Sheila's Guide To The Good Stuff

Second in a blog post series for the get-revved-up week between Christmas and New Year’s.

If you have a fairly recent point-and-shoot camera, then you have a Macro setting for closeup shots.

How often do you use it?

Macro gives you another way to take what might be a ho-hum, expected photo and turn it into something more interesting.

The picture you see here was taken with my little Canon PowerShot Digital Elph;  it’s one of the handmade green icing trees, dusted with sugar “snow,” that surround the holiday village made of gingerbread in the lobby of the Four Seasons hotel (this one in Austin.)

Rev-up recommendation for you:

**  Play a bit with close-up photography in 2012.

—->>  Find the Macro setting on your camera (often a flower symbol.)  Look for interesting little details around town to photograph – perhaps that includes a mouthwatering close-up of a chocolate milkshake from the real corner drugstore that you still have downtown.

—->>  Put the milkshake photo into a round-up blog post that calls attention to fun, quick, family-friendly downtown places to eat. Link to each of those businesses in your post.

—->>  Link to your blog post in a Facebook Page update. Tag the place where you took the milkshake photo, and the other eateries, too.

—->>  Tweet the link to your post 2-3 times on Twitter, over a few days, at different times. Include the Twitter handles of those downtown businesses.

—->>  Pop the chocolate milkshake photo into your email newsletter.

—->>  Shoot a short video of a drugstore employee showing how he/she makes the perfect chocolate milkshake, then put that on YouTube, with a link back to your eateries blog post in the video description.

Can you think of any other way to use Macro photos to entrance visitors with an unexpected close-up view?

For more ideas on using one piece of content multiple times, look in the Solutions section of our Tourism Currents Store for a two-page download titled Create Once, Use Many Times – How to Think Like an Online Publisher.  It includes lots of different ways to use photos.

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One of the takeaway points at my SoMeT blogging/content presentation was to spend more time focusing on the small details of your destination. Look at the world through a mental soda straw to shed light on the unique and interesting, rather than only writing list posts (“Top 10 Beaches” blah blah) or broad overviews.

This photo is to illustrate the concept.

It was taken with a Canon PowerShot point-and-shoot camera, but using the Macro (close-up) mode, which can do some really fun stuff for you.

It is part of the patterned door of an antique pie safe at Clyde’s Willow Creek Farm, a unique restaurant and tavern in Broadlands, Virginia which is part of the Washington, DC area’s wine country (and a big thank you, preservationists for keeping our history alive in such places.)

See the poked-up holes?

Those are made by sticking a nail through the thin metal to make decorative patterns that also provide ventilation for the pies stored on shelves within.

Can you now imagine someone laboriously doing that by hand a long time ago….poke-poke-poke, but always with design in mind, like the paisley swirl detail seen in the photo?  It brings joy to an everyday piece of furniture while also serving a purpose.

Takeaway from this:   Soda straw. Get super-close. Use your camera’s Macro setting. Find those little miniature landscapes that tell a story.

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A follow-up to my earlier post about not getting an HD video camera till you know what you’re getting into….

I have been practically welded to my tripod (a three-legged Sunpak 6060) for the last few weeks as I’ve shot video (and still photos to incorporate into those videos) for a client CVB.

There is no question that it has enhanced my good shots and totally saved several otherwise crummy ones.

Before you shoot another frame of any visual digital medium, go get a tripod.  Your viewers will thank you.