In April London-based photographer Anton Hammerl was shot by Qaddafi loyalists in Libya near Brega.

For 44 days the regime told his family he was alive and in detention along with 3 other kidnapped journalists. The truth is he was left to die in the desert.

Anton had 3 children, including a newborn baby. Now they need our help.

With the very generous support of PhotoShelter and Reporters Without Borders, I put together a website using on the same model as Joao Silva’s: selling prints and collecting donations. But this time the prints are from work by other photographers.

Some of the biggest names in contemporary photography have contributed: David Burnett, Gary Knight, Kenneth Jarecke, Todd Heisler, Tomas van Houtryve, Greg Marinovich. And we have more coming.

Please buy a print – they look incredible, are affordable and make really great Xmas gifts – or make a donation:

www.friendsofanton.org

A Website to Support Anton Hammerl’s Kids from digitaltechparis - web presence for photographers

And quite frankly that difficulty often shows. A well-written artist statement offers wonderful insights but more often than not they are lofty, meaningless and self-aggrandizing texts that break all the rules of good online copy.

Fortunately there is a brilliant tool to make the process a whole lot easier: the Arty Bollocks Generator.

I think mine is spot on:

Easy Artist’s Statements For a Photography Website from digitaltechparis - web presence for photographers

Yesterday Google released +1 buttons for use on any website. When a visitor clicks a +1 button on a page, he/she recommends that page to friends, contacts and the rest of the world. The next time that visitor’s connections Google something, they could see the +1’s directly in their search results – and in ads – helping them find their recommendation from their social network.

If all goes according to – Google’s – plan, we will soon see photo editors and buyers recommending your work to each other like crazy.

Here is the quick Google video about this new tool:

An Easy Way to Let Your Contacts Give You Some Google Love

Adding a +1 button to your public PhotoShelter galleries makes perfect sense. We, editorial photographers at least, often use them to showcase stories. Even if you have NOT just returned from an assignment, the content of your galleries will probably have a coherence that is relevant to your wider brand. Think wedding, portrait session, stock theme, etc. The button will appear but not work on urls that are not public so don’t worry about this affecting your privacy settings.

Pick Your Settings

Visit Google’s dedicated page and select the options you need.

1. Size: your choice;
2. Language: also your choice but note that for now the annotations only appear in US English results;
3. Include count (in Advanced options): tick the box if you want the button to show the number of clicks it received. For small traffic websites I find this kind of counter only highlights how few people have clicked. I usually don’t recommend it but it is your decision;
4. Parse: keep the default setting;
5. JS Callback function: leave blank;
6. URL to +1:: this option lets you choose which URL the button will +1. You can’t enter a gallery URL here as each gallery has a different URL. Fortunately if you leave this attribute blank Google will use the URL of the page as found in the address bar (for the geeks: as defined in document.location.href). This should work fine on both public galleries and search results.

Grab the code

Scroll down and copy the line of code that reads:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js"></script>

That line will load the necessary script from the Google server. Paste it into your Gallery Display page at the very end of the code. No need to paste the first line of code which is just a comment.

Then copy the last line of code. It should read something like:

<g:plusone count="false"></g:plusone>

depending on the settings you picked. That tag generates the button. Paste it into your Gallery Display page but this time paste it where you want the +1 button to render on your page. Again, no need to paste the first line of code.

When choosing where to render the button think like a visitor. Too close to your logo and it will appear to be related to the entire site. A good spot will always be near the gallery title. I chose to place mine alongside other social media sharing tools but clearly in a column that refers to the gallery.

Add a +1 button for your homepage as well

Of course you can just as easily add a +1 button that recommends your homepage. Keep in mind that for photographers seeking mainly jobs over stock sales, the homepage should be the primary focus of their SEO effort. It doesn’t have to appear only on your homepage. It can appear on other pages as well – by the logo in the header for example – but make sure to pick a location that leaves no doubt about what it relates to and enter your homepage’s URL in the ‘URL to +1:’ field otherwise Google will recommend the displayed page which might not be your homepage. In any case, having multiple +1 buttons does no harm.

To place a button on your homepage paste both lines of code into the homepage page.

To place a button in your site’s header or footer place the first line of code in your footer just before your closing body tag (should be right near the bottom of the footer’s code) and the second wherever you want the button to render.

The script only needs to be loaded once so if you have already pasted the first line of code into your footer you won’t need to also paste it in your Gallery Display page should you want to also show a button there.

Let me know if you think of creative ways of using the button.

Add a Google +1 Button to your PhotoShelter galleries and website from digitaltechparis - web presence for photographers

One such tool is HyperImage (H/T Steve Skoll for pointing them out). From their website:

HyperImage is an industrial-strength tool for searching the web and downloading entire websites worth of pictures. Just enter an address or keyword, and watch as thousands of pictures stream down to your computer.

