Carl is an expert at the platinum printing process and also the use of large format cameras – scratch that – VERY large format cameras.

In the interview, you’ll hear about his reasons for doing the project, as well as about the spectacularly successful investment drive that he undertook earlier this year to raise the funding he needed.

Links

Carl’s Website
Carls’ Blog
Kickstarter

In the podcast, Carl and I touch all to briefly on platinum printing. If you’d like to learn a bit more about this process, there is a great slideshow here by Carl: Step By Step Platinum Printing. He also wrote an overview article on The Online Photographer blog: The Making of a Platinum Print.

One of Carl's drive-in movie theatre photographs © Carl Weese

Subscribe to the podcast

You can subscribe to The Documentary Photographer podcast by clicking on any of these links:

iTunes
Zune
Blackberry

Pat isn’t a photographer. I’ll tell you that now. However, I do think what he is doing is could be of interest to photographers. Actually, I think it could be of real use to us.

Pat publishes the Smart Passive Income blog and podcast, and has built up a solid reputation as a rich source of useful information about how to earn an income online. This fits really well with my own ambitions to find ways that I can monetize my photography via the internet (The Online Income Experiment). So when I had opportunity to interview Pat, I couldn’t believe my luck.

Links

In the podcast, Pat mentions a lot of links that will help you if you decide that you’d like to research the possibilities of earning online income:

Smart Passive Income
Think Traffic
Gary Vaynerchuk
Green Exam Academy
The Four Hour Work Week
Security Guard Training HQ
InfoBarrel
ViperChill
Social Triggers

Special favour. In the podcast, Pat asks you to swing by his Facebook page to say “Hi”. Please do so. He’s a good egg:

Pat on Facebook

Quick links

By the way, if you want a quick link to two of the books/authors mentioned in the podcast, here you go. Warning, if you buy from Amazon on the other side of the jump, I get a few pennies in commission. You don’t pay anything extra, but I thought you should know that if you did buy, you’d be putting a little tin in my pocket.

The first is Gary Vayerchuk’s Crush It!; the second is The 4-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss.

The internet is a realm of opportunity. For photographers, it offers new ways to monetize their images. The Online Income Experiment is a series of posts describing my progress to do just that, based on a self-publish model.

The plan is to earn money from my interest in food, specifically in the people who produce it. To that end, I created Cork Foodie. If you missed it, you can read about the thinking behind it here: The Online Income Experiment – Launch.

February and March update

So what have I been doing in the past two months on the Cork Foodie blog?

The simple answer is: “Not enough.” The fact of the matter is that I’ve been pulled in at least half a dozen directions in the past two months, so I haven’t given the new blog half the attention it requires.

Let’s look at what hasn’t happened, and then we’ll look at the successes. Better to end on a high, after all.

Content

While I have been able to produce some content for Cork Foodie, it hasn’t been anywhere near the volume I was hoping for. Nor has it been as regular as I would have liked.

That’s OK for the moment. It is better to quietly populate a new blog before making a big splash with it. Nothing is more annoying for new readers than to land on a blog only to find one or two posts. Better to have a load of content waiting for them. It gives the blog credibility and the readers are more likely to make a note to return, or even better subscribe.

The longer it takes me to populate it properly, the longer it will take to get ready for prime time.

Fish at Douglas Farmers Market. A post describing a visit with my daughter got some lovely attention © Roger Overall 2012

Traffic

The erratic publication of content has had an adverse impact on traffic.

Here are the figures for February, drawn from Google Analytics, with mini graphs that give you an idea of how things bumped along during the month:

414 Visits

262 Unique Visitors

785 Pageviews

1.90 Pages/Visit

00:03:08 Avg. Visit Duration

69.32% Bounce Rate

62.80% % New Visits

March wasn’t so good. In fact, every single trend measured showed decline. Here are the figures and mini graphs:

289 Visits

195 Unique Visitors

436 Pageviews

1.51 Pages/Visit

00:01:11 Avg. Visit Duration

74.74% Bounce Rate

57.79% % New Visits

What the figures don’t tell you is that those for February are for about 20 days (the blog launched around 8th February), compared with a full 31 days for March. So the downward traffic figures for March were comparatively even worse.

