A couple of days ago, I had 368 followers of my English Facebook-page connected to this blog, with the same focus on studio lighting, portraits and stuff like that. For some reason, I wanted that number to be 300, maybe just because.

Paying for advertising just to get more followers is not something I would do, or recommend for that matter. But, if you are not paying with real money, that is something else.

Late last year I joined Empire Avenue, what they call a social stock market, or social media rocket fuel, which is their latest tagline. It’s just a fun online game, but if you give it some time, you can use it to drive traffic or do other stuff that might benefit yourself in your social networks.

Social media earnings

If you haven’t tried it yet (sign up here for free), here is the short version. You create your profile, connect your different social media networks (Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, Facebook-pages, LinkedIn, YouTube etc) and start to buy shares in others.

Sooner or later, other people will start buying your shares, and your share price will go up. Your share price is also based on your activity in your social media networks, so it pays to be active.

I have been on Empire Avenue for three months or so, not every day, but when I have the time. They have forums and you can interact with other users in many ways.

But, the big thing if you want to drive traffic, get more likes, or just want other people to check out your blog or photo on Flickr, you can create Missions.

And that is what I did. My bank balance at the time was quite good, so I had a couple of hundred thousand “Eaves” (which is the internal currency you use) to spend. You just create a Mission, you chose the payout and what you want the participants to do, and voila! Marketing with fake money.

You can buy yourself fans, or likes, or viewers or votes. Exactly like in the real world. I know it is a bit like cheating, but I have payed it with my hard earned online money, so why not?

If you want, you can invest in me on Empire Avenue, I promise to try to pay good dividends to all my shareholders. Here is my profile (e)STEFANTELL.

Please join, and let’s get rich together.

I just missed it, this blog has passed the 100 mark. 100 posts with behind the scenes, lighting diagrams, a lot of text about how the angle of a softbox can improve a portrait and things I just write when I get started.

The funny thing is that this blog in English was just a test to see if there was an interest in stuff I like to read on other blogs (my blog in Swedish is not at all this focused on lighting, but I had to narrow the scope here, otherwise I would never have time to work).

Photographers providing detailed information on how they set up a photo shoot on location or in the studio, why they chose a beauty dish instead of a Magnum reflector, or just showing how it was done, behind the scenes. Those are the things I have learned almost everything I know about studio lighting from (plus a few books and a little trial-and-error of course).

And sharing it is not just something for good karma, it is really helping me to put words on what I know, having to describe it to the Internet. I only read books in English, watch DVDs without subtitles and wander around the english speaking Internet effortlessly, but writing stuff in English is hard. And time consuming.

Sure, it is a lot of technical words that are easy to understand in this business, but the wording often gets me stuck. If you have English as your first language, please excuse some funny direct translations or other mistakes.

And thank you all for all the comments, they really help me finding the time to document more, write more and make me happy even on boring days.

And if you have the time, please share the content on this blog via Twitter, Facebook or on forums, I love to see how this thing grows just with the help of good old word of mouth.

Let me know if there are things you want me to focus more on, I am happy to fill my list with requests. Now I have to finish a blog post with crochet cakes.

There are more and more sites that connects you and your social networks on the web, promising something. I’m not sure exactly what, but I tend to sign up just to see what it is all about. Primarily to make sure I own my name on the net.

Connect.me is a new thing that lets you connect your accounts on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Then you can vouch for other people in, what they call it, your reputation network. The goal, it seems, is that this will be used as your “card” on the net and show how trusted you are in different areas (skills, interests and passion). Maybe it will be big, who knows?

Currently in private beta, so if you want an invite, add me on Twitter (@stefantell) or LinkedIn, send me a DM and I will vouch for you (and after that I think you will get your invite-link).

It is free to sign up, and takes a few click to finish your profile.

After waiting almost nine months, Beppe and Hannes are finally out. Our family went from small to big overnight, and now the juggling begins.

I will try to stay at home as long as I can, two kids needs a lot of hands.

Every now and then, I wish for more comments and more interaction on this blog (as well as the Swedish photo blog I post more stuff on). Sometimes I even complain that it is too silent here. Thousands of readers, but only a few comments.

Then, all of a sudden, I get this e-mail from a guy:

Hi Stefan,

I think reading your blog, the day before my first corporate assignment, may have saved my life .

First of all, the clam shell technique proved the be very flattering for the sales and management team and they quite liked the results.

Secondly, when I entered the offices, I saw that all walls (no exceptions) were (very) dark grey and I was instructed to have a white background. Your simple trick of using white paper sticked to the wall, was all I needed.