Unfortunately this is nothing new and there are plenty more besides HyperImage. They crawl up and down static links to all corners of your site (and to any other site you link to) and download any image that renders in the browser: logos and icons but also your thumbnails, large img files, background images, slideshow images, etc. I just downloaded 794 images from a photographer’s website. Took me under a minute.

Tweak Your .htaccess File

The good news is you can block them with an .htaccess file placed on the root folder of your website. This file will detect the unwelcome visitor and send them away. Modifying an .htaccess file is a very simple task BUT get it wrong and it can really mess up your website. So take the utmost care doing this – and don’t hold me responsible.

An .htaccess file is a simple ASCII text file that provides a way to make configuration changes on a per-directory basis. It can do many things: password protect a folder, redirect users automatically, direct to custom error pages, change file extensions, ban or allow users with certain IP addresses, stop directory listings and use a different file as the index file.

Most hosting providers support .htaccess but some don’t publicize it much and some won’t allow you to use it at all. If your server runs Unix or Linux, or any version of the Apache web server it will support .htaccess, although your host may not. Search on their help pages or give them a call.

Watermark Your Images

Of course if you don’t have access to the server hosting your site as is the case with WordPress.com or PhotoShelter sites you can’t modify the .htaccess. The fallback solution is to watermark your images – something that should be done anyway for all archives images and possibly on portfolio images as well (more on that someday). You want HyperImage to download the watermarked image so your watermark needs to be part of the image itself, not overlayed by the browser. Thankfully PhotoShelter serves up ‘real’ watermarked images (PhotoShelter instructions on watermarking). Now not all photographers will agree to use watermarks and not all images can reasonably be watermarked. I suspect PhotoShelter will be taking steps to block ‘bad bots’ pretty quickly if there is enough consensus among users. The consensus is needed because these image harvesters are not actually doing anything illegal. They are simply extreme facilitators of copyright infringement.

Back to your server. Before you create a new .htaccess file check to see if you already have one in your site’s root directory on your server (make sure your FTP client is showing system files). You will probably need to edit the permissions for that file in order to edit it. Download it to your computer and place a copy on your desktop as a safety net.

Open it in a plain text editor that doesn’t use word wrap or in a code editor like Dreamweaver. You don’t want the application to insert special ASCII codes to signify a line break or save the file with any other extension.

In your plain text editor type the following:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^HyperImage
RewriteRule ^.* - [F,L]

The first line turns on the rewrite engine in Apache, this allows you to redirect the user’s request. The second line sets a condition using RewriteCond. In this case you want to detect visitors with user agent HyperImage. The third line sends a 403 forbidden error to user (F) and tells the engine to stop rewriting so no other rules are applied (L).

Save the file with filename .htaccess. If you can’t shake off an unwanted extension added by your editor name it htaccess.txt and rename it with your FTP client once you have uploaded it to the server.

Place the file in your root directory so that it affects your entire site. Change file permissions (CHMOD) back to 644 (RW- R– R–) or whatever it was originally (on my server it was 604) in order to make the file usable by the server, but prevent it from being read by a browser.

While you are at it you can deny access to many more unwanted visitors: email harvesters, offline browsing programs (site rippers like HyperImage), spammers. Typically they ignore robots.txt rules, which is plain rude, but also allows you identify and trap them. Identifying them by their user agent (as we have done for HyperImage) is less reliable as bad bots will often fake their user agent. Here is one list of bad bots and here is a discussion of the “perfect .htaccess ban list”. In the end choosing who to ban is a matter of personal choice.

Stop Image Harvesters Like HyperImage From Downloading All Your Images from digitaltechparis - web presence for photographers

Don’t get me wrong. We ARE best friends from day one. My concern is that photographers seems to take an astonishingly lax attitude to password security. Yet as small business owners they have so much to loose should things go wrong. By using their wife’s name as their password, they are playing Russian roulette with their online photo archives, their client list, their website, their bank accounts, their reputation and more.

Put simply, family names, dictionary words, countries, “123456″, “password” and “qwerty” don’t make good online passwords. Even simpler: if your password is easy to memorize it’s probably a bad one. My advice: use specialized software to generate strong passwords and store them securely.

BRUTE FORCE ATTACKS

There are many technological and non-technological ways an ill-intentioned person can get hold of your login credentials. One of them is known as a ‘brute force attack’: an automated process of trial and error used to guess the “secret” protecting a system. Picture a powerful computer entering every word in the dictionary, every first name and then variations on them in your account login form. This is (probably) what happend to Twitter in 2008 when 750 user accounts were hacked.

