There’s more to life than PowerPoint (and Newsletters)

Here are a few ways of keeping your your supporters interested in what’s going on where you’re working … and, things to keep you on your toes as you try out some new ideas.

Understanding Digital Camera settings

I’m publishing this in it’s unfinished state – I’ll refine as we go along – Google style.

Digital photography is all about capturing light on a digital sensor in the back of your camera.

That may sound obvious, but understanding the 3 ways you can control light getting to the sensor will help you take better photos.

This leads to 3 main questions to consider for each photo you take:

• How much of the photo do I want in focus?
  This depends on the Aperture: Opening and closing the camera iris
• Is the subject moving or still?
  Shutter speed: Changing how long the sensor is exposed to light
• How sharp/detailed do I want the photo to be?
  ISO/Gain: How sensitive the sensor is in the camera

Which one/s take priority will depend on your subject and the conditions.

If you leave you camera in the ‘green’ auto mode, it will always try and find the middle ground and that may not be suitable for your photo.

Let’s look at each of those in turn. Each of them has a benefit and a pay-off.

A Crash Course in Digital Photography

- Try something different

Here are 6 tips to help you take  better photos.

1. Rule of thirds, 2. Get closer, 3. Get inspired, 4. Different point of view, 5. Use camera “Scene” modes, 6. Look out for interesting elements.

Ask me if you need any clarification.

Top Video Tips for Shooting Interviews

Videoing Interviews with people

Here are some tips on how to make your interviews with people look professional. Full credit here goes to Nigel our OMF Video guy – they’re pretty much all his.

The mnemonic is FLExCS: Framing, Lighting, Exposure, Clutter, Sound

Why Tim? Tim is a Christian worker and media junkie who can often be found on the end of a camera – these are for you my friend – keep going, it’s always good to see your work …

Photography: The Rules Of Composition

Useful tips on photo composition (part 2)

more about "Photography: The Rules Of Composition", posted with vodpod

Killer Google SEO tips

I can’t claim credit for this, but I should share this with you.

A timely chat with a friendly Christian worker (and former employee of a leading Search engine company) yielded these suggestions for ways that Christian Organisations can use their real world networks, to yield on-line results.

The two big pillars of SEO ranking it seems to me are relevancy and authority.

To improve your ranking should mean understanding you audience and some hard legwork and cajoling.

Relevancy

You, the site manager can make sure the site has relevancy (by making sure you title, head and link you pages in a way that people will find helpful), but what can you do about authority?

Authority

Authority is about credibility and popularity, and links from other relevant sites.

Using your networks

• Churches have a fair number of hits
• 30 links from good sized churches/organisations is valuable traffic
• Churches and other Christian orgs are relevant to your work (Mission Bible, Christain etc).
• They will be happy to link to you.
• The more relevant links to you, the better your credibility, and the better you will rank.

So…

1. Work out who you would like to link to you
2. Identify the key pages and keywords you want to boost on your site (for us that’s “long term mission opportunities” and our “short-term serve Asia programme“)
3. Get churches and other Christian groups to link to the specific pages in your site (not just your homepage, for you it might be courses?)
4. Make sure they include the keywords in the link (see my suggestion below)
5. If possible, get them to link from their home page (high popularity), or a page that is applicable to you ministry (good relevancy -the surrounding words on that page are taken into account).

What does it look like:

Asking people to replace links like this:

Visit the OMF International website at www.omf.org

with:

Visit the OMF International website to find out more about long term mission opportunities in East Asia and their short term Serve Asia mission trip programme.

If that helps, please let me know.