Over the last 18 months or so, I have been working so hard on my dental practice, and my websites, that I’ve had little time to actually be a photographer, which is truly a passion.  The last time I got to do any real shooting was when we took a family vacation to Hawaii in April 2010, but even that was just snapshots of a vacation, not planned, scouted, and visualized in advance for the best shots.  But that is about to change!

My Passion for Photography Outside Dentistry

A few years ago, I came upon a fabulous photography forum: FredMiranda.com.  A free site (you do have to sign up to post photos, but there are no fees for most things), they have a wide variety of forums, from weddings to landscapes to sports to wildlife, etc.  I learned a tremendous amount just by reading and viewing, then gathered the courage to post some photos and received some very constructive critique.

One photographer, whom I came to greatly admire, is Mark Metternich, and you can see his landscape photography on his website: WildforLight.com.  Around the end of 2008, I was exploring the idea of supplementing our family income with some photography (back in the midst of the economic crisis, anything seemed like a good idea!), and Mark was kind enough to spend some time with me on the phone, explaining some possibilities.  It didn’t pan out, but he did push me to start building my own photography website, www.CDPayetPhotography.com.

Landscape Photography Expedition in Oregon

Mark also told me that he does photography tours of the Southwest and the Northwest, and the idea fascinated me.  To spend an extended time totally devoted to landscape photography.….back in those days, it was a pipe dream for financial reasons, but the dream took hold, and it became a real goal to make it happen.  And earlier this year (spring of 2011), the time was finally right to make a commitment and schedule a trip, so I called Mark up and said, “Let’s do it!”

This coming Friday, September 1st, I will be taking off for Portland, OR, to be picked up by Mark, and we will be heading out for a full week of landscape photography at a level that I have never before reached.  I am so incredibly excited, I can barely make it through the next 2 days of work!

I don’t know if we will have much in the way of Internet access, and I don’t plan on taking a laptop this time, so I’m not sure yet if I will be able to blog my way (with photos) through the trip, but I am going to try.  If not, I’ll be doing a huge amount of post-processing for weeks afterwards, and I do plan on using this as a place to share (partially because I am going to be testing out some new WordPress photo gallery plugins).

Google+ Is the New Photography-Sharing Site

Is anyone else on Google+, their new social media platform?  If you are, it is rapidbly becoming a photographer’s dream — there are some amazing photographers on there!  If you’re interested in joinging Google+, please give me your email, and I’ll be glad to send you an invitation.

Dear fans, friends, and visitors:

Due to some recent issues arising in my practice, I am taking a short (hopefully only a month or so) sabbatical from my work here on DentalDigitalPhotography.com.  Nothing horrible, don’t get me wrong, but my practice is my top priority in order to provide a living for my family, and there’s just a lot of work that must be done in a short period of time to re-solidify the progress we’ve made over the last 18 months there.

So don’t worry, I shouldn’t be gone long, and then I’ll be back. 

Ever since the iPad was released, many apps have been developed for photographers, but none have had much real editing functionality, nor the ability to easily work with desktop photography software.  The Photosmith app is finally a real sign of change, and for dentists, this will be terrific.  With the Camera Connection Kit, here’s all you have to do:

1. Take the pictures with your DSLR;
2. Plug the camera into the iPad with the Camera Connection Kit
3. Open the “Photos” app and import all the pictures (or just selected ones)
4. Open (or switch to) the Photosmith for iPad app
5. Show your patients
6. Create folders, add color or star ratings, keyword tags, other info
7. At the end of the day, sync all the pictures to Lightroom and it keeps all that info!

Press Release

Photosmith brings Lightroom synchronization to the iPad

Photosmith introduces sorting and tagging to photographers on the go

Atlanta, GA. April 26, 2011 – C Squared Enterprises, Inc has released Photosmith for the iPad. Photosmith brings the ability to manage photos using collections, keywords, tagging, ratings, EXIF, and IPTC metadata. Photographers no longer need to wait until they get back to their main computer or drag a laptop to sort through photos or show clients their latest results. With Photosmith, photographers can load their photos directly on the iPad, filter, sort, rate, and keyword while in the field/studio. When they get back to Adobe Lightroom on their Mac or PC they can sync all photos from the iPad to Lightroom and all of their tagging and rating will also transfer with no need to duplicate effort.