At the moment, I don’t really have a strategy for driving traffic to the blog. Or more precisely, I’m not really executing a strategy and won’t be until I have more content in place. I know what needs to be done. I could do with writing it down, though. Here goes.

My traffic strategy

Once I have a dozen posts published (there are six on the blog at the moment), I’ll start making a fuss of it.

My chosen routes are: connecting with other food bloggers, connecting with food magazines, connecting with food organisations and, most importantly, connecting with food producers.

I’ll achieve this through my own favourite social media channels to begin with.

I’ll leave useful comments on blogs. The operative word there is ‘useful’. Comments that don’t enrich the blog they’re posted on or the internet as a whole get ignored. “Great blog post” is a junk food comment. It gives a quick hit of satisfaction to the blog writer, but it does nothing to build a relationship. Nor does it give the other regular readers on the blog any reason to connect with you. If, however, you engage properly with the blog post and offer additional, supportive insight, you’re on your way to being useful and forging relationships.

I’ll also use Twitter to interact with all bloggers, magazines, organisations and producers. I’ll retweet their tweets, and highlight their blogs and their products.

As far as food producers themselves are concerned, I’m actively going out to meet them. Farmers’ markets have been my staple so far, but I’m also attending industry events and approaching people directly.

By engaging with all these people, my hope is that they will tell others about me and send traffic to the blog.

Another part of my traffic strategy is to rate as high as I can for certain search terms in Google.

One of my first posts on Cork Foodie was about Shandon Sweets, where father and son team Dan and Tony make sweets by hand. It was picked up by another blogger © Roger Overall 2012

Google ranking

This is where the good news kicks in. Cork Foodie has made it on to the first page of Google already for the search term ‘Cork food’. That’s promising.

However, for several other key phrases, which I’ll keep under my hat for now, but will reveal as we go on, the site doesn’t even rank in the top 20 pages.

I need to keep building back links. To help me achieve this, I’ve built additional blogs at Blogger and WordPress. These will be the anchor blogs for links that I’m hoping to generate from mass article submission and social bookmarking. You can find more about all that here, courtesy of Pat Flynn: The Back Linking Strategy.

My plan is to create a couple more of these anchor blogs and then start ramping up my submissions to article sites. My target is to have half a dozen anchor blogs in place by the end of the summer.

Income

As you can imagine, after such a feeble start, income from the new blog is miniscule.

One avenue of income is Adsense. So far, Cork Foodie has earned €0.44 from clicks on Google ads. The beach house is going to have to wait a while longer.

From that perspective, the blog isn’t a success just yet. Of course, we’re at the start here. Any income at all is a bit of a coup right now. If it’s still at this level in a year’s time, yeah that wouldn’t be so hot.

However, that’s not the full story.

I made a €65 sale from the blog when I was contacted by a national broadsheet about using one of the photographs in its Sunday supplement. The journalist had interviewed one of the producers on the blog, who in turn had told them that I had taken photographs when I spoke with them myself.

In fact, that happened twice. On the second occasion, the newspaper refused to pay anything. So I refused to give it a photograph.

Both times, though, I was able to take the first steps to building a relationship with journalists and publications relevant to my ambitions. That is a major win, and one that I hadn’t anticipated. It hadn’t occurred to me that producers I speak with would put me in direct contact with potential picture buyers.

So, in the plus column we have €65.44.

In the debit column, we have the monthly hosting fee for the blog: €4.95 x 2 = €9.90.

So profit for the two months is €65.44 – €9.90 = €55.54 (ex-VAT).

The next two months

Cork Foodie won’t improve much over the coming two months. I can see that already. My diary is heavily committed to other projects – three of which are related to online income, two of which are e-books.

I shall be creating content, though, and my aim is to achieve my target of a dozen blog posts by the end of May. That will allow me to push forward with publicizing it from then on, which will, I hope, accelerate its growth in terms of content, traffic and Adsense income.

