5 Tips for Photography on Google+

I had no idea–and I do not think any­body did–that Google+ would be­come so pop­ular  for pho­to­graphers, and pho­to­graphy per se, as it has be­come today. With Google+, often dubbed a photographer’s paradse, Picasa re­ceived a ter­rific lot of at­ten­tion, Flickr may start losing out soon if Yahoo! does not come up with re­mark­able new ideas, and smaller port­fo­lios such as 500px are seeing a wave of their pho­to­graphers moving their en­tire work to Google+.

+You This is part 2 of a 4-part art­icle series on Google+. Read the others here: Google+ vs Facebook: 10 reasons why Google+ is far better 7 Tips for Photography on Google+ Google+ Daily Photography Themes How to make the best use of your Google+ Profile

 

And with this auto­mat­ic­ally banking on Picasa Web Albums–and there­fore the Picasa desktop ap­plic­a­tion to an extent–I see the Flickr-Picasa com­pet­i­tion once again coming to the fore. Right now, Google has a head start with the seam­less in­ter­linking of its other products along­side Google+ and Picasa.

With this in mind, we can ex­amine seven key as­pects of pho­to­graphy on Google+. Mind you, I means all as­pects of pho­to­graphy not solely linked to amateur/professional pho­to­graphers al­though the former are a ma­jority of my target audi­ence in this article.

1. Grab at­ten­tion: post publicly

If there is one as­pect of Google+ that quite goes against its circles, it is  photo sharing. Now I have a right to keep my circle names private on Google+, meaning if I add you to a circle you have no idea which circle I have added you to, merely that I have added you. Bending this rule just a tad, let me in­tro­duce you to one of my circles titled pho­to­graphy.

Much un­like what you may think, I do not share my pho­to­graphs solely with this circle. I keep it in mind to make all my pho­to­graphs public. There are many reasons for this: your post on Google+ re­ceives max­imum at­ten­tion the first 30 seconds, and it re­duces geo­met­ric­ally from then on. In other words, by a few minutes from your posting, your pho­to­graph is as good as buried. It is, of course, present in your album but there it does not garner half the at­ten­tion it does while it is placed above the fold on somebody’s stream.

Perhaps the only way to bal­ance this out is by in­creasing the number of people who see it. This does not mean blindly circ­ling people in the hope that they circle back. Rather, it is sharing the post pub­licly so that if any­body you have not circled ends up on your stream, they can see it too. And con­sid­ering that you have, say even so large as a few thou­sand people circ­ling you, re­member that your net­work ac­counts for only a meager one-hundredth of all the people on Earth, and about one-ten thou­sandth (or even less) of all the people in the world.

So when you post your great pho­to­graph on Google+, make sure you share it publicly.

2. Visibility: up­load dir­ectly to Google+

Remember I was talking about Google+ get­ting a head start on Flickr? Well, this ought to high­light that point brilliantly.

Let us as­sume you have a 500px or Flickr ac­count (or Tumblr or Wix or any of the other hun­dred good photo sharing sites you can think of) and you put up a pho­to­graph there, then you copy the link provided and paste it in your up­date. You may have no­ticed that cool little thumb­nail you get? Like it?

Alright, now re­vert to your stream once again, click on the green camera icon and up­load a pho­to­graph dir­ectly to Google+. See the dif­fer­ence? You get a full blown, stream-width image to boast of.

That is the dif­fer­ence between up­loading dir­ectly to Google+ and linking to a pic­ture else­where. But that is not the only dif­fer­ence. Clicking on the photo linked else­where will take the viewer there, and that is not some­thing every­body likes. They would rather see it staying in Google+. But your up­loaded pho­to­graph on Google+ will open in a neat, full­screen lightbox. Moreover, un­less you are Thomas Hawk or Trey Ratcliffe or Colby Brown or any of the other élite pho­to­graphers cur­rently active on Google+, I doubt any­body would want to go through the routine of clicking on a thumb­nail they cannot even discern.

