Guest Blogger - Drew Bennett

My name is Drew and I am the author of The BenSpark. I was invited to write a guest post on the Cutcaster blog. My topic is the low cost ways that you can create content to enhance your blog. Personally, I usually skip blog posts that do not include images. They bore me. But if your post also includes an image, my eyes are going to be drawn to the image and I may look at your written content as well because of that image.

For almost three years now, I have been working on a personal project where I take a Photo-A-Day and post it to my blog. I have used a number of cameras as well as software programs to accomplish this work. I have also used a number of photo hosting platforms to host those photos. And in the end, I have also widgetized my daily photo stream so that others can host my content on their blogs. Getting started with photos and video on your blog is very, very simple.

Things you need:

* Digital Camera
* Photo Editing Software
* Photo Hosting Platform

Digital Camera - First things first, you are going to need a digital camera. Digital cameras have dropped dramatically in price and as each new and improved version comes out the previous versions drop even lower in price. Here's a secret. Unless you are printing images in extremely large formats or going into professional photography you don't need the latest and greatest gear. You can pick up last year's model and it will be perfect for digital online content. So if you are shooting just for the web let's say that $100 would be a good price point. As far as what camera is the best I cannot speak to that. I can tell you about the gear that I have used in the past and what I use currently.

For years I had a Sanyo Xacti C4 camera, but it was much more than just a 4MP (mega pixel) camera. This was a camera and video camera in one and it recorded video straight to an SD card. This was something I bought 4 years ago when this wasn't the norm with cameras today and I paid through the nose. Now nearly every digital point and shoot camera has an option for shooting video included as well. So for around $100 you can get a decent camera that also doubles as a video camera. I have a point and shoot 7.1MP Canon SD800 and a 10MP Nikon D80 DSLR. I shoot with the intent of either selling my photos or having them be of high enough quality for print. However, most of the time I print only 4 X 6, the average size of the basic consumer and you certainly don't need 10MP to do that. The photo will look better the higher the MP but you don't need it, especially for web content. When I post to the web, I take those large images and format them to a much smaller size. Remember that with web images you are going for a fast load time so the images file size should be small.

When I take a photo, I edit it in Adobe Photoshop Elements and when I create a video, I use Adobe Premiere Elements. However, I am still using an old version of both programs. I haven't even upgraded to the latest and greatest. You don't need the latest and greatest to edit your images and send them to the web. A quick Amazon search of "inexpensive image editing software" and "inexpensive digital cameras" brought back many solutions for either the pro, enthusiast or easy user. There are many options. Set your budget and buy the most you can within that budget. Also look for packages where you get the camera and image editing software together.

Image Editing Software - You can buy the image editing software with all the bells and whistles like Photoshop CS3 or you can go the more moderate route and buy the consumer version of Photoshop called Photoshop Elements (version 6.0 is the latest, I'm on 4.0) or you can go the super simple easy route and download a free program like Picasa. Let's stick with the theme of adding digital content to the web in the most inexpensive way so let's talk about the basic things your image editing software needs.

Cropping - Cropping is the most important feature in my eyes. To me, "life is how you crop it". Suppose you took a fantastic picture of your dog but also in the picture you get some goof making faces. Rather than junking the image as being lost you can easily crop out that goofy character. Cropping is a way of selecting a portion of the image to become the main image. I have a good eye but I almost always crop my images in some way. Your image editing software should allow you to crop.

Remove Red Eye - You're going to get images where your subjects look possessed. You can fix that with a quick red eye removal. Your software should include that as an option.

Image sizing - I usually do my image sizing, when I crop. I use the size of 450px (pixels) x 350px (pixels) at 96 dpi (dots per inch) for my images on my blog. This way the images end up being quite small and I know exactly how large the image will look when displayed. So many people upload their images unedited and then get giant images blown out on their blogs. Having control over the image size is also crucial. You want to know exactly where that image will fall on your page. Make sure your images are not wider than the width of the content column. With Photoshop elements, I can set my cropping tool to crop an image to be 450px (pixels) x 350px (pixels) at 96 dpi (dots per inch). You can also avoid this by using a photo hosting site that takes your images and gives you multiple sizes to display on your blog.

Photo Hosting Platforms - Once you have taken and edited your images you are going to want to host them somewhere so that you can add them to your blog quickly and easily. Some blogging platforms allow you to upload your image directly to your blog and that is okay. I prefer to post my images to a photo hosting site and then copy and paste the image into my blog post. There are so many different hosting platforms and I am on a bunch of them. I usually upload my Photo-A-Day to Buzznet, Flickr and Zooomr.

Why all three? Well, for one thing it gets my content in front of many sets of eyes. Each time I post an image I can tag it or label it with keywords that people can search on. If I post an image of my cat I would tag that image with the keywords "cat", "pet", "tuxedo", "shorthair". That way when someone is looking for shorthaired tuxedo cats as pets they could easily find my uploaded photos of my two cats, Duncan and Oliver. I also add a link to my Photo-A-Day blog post on each of the descriptions on my uploaded images. This way I now have three links to my blog post (one on each platform). There are people who strictly use photo hosting platforms and are loyal to one or the other, by posting my images to multiple platforms I am able to put my content in front of many diverse audiences.

Some photo hosting platforms are free and some are for pay, if you can afford a pro account on a hosting platform like Flickr buy it, if you want all the best functions without having to pay for them then try hosts that have unlimited uploads like Zooomr. And if you decide to go the Picasa route with free image editing software you can also upload your images directly from Picasa to your blog.

The Internet is a full on multimedia experience. When you blog, think about providing that experience to your readers. Don't just give them flat text, engage your audience with images, video and sound. Oh yeah, I haven't even gotten into videos and how they can enhance your blogs... Maybe next time around...

Drew writes five blogs, is an avid kayaker and a Transformers fan, he also takes at least one photo every single day and posts it to his BenSpark Blog. You can visit him at The BenSpark, BenSpark 2: Electric Boogaloo, Flatwater Tech or The Wired Kayaker and Read To Me, Dad