So a while ago I heard this interview with a guy that had started a cool Google Earth project on North Korea. With the help of North Korean ex-pats and people scattered around the world he started tagging locations of interest all around North Korea. He has managed to tag airports, dams, military bases, missile launching sites, ground defense locations and even Kim Jong Li’s house.

This interview got the rusty wheels in my head turning, I started thinking about all those posts in forums all over the internet from photographers traveling to unvisited cities and locations looking for good locations to shoot. I have yet to travel for a wedding yet, but when I do I’m not looking forward to scouting out locations in a city I know nothing about. I would really hate to be a photographer scouting in a country who’s language he doesn’t speak!

Now, wouldn’t it be cool if a bunch of photographers got together to collaborate on a Google map just like the one for North Korea, but instead of military bases and dictator’s homes, you would have cool locations for a portrait or engagement session. What a great way to help out other photographers from all around! Then there is the local aspect, this would be a great way to spare that cool barn you found or that little bridge with the rusted support beams.

So I’m now looking for photographers from all over to help out create this map, if you are interested just drop me an email and I will shoot you off an invite to the Google map. This wouldn’t even take up a whole lot of your time. You would just pull up the map in your browser, click edit, drop a pin and then enter a small description or a photo of the location if you want… It’s that easy.

I’m expecting this to have a slow start, but once I get the word out and hopefully more people join, we’ll have one killer resource for location scouting world wide!

Update – Been a good response so far, thanks all who have contacted me asking to help out! Anyways, I do have to mention that you need a Google account to collaborate on a Google Map. So when you contact me with your email I will need the email address you use to sign into your Google account.

J.C. Hutchins’s “Personal Effects: Dark Art” – SuperVlurb from Stephen Eley on Vimeo.

Ok, so you may be asking yourself “Why the hell is this guy posting a video trailer for a horror novel on a photography blog?”. That’s easy, it’s a perfect example of a community coming together to help out one of their own.

Lately I have been looking at my efforts in wedding photography and have noticed that I really need to do things differently. I have always taken my photography very seriously, but when it came to the business side I figured that all I had to do was follow the road map left by others that had made it. The biggest problem with this idea is that the map left behind by those successful photographers may have worked for them, but it isn’t going to work for me. I’m nothing like them, I have different strengths, a different personality, different work. I have fought to make my own way with my photography, to develop my own style, so why would I not do the same in the building of my business.

In my research of marketing, branding (more on my adventures in branding in a later post) and general business, I have been looking at other artistic industries. One field I have been very interested in lately, one that is actually fairly new, is serialized audio books.

Maybe I should give a little back story here. A few years ago I found this great place, Podiobook.com a site that offers free serialized audio books. What is a serialized audio book? Well quite simply, it’s audio book read most commonly by the author and released for free serially once a week/bi-weekly/monthly over the net.

As I was listening to all these great authors, I started to notice something kind of surprising, the authors of these audio books have created a very tight and supportive community. The different authors appear as voice characters on each others audio books and they have even teamed up to write, produce and perform audio books. In general they were promoting and helping each other out, a lot! If you listened to say James Melzer, there is a very good chance you had heard of or listened to the works of Mark Jeffrey, Mur Lafferty, Philippa Ballantine, Seth Harwood, Matthew Wayne Selznick, Mark Yoshimoto Nemcoff or Phil Rossi. The community they have build together, all of them working together towards the same goal and supporting each other along the way has produced some amazing results

So what exactly have they done? Well look at Scott Sigler, late last year his book Contagious made it onto the New York Times hardcover bestsellers list. J.C.Hutchinson, the author who’s book is featured in that video at the beginning has had his last series, 7th Son, options by Hollywood and with everyone rallying behind his new book Personal Effect: Dark Art, I expect it to have a very good showing on Amazon. Not back for a couple of guys giving away their work for free eh?

I have talked about community before, I have talked about Twitter, Photography Forms, Facebook and the such, but what these guys and gals have done is truly amazing. It has made me realize that although I have participated in the photographic community to some extent, I need to step up my efforts to play a larger roll in the photographic community, not just locally, but internationally. Thank God for the internet!

Talking about helping out and promoting fellow artists, I wouldn’t want to leave you without mentioning James Melzer’s new audio book, The Invasion coming June 17th. The Invasion is the second book in The Zombie Chronicles. I listened to the first installment, The Escape and it was amazing! Zombies, aliens, clones, how could you go wrong?

Yesterday I had the pleasure to participate in the first (to my knowledge) organized photo walk here in London Ontario. If you are not sure what a photo walk is, it’s actually fairly simple, it’s basically just a bunch of people going out for a walk to take pictures and get a chance to talk and exchange ideas.

This first photo walk was organized by Kevin Van Lierop from the blog From my Bottom Step. The really cool thing about this whole thing is that it was pretty much all done over Twitter showing yet another valuable use for the social networking tool.

Although meeting up with a bunch of strangers can be a little uncomfortable, I got to meet some cool local amateurs and help strengthen the local photographic scene. I had a great time and hope there will be more photo walks in the near future.

Here are my results from this outing.

The one thing wedding photographers love is stalkers fans. These days it’s very easy for people to follow your every move and I am more then happy to give my fans the tools to follow everything I am doing. Up top in the links bar you will see a link category full of links to ways you can see what I’m up to (if you are so inclined that is).

Contact me:

A simple contact sheet for all your questions, complaints or messages about how much you love/hate my work. If you don’t like email and prefer taking the more direct route, my phone number is on there as well.

Twitter:

If you have yet to hear about Twitter, it is a mini blogging service that limits you to 140 characters to say what you are doing. Once you start following people you will get short updates about what they are up to at the time of their message. I use Twitter when I want to say something, but it’s not involved enough to merit a blog post. Give it a try, it’s free, it’s addictive and you can get tons of information… But, don’t forget to follow me!

Flickr:

Not every picture I take will make it into a post here on the blog or into my portfolio. If you are interested in seeing everything I make available for the internet my Flickr stream is the place to go.

FaceBook:

I LOVE friends on FaceBook! I clearly don’t have enough. Another good reason for befriending me on FaceBook is everything I do on Twitter, here on the blog and what I upload to Flickr shows up in my FaceBook feed. So if you really don’t feel like checking out Twitter or heading over to Flickr, you can just friend me up on FaceBook and let all that info come to you.

Friendfeed:

Ok, so you don’t have a FaceBook account and you are not interested in getting a FaceBook account, but you still want to keep up on everything? Well then head on over to Friendfeed. Again, just like FaceBook, everything I do on Twitter, the blog, FaceBook and Flickr is added to my feed.

So with so many ways to follow me one must ask “Why aren’t you?”.