR finder. That weakness did not prevent many if not most of the 20th century’s greatest photographs being made with a Leica. Just as with the Leica, the flaws of the GF1 finder are a consequence of the compromises necessary to create an otherwise exceptional camera; a camera that is the perfect horse for many courses.

Goods Shed Door, Chama Rail Yard

It seems that I may be shooting more abstracts and close ups on this vacation than on past trips to New Mexico, at least to begin with. An 11,000 acre wild fire, the “South Fork Fire”, is burning in the Santa Fe National Forest about 20 miles west of Espanola. That’s maybe 60 or 70 miles from Taos but the prevailing winds have been in this direction; the smell of burnt wood decorates the air and a haze blurs the landscape. The normally bright New Mexico light is diffused; the contrast is low. So it goes.

Apart from the smoke, the skies are cloud free and blue; we wait on the storms of the monsoon season to douse the fires, wash out the smoke and bring drama to the landscape. Our vacation is a week or two earlier than normal, and the chiaroscuro contrast of dark storms and sunlit hills that patterns New Mexico summers has not yet begun. I wait as patiently as I can for the first rain.

The “Goods Shed Door” image for this post comes from the rail yards of the Cumbres and Toltec Scenic Railroad in Chama. We drove to Taos by way of Chama in order to meet up our daughters, Rachel and Katherine, who started their summer with a friend in Colorado; arriving in town an hour before the appointed meet I had some time to explore. At the dinner table of our rental home in Arroyo Seco, seven miles out of Taos, I allowed the girls to select today’s blog image and they chose the heavy contrasts of this corrugated iron door. I was leaning towards the pink sidewalk stains of the thumbnail on the right but sometimes it is healthy to listen to other voices than your own stale one when selecting pictures.

Is he paparazzi?

I love visiting Santa Fe but I wonder if I would like living here? These “African Nouveau” ceramics of Woodrow Nash, warily eying the camera, seem more real and alive than some of town’s organic residents. As one store manager we spoke to described it, you must either posses a well endowed trust fund or live hand-to-mouth in this city; there are few to be found in between the two extremes. It is an expensive place with more than a hint of decadence.

But wherever the true heart of Santa Fe lies, it is a fecund source of photographic subject material; too much to show in a one posting per day blog. All of the New Mexico, 2010, images can be found collected in a gallery of the main web site.

Tail Light, Santa Fe

Yesterday I only had two photographs to choose from; today, in Santa Fe, I have 28. Each visit I have made to the town over the last ten years has proved to be rich in images though not quite of the type one might expect from such a storied location; there is something special about the New Mexico light but it does not stir me to make National Geographic cover submissions when I am in the state’s capital. Perhaps half of all the images I have shot here have been abstracts, half of the remainder have been store windows, and the rest have been of people; but very few of them appear on first sight to be specific to Santa Fe.

It seems that there is a Santa Fe muse that calls on me when I am here. I can rationalize it as a combination of being off duty and on vacation, being in a place where cameras are on every second arm and raise no eyebrows, being in an art Mecca so who wouldn’t be inspired? But I think there is something more than simple psychology at work for there is a strand that ties all the images that I make here together (and subtly different from those I make elsewhere) even if it is not as obvious as the turquoise and adobe reflected in this car body.

Fence 1675+00, US-380, West of Caprock

Ask Google how to drive from Austin, Texas, to Roswell, New Mexico and you might think it was broken. The directions stop in Brownfield, still in Texas, ending with with a final offering of “Continue to follow US-380 W”. That’s it, 133 miles with hardly a kink in the road. In places the highway is straight as an arrow from horizon to horizon. And the sky is big, bigger than any Londoner could imagine.

The “free Internet” in our Roswell hotel was worth less than it’s price otherwise I would have posted this yesterday. Not such a special image but enough to make you wary of moving your family to Caprock, NM. With almost 600 miles to drive in the day we did not stop for photographs on the way, except for this one time in the middle of the high plains desert with not so far left to go and time in hand. The plan is to post once each day for the remainder of the trip; tonight from Santa Fe, Saturday and for two weeks after, from Taos.