Password reminders or so-called “security questions” can make it even easier. According to the Web Application Security Consortium:

(…) if the personal detail is “favorite color” then an attacker can use a brute force attack to retrieve the password as the number of color choices is limited. In addition, studies have shown that approximately 40% of the population selects blue as their favorite color (…).

Need more? A recent study of a 32 million user password breach at RockYou, a Facebook application developer, found that the most common password, by far, was “123456”, followed by “12345”, “123456789”, “password” and “iloveyou.”

THE BASICS OF PASSWORD SECURITY

1. Use different passwords on different sites. If you use the same login for multiple sites as soon as one gets compromised, they all are.
2. Don’t use common words or sequences. Instead use at least 8 characters and 3 of the following character types: upper-case letters, lower-case letters, numbers and special characters. There are 26^8 possible permutations for an 8-character lowercase password, but 94^8 possible permutations for an 8-character password that cambines mixed-case letters, numbers and symbols. That’s over 6 quadrillion more possible variations.
3. Don’t base passwords on personal data — we share these bits of information with others more routinely than you think.
4. Don’t leave your passwords somewhere visible. Take that post-it off your monitor. And if you keep a list of passwords in a file on your computer, call it something a little less explicit than “passwords.”
5. Make sure your password recovery questions are also secure and not based on common-knowledge personal data either.

USE SPECIALIZED TOOLS

There are tricks to make secure passwords memorable but I find they require more work than suits my brain. I much prefer to use a specialized password management utility.

There are a number of them. I use 1Password (Mac/Win, $39.95) and I highly recommend it. It’s simple and intuitive to use. It stores your usernames, passwords and other sensitive information on your computer, not on a remote server. It constantly gets great reviews).

And disable password storage by your browsers. As practical as it is to let your browser store your login info, they are very vulnerable. Even if the application encrypts the account information, it does so with a static key that can be easily deciphered. So turn it off and let 1Password or whatever tool you choose do the work.

There is plenty more you can do to secure your accounts but this is a good start.

Get Serious About Password Security from digitaltechparis - web presence for photographers

It would be smart to keep your location information current on your website. At best you will be considered for a job is this new location; at worst you will have kept your regular client back home in the loop and saved him/her from making a phone call for nothing.

The problem is that right now updating your website means lifting the hood and dealing with html, css, ftp, login, password, wifi and more. You could call your web designer but that will probably cost you $$$ and it will definitely take time. If only you could update your location on your website straight from your cell phone. If only…

Let me help with that.

Meet Pocket Locator. These last few weeks I have been spending way too much time advising the developer of this nifty little free mobile web application (it’s not an iPhone App) that lets you instantly update your location information on your own website with the touch of a button on your web-enabled cell phone.

It isn’t only for photographers and it isn’t for all photographers – if you never move around, you don’t need to update – but it is a solution to a problem that has frustrated many of you for a long time. The best about it is there are no strings attached whatsoever: no backlink, no widget, no ugly logo, no badges, no rewards, no showing of your location anywhere but on your website. It produces plain text information that you can display in any way you want anywhere you choose. And that makes Pocket-Locator quite different from all the other location sharing devices such as Foursquare, Google Latitude, Facebook Places or Dopplr.

And it is the easiest thing in the world to set up. Create an account, grab the line of code, embed it, done.

And please make a donation (I don’t get any of it, the server does. Yep, that’s the pecking order around here). You wouldn’t believe the amount of resources something as simple as this requires.

Update your location on your website from your cell phone from digitaltechparis - web presence for photographers

The idea came up to set up a website to sell his prints and collect donations. PhotoShelter extremely generously donated an account, waved their transaction fee and offered to cover a big chunk of the print costs. I volunteered the design and PhotoShelter customization work.

joaosilva.photoshelter.com


João is the kind of photographer that fed my childhood fascination with front page news photographs, long before I even considered becoming a photographer myself. Looking at his images I can’t help but feeling very lucky to be watching that moment in the world’s life that he went out to see for us. He is a true journalist. Our eyes out there.

Please support him all you can: buy a print (hint: makes a great holiday gift), make a donation or leave a message.

And make sure you tweet it, click the Like button, share it on Facebook, blog about it and email your network. Let’s make some noise about this.

Thanks for your help.

New Prints Website Goes Live for Injured War Photographer João Silva from digitaltechparis - web presence for photographers

However you should absolutely include a properly formatted copyright notice on each page of your website that displays an image. With the notice present the defendant in an infringement lawsuit can no longer claim they did not realize that the work was protected – the so-called “innocent infringement” defense which, if successful, can result in reduced damages.