In addition, by then I will be ready to add another passive income stream to the blog: the Amazon affiliate programme.

The Documentary Photographer Podcast

If you think that you might be interested in earning passive income and generating interest in your photography online via self-publishing, you definitely have to listen to episode 2 of The Documentary Photographer when it goes live later this week.

I have an hour-long interview with Pat Flynn, of Smart Passive Income. You don’t want to miss that.

The other side of human life

Documentary photography has an image problem. Among the general public today it often evokes connotations of the grimmer side of life: misery in Africa, war in Afghanistan, poverty in Latin American slums, substance addiction in Western cities, degradation of the environment at each turn – injustice and inhumanity everywhere. That, sadly, is what news outlets want. It is what photojournalists must provide.

These things are important. Of course they are. But they aren’t the sum total of human existence and experience. There is also love and laughter and dignity and achievement and problem solving and the simple act of just being.

Elliott Erwitt has built a career around this other side of life. For that reason alone, Sequentially Yours is worth a look, even if it isn’t his strongest book.

In it, a family tussles with an obstinate parasol. A group of filmmakers jostle and joke ahead of a formal group photograph. A man watches a steamroller flatten a freshly laid stretch of path. A man drinks coffee. A girl adjusts her bikini. Protestors shout. Children play. People laugh.

This side of life rarely makes it into the newspapers. Consequently, we’re almost conditioned to think that it is unworthy of our attention. But it isn’t. A point made in the foreword of the book, written by Marshall Brickman, a former collaborator of Woody Allen’s.

Sequences distort

Documentary photography is about telling a story. It should be a genuine story – one grounded in actual events. In Sequentially Yours, however, Elliott Erwitt sometimes juxtapositions photographs with the clear intention of distorting real life.

For instance, the combination of the photographs on the front cover suggests the occupants of the deckchairs were flung out of their seats. We interpret it that way, and I don’t think anyone could doubt that is the photographer’s intention. It is very funny, after all.

The same goes for a sequence where a man throws a stick into water for his dog to fetch. In the final picture, the dog stares at circular ripples in the water, but the man is gone. Did he fall in? Doubtful. As a three-part slice of comedy, the sequence is a gem. As a true reflection of what happened, less so.

Does it matter?

No. Erwitt’s intention is clear. We marvel at the joke and at his ingenuity and skill as a visual storyteller. We know we’re being manipulated – and we love it.

Sequences reveal

While some sequences in the book intentionally distort reality, others illuminate it beautifully. One of my favourite sequences shows cast members from The Misfits, including Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable (for whom the film was their last completed work) being corralled together for a group shot. They joke and mess about in a way the final, rather sullen, formal group photograph wouldn’t suggest.

This particular sequence, together with one showing an attractive topless girl on a beach, made me wonder whether these photographs could be taken today.

Unless you are Jeff Bridges, getting on to a movie set to produce documentary photographs of the production is difficult. Movies stars, or at the very least their publicists, are so protective of their image that allowing unguarded access wouldn’t be allowed. Or would it? Let me know if I’m wrong. And by the way, I’m preparing a top ten list of dream assignments. Photographing behind the scenes of a motion picture production is on there. Just in case you know someone.

Equally, you have to wonder how well you’d be received if you were taking photographs on a beach of a topless girl adjusting her bikini briefs these days. Or taking any photographs of children. Or of people in general as they go about their daily business.

In the West, any road, you could run in to trouble. Even though we live in a society in which people are eager to publish the minutiae of their lives online, we don’t feel comfortable that someone might take our photograph in a public place. In fact, I get the sense that if it were possible, it would be banned. Particularly when it comes to children. Oddly, we think nothing of photographs being taken of children in, say, Africa. That’s fine. But photographing children in the West? Clearly, you must be a sexual deviant.

Lost history?

It would be tempting to say that today’s restrictive attitudes towards photography will result in a poorer visual archive for future historians to draw from.

That is doubtful.