Photosmith improves the photographer’s digital workflow, especially flows with RAW images. Photosmith offers viewing of full RAW image data from the latest dSLR cameras in full fidelity and up to 100% zoom; even on 25+ megapixel images. Photosmith offers a grid view for quickly sorting through thumbnails and collections, a loupe view for viewing individual images and tagging, and a full screen view to maximize use of the screen. Users can assign a rating, choose a color label, view the basic EXIF data (shutter speed, ISO, f/stop, and more), or edit the title, caption, or a number of other IPTC fields. All these settings are synchronized with Lightroom using the free Photosmith plugin. Future changes made in Lightroom are saved back to the iPad during a sync as well. See more at: http://bit.ly/PhotosmithTour

Photosmith assists photographers on the go with sharing their photos too. Photos can be sent to Flickr, Facebook, Dropbox, or email. Those sent to Flickr and Facebook maintain their titles and keywords, allowing pros to quickly share and get feedback from their clients, or allows the causal photographer to share photos while on vacation.

Photosmith is the culmination of 24 months of effort and development continues to add new features over time. Users are encouraged to submit feedback and suggestions to help drive the future of the app.
The app is available worldwide for US$17.99 (or the approximate equivalent).

For more information please visit http://www.photosmithapp.com

Recently, in response to my post about improving patient communication by showing them their teeth, Sanjay Hirokedi asked if one can improve Google SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages/Positions) by optimizing images on Google Picasa, Flickr, Smugmug, and other online photo sharing sites, as well as your own dental website(s).  The answer is both simple and complex, but the basic answer is YES, you can improve your Google SERPs by optimizing pictures.  Here’s a little bit of how and why:

Content (including Pictures!) is King for Google, Bing, Yahoo

When it comes to the best way to improve your web presence in the search engines, always remember this motto: CONTENT IS KING. Search engines are all about relevent content, not just fluff, so besides linking strategies, proper use of headline tags (h1, h2, h3, etc), and other techniques, what you really want is information that your prospective patients are seeking. And yes.…patients love to see pictures, because they’re easy to understand.  So if you know how to add the right information to your pictures in the code “behind” the pictures, you can tell the search engines that your pictures are relevant, and the pictures will be indexed and findable in searches.

As an example, I did a Google Images search for “porcelain veneers pictures charlotte,” and this is what came up.  All of the pictures with a green arrow by them are from one or more of my websites, and if you were to do a similar search, then hover your mouse over each image, it would pop up for you to see from where Google found it.

(click for a larger version)

Keywords in the “Alt text” and File Names are SEO Tools

When looking at the code for a picture online, you would see something like this example:

<img src=“images/cindy-after-8-veneers.jpg” alt=“After picture of Smile with 8 Porcelain Veneers” height=“169” width=“300” />

The yellow highlighted text is the file name, and as you can see, in the file name itself, I have included some words people might use to search, “8 veneers,” and “after.” I didn’t put the word “picture” in, as Google already knows it’s a picture, so it’s a bit redundant.  DO NOT use file names like those that come from the camera, i.e. “_MG_9804.jpg,” as that has no meaning, and no one will ever search for a dentist with that, I promise!

The green highlighted text is what is called the “alternate text” of the picture, which is used by search engines for several purposes, but for our purposes, there is 1 very important one:

1. Relevant content — again!  “After picture,” “smile,” and “8 porcelain veneers.”  Right back to the most important part of all SEO — RELEVANT CONTENT.  When you add the right alternate text, with appropriate keywords, you are telling the search engines what the picture is about.  Using a boring file name like _MG_9804 tells the googlebots absolutely nothing about the picture, so it’s irrelevant.  But keywords?  Bingo!

To be honest, these aren’t even the best file names and alt text that could be used; they’re from a website (TheCharlotteDentist) I haven’t updated in quite a while.  For a far more detailed explanation of how to properly use keywords in file names, alt text, etc., I highly recommend The Website Owner’s Manual for Dentists, by Dr. Mike Barr.  At only $347, it will be one of THE best purchases you will ever make for your dental practice if you have a website.

Important Note: everything you just read applies equally well to social media sites AND your own practice websites!

Social Media Sharing of Pictures: Which Work Best?

This topic is now moving into the realms of the more speculative, because while there may be books and/or research that has done real comparisons among the different social media photo sharing sites, I don’t know of it, and I don’t really have the time to look.  Just so you know.    Therefore, what I am about to share with you is based exclusively on my own experience with the following 4:

• Flickr (a bit more than beginning, but learning a lot these days)
• Google PicasaWeb (beginnger/intermediate)
• Facebook (intermediate level of experience)
• SmugMug (reasonably advanced user)

As can be seen, I have the most experience with SmugMug, with which I built my photography website.  I do pay the $150/year fee for a PRO version because of some important features if you want to sell pictures, as I do, but most of you won’t need to do that.  However, if you do, email me for a Coupon Code that will save you some $$ on any level subscription. 