So, thanks for that.

What can I say? Even if I don’t think I really save lives in my profession, it is very satisfying to know that with just by sharing a few tips, I can help others learning a thing or two just by writing it down and posting it here. The same way I learned studio lighting, and still do. By reading, and asking. And trying.

But, there has been an increase of communication I think, and that is fun. Maybe because I have posted things that are easier to comment lately, even if I really don’t know exactly how. It is a lot easier to comment on my Facebook-page, or even on Flickr, but that’s the way things are.

If you have any suggestions on how to make this blog more comment-friendly, please let me know. I would love to have more communication, and less just me talking.

Recently I had the luxury of having on of the posts on my blog featured in some way on StumbleUpon. It was a post describing the lighting setup with three lights for a business portrait.

The day before, I had 426 visits, the same day the link was found by someone using StumbleUpon, 2918 visits were registered by Google Analytics.

A nice increase by 685%.

A quick peak and a long tail

Most of the new visits came during one hour, but after a few days, I can see that it does not stop there. A week later, there are somewhere between 50 and 60 daily visits from StumbleUpon, and that is not bad at all.

According to a infographic on their blog, links from StumbleUpon has a lot longer life cycle than from Twitter or Facebook, and it seems to be correct for my blog as well. Only links from other blogs or forums tend to live on like this.

Market yourself with StumbleUpon

If you have a photo blog, signing up for a free StumbleUpon account might be a good idea. Adding some friends from Twitter and Facebook, as well as posts or items from your blog that might be of interest for others, and someday someone with a lot of influence might find it.

I’m not really sure why I got all this traffic, probably someone with a large network on StumbleUpon pressed the “Like”-button. Some of my posts I have added myself, but not this one.If you know more about how SU works, you might have a better explanation.

If you are on StumbleUpon, please add me to your network, here is the link to my profile. Or just search for “stefantell”.

Profoto, the makers of the studio lights and light modifiers I use almost daily has a really good blog, with a lot of interesting content.

I have had the honour to be mentioned in their post three times now, the first with a blog post on clothing photography for a Swedish designer, the second from a portrait session with a young model and the latest was when I tried to take good product photos of pills and plastic bottles.

Now they have added even more content with the addition of three lighting videos that I think are really great. Maybe a little too long, and a little too much talk, but the summary when they show the final photo in different stages of lighting together with a lighting diagram, it makes everything really easy to understand. If you are getting bored by the talking, fast forward to the last 20 seconds or so, and there you can find the summary.

4 light setup

2 light setup

1 light setup

Don’t forget to add www.profoto.com/blog to your RSS-reader. You can of course also find them on Facebook and Twitter. Another great site with a lot of behind-the-scenes content is ISO 1200 where you can find new videos daily.

Do you have any good tips with similar content, please let me know.

I’m back from a long vacation, and just added another time consuming social network to the list, Google+. Add me if you like, even if I have no idea what I will do there. Not yet, anyway.

Photographer Stefan Tell on Google+

If you have a Google account and want to give my blog a +1, just click on the button below. Thanks in advance.

If you rather use Facebook, just click in the box to the right if you want to follow my page from there.

It took a while, but now you can click “Like” in the box on the right and we can continue communicating on Facebook.

There is not much to see there right now, but I am hoping to keep posting stuff inbetween blog posts, so it will be a more steady flow of everything from snapshots, behind the scenes and things like that.

Do you have any ideas or suggestions for what you would like to see on my Facebook-page in the future, please let me know. I’m all ears.

Click.

When I started this blog, I didn’t really plan for it to be an archive full of studio lighting setup diagrams and examples from different photos (mostly portraits, and some product photography) I have been doing for different clients and in my spare time. But now it is, and a little more.

The problem is to find a way to sort it, and categories does not really work (too much duplicate content).

I try to tag every blog post with equipment used (beauty dish, Magnum etc) or techniques/methods (clam shell, hard light etc) or other keywords that could make it easier for you reading this blog to find more posts on the same subject you were looking for.

In the column to the right I will put more links to those tag archives. I have started with links to posts that includes diagrams (or descriptive behind the scenes photos, which are sometimes more instructive than diagrams) for setups using one, two, three or four lights.

Later I will continue this by adding links to the archives for specific tags, such as all the photos where I used a gridded reflector or a strip softbox. Hopefully it will make it easier for you to find more of what you were looking for.

If you have any ideas for how this blog can be better (or just easier to navigate), please write a comment.