In fact, it is likely that the opposite will be true. So much photography and video is being uploaded to sharing platforms that, as long as the platforms remain intact, historians in the decades and centuries to come will have too much rather than too little material to work with. That’s really where the problem lies. By restricting photographers today, future generations won’t have the benefit of the unique filter that they bring to the world. There will be fewer editors like Elliott Erwitt for them to enjoy. Quirkly, insightful and, importantly, contemporary interpretation will vanish.

That would be a real shame.

Fortunately for everyone, Elliott Erwitt has been able to practice his craft mostly before attitudes towards photography hardened. We should all be grateful for that.

Would it occur to you to do an interview that you could send to a friend to publish on their blog? There would be huge interest in it in the right circles.

Or would you store the encounter away, only drawing upon it at dinner parties in front of an exclusive audience?

Fortunately, novelist John Camp chose the former: Just Make the Damn Picture: An Interview with David Burnett, Part I.

By the way, if any readers of this blog get a chance like this, you will pass it on, won’t you?

Sequentially Yours

I’ve had time to digest the book, and it’s raised quite a number of thoughts in me. So many that it’s best to split the review of the book into two parts. One about the book itself; the second about the issues it raises about documentary photography.

This part is about the book itself.

Smell

Fresh out of the cellophane wrapping, the book smells gorgeous. That’s an odd thing to say, I know, but it’s rare that I get a book of photography so fresh off the press. I’m not used to that smell. I like it, though.

The glimmer of the silver print on the cover suggests that once the book is cracked open rich delights await the photographic connoisseur. Even more so if you are a die-in-the-wool, card-carrying, it’s-a-shame-my-daughter-isn’t-a-boy-so-that-I-could-name-him-Elliott aficionado. The tingle of anticipation as the book lies in front of you. What treasures will it contain?

Sometimes, anticipation isn’t rewarded.

Two dozen pages into Sequentially Yours, you start to get a little concerned. It’s a bit uneven. Some of the photographs don’t hit the mark. Still, it’s early doors.

Halfway through, it’s still hit and miss. You’re reckoning that the editors must, surely, have weighted all the really good stuff in the second half, which is kicked off by a seemingly endless, yet hugely engrossing, series of photographs culminating in a formal group shot from the set of The Misfits.

Unfortunately, the incline after that is only marginal, though the final few sequences are fabulous, even laugh-out-loud funny in one instance.

If the book were an aeroplane, you’d say it just doesn’t get very high off the runway after takeoff. A mildly ambitious tree would cause it concern.

Reproduction

There are a number of reasons for this.

First, I have to say that the reproduction just doesn’t do it. The photographs lack depth. They look dense and dull. With only a rare exception, they are lifeless.

Lifeless. That bears repeating.

Lifeless isn’t adjective you associate with a photographer of Elliott Erwitt’s remarkable ability to show us life as it is lived.

The alternative is just too terrible to contemplate. Could it be that the reproduction is the best that could be achieved from Elliott Erwitt’s negatives and prints? Surely not?

Last year, in Arles, I saw prints of photographs by Sebastião Salgado. They were exceptional. I’d never seen black and white prints of such three dimensional, luscious, almost tangible quality. I don’t know for sure who printed them (Dominique Granier?), but it would be interesting to see what that person could do with Elliott Erwitt’s negatives.

Even then, would they reproduce well using the same printing process used for this book?

I don’t know. I have no answers really. I just feel the print quality isn’t as good as it should be.

Photographs

Then again, perhaps inadequate reproduction it is all that some of the photographs in the book deserve. While it does contain some absolutely wonderful photographs, the book also contains [Oh heavens, how do I put this and still get out of here without my car tyres being slashed?] less wonderful photographs.

If you were shown some of these photographs and weren’t told who had taken them, you’d be searching for nice things to say about them at best. At worst, you’d be looking for a nice way to say bad things about them.

Also, some of the sequences don’t work. They lack a point or a reason. Sometimes they are constructed around a single image that would shine much brighter if it weren’t surrounded by dimmer companions.

There is good work here. Just not enough of it. [Where's the exit?]

In the end

Giving a verdict on this book is really hard. I want to like it. Elliott Erwitt is a man I look up to. It’s just that the book falls short.

The quality of the photography is uneven.

While some of the sequences work so well and lift your spirits so high, you want to find someone immediately to share the photographs with, others don’t.

The reproduction is, I think, second rate – certainly compared to the print quality of a book of landscapes by Icelandic landscape and nature photographer Daniel Bergman shown to my by a friend late last year. It took my breath away and I couldn’t stop talking about it. My friend had to leave the room to quieten me.

There is another consideration to be given to a book of documentary photographs. Does it succeed in enlightening the reader about the human condition and the world in which we live? In the case of Sequentially Yours, I’d have to say that the answer is: “Mostly.” From that perspective at least, there is a lot to cherish. More about that in part two of the review.

I have a sense that the genesis for the book stems from the notion that Elliott Erwitt’s archive must contain many more sequences in addition to the ones already known and marvelled at by the public at large. Maybe it does. But someone will have to go and have another look.

Self-portrait of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii

There is an argument that something of reality is lost in black and white photographs. I’m reminded of this every time I see colour work from an era we would normally associate with black and white photography.

Take the photographs produced by Russian aristocrat Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii in the early 1900s, using a process he developed himself. The BBC has a great slideshow here – In pictures: Russian Empire in colour photos.

There is a life to these photographs that black and white photographs from the same era lack. It is as if you are transported through time. You make a connection.

I find that spellbinding.

In the newsletter, the association says:

“On the subject of weddings, we are aware of a number of complaints being made by wedding clients regarding the quantity of wedding images being provided to view and the clients then claiming that more images were taken and they have not received them all. In a recent case before the Civil Court a Judge agreed with the clients where around 800 images were taken at the wedding and after deletions the photographer supplied the client with 300 preview images. Costs were awarded against the photographer who was ordered to hand over the unused images but unfortunately the photographer had already deleted them: further costs/compensation were ordered.

“The motto of this story is that if you edit images and provide a ‘selection’ for the bride to look at DO NOT DELETE the retained images but keep them on file in case this happens to you!!”

Open letter

I was shocked at these two paragraphs, for several reasons. Not least of which is the flippant and inappropriate advice the association gives to members. What follows is an open letter to Colin Buck, chief executive of the MPA

Dear Colin,

In the newsletter that the association emailed out to members yesterday, it touched upon the case of a wedding photographer against whom damages were awarded by a court on behalf of a bride. The judge agreed with the bride that she should receive all of the photographs taken by the photographer on her wedding day. In response, in the newsletter, the MPA recommended that its members should not delete files in case they find themselves in a similar situation.

That is a very disappointing stance for the MPA, a trade association, to take. Worse, it is flippant and does nothing to help professional photographers. It also shows that the association possibly agrees with the judge, who I think has made a mistake – one that sets a precedent.

When a photographer is commissioned to photograph a wedding assignment, they are being paid to provide their vision and interpretation. Their role is to distill the essence of the day and tell the story of the day as they see it.  As part of that process, they will discard captures for a great many reasons, including error (exposure faults, focus inaccuracies, etc).

They do so just as the author of a book deletes misspelled words, along with phrases, sentences, passages and entire pages that they feel don’t contribute to the story they are telling.

No one, as far as I know, has ever taken the author of a book to court because they bought a book that didn’t contain every single word that the author wrote in producing that book.

The judgment against the photographer is, in my view, wrong.

Rather than challenging it, however, the MPA is indirectly endorsing it by advising members to keep all their files from a shoot.

That is an inadequate response.

As a trade association, the MPA should be standing up for photographers’ rights.

The MPA should be advising members to include a clause in their terms and conditions that specifically and expressly states that the number (and style) of photographs delivered to the client by the photographer shall be deemed correct.

The association should be encouraging photographers to explain to their clients the difference between the number of photographs taken and the number of photographs delivered.

