My image “Racetrack Sunset” will be the April cover photo of Outdoor Photographer!  “The Racetrack” is a seasonally dry lake located in the northern part of Death Valley National Park and is famous for its moving rocks.  With the right combination of rain and wind, the rocks move slowly across the surface of the playa, leaving a track as they go.  I photographed this amazing rock at sunset during my first visit to the Racetrack in January 2006.  I was enthralled with the unusual arc that it had created as it was moving.  This rock was still in the same location during my recent Death Valley National Park Tour.

This is a cute tufted puffin that I photographed last June in Lituya Bay on the remote outer coast of Glacier Bay National Park in Alaska.  During my visit, I used my inflatable boat to explore the sea bird cliffs on the south side of Cenotaph Island.  There were thousands of kittiwakes but only a few breeding pairs of tufted puffins.  The puffins constantly flew back and forth from the tops of the cliffs down to the water to fish.  Through my persistence, I was eventually able to drift close enough to this puffin to take its picture with my 500mm lens.  I like the dark green water and pink reflection of the cliffs on the water behind it.

Most photographers do not appreciate how difficult it is to photograph sea otters in Southeast Alaska.  Plenty of people, myself included, have photographed the approachable sea otters in California, but the “wild” ones in Alaska see you coming from a mile away and want nothing to do with you.  This is probably a good thing, since sea otters were previously hunted for their fur almost to the point of extinction.  I have watched rafts of hundreds of sea otters in Glacier Bay, near Cape Spencer, and in Frederick Sound, but none of them have allowed me to get close enough for a decent picture, even with a long lens.  After being frustrated so often by their elusive nature, I was surprised to find this cooperative mother & baby during my brief visit to Torch Bay last June while returning from my amazing Lituya Bay visit.  It was pouring rain, but fortunately I was able to set up my 500mm lens & tripod underneath the rain canopy on the back deck of my 22′ C-Dory while my friend Dominik Modlinksi manned the helm.  The mother repeatedly dove to the bottom to catch some food.  When she returned to the surface, it was all she could do to grab a bite of her catch before her little one voraciously snatched it away from her.  (It was kinda like me trying to eat ice cream around my daughters.)  After stealing mom’s food, the baby would climb on top of her for comfort & bonding.  It was a beautiful wildlife experience in a unique setting and I am happy that I came away with a few images.

For the third time this year, one of my images graces the cover of Backpacker magazine.  The March 2010 issue’s cover shot is my image “Lago Pehoe Fiery Sunrise“.  I also give tips on photographing wide-angle landscape scenes in the article “Shoot Like a Pro” on pages 36-42, and my image “Spray Park Wildflowers 1” is featured on page 37.

In other news, I am currently updating my website to make it is easier to sign up for my photography tours, purchase my fine art prints, and license my images.  The overall design is going to stay the same, I just need to simplify access for my customers.  I also need to add several new galleries and update my older ones with the new images that I have created during the past 16 months.

This is another image that I created during my recent Death Valley National Park Photo Tour.  My 3 LA based clients unfortunately missed this photo opportunity because they drove home the day before.  My remaining client & I left the Badwater parking lot in the dark an hour before sunrise.  We wore our headlamps and hiked towards the center of the salt flats.  After 40 minutes, we stumbled upon these salt patterns and set up our cameras to capture the magnificent scene.  I like the textures on the salt flats, but I love the puffy sunrise clouds over the mountains.

I created this dramatic image on the Badwater salt flats during the 2nd morning of my recent Death Valley National Park Photo Tour.  My favorite landscape lighting scenario is the one that you see here, when sunrise light illuminates a mountain range underneath ominous clouds.  I could not have asked for anything more.  Over the next hour, the light interacted with the clouds giving me some very different images, but this early one is my favorite.  On my way to Death Valley, California photographer G Dan Mitchell was kind enough to send me a Facebook comment about looking for nice salt crust patterns around the first corner south of the Badwater parking lot.  I’m not sure if I found the exact spot that he was referring to, but I probably would not have parked in that area and walked the short distance from the road to these bizarre salt crust eruptions without his recommendation.  As the sunrise began, I was mostly walking back & forth answering my 4 clients questions, but I still managed to briefly set up my camera to capture the wondrous scene unfolding before me.