I really like the layout that SmugMug provides for editing the captions and keywords of large numbers of photos at once, as seen here for the following reasons:

• Add keywords to a lot of pictures all at once or individually
• Plenty of space in the keywords/phrases section to see ALL of the ones you’ve added at once
• Ability to add hyperlinks (for example, to your website page on cosmetic dentistry, or CEREC, whatever) in the Caption/Description
• Neat, organized layout onscreen

Flickr is reasonably close in ease of use, but the things I don’t like about their batch editing section are:

• No way to add the same keyword to a lot of pictures at once
• No ability to have hyperlinks in the description/caption
• Not as neatly laid out onscreeen
• The line to add keywords is just 1 line high, and you can’t see all the keywords/phrases at once.

Facebook has a pretty easy-to-use layout, too, but it has some VERY distinct disadvantages that bug the heck out of me:

• It does not allow you to add distinct keywords, just a caption/description for each picture
• No hyperlinks in the captions
• You can only get to it when initially uploading pictures to an album!  YEESH!  And that’s why I don’t have a screenshot right now, ’cause I don’t need to add any pictures right now.  I’ll add it later.

Lastly, Google PicasaWeb is about on the same level as Facebook, although it does allow you to add keywords distinct from the descriptions, but as with Flickr, not as easily, and not to more than 1 picture at a time.

Google does have 1 VERY distinct advantage, though: it’s part of Google!  Naturally, any photos added to Google’s PicasaWeb will be indexed rather quickly.  Whether or not this affects their findability?  I don’t know.

Add Keywords in Adobe Lightroom Before Uploading

While you can’t add a long caption within Lightroom, you CAN add all the keywords and phrases you like before you ever upload them, assuming you are using any of the Export or Publish features.  There are also Lightroom plugins that allow you to upload and keep track of the uploaded pictures right inside the program, as I described when talking about Jeffrey Friedl’s LR plugins for social media exports.

So when all is said and done, is it worth it to use photos to improve your website optimization?  ABSOLUTELY!  The pictures alone won’t do it, but they can, and should, be an important part of building your web presence, and online photo sharing sites can also help.

OK, anyone else going to be at the Townie Meeting 2011 in just another 5 weeks?  I am really looking forward to it, as this is my first time back since 2005.  My wife is coming, too, as there are plenty of Townies who want to meet the woman who, quite literally, helped save my dental practice and turn my life around. It will even be a sort of 5th Wedding Anniversary trip for us. 

Naturally, with my wife along, and with all the great courses being given by some phenomenal lecturers, there won’t be a lot of free time, even in the evenings, but one thing I REALLY want to do is spend some time one evening walking around the Strip shooting pictures.

The only “requirements/suggestions:”

• A camera and plenty of memory on the cards
• A tripod in case you’re too tipsy to hold the camera steady from all the parties
• You want to have fun taking a ton of pictures!

For a long time, one small barrier has kept me from uploading a lot more photos to my office Facebook Fan Page: Facebook.com/TheCharlotteDentist, and that is the simple fact that Lightroom did not have the ability to upload directly (no Publish Service) to Fan Pages — only to Personal Pages.  I had to export the pictures from Lightroom to another folder, THEN go to Facebook and upload them from there.  Not that it is a lot of work, but it required more steps than how easily I can Publish photos to my SmugMug photography site, CDPayetPhotography.com, where I have photo galleries of 6MonthSmiles Invisible Adult Braces patients, porcelain veneer before/after pictures, and more.

Jeffrey Friedl’s Lightroom Plugin Exports Directly to Fan Page Albums

Well, tonight (March 20th, 2011) I was researching some material to put in my upcoming Townie Meeting 2011 lecture on dental digital photography workflow, and through various roundabout ways, I ended up back on the blog of Jeffrey Friedl, who has been creating and updating highly functional Adobe Lightroom plugins for as long as Lightroom has been around.  And I happened to read this very exciting statement:

Note: as of version 20110116.147, the plugin can upload to albums on fan/group pages.

Needless to say, I immediately downloaded the new plugin and registered it (it’s Donationware, which means it is “almost” free, which means all you have to do is pay the minimum 1 US penny via PayPal for unlimited registration/use of the plugin) with a $20 donation.  With just a minute needed to authenticate to Facebook, suddenly I had the easiest way possible to send all the pictures I could want directly to Facebook and even keep track of them within Lightroom.  You can even set it up for multiple Fan Pages, as I’ve shown here.

I highly recommend Adobe Photoshop Lightroom for dentists, and with this Facebook plugin, it became an even better option, given how important Social Media is becoming in promoting our dental practices.

I have known Dr. Mike Barr, of Boynton Beach, FL, for about the last 8 years through DentalTown.com, although we’ve only met once.  However, of all Townies, he has had one of the biