Before the game

I shoot aperture priority, not shutter priority because I want to achieve f/8,0 where I think my lens gives me best quality. Secondly, with my camera, you can set a minimum shutter speed in the ISO section. I set 1/500 as this freezes most elements of the player but still shows a little movement. If I were a better photographer I’d go down to 1/250. Personally, I’d end up with too much camera shake.

Next, I sit on the 22 meter line for the first half and behind the goal for the second half. Whenever I am shooting pictures, I make sure I have the boys running towards me. I will select the left or right side of the field depending on the direction of the sun. I want maximum light on the boys faces. I have a friend who likes to shoot with the sun behind the palyers, to get that halo effect. For me, I want lots of light, lots of detail and the fastest shutter speed possible!

Finally, I will sit on the ground; rugby is a game played close to the earth and I want to be in line with or below the boys eyes. Eyeline is key. If you stand up, you loose the intimacy that this sport requires.

I shoot everything horizontally in the camera because I have more room to frame the boys and finally I’m going to crop the shots heavily in the computer so I shoot a little wide.

At the game

During the game you have to be on your toes. You need to predict the play as far as possible. When the opposition has the ball our boys will tackle them. That tackle will become quite airborne if the opposition gets a good run and heads out to the wing. Conversely, when our boys get the ball, they will gnerally move it to their right and then run up the field. The more I observe the way our boys play, the better I can predict where the next shot will be.

Two key shots are when our boys tackle the opposition or when they make a run with the ball. A change in direction means a change or lean of the body and that makes a good photograph.

After the game

When I get them home, I open every image in to Photoshop. I do it five images at a time and then crop closely making the final image 800 pixels wide by 600 pixels high. That is big enough for a screen. I rarely color correct but I do lighten higlights and shadows and then I ‘smart sharpen’ by 70% radius 0.7. I save for web as a JPEG high which gives me a 150kb image.

I then upload the images to a template that I use called phpslideshow (author) and that’s it.

It sounds like a lot of steps if you aren’t used to it, but as the process is pretty much the same each week it becomes quite straight forward.

How many pictures do I shoot? About twice as many as I show.

What camera do I have? A Nikon D90 with a Nikon AF 85-400mm zoom and a Manfrotto monopod. You could easily get away with a lens that goes to 200mm so long as you crop the images on your PC afterwards. You don’t need a camera with a massive sensor, but the more pixels you have to start with, the more you can crop the photo. My camera does have a motor drive, but I rarely shoot more than two images in a sequence.

I think the results come from the position on the field (low and front on to the players) not the equipment. And it comes from practice; the more I shoot pictures of our boys, the better the pictures.

Well, here are the set that I have settled on:

<title>Cowan Creek Consulting</title>
<meta name="google-site-verification" content="q2kwN0dGn9C8IXnar7
h8jm-IjtqFQ7Mzgx8qW2eRUNw" />
<meta content="Cowan, Creek, Consulting, web, design, development,
designers, deveopers, PHP, applications, Sydney, Homebush, NSW,
St Ives" name="keywords" />
<meta content="Web based business specialists. Business Strategy -
Branding & Design - Web Solutions - Email Marketing" name="description" />
<meta content="text/html; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="Content-Type" />
<meta content="no-cache" http-equiv="Cache-Control" />
<meta content="Cowan Creek Consulting" name="owner" />
<meta content="Cowan Creek Consulting Pty Ltd Tel: +61 2 8746 0067"
name="author" />
<meta content="0" http-equiv="expires" />
<meta content="English" http-equiv="Content-Language" />
<meta content="Document" http-equiv="vw96.object type" />
<meta content="General" name="rating" />
<meta content="index,follow" name="ROBOTS" />
<meta content="7 days" name="REVISIT-AFTER" />

Let’s explain them:
<title> That’s the name of the page. It needs to be a thoughtful logical and relevant title. For my business website, it’s the name of my company: Cowan Creek Consulting.

<meta name=”google-site-verification” – This is a tag that says this website is registered within the Google Webmasters program. If you haven’t found Google webmasters yet, go and read about it. It will help you get you web page organised for site crawlers.