The MPA should be helping photographers to express their vision of a wedding, rather than allowing others to dictate what their vision should be by demanding every single frame that was exposed on the day. A photographer’s vision and voice are their unique selling points – things that will keep them afloat in tough times. By offering weak advice about retaining files, the MPA isn’t helping photographers as they face up to the challenges in today’s marketplace.

It would be better for the MPA to be speaking out against what is, I think, a miscarriage of justice. Yet it has chosen not to. To put it mildly, that is a shame. Here is a gilt-edged opportunity to engage with the marketplace and put forward the case for professional photography. From the newsletter item, it is clear that the association has chosen to let it slip in favour of offering inadequate advice to its members.

Yours sincerely,

Roger Overall

Podcast

If you’d like to hear just how agitated I was with the MPA, why not listen to episode 24 of The Circle of Confusion Podcast? It was recorded very soon after I read the MPA’s newsletter. It shows. Just sayin’.

***UPDATE***

–15:26 on Friday, 23rd March 2012–

The MPA has responded:

Dear Roger

Thank you for your email.    

As an Association we have a duty of care to make our members aware of any issues that may affect their trading practices, and it is up to the individual member as to whether they choose to avail themselves of our advice.

Our advice is always based on the best practices of the DTI and OFT.

Yours sincerely
Colin
Colin R Buck Hon FMPA
Chief Executive

That is true. But not all of your potential clients like to receive information visually. Some prefer the spoken word. If you ignore that in your marketing efforts, then you’re going to miss out.

Not only that. By podcasting about your profession, or about a niche within it, you start to take ownership of that space – to use the appropriate business geek speak. In plain English: you become an authority. You become the person people seek out, including prospective clients. That can’t be bad for business.

You can also produce a podcast that isn’t photography related, yet is designed to bring you photographic commissions. I’ll have more about that when the second episode of The Documentary Photographer is released next month.

You shouldn’t overlook the fact that podcasting sets you apart. How many photographers do you know who produce a regular podcast? There aren’t that many. Do you think that those who are podcasting are reaching more people, including prospective clients, than you are?

And finally, you should consider podcasting because it is a whole heap of fun.

Audioboo

So how do you start?

By far the simplest and cheapest way to start podcasting that I know of is AudioBoo.

You sign up. You record a three-minute broadcast. You publish it.

And you can do it all from your smartphone.

It really is that easy, and a really entertaining way to get into broadcasting yourself. On top of which, you can embed your ‘boos’ into a blog post with a pretty nifty audio player.

Did I mention that it is free?

The drawback of AudioBoo is that you only get three minutes.

You can upgrade for £60 a year and get unlimited half-hour segments, a good length for podcasting and it will help you take care of things like getting your podcast included in the iTunes catalogue. (As an aside, iTunes is a huge search engine in its own right, not just a service to deliver content, so it makes sense to have a presence there).

Soundcloud

If you’d like to test the waters, and would like more than three minutes per recording, you could try Soundcloud.

You get 120 minutes for free with this service, though once those 120 minutes are full, you have to move on to a paid programme. In essence, you have to keep moving up to the next level each time you fill the time available to you at your current level. In the long run isn’t a great deal, in my opinion.

You can also buy into an unlimited podcasting service with Soundcloud. That’s the service we currently use to host The Circle of Confusion, the weekly photography podcast that I co-host with Peter Cox and Neil McShane.

One of the great features of Soundcloud is that you get a terrific player to embed in your blog. It’s certainly the best I’ve come across. You can see it below. By way of a sample podcast, I’ve recorded this blog post.

Libsyn

If you get serious about podcasting, you’re going to end up with a dedicated podcast hosting service. Libsyn is a popular one. That’s where I host The Documentary Photographer on its $5/month package. For this, I get 50MB of space each month. That’s enough for now, but I’ll have to upgrade when the podcast goes fortnightly.

My impression of the service has been good so far. The help desk, for instance, has been quick to respond to any queries that I’ve had.

