Love is in the air or is it cabin fever?

It’s that time of year where love is in the air or maybe it’s the cabin fever or some form of both.

For us at Vagabond Photography it’s where we come out of our winter hibernation and start gearing up for spring/summer weddings, corporate events, senior portraits and so much more. Also, we will be traveling around to a few of the areas comic cons for fun.

It’s been a long, kind of dull winter here in Southern Wisconsin. We have had a lack of snow and an abundance of rain and abnormally high winter temps. It seems though, weather is finally starting to change for the better, hopefully, and we would like to reach out to the recently engaged or couples looking to have a unique on location photo session. There is still some snow in parts of Wisconsin so if you were thinking “hey I’ve always wanted pelt my significant other with a colored snow ball (provided we still have snow) or ice skate on a lake” for a photo session we can help with that. The joys of Wisconsin the possibilities are endless you just need to have a love of outdoor spaces and the willingness to brave the cold.  As spring progresses and it gets warmer out we can even change it up to suit you and your significant others outdoor activities. That could be anywhere from activates on the lakes and waterways, to the riding trails of Northern WI or relaxing on the beaches of Lake Michigan/Superior to the cities Madison/Milwaukee or anywhere/anything in-between.

This spring we are also looking forward to getting back to some of our fun personal projects and we will be looking for some people to collaborate with to create some new and exciting photos. We’ll discuss those more at the spring rolls along.

We look forward to hearing from you and bringing your dreams and imagination to prints that will hang on your walls. We also hope that you and your loved ones have a great Valentines Day.

Year in Review 2016

As the year draws to and end and I sit here and enjoy the last breakfast of the old year and eagerly await the beginning of the new, it’s time to sit back for a minute and reflect on what a good year it has been for Vagabond Photography.

Vagabond Photography had a good year with some ups and downs. While at Imaging USA in Atlanta in January, I decided it was time to start writing down some of our experiences in the photography industry. This has turned out to be a good way to communicate with you our clients and readers.

Bookings didn’t come in quite as quick as I had hoped for, for weddings and senior/portraits in the first half of the year but we did have a large expansion into the Corporate photography niche, with this new area now comprising about a quarter to a third of our business.  Something that I learned from my father is that even though you may have intended for your company to serve/provide one style of service, sometimes it can take on a life of its own and move in a different direction.

In April and May we had the joy of teaming up with two non profit groups in Milwaukee called Sweetwater and the Water Council of Milwaukee. They both have a great mission Sweetwater aims to help clean up the Milwaukee River, Menomonee River and Root River basins. While the Water Council of Milwaukee looks at ways of restoring our aquifers and delivering clean water to the area. It was such a great experience to be able to work at both of their conferences, I learned a lot even though I was just there to document the day for them.

Over the summer, we saw the launch of our new website for Vagabond Photography. www.vbphoto.co  For many years, I used and loved the hosting company Zenfolio, they have great layouts and custom designs but with diminishing returns though search engines and a lack of being able to do customized SEO, I decided it was time to make a move. After some research beginning in late July I decided on moving our hosting duties to Square Space. It took a little while to get everything set up and also, I had to find a new hosting platform for our client galleries and for that we settled on a little-known company called Pixieset. I was able to integrate both platforms to create a seamless new website that I think looks marvelous.

As the fall approached we moved to the last of our Senior Portraits and a few weddings. It was so great to a part of our wedding client’s special day.  I really love fall weddings so much more than summer weddings. There is such a great wide range of colors from golden hues of yellow, fiery reds, hazelnut browns and every other color in-between.

At the end of October/beginning of November I interviewed with an auto auction company called Mecums to possibly photograph cars for them part time while still being able to run Vagabond Photography full time. It didn’t pan out but I am thankful for the time to learn from there master photographer David Newhardt. I always love to learn new things and in a couple of days photographing with them it turned into a great learning experience. Learning something from a gentleman that has photographed classic cars for over 40 plus years is a great treat.

As Christmas approached we moved back into our Corporate Christmas season. I was great, to have our friends at MUZA Metals in Oshkosh ask us back for a second year even though getting there did happen on one of the more hazardous snow storms we have had it Wisconsin in a while. But it was fun, they all were but this one stick out in my mind the most because the getting there was just as interesting as the actual event was.