When you want to share a pho­to­graph on Google+, make sure you up­load it dir­ectly to Google+

3. Hangout: rush to great hang outs or host your own

I have already spoken of better group activ­ities such as Hangouts on Google+ in one of my pre­vious art­icles in this series. In fact, hangouts¹ are an ex­tremely won­derful thing for pho­to­graphy en­thu­si­asts on Google+ as they can host public hangouts with other pho­to­graphers around the world.

And if you do not want to host a hangout for some reason, you can al­ways scout the net­work for other pho­to­graphers hosting them. Personally, I re­com­mend at­tending every one of Trey Ratcliffe’s hangouts–he hosts an in­finite number of them regularly–if you are lucky (and fast) enough to enter one be­fore it fills up.

Once in a hangout, forget your­self and dis­cuss pho­to­graphy. In short, hang outs are great chances to meet like minded people; would you shy away from talking to them if you met them in real life? That time is quite im­portant if you want to de­velop your pho­to­graphy on Google+

Host hangouts or join them, dis­cuss, learn and look to de­velop your pho­to­graphy through good in­ter­ac­tion there.

4. Keep your eyes on daily pho­to­graphy themes

In one of my art­icles in this series, I have listed all the pho­to­graphy themes being cur­ated on Google+. It is quite up­dated, al­though I promise nothing right now, so I sug­gest you take a look at them here.

On the one hand, some people are sticking de­votedly by their 365 and 52-something pro­jects,² and on the other we have people at a loss as to what they should post. What pic­ture to shoot or which of their many to up­load or some­thing else along those lines perhaps.

While I have, my­self, never come across this block, one great solu­tion  would sug­gest is to keep your eyes peeled for the day’s (or the next day’s) pho­to­graphy theme. This will serve as an in­spir­a­tion to you, either to go shoot some­thing under that cat­egory or to up­date a pic­ture of that cat­egory. Curators re­spons­ible for pho­to­graphs tagged this way are on the look out for good pho­to­graphs for their themes.

While I strongly urge you not to make  this a wall to re­strict you, I be­lieve good leverage can be made of this to en­hance your pho­to­graphy on Google+ and re­ceive good at­ten­tion. And make sure you tag your pho­to­graph right. Read more about how to tag your pho­to­graph for a day’s pho­to­graphy theme here.

Occasionally–or reg­u­larly, of you like–upload pic­tures that con­form to the day’s pho­to­graphy theme.

5. Post right: know how fre­quently to post

It is one thing to post your pho­to­graphs on Google+, but it is an en­tirely dif­ferent thing to over­flow others stream with 25 photos like steaming hot lava that nobody will bother taking a good look at. The secret (if one can call it that) is to post pho­to­graphs reg­u­larly, at in­ter­vals suf­fi­cient far apart so that people will end up keeping track of you while not get­ting ir­rit­ated by you who would make your­self ap­pear like an attention-seeking ma­niac throwing pho­to­graphs at them.

And this, un­for­tu­nately, is true no matter how good your pho­to­graph. As I ex­plained earlier, the time that has passed since your up­load is in­versely pro­por­tional to the at­ten­tion your up­load re­ceives. So be sure you are ready with an­other pho­to­graph as soon as your first one gets quite buried.

Upload pho­to­graphs slowly but surely so people pay at­ten­tion to what you post and not dis­regard you be­cause your posting is ana­logous to spamming.

So good luck with your pho­to­graphy on Google+; and one last thing be­fore you leave is about those ru­mors cir­cu­la­tion that Google’s Terms of Service claim all rights to your pho­to­graphs as you post them. That is all un­true as far as my know­ledge is con­cerned (why else will I be posting pho­to­graphs there?) But if you have doubts, feel free to ask the helpful Vincent Mo. Or read this post Thomas Hawk shared a long time back be­fore you dis­turb him. If you want more, I sug­gest Colby Brown’s ex­plan­a­tion (re­but­ting Scott Bourne’s art­icle that started all this hul­labaloo in the first place.)

Have fun on Google+ and do read my other art­icles in this series.

1. Hangouts are ba­sic­ally video chats, cur­rently lim­ited to 10 people [↩]
2. These are like new year res­ol­u­tions saying you would post 365 pic­tures (one a day) or, to ease out a little, 52 things (weekly) of whatever they like. [↩]