Blogging for Photographers by Jolie O'Dell

Saltaire Art and Craft centre

As I mentioned in an earlier post I bought this book at the fantastic Art and Craft centre in Saltaire. It was one of many nice and interesting books available there. Not that I am a photographer, but I thought that it might explain a little bit how to use photos on the blog and other things about photos. It does not. However, it is a very interesting and very pedagogical book about blogging. OK, for photographers, but this is just the theme of the blog, right? Most of the advice is also valid for bloggers in general.

The book is printed on beautiful, a little bit thicker, half glossy paper and is divided into 8 chapters; basics, blogging platforms, content, community, monetization, inspiration, photoshop basics and resources.

Even when you have been blogging for some time and you think you know what to do it is very useful. At least for me. I might know what to do, but I don't always know why and how it works. You also get explanations on a lot of abbreviations and other technical terms.

The most useful for me were:

Content: How to write a blog, what to write about, methods, regularities and consistencies. How much? How little? Most important thing is to write regularly. Since that can sometimes be a problem we go to the next point.

Inspiration: Challenges are one. Considering all the challenges out there the biggest problem would probably be to find a new challenge that people would be interested in. With photography it might be easier, but the 'well of books' is big and there are a lot still to be found. Another option is to find inspiration from other artists; not only book bloggers as in our case, but also from other areas of which you have an interest, photo blogs for example!

Photoshop basic: This was very useful to me who is not very good at photoshop. I just bought a magazine tutorial how to do it. It is time consuming and I don't know why, but my efforts does not always end up at the same end point as in the tutorial! Maybe the tutorial is wrong! Hmm...This basic one is very good and probably all what you need to highlight your photos a bit.

Resources: This was also very useful for me with information on various media. Web hosting with links to various types, software that can be useful for various parts of the blogging. And on top of all! A glossary that explains it all.

Jolie O'Dell has worked as a technology journalist for Mashable and Venture Beat, with a decade of experience engaging the online community. Her photojournalistic creations have been featured in tech and social-media publications internationally. All according to the cover. She has also written a blogging for creatives which could be interesting to read as well.

Well, that's it. Now, I have no excuse not to make professional blog posts! Let's see if I can put some of the advice into some thrilling posts for this site!