Did the title of this post catch your attention? Well the title could very well have been: “PUT YOUR BEST PHOTOS AND VIDEO EVERYWHERE! BECAUSE YOU NEVER KNOW WHO MIGHT SEE IT AND CALL YOU AND WANT TO BUY IT” Maybe a little wordy, but the point is that as photographers, we should be sharing our stuff, first and foremost just to share our passion with the world, but also it doesn’t hurt if every now and then someone wants to buy something of yours!

In this case, I received a call a few weeks ago from a production company in Los Angeles. They had found my short video clip of monster waves hitting the icy shore of Tettegouche State Park on Lake Superior during a March gale last year. The editors liked it and included it in the “rough cut” for their client—DiscoverAmerica, an organization promoting tourism TO the U.S. in Europe, Asia and around the World. Well, the 1-second clip survived the cuts and even made it into two TV commercials (shown below).

When I opened the link to the finished product yesterday, I was thrilled with the videos…I had no idea that the whole campaign was built around a music video and original song by ROSEANNE CASH, country-pop-folk-blues-rock star and eldest daughter of Johnny Cash. Fun surprise! …and a great video. It is a 12.3 million dollar project and the “first ever global ad campaign for the United States.” The TV commercials will run in the United Kingdom, Japan, Canada, Brazil, South Korea and other countries. And the website is very fun too…see it here.


Look for my clip at 1:10 in full length video

Look for my clip at 0:06 in the “See it” short video


No clip of mine in this short, but the outdoor adventure sport clips are fantastic!

Here is the full clip shot at Tettegouche State Park on Lake Superior on March 23, 2011.

So I guess the point is, that sometimes you get lucky! And to get lucky, people have to be able to find and see your stuff…and today that means the internet. To help your odds of being “discovered,” keyword your photos and give your titles/file names common sense searchable names “Waves on Lake Superior” for example (This is how they found my video on vimeo). Also use photo/video sites like photoshelter, smugmug, flickr, google plus, vimeo and youtube to place your galleries and videos. And blogs consistently rank high in searches because they are updated frequently (or should be!).

My video shot with the Canon 7D and Canon 70-200 f4 lens on tripod.