When browsing the web today I found an interesting article about VSEO, video search engine optimization. That means that it’s possible to generate some extra traffic through YouTube! You can find the article here. It explains in short what to do, to get that extra traffic. In short:

Video search engine optimization begins with writing effective title, description and tags (Keywords). One should remember that the Title of the video has to be attractive and include the keywords. Again description should be attractive and should include proper keywords relevant to your industry. It is a good idea to add URL of your website/blog on your video in watermark. Finally add effective tags (keywords) of your video.

Yet another thing you can take in consideration when doing your SEO business.

Today I shot around 100 photo’s in a nearby nature reserve. I used my newly bought Olympus E500 SLR camera. Normally I use a 400D when it’s available from work. I still wanted to have one myself though and this week I found a bargain of the old Olympus SLR line. It works wonderful! I added the nicest photo’s to RGBStock and Picasa. Take a look and tell me if you like them!

Van Stockphoto’s

When shooting my Photo’s I always use RAW for the simple reason that RAW is easily editable. Recently I came across a tutorial from Scott Kelby. He explains how to get a really nice HDR like effect on your photo’s, only by editing your RAW files in Photoshop and / or Lightroom! Bookmark this one, it’s really one of the fastest ways to get this result other then paying for a plugin.

The tutorial in a nutshell, I’ve qouted the simple list from it below:

Recovery = 100

Fill Light = 100

Blacks = Drag this slider to the right until photo looks balanced again, because setting the Fill Light at 100 will wash the photo out big time. In our example, I dragged it to 24

Contrast = 100

Clarity = 100

Vibrance = 100

Saturation = -81 (basically what I do here is drag the saturation all the way to the left, to -100 (which removes all color, making it a black and white image), and then I slowly drag back to the right until some of the color starts to return to the image.

As a designer I made my share of mindmaps throughout the years. In both studies they let me mindmap for almost every project, so yes I was getting tired of it. Because of that I almost never used it in my daily job. This changed the last year however.

Last year I started a new study and came in contact with mindmapping again. Of course my first reaction was: “Screw this, I’m not going through all this again” and: “I’m don’t use this technique at all when working”. But this changed when making the first few mindmaps again.

I found out, that a mindmap gets me to an idea faster then a normal brainstorming process. In a normal brainstorm session I always have the problem that I run out of idea’s very quicykl. With a mindmap that doesn’t happen. This is because you are writing it down in a tree like manor. When you run out of keywords you just start over with another section of your mindmap. Even words that aren’t related with the eventual project are allowed to be written down, everything is allowed.

When done you’ll see the bigger picture and all relation within your projects subject. This gives ton’s of inspiration for new idea’s. No stressing involved!

This weekend I found some nice video tutorials about photography. The first one is about studio lightning techniques. It shows what can be accomplished by simply getting the lightning just right!

Fashion Photography Lighting Tutorial from Rod Evans

The second one features an easy technique to get a high fashion look in Photoshop.

Caslys Editorial High Fashion Photoshop Technique

I already applied both tutorials when fooling around with my own small studio and it seems to work perfectly well!