<meta name=”keywords” content=”(list of keywords)”/> this used to be a vital tag. It provided relevant keywords in to Google to help with its searches. These days it is not so relevant because Google can rapidly and easily crawl an entire page of content.

<meta name=”description” content=”(sentence about your website)”/> when you search for Cowan Creek Consulting in Google, this is the sentence that is returned below the page title link. So the combination of title tag and description tag forms your little advert on Google.

<meta content=”text/html; charset=utf-8″ http-equiv=”Content-Type” /> This is the character set that has been used to code the page. I almost always specify UTF-8 as it is a broad superset of standard web charatcers and all modern browsers can read UTF-8.

<meta content=”no-cache” http-equiv=”Cache-Control” /> This tells a web page not to retain any variables or content after leaving the page.

<meta content=”Cowan Creek Consulting” name=”owner” /> This is pretty obvious, it shows who owns the page.

<meta content=”Cowan Creek Consulting Pty Ltd Tel: +61 2 8746 0067″ name=”author” /> Again, pretty obvious, it shows who is the author of the page. Although this doesn’t get used in Google searches, it is a neat way for us to be able to “sign our work”.

<meta content=”0″ http-equiv=”expires” /> This shows when the page expires.

<meta content=”English” http-equiv=”Content-Language” /> This is the language of the page. I generally produce pages in English, although I have been asked to produce pages in Portugese and Chinese. I will then code in English but the content on the page will be in a specific language.

<meta content=”General” name=”rating” /> Again, another obvious tag. It tells the crawler the rating of the page. As mine is a business website with general content, it is classified “General”.

<meta content=”index,follow” name=”ROBOTS” /> Here we tell web crawlers if they are allowed to index the page and follow the links on the page. We want Google all over our website, so we set them, to idex, follow, but if the page was a private members only page or other page of resticted content, we would set the pointers to no-index and no-follow.

<meta content=”7 days” name=”REVISIT-AFTER” />And when do we recommend a web crawler should come back and take another look at our web page. Be careful you don’t set the revisit number too low, bringing a crawler back to look at content that has not been changed. Remember, crawlers like fresh, new, original and interesting content.

if(ereg("^[-A-Za-z0-9_]+[-A-Za-z0-9_.]*[@]{1}[-A-Za-z0-9_]
+[-A-Za-z0-9_.]*[.]{1}[A-Za-z]{2,5}$", $mail)) {
      return true;
    } else {
      return false;

But, with PHP 5.3 the ereg function has been deprecated. So how do you test for a valid email? It’s really simple! From PHP 5.2 there has been a function filter_var/Filter_Valid_Email:

function CheckEmail( $email ){
    return filter_var( $email, FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL );

This little snippet of code will validate the variable ($email) and return if it is, or is not a valid email.

1. First things first. If you are writing a blog about your favourite pet, then an image of your pet is probably appropriate. If you are writing about cars, the a picture of should probably be about, well, cars! That is, select an image that is relevant to your article otherwise you will confuse the  reader. The image is there to reinforce, summarise or expand on the copy.
   

   Subject matter too small in the frame

2. Concentrate on the subject matter. Most people shoot a picture and have far too much background in the image. That might work well on a big print to go on the wall, but we talking about publishing images for a website here. And websites are published on things that are low resolution (computer monitors) and that means you have to crop out all the extraneous information.
   

   Subject cropped and positioned

3. Clean the image up. If you have access to an image editing or manipulation program such as Adobe Photoshop, then take a moment to sharpen the image (I use smart sharpen and set the Amount to 80-90% and the radius to 0.6 for an image of 300 pixels wide). I probably over sharpen my images, but that is what looks good on a website. I also use the Image > Adjust > Shadow/Highlight function and clean up the blacks. Most people have their monitors set with the contract far to high and that will make an image with lots of black detail look blocked-up. So I lighten the shadows a little which pumps in a bit more detail.
   

   Image sharpened and shadows cleaned-up.

There are a lot more sophisticated things you can do to an image, but those are the basics. Then, if your website, blog or whatever will allow, make sure you leave a little space around the image, particularly if you have the image embedded in the body copy. Don’t let your text run up hard against the edge of the image. On an image of this size, white space of roughly 10 pixels is often sufficient.

