March 28, 2006

Picture Blogging for Dancers and Choreographers

Blogs can be a good marketing tool for dancers and choreographers. But it can be time consuming to write a few posts per week to ensure that readers keep coming back to your blog.

So instead of focusing on a text-based blog, you might want to consider creating a blog that primarily consists of pictures and brief passages describing your pictures. This type of visual blogging is ideally suited for the world of dance and once you get the hang of it, you can take pictures and place them on your blog fairly quickly.

The trick is for you to be able to take good pictures of your rehearsals and performances as well as casual shots of dancers hanging out. The problem is that it may not always be possible, from a legal or contractual standpoint, to take pictures of dancers - this is something that you will have to look into.

For example, I haven't specifically asked her, but on Kristin Sloan's picture blog, "The Winger," she takes very, very few pictures of dancers - Kristin is with the NYC Ballet. My guess is that she is not permitted to take pictures of rehearsals or performances and so takes pictures of other things.

So hopefully, you're in a position where you don't have similar constraints. I think a dance-focused picture blog would be a lot of fun and very captivating.

If you want to explore creating a picture blog, here's what you need:

1) A digital camera or a good quality camera built-in to your cell phone.

2) A blog.

3) A way to add pictures to your blog. There are two possible ways to add pictures: you can transfer a picture to your computer, edit it and then upload it to your blog, or you can take a picture with your mobile phone and email it to your blog.

I'll write more about the specifics of how this process works, but for starters, you can read my post from last week on how to create a blog with TypePad or Blogger. Both of these weblog software programs let you add your pictures. In addition, some bloggers add their pictures to flickr, and then pull the pictures from Flickr into their blog.

You can even set-up Flickr so that you email pictures from your phone to Flickr and then Flickr sends the pictures automatically to your blog. A similar service is called SplashBlog, which also automates the process of sending pictures from your cell phone to your blog.

If you have specific questions about creating a photoblog for dance, please let me know.

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