This is my favorite (and 1 of my only!) landscape images from my recent trip to Hawaii’s Big Island.  I was fortunate to photograph this amazing sunset early in my trip during one of the few vog free days.  I created it near Pu’uhonau o Honaunau (Place of Refuge) National Park, which is just south of Capt Cook.  The park is one of my favorite places near Kona to spend the day snorkeling, hiking, & exploring.  It has a long history & powerful spiritual presence.  In ancient Hawaii, kapu (laws) governed every aspect of Hawaiian society.  If  you violated a kapu, the penalty was death.  Your only option for survival was to elude your pursuers and reach the nearest puuhonua, or place of refuge, where you would be safe.  Fortunately, I was not on the run from anyone, but I did have to quickly set up my camera to capture these brilliant clouds before the sun dropped below the tropical horizon.

Yesterday was my last day in Hawaii.  Overall, the trip was exciting and adventurous, yet the photo opportunities were limited.  The volcanic haze (vog) foiled almost every sunset landscape image that I tried to shoot.  I also went boating 4 days to try and shoot some underwater wildlife.  Even though I encountered spinner dolphins, pilot whales, and oceanic white tip sharks, none of them came close enough to me in the water to capture a publishable image.  I always say that you better enjoy the boat ride when you are looking for pelagic critters.  The chances of finding them are few and far between, yet when you do, it is an incredible experience.

I lucked into this image yesterday morning while snorkeling near the Place of Refuge.  My flight home was not until the afternoon, so I decided to go for one last swim.  Almost immediately, I found some green sea turtles feeding underwater, but soon turned my attention to a large school of yellow tangs that were moving back and forth in the wave surge.  I noticed how dramatic the waves appeared in the background of my useless fish photos, so I turned my attention to capturing the drama of the large waves breaking over the coral reef.  After some trial and error, I got my timing down for when I should dive underneath the surface and how to angle my camera up to shoot as the waves boiled over the reef.  Of course right after the waves hit me, I felt like I was on the inside of a washing machine!  It was challenging, but I had a lot of fun shooting something different.

These days every photographer on the planet has a website, but very few understand how to increase their site’s visibility.  A few years ago, I was in the exact same place– wondering why I did not get more web traffic; but then I learned about Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  SEO is a set of web design practices that help you build a site that the major search engines will index.  I am not a web developer, but I have been able to implement most of these 10 tips on my own, so you can, too.

1. Commit. Longevity plays an important role in search engine rankings.  The longer your website has been online, the higher it will rank.  My website already ranks well since it has been online since 2001.  However, I recently found out that I was being penalized because my domain name was set to expire at the end of each yearly billing cycle.  Registering, and paying for, a domain name for multiple years lets the search engines know that your website is permanent.  Based on this, I just registered my domain name for 10 years.  This will help convince the search engines that my website is legitimate and lead to a higher overall page rank.

2. Optimize your title tag for each page. The meta title is the the title of each page, and it is one of the most important things that search engines use to index your site.  Now, look at the top of your browser when you view your website.  I bet that over 95% of you have your meta titles set to “Same Old Photography” on every single page of your website.  Now, get over your shame, this is one of the easiest things for you to fix.   For example, look at my above browser image.  My page is about Denali National Park Photography, Photos, Pictures.  The first few words are the ones that I want the search engines to find.  The “Cornforth Images” part comes at the end, because people searching for my name will find my website easily enough.  What I want is for people who have never heard of me and are searching for Denali National Park pictures to visit my website.  Finally, when writing meta titles, it’s important not to use more than 60 characters because the rest will get chopped in search engine results.

