Sisson Product Photography

Hey I just realised that clicking these images opens them bigger - try it you'll like it!


The sisson - beautiful pictures of New Zealand - website is finally nearing completion* - thank God!!!

Countless hours have been spent grovelling to the over-lords at google - optimising pages, renaming images and re-working the descriptions for each of our 310 products into uniquely tempting metadata morsels for the 'spiders' and 'bots' to feast upon.

If any of the preceding sentence:

a) sounds remotely interesting to you.
b) made any sense.

I suggest that you sign up on this website for uber-dweebs that I found myself languishing on yesterday. Just don't expect to see The Autocrat trolling the forums with biting witticisms about metatag refresh rates, referring to google and yahoo as simply G & Y, or making suggestions on Alt- Tag optimisations - for the first time in weeks I found a site that I didn't subscribe to.

As usual I digress.

The final barrier to completion has had nothing to do with this techno-babble, it has had everything to do with our photography, more specifically, photos of our finished products deployed in the home.

We genuinely thought that this would be easy - given that we used to earn our living as commercial photographers. We also think that our products actually look pretty snappy.

Unfortunately after three or four attempts at shooting our fine-art prints, photo blocks and photo magnets at home we had exactly zero shots that successfully represented our work.

Both of us were suffering from a crisis of confidence. So we sat down together to analyze the shots. It rapidly dawned on us that our toddler-infested suburban residence was holding us back.

Although it is a nice house, not a single room will ever grace the front cover of architectural digest - or, for that matter, the back pages of remotely interesting homes weekly.

So today we loaded up the car and headed around to Mark & Sharon's house (yes the same Mark that seems to appear in 50% of these posts) to try out our luck there.

I am happy to report that three hours in their beautiful home yielded all the shots we needed and partially re-inflated our sagging egos**!

Now that's more like it! - one of Sarah's shots displayed in a snazzy environment

There are many more shots on the home page slideshow over at sisson fresh New Zealand photography - check them out :)

Cheers! TA


* to our dismay, we have learned that a good website is an 'ever-changing, dynamic organism' that is, by definition, never completed. For more information spend a week or two on the forums at webmasterworld.com :)

** despite outward appearances photographers have notoriously fragile egos - hence the abnormally high incidence of leather jacket wearing press photographers (its a metaphorical thick skin thing).

I forgot to mention......

That our recommended New Zealand camera stores listing is now up on our site.

Anyone needing some new gear should check it out.

TA

My Next Nikon......

doesn't exist.....

I have been waiting for nikon to build my next camera for about two and a half years now. They released the D3 about 18 months ago and followed it up with the more compact but equally capable D700. These are both superb 'full-frame' bodies, and they set new benchmarks in terms of noise performance , making ISO 3200 (and even 6400) a viable option in low light conditions. However, at 12MP they didn't address my primary requirement for an upgrade - more (and better) pixels than my venerable D2X.

If we were still shooting commercial work every week I would have been all over the D700, as its' performance for my University work and Sarah's available-light fashion photography would have made it outstanding value for money at $5400 (when released).


The D3/D700's High ISO performance makes it perfect for this type work.

For the majority of our commercial work 12 MP is the perfect file size - you don't require a Kray Supercomputer to keep the post production pipeline efficient and very few clients actually print larger than A4. Having said that we have seen our D2X studio shots printed beautifully as billboards.

12MP is more than enough resolution for most clients - if only they knew that!

However, the sisson fresh new zealand imagery range is a different beast altogether. For the past two years we have been shooting primarily landscape and nature and despite NZ being located on the edge of a tectonic plate it seems that our mountains don't move very much.

Hence, 90% of our work is done off a tripod at ISO 100 and we often find ourselves trying to slow exposures down, rather than speed them up via a higher ISO setting. Add to this the aggressive anti-aliasing filters on the D3 sensor and there is not a marked quality discrepancy between the D2X and the D3/D700 at base ISO settings.

Why the need for more pixels? Call it future proofing. As our business is developing we are discovering more demand for bigger and bigger prints. As each landscape shot is unique and unrepeatable, it makes sense to be capturing at the current 'state of the art' for your chosen format to allow for future use - who knows, Tourism NZ may yet come knocking for a billboard campaign ;-)

we've had enough of shooting beautiful models - maybe next time it'll be a mountain range...

So, for about a year I had been glued to the excellent nikonrumors.com seeking clues as to what Nikon's response to canon's DSLR offerings would be. Rumours flared up and died with each trade fair or pending media event. During this time Nikon released wierdy beardy 'multimedia headsets' for Japan only, more crappy software (please leave that to adobe), spent vast amounts on advertising 'Something Big' which turned out to be a washed up blues band playing at a wedding photographers convention (shudder), and to complete this cocktail of woe, they made the highest resolution camera in their range a coolpix (not cool nikon, not cool at all).

And then in late 2008 my spirits were lifted by three huge announcements. Firstly, Axl Rose finally set a release date for the, 14 years in the making, GN'R album Chinese Democracy (yes I am a proud Nelson bogan), Canon announced the 21MP 5dMKii with a $4,950 list price and (finally) Nikon announced the D3X*.

The D3X specs were impressive - 24 million beautifully executed pixels and excellent noise performance in a bomb-proof body (it has since been deemed the finest DSLR in the market by many photographers that I respect) - perfect! .....