I called the Libray of Congress’ Copyright Office to double check. This is what they told me:

1. The symbol © (letter C in a circle), the word “Copyright” or the abbreviation “Copr.”
2. The year of first publication followed by a hyphen and the year of last publication. If your website only includes images published during the same year then a single year of first publication would be enough.
3. The name of the copyright owner, an abbreviation by which the name can be recognized, or a generally known alternative designation of owner.

Example: All images © 2003-2010 David Brabyn
For more information, see the Copyright Office’s Circular 3, Copyright Notice (pdf).

Add it to every page that displays images. I also recommend you include on your About page because, as the legal benefits reflect, the notice actually provides real information to the visitor and the About page is a logical place to give copyright information about the work on the website.

The copyright notice should be affixed in such a way as to “give reasonable notice of the claim of copyright.” The three elements of the notice should ordinarily appear together on the copies.

You will need to change the notice every time either the earliest or latest dates of publication change. Typically you will be changing at least the second date every year.

Determining publication dates is tricky because determining whether an image is published or not is itself tricky. According to the statute, “Publication is the distribution of copies (…) of a work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending. The offering to distribute copies (…) to a group of persons for purposes of further distribution, public performance, or public display constitutes publication. A public performance or display of a work does not of itself constitute publication.”

Browsers render webpages by downloading content to the viewer’s browser’s cache. Does that amount to transfer of ownership, rental, leasing or lending? In the absence of clarification from the lawmakers, the Copyright Office asks applicants, who know the facts surrounding distribution of their works, to determine whether works are published. (http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl107.html)

You don’t want to enter the © symbol in html code via keystrokes (Ctrl+Alt+C or Alt+0169 on a PC and Opt+G on a Mac). Ever seen © in a copyright notice? That is the result of a keyboard-entered © symbol. Type entities into the code instead.

The code for the © symbol in HTML is ©. Better still use the number code: ©. The actual code snippet would therefore be:

© 2010 David Brabyn

You have probably also seen the phrase All rights reserved. It indicates that the copyright holder holds all the rights provided by copyright law for their own use, i.e. they have not waived any such right. Most countries no longer requires such notices, but the phrase persists. There is no real downside to including it. The spread of Flickr terminology and mis-conceptions about copyright, particularly when it comes to online use, pleads in favor of asserting rights in all ways possible. So, by all means, add it to your website pages.

And remember: I am not a lawyer.

The Correct Copyright Notice on a Photographer’s Website from digitaltechparis - web presence for photographers

Most email software will duplicate the URL as an active hyperlink immediately after the non-clickable one but the result is ugly, semantically redundant and turns the signature into an unmemorable mess.

That’s a pity because email signatures are great marketing tools. Where else – aside from the email address – can a recipient find out about the sender? It allows you to repeat your brand, state your activity, provide updated contact information and lead the recipient straight to your most important marketing tool.

Fortunately, ensuring your recipient receives a clickable link couldn’t be easier: just use the entire url, including the http:// part, instead of just the shorter www.mywebsite.com.

• http://www.digitaltechparis.com/ will arrive clickable
• www.digitaltechparis.com won’t.

That’s all there is to it.

Clickable Website Addresses in Email Signatures from digitaltechparis - web presence for photographers

Announced today, I am now a Certified PhotoShelter Consultant. One of just two, for now.

The head honchos at PhotoShelter carefully examined my customizations, recognized them to be best-practice work and decided to recommend my services to PhotoShelter members.

I get a Liquorice Allsorts Pepto-Bismol badge for my website and bragging rights.

As they put it on their website:

“Our Consultants have all met a strict set of criteria in order to become “certified”, and we’re proud to offer their services to those of you who could use a strong helping hand.”

PhotoShelter customizations come in two flavors: full custom builds that allow for totally unique results and tweaks to the existing PhotoShelter templates. It is best to start from scratch and build a whole new design but you don’t have to. The fastest and definitely the cheapest way to go is to pick an existing theme and make some small changes here and there. You won’t have something unique but it will be adjusted for you.

Some brand new custom setups and tweaks will be launched soon. In the meanwhile here are two examples including a gallery on my own photography website:

Charlie Mahoney's features page

My gallery page

PhotoShelter deservedly enjoys an excellent reputation within the professional photo industry. Needless to say, I fully recommend them. I just don’t see how a professional photographer can afford to not use the services they offer: web galleries for pitching and delivering, RM licensing, print selling, archive backup, photo library display and search visibility. There is a product tour on the PhotoShelter website if you want to take a closer look.

If you do sign up for PhotoShelter make sure you use a discount coupon from a PhotoShelter member. Here is mine:

• DA6BR5BT44 chops up to $30 off new accounts and renewals.

As a photographer, I use PhotoShelter everyday and I started doing so long before I became a Certified Consultant.

Now a Certified PhotoShelter Consultant from digitaltechparis - web presence for photographers