Spring in Fairbanks
Birds and Baby Animals Appear | Some Portfolio Updates
Spring has finally sprung in Fairbanks, Alaska, and I couldn't be happier to welcome the season's warmth and the resurgence of life it brings (not to mention personal energy). In my latest blog post, I share some of my adventures as I explore the great outdoors, marveling at the beauty of nature and capturing it through my camera lens.
At Creamer's Field Migratory Waterfowl Refuge, I witnessed an impressive array of birds, including trumpeter swans, Canada geese, and my first sandhill cranes of the season. I also discuss the upcoming Fairbanks Birding Challenge, hosted by the Alaska Songbird Institute, which has ignited my passion for birding and bird photography over the last two years. And it starts tomorrow, May 1st!
The highlight of my recent outings was a heartwarming encounter with a fox family, a den filled with adorable, palm-sized kits. In the post, I describe my experience observing the playful kits and their protective mother and share some of the 200+ photos I took during my visit. To read the full blog post and immerse yourself in the beauty of Fairbanks' spring wildlife, click here.
Portfolio Updates
I love photography. And I love writing. I love writing articles and posts about the things I take photos of. Shocking, I know.
You might not guess it, but I hate writing photo captions and maintaining my photography website. It’s a hassle. I need to write descriptions that are somewhat marketing driven. And it needs to be updated frequently (it doesn’t happen). Captions and titles need to be unique enough that search engines see them as actually unique.
But I have thousands of aurora photos. How many unique titles can I spin off the top of my head for aurora borealis, or northern lights? It’s tedious. Annoying, banal, boring, dreary, endless, exhausting, laborious, tiresome, tiring, uninteresting. See, that’s all the synonyms I get for tedious from the thesaurus. Guess how many I get for “aurora borealis.” One. But I have literally thousands of aurora photos.
So, I’ve been doing some testing with AI. I’ll never use AI in any broad scope for my writing, but I have been pleasantly surprised by its effectiveness in titling and describing photos. The funny thing is, the process is much longer than it was before. Previously, I would look at a picture of the aurora and give it a title like “Northern Lights.” Then give it the magical description of “Aurora over Fairbanks, February 14, 2023.” Then repeat (or copy-paste) for the other 30 photos. And then, of course, all those photos look exactly the same to a search engine.
Now it’s a multi-stepped process. I describe each photo in as much detail as possible to chatGPT (something that would look great for a search engine but be terrible for a human to read). It spits out a unique title and a more engaging description. I tell it to stop using the word mesmerizing. Repeatedly. It keeps using the word mesmerizing. I throw the content into Grammarly and begin editing away to create my final version. Then, I return my revised version to chatGPT and ask how many times I used the word mesmerizing (almost always zero).
Anyway, for now, this is an experiment that I’m running on my portfolio photos to make the descriptions more informative. As I said, it’s a longer process, yet for some reason, it feels less tedious (for now), and most importantly, I get the unique titles I need for SEO's sake. It also helps me sneak in some of the marketing language I am absolutely terrible at. I hope this will soon free me up to focus more on my photography and actual writing and spend less time on SEO and general website maintenance.
Long story short, I’m slowly redoing my entire portfolio page. Not just editing titles and descriptions but updating and re-organizing the photos contained in it for greater diversity. I encourage you to check it out here. Maybe you’ll even find something worthy of hanging on your walls!
Alternately, my homepage displays the photos without the descriptions and titles so that you can view just the pictures of those “mesmerizing” Alaska landscapes and northern lights.