3. Optimize your meta description, and limit your meta keyword tags. A meta description is the sentence (in black above) that you see underneath every search result that you have ever done.  If you are like most people, you won’t click on a search result if this line looks like gobbledegook.  A meta description is another easy piece of code that you can add to each page of your website.  In 160 characters or less, this description tells people why they should click on your link.  Treat it as your sales pitch, which will attract visitors looking for what you have to offer.  While you may add meta keywords, these were made almost useless years ago, due to websites spamming early search engines with long keyword lists. It is now recommended practice to only include your top 10 keywords.

4. Use an <H1> tag on each page. Hierarchical tags (<H1>, <H2>, etc) are pieces of code that will further convince the search engines that your page is relevant to your meta title.  If you scroll down my Denali National Park Photography, Photos, Pictures page, you’ll see an <H1> tag is used on the big title above my lower-most copy.  Multiple hierarchical tags are only relevant for indexing long, written pieces, so one <H1> tag per page should be fine for most photography sites.

5. Use alt tags. Alt tags on images describe the photos to the search engines.  Search engines can not interpret pictures, they only index words.  Therefore, the more relevant text in your source code, the better your chances are of achieving high rankings.  This is my website’s biggest weakness and I need to fix it.

6. Write compelling content for your webpages and make sure that the search engines can “see” it. Are you a photographer that believes that your images speak for themselves?  Well, guess what?  Your images CAN NOT speak for themselves.  The search engines index words, but they can not judge whether your shots are awesome or crappy.  To each page of your website, add a few relevant, non-spammy, keyword-dense sentences.  Make sure the engines can read the text, which means do not embed it in Flash, or try to hide the text in a same-colored background.

7. Don’t use Flash, and get rid of that splash homepage. As far as the search engines are concerned, a Flash web site is invisible.  Search engines can not interpret Flash and graphics, fill out forms, or read JavaScript links and menus.  This does not mean that you should avoid these tools, but you will need to provide alternatives for navigating your site.  If a page is hidden behind a sequence of drop-down menus, the search engine crawlers will never find it.  Make sure that your site has HTML links on every page’s main navigation.  In addition, get rid of your pointless splash page!  The most important page of your website is the one the search engine first encounters.  If that page says, “Click to Enter”, then that is all you are offering the world.

8. Blog & participate in social media. Make sure that you have a blog, that you regularly update it, and that you engage your readers by allowing them to make comments.  Blog once or more a week to build up a loyal following of readers.  A blog should draw people to your site and help attract a broader audience to your work.  This article alone will generate a lot of search engine traffic for me from people looking for “top 10 photography tips” based on the way I used SEO.  Every time that you can reference your main website, add a link to it from your blog.  How about using Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and other new social networking tools?  That is a topic for another blog post, one that I am going to work on soon.

9. Reinforce your website’s reputation with inbound links. With quality content you will eventually be able to generate inbound links from other websites and blogs.  If your site is full of one-of-a-kind photos and information, other sites will naturally link to it without even asking.  However, it takes time, years even,  to build up these links, so don’t expect it to happen overnight.  Steer clear of link farms and other spammy schemes for getting links to your site.

10. Include a robots.txt file & install a sitemap.xml. The easiest SEO method that you can employ is to include a robots.txt file at the root directory of your website. This one command will invite any spider that visits your website to crawl all of your pages.  You can also install a sitemap, which the search engines can use to index your site.  Sitemaps include information such as the date each web-page was last modified, as well as the priority number you give each page of your site.  Such a map will help the search engines properly find and link to all of your content.

I look forward to the discussion that will follow this article.  I hope that it helps a lot of photographers, and also anyone else looking for SEO advice.

I am excited to announce that my image “Torres Dramatic Sunrise” will be a Highly Honored Landscape in the 2009 Nature’s Best Windland Smith Rice International Photography Awards!  I created this image 2 years ago while backpacking in Torres Del Paine National Park in Chile.  Most trekkers who have visited this location have done so while multi-day trekking and usually only spend 1 night before moving on.  However, my only goal during my visit was to photograph the Torres in epic light, so I spent 5 days/4 nights camping in the same location so that I could photograph the spires each day.  My last morning was the most dramatic.  You can read more about it in my previous post on the Singh-Ray filters blog.