And that’s about it for starters. I will talk in more detail about imaging, colour and colour space…

The significant change to the web has come with Google. It is not so much Google as what Google allows us to do. It allows us to seek answers to our own questions and that means websites have to talk about how they can help you; they have become outward looking containers of answers.

I will be adding a heap of content over the coming period and expand the ideas section to encompass a great deal of thoughts, tips and suggestions that I have.

In the meantime, please take a look around and let me know what you think.

Regards,

Mike Coles

Optimise for humans, not search engines.

Google et al. are trying to deliver search results that best represent the terms being used in the search. If I type the phrase “How to Shoot Rugby Photos” in to the Google search box, I’d reasonably expect to see results coming back about the best way to take pictures of Rugby Union matches. I wouldn’t expect to see results about the new Toyota Corolla or Red Shoes. So how does Google match between what I have asked for and what it delivers to me?

There are two answers;

1. I am probably not the only person in the world asking for “How to Shoot Rugby Photos” or some other mixture of those words “Tips on Rugby Photos”, “Rugby Union Photography”, etc. And Google makes an association between the phrase (or phrases) and the results that the visitor goes to. That is, a web visitor types in the word “How to Shoot Rugby Photos” and clicks on the link “How to Shoot Rugby Photos” and Google makes an association between the phrase and the URL. This is powerful stuff. It is also the stuff of the masses, but that’s an article for another day.
2. Alternatively, Google has also taken a look around the internet to see what websites are available. Google and other search engine providers have programs called web crawlers or spiders, that march across the internet jumping from page to page noting elements about a page and adding those notes in to its index. This is the area that we can influence. We can optimise our website so that it fits naturally in to search queries that visitors might perform. This is the focus of this article.

What do Web Crawlers Do?

Web crawlers by there name, crawl the web. They do this task by jumping from page to page by following the hyper-links on the page. So, if a crawler starts at your home page and you have a menu item “About Us” that leads to a new page called “about.html” Google follows the link from your home to “about.html” and reads the content.

What do Web Crawlers Read?

Web Crawlers read a number of different things in an order of priority. That priority order changes over time, but it is currently thought to be;

1. The page title. That is, within the <head></head> tags there is a <title></title> tag. Google is looking for a pithy, unique title tag. If my page is called “Our Shop”, it is pithy, but not very unique. “Jeff’s Light Shop” is a better title, because it is more likely to be unique and it is still very short. “Lighting Gurus – Online discount lights” is a lot better. It positions the business as an expert in the field, mentions the key subject in two ways and is a title that reflects the business.
2. Description Tag. The description tag is your little advert on the internet. When Google displays your website in a list of other websites, it display the title tag as the bold bit and the description tag as the next two lines. There are a number of tags that you can use at the top of a page to identify it on the internet. For many years the “Keywords” meta tag was thought to be the pivotal tag. It probably was as it contained the key words on the page. These days spiders can crawl the entire page and therefore the Keywords meta tag is much less important.
3. <H1> tags at the top of the page. That the title to the bit us humans read. Google wants to see a well thought title.
4. <p> Tags. That should be the the opening couple of paragraphs.

So, let’s think of this from a layout point of view; Google is looking for the Title of the page to be pithy and unique. That same idea should be briefly explained in the description tag and then reflected in the the title of the visible page and the opening paragraphs. Make sence, doesn’t it?

Then, Google will display your results along with anyone else’s that match the same search query. That means, the more unique your page is, the more likely it is to be found on Google, but there will be fewer people looking for it. Have a try, search for Cowan Creek Rugby. You will find an article written inside this blog (Cowan Creek) about Rugby Photography. Simply put the word rugby in to Google and you could spend the rest of the day trawling through pages until you found by blog. The first search is very specific and the answer is very specific, but very few people will ever do it. And the second query is very general and therefore you get loads of answers.

I think the art of being found on the internet is focus: know who you are talking to and what you should be talking to them about and talk to them very specifically. You might be found by a few others along the way, which is nice, but focus on your audience and give them what they want.