Start a Photo Blog

Maybe you're tired of staring at text, text and more text on your blog all day. Then before typing yet another word you should consider starting up a photo blog. With the right blogging platform it's the easiest thing in the world, and a great way to share your photography with a larger audience. All you'll need to get started is a digital camera and the software to transfer images from the camera to your computer - which should come with just about any new digital model you buy these days. My camera's an old Canon PowerShot S200 Digital Elph and I use the Canon's ZoomBrowser software that came with it to import and edit the photos on my laptop. ZoomBrowser's fine for my purposes, but if you've got a high-end imaging suite like PhotoShop installed, you have even more options in terms of editing and enhancing your images.

One the key steps in preparing photos for a blog is to reduce their file size a little bit. Images coming straight from a digital camera can take up quite a lot of memory, many megabytes worth, which can make them slow to load in a web browser. There's no point in having a photo blog if it takes 10 minutes to open and no one waits around past the first two. By reducing the resolution of your photos you'll make the files a lot lighter and therefore faster to upload and view.

If your original photo files are in a memory-hogging format like TIFF, Bitmap, or PhotoShop's PSD, you'll also want to convert them to a web standard format like JPEG, which will reduce their file size even further. However, whatever you do, don't discard your original image! Make sure to "Save As" rather than save over the original photo, since you'll need that high-resolution version if you ever want to order photo prints or maybe even sell high-res images from your blog.

Once you've got a set of images you'd like to feature on a blog, any blogging platform worth its code will enable you to upload them with a few quick clicks. In Blogger, which I use, there's a little image icon in the toolbar of my blog edit page. When I click it, I get a form that looks like this:

In fact I just used this form to upload the image of this form. Mind boggling! By selecting the photo file you'd like to upload, the size you'd like it displayed in, and its orientation on the page, you can specify exactly how you'd like each photo presented. With Blogger, it's important to know that the photo will appear at the top of your blog post after you upload it. You can then cut and paste the image code to whereever you'd like it within your post.

Once you've got photos uploaded to your blog post, you can then add your own titles and comments using the standard text interface. You can also invite your blog readers to add their comments, or submit their own photos for display in your blog. This is where I get most of the photos for my own photo blog, The Yard Art Project. You could even run a photo contest to encourage submissions and generate buzz about your blog.

If you don't feel like setting up a blog but would still like to share your photos online, there's no shortage of free services that will let you do so. Yahoo's Flickr and Google's Picasa are two of the better-known ones. Both allow blog-like captions and comments from you and your friends that make photo sharing so fun.

So if you've been wondering how to share your photos online, that's just about all there is to it. Now you have no excuse for letting all those great photos languish unviewed in your camera!

Key terms: photo blog, photoblog, photo blogging, photo bloging, photo sharing, photo shareing, digital photography, dijital photos