Except for one minor detail. The price - an amex blistering $17,200 (I believe it was over $21,000 for about 3 days, until 'market considerations' forced a re-think).

Yep, $17k for a camera that will have a resale of $1,500 in 3 years time. $17K for a camera equivalent to Canon's 21MP 5dMKii at $4,950 and Sony's 25MP A900 at $7,500. Most importantly, $17K for a camera body during the most grueling economic climate I can remember. That's just not happening round here....

Axl Rose: the only thing crazier than the D3X list price?
So, we had a business decision to make about six weeks ago. Since the kids have been born, it has been only one of us shooting at any given time, so one main kit has been workable. With both of us now shooting together we need two complete rigs (extensive field testing has shown gear sharing to be detrimental to the health of our relationship).

So we bought a 5Dii. Yep, we snagged a pre-price rise body, a mint 2nd hand 17-40 f4, 24-105 f4, and a 70-200 f4 all for well under $10K from P&V. I can't be bothered doing the sums, but, considering that we would have been purchasing a similar suite of lenses for our notional D3X we must be looking at a first division powerball type saving on this deal.

Sure, I have some problems with the 5d and these will be detailed in my next post, but these are not $12,000 issues - maybe $783.96 worth at best - but it cannot be bettered for return on investment.

So the bottom line? I love my Nikon gear, I prefer using it to the Canon system, but we run a business. Nikon have about 6 months left during which to release a competitively priced, compact, high resolution body. Failing this, there will some well worn nikon gear appearing in the cabinets at P&V**. So come on Nikon give me my D700x or preferably a D700T (you know what the T stands for :-)

TA

* I have never even touched a D3X - simply out of fear that somehow I will concoct a rationale for purchasing one.
** I expect emergency board meetings are being scheduled at nikon HQ as you read this :)

How Google May Save The Species

I now know what it means to be a googly-eyed monster. I have been practically living inside google for the past two days in an attempt to improve our search performance at sisson.co.nz

The new site has been live now for about a month and we have seen some stratospheric improvements in some of our keyword/phrase results. For instance we are now ranked #6 globally for this exact phrase: 'We are excited to finally have our online store up and running'. Just don't type shop instead of store - or its page 17 for that one.

Likewise, entering; 'Todd and Sarah Sisson photographers queenstown NZ' finds us on pole position - that's right baby! #1 on the whole world wide web!

Unfortunately, we have found that not a single new customer has had the inclination or foresight to enter these rather obvious query strings into google. No, instead they seem hellbent on searching for things like 'landscape photos NZ' or 'photography of New Zealand' according to google's excellent keyword analysis tool.

Our old site had us firmly seated on page 9 (no, not 9th place - page 9) for those types of search phrases. Yesterday I gave up at page 22 of 'landscape photos NZ' - apparently we have been doing something wrong.

So I spent last night testing searches out against our 'metadata' and found the problem - I won't divulge the details, but the unfortunate result was a day spent in excel inventing key-wordy type stuff for each product (not keywords mind you, as google's all persnickity about them thanks to overabuse by Croatian Pornographers).

I have attached this screenshot for you though, as it reminded me of my first job out of University - ya reading this Angus???


So now to divulge my unified theory of google goodness - by which the world may be saved by a search engine....

OK, here we go, quickly:

I noticed quite a few Germans coming to the site. This is to be expected for, despite their well publisised attempts at global domination, they do seem to have a soft spot for ferns, penguins and seals - hence they like NZ.

Right let's do a google adword tailored to Germans I figured

I researched some common keywords for NZ and had a good laugh - seems most of Europe thinks we live in NZ Zealand or Zeland or SouthNZ and any combination thereof......

OK back to the ad - staying with google here, lets bang it out in google translate, no worries.

::Turning point::

The Germans have at least 16 different ways of writing 'landscape photo', about 5 distinct words for 'Penguin', 'photo' alone must have 25 options and the moment you type in a sentence it looks like the minutes of the Geneva convention.

So how does this save the species? Simple really, I gained healthy of understanding and respect for those people on the other side of the planet who are curious enough about nu Zeland to click on my ad for 'New Zealand landscape bandsaw penguins'.

Think about it. Tonight thanks to a few grams of code housed on a server farm the size of Westport we are 1/4 billionth more compassionate as a species - what can google teach the other 6 readers of this blog eh? - anyone?? Angus???

Auf Wiedersehen - TA

NZ Photography Hotspots - Mt Cook/Lake Pukaki

My blog has segued quite dramatically towards becoming a parenting and relationships column recently. The web has enough of that 'content' already, so I thought I had better get some photography postings up before I find myself sharing my to-die-for pecan and maple muffin recipe with you!

So it is with great pleasure that I announce the release of part 1 of our 2 part Mt Cook photo-guide here.

We have also posted several shots from our recent trip on flickr ,so check them out. Everyone is going gaga over Sarah's shots and I am now feeling inadequate vulnerable and under-appreciated - think I'll go bake a tray of my incredible mocha banana brownies OMG they are sooo goooood!!!! I'll get the recipe up tomorrow ;-)

If you have found us on blogger, remember to drop by our website to view our New Zealand Photography :)