Feedburner

When you start podcasting seriously, Google’s Feedburner service is going to become your best friend. The kind of friend that you may never need, but should you need to call upon it, it will be there to help you out of a hole.

Why do I say that?

When you list your podcast in iTunes, you need to tell it where the podcast can be found so that subscribers can pull the podcast from its host location.  iTunes doesn’t host your podcast, it merely tells people where it is and allows listeners to subscribe.

Here’s the thing. What if you decide to move your podcast from one host (X) to another (Y) – and you have told iTunes that your podcast is hosted at X? After the move, iTunes is still going to direct all the subscribers you’ve built up to X rather than to your new host Y. As a result, they stop getting updates and you lose your audience.

Enter Feedburner atop a white steed. Feedburner acts as an intermediary, allowing you to direct iTunes to it. In turn, Feedburner then directs iTunes to where your podcast is hosted. Change your host and all you have to do is tell Feedburner to direct iTunes (or any other subscription service) to the new location. You get to keep your audience.

Feedburner also provides you with some statistics regarding listenership, along with help for getting proper descriptions to appear with your podcast in iTunes.

Equipment

The one single thing that is going to make or break your podcast, apart from the quality of its content, is the quality of the audio. The better the sound quality, the better your podcast is going to be. In fact, if the sound isn’t up to scratch, you’ll find many listeners will abandon you within the first few minutes.

For my own podcasts, I use the Rode Podcaster, along with a suspension arm and a shockmount. It works very well, and I’ve even used the mic on location to do interviews, though that isn’t a recommendation. It’s a bit cumbersome as it requires a laptop with a USB port to run.

For location interviews, you’re better off buying  dedicated recorder or using your smartphone. I’ve found the sound quality from an iPhone to be very useable for location interviews. The interview with Dragan Tomas in episode 1 of The Documentary Photographer was done at his studio using my iPhone.

Software

If you own a Mac, you don’t need to do anything else. It will have come preloaded with Garageband, which is a terrific piece of software that will allow you to edit and produce professional sounding podcasts.

You can record directly on to a Garageband track and then edit in interviews, intros, outros, music and so on.

You’ll also be able to even out the audio levels of your podcast, so that it sounds smooth all the way through.

If you aren’t Mac-based, I’m not the best person to advise you. I hear Audacity is a good piece of software, though, so it may be worth checking it out.

If you’re a photographer who has bought an entire Adobe Creative Suite, rather than just Photoshop, it may include Audition, a pro-standard piece of software that will do the job very nicely.

Intro and music

To give your podcast that extra bit of kick, you should consider buying some royalty free music (even better if you can get a friend to produce a bespoke piece for you) and ask someone else to record an intro for you.

For The Circle of Confusion, Peter and I paid a professional actor to record a lead in and lead out. For The Documentary Photographer podcast, I asked a friend to do so.

As for royalty free music, there are a lots of online services. I’ve used The Music Bakery for a number of projects.

Success?

My first effort at a regular podcast programme (the initial incarnation of The Circle of Confusion) ended after ten episodes. Peter and I were putting too much effort into a monthly podcast for very little return. At our peak, we got no more than 150 listeners, I think. And even though we’d managed to greatly reduce the production time from eight hours for the first episode (I’m not kidding), we were still spending too much time on it for no appreciable gain.

Fast forward to today. We’re now producing a weekly podcast and some of the shows are getting close to 750 listens. We’ve slashed production time and have grown our audience. The listener figures aren’t huge, but they are growing at an encouraging rate.

Importantly, we’ve found a new way of connecting with an audience – a way that is complementary to our other online activities. Whether this means we will attract more business remains to be seen. We don’t have any data yet. It’s too early. Similarly, The Documentary Photographer podcast is still in its infancy. It will take at least six months to determine whether it is succeeding in helping me take a strong foothold in the documentary space. I’ll keep you posted, though.

Would you like to listen?

If you’d like to listen to either The Documentary Photographer or The Circle of Confusion, just click on the corresponding icon below and you’ll be taken to the relevant podcast page. If you like what you hear, why not subscribe via iTunes?