Christmas was spent back in my home town with my family and it was great to have some down time and to be able to be with friends and family for a few days.  I keep telling myself one of these years I need to bring my gear home with me and photograph a Gumz Family Christmas on Christmas Day but I have yet to do this. It’s a great time with mom and dad on my dad side of the family all the aunts and uncles show up with all the cousins and it turns into a great time when you stick 75 to 100 people into a town hall with the same last name. I guess next year should be the year to do that before the family starts to dwindle.

As we look forward to the new year it comes with hope and a little apprehension of the unknown. I cannot wait to get to San Antonio in the first part January for Imaging USA’s annual convention and trade show and to escape part of the cold Wisconsin winter.  We are still working on bookings for 2017 and I would love to be a part of your wedding or collaborate with you on your senior or family portraits. No idea is too big or too small for us. For our corporate clients, we would enjoy teaming up with you and photographing your summits, meeting and conventions and we can work with you based on your business size.

Have a great and safe New Years Eve folks, if you venture out tonight and you find you had a little too much to drink call a friend or a family member because a little lecture is better than not having your presents to enjoy. And as my favorite character Sherman T Potter from Mash says “Here’s to the new year. May she be a damn sight better than the old one, and may we may we all be home before she’s over.”

I look forward to hearing from you and seeing you in the New Year.

Best wishes,

Tim Gumz
owner and principal photographer

Leaving our online home: Switching website providers

Leaving our online home: Switching website providers

For a while now I’ve noticed diminishing clicks on my website vbphoto.co and it wasn’t easy at first to understand why? Nothing has really changed I still add new and updated photos ofclients and updated projects but the metrics were just not there anymore when studying my Google Analytics sheets.

So I started to do an investigation on why this may be. I have always been good at my keywords, SEO and Metadata but still could not understand why when I Googled my company I was way, way, waaayyy at the back of the list if you typed in Milwaukee or Greater Milwaukee Senior Portrait, Family Portrait or Corporate Events Photographer/photography.

Currently for my website I use a host company called Zenfolio and I think they are great, for photographers. Also my clients have told me they like the ease of use of the website when using a computer. In addition, if you are just starting out they offer many different package levels from beginner to seasoned veteran. Also, they have basic templates so if you do not understand a lot about website design it is relatively easy to set up. There are a few pit falls with them but, hey, no company is perfect and these small things will probably get resolved in time.  These few pit fall are in relation to their blog design and mobile site.

After going through a few web tutorials about SEO on Youtube and a few other blog pages I learn that Zenfoilio as great as they are, are terrible at SEO. I spent a slow afternoon trying to figure out if this is something that could be easily fixed. Unfortunately, it is not. I can add more keywords to my photos, and on my text based pages. Though this only goes so far.

The real problem stems from URL’s on my website. For most web sites you want your URL to read as simply as possible.
For example, one would ideally like their gallery too ready like this:
-vbphoto.co/gallery/people/portraits-bw/-
The problem with Zenfolio is your links tend to look like this:
-vbphoto.co/p493259340/h74baf075#h74baf075-

I learned the second link is horrible for spider bots on the web to be able to index your site properly. The reason behind this is there is no words that would indicate to the bot this is either a gallery, a photo or a page with text. It also does not help to promote your brand online using your keywords that these bots probe the web for. If I understand it correctly. Also Al Anderson Photography blog post explains Zenfolio use a # instead of / which also causes some problem with bot crawling because it considers them as page markers not URLs. If I understood his blog post correctly.

So that right there is the major problem for why my website does not appear sooner in the results when searched by Google or Bing or Yahoo as I would hope for. Potential clients tend only to look at the first two pages it does not help that I am back on the fourth to tenth pages.

The plan now is to find a new web hosting venue and say a sad goodbye to my long term host at Zenfolio.com. Vagabond Photography will still remain the same but we will just have a new website provider. The URL will remain the same so my clients will not have to worry about looking for us under a new website address.

Currently we are looking at a move to Squarespace or WordPress. Both seem to have their ups and downs. I currently use WordPress for my company’s blogging needs which is great. I really like both of their mobile phone site capabilities they are both easy to use and navigate around.  Over the next couple of weeks we plan to make this change and we will let your our readers and customers know what we choose and how we like the new platform.

If you our valued readers and clients had recently made a switch I would greatly like to hear about your experience and why you chose your current provider.