1106 is Missing

I saw this on my lunch time perambulation yesterday; very strange, steps that lead up into a bush. It is a suitable metaphor for my success selling prints from this web site: Fotomoto is the staircase that makes it technically possible but there have been no purchases and no profits to send to Save the Children.

Let’s be clear about this, the problem is not with Fotomoto; their technology works as advertised and the results are generally very good. In traditional brick and mortar sales the mantra is “Location, location, location;” if your store is in the wrong place you won’t get enough customers through the door. In Internet speak this translates to “Traffic, traffic, traffic.” My lack of sales can almost entirely be blamed on a lack of eyeballs arriving at http://www.mikebroadway.com. If I had a lot of traffic and still wasn’t selling then it would time to look at the site design but my visitor count is so low that site design doesn’t matter.

According to the Alexa statistics web site, mikebroadway.com currently ranks 20,921,835th in traffic volume. The tin foil lining in that statistic is that up is the about the only direction it can go. Sobering as this dismal number is, some of Alexa’s statistics are unreliable for low volume sites; Alexa only credits mikebroadway.com with one incoming link from another web site whereas Google’s Webmaster Tools give me a more hopeful 360 incoming links.

Still, whether my ranking is below 20 millionth or 10 millionth the consequences are the same: little hope of making a print sale. If I want to change this I will have to work on SEO and partnerships. SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the term given to mixture of art, science and magic used by web site marketeers to ensure that thei sites appear on the first page of results for any relevant query entered on Google, Bing or Yahoo. My SEO for the term “Mike Broadway” is pretty good with Google awarding me both second and third places; I used to be first but I am in a horse race with a baseball pitcher of the same name and he has edged in front for now. Big deal, the only people who will search for “Mike Broadway” are the ones that already know me :-) I need to reach people that don’t know me and that want to buy prints.

It is generally recognized that the key drivers for search engine ranking are content (the text on the web site) combined with the number and significance of the incoming links. My content is a bit of a problem; a camera review for the Panasonic GF1 may deliver fellow photographers to the site but is unlikely to bring people looking for fine art prints to hang on their wall. Photographers looking to buy a camera have enough of their own prints on the wall; they are not generally looking to buy someone else’s images.

I can tweak a few keywords easily enough, put “Fine Art Prints” into the web site title etc (see footnote below), but incoming links are at least as important if not more so for SEO ranking. Google wants to ensure that its results are as relevant as possible for any query; Google depends on people coming back for all their searches and that will only happen if the results are consistently on the mark and useful. If both my site and Mike the baseball pitcher’s site have an exact match for the query “Mike Broadway”, but the baseball player’s site has a dozen incoming links from well known newspaper and TV station web sites where mine has just two incoming links from photography blog sites, then the baseball player will win the race to the top of the that particular search’s results.

The incoming links I need most are those from sites frequented by art buyers. Links from gallery web sites, LensWork, B&W and The Center For Fine Art Photography would be valuable. These links will have the double benefit of delivering direct referrals and improving my search ranking for queries about print buying.

My goal is to raise money for charity. The most valuable incoming links will be those delivering people who both want to buy art and support the charity that sent them across at the same time. That is the kind of partnership I need to establish and I think I know just the person to talk to.

Footnote on “Fine Art Prints” and Fotomoto: There, did you notice? I just tried to do something to improve my SEO for print buyers by entering the term “fine art print” into this posting but I must clarify that I would not class Fotomoto machine prints as “fine art prints.” While most of the results are excellent, and the process does deliver 100+ year archival quality fade resistance, the term “fine art print” conveys that the print was individually made, approved by the photographer, and signed. I can’t start claiming to offer fine art prints in any quantity until I am ready to spend a lot of hours fussing over color matching and paper blemishes; I am not quite there yet. Maybe it is a good thing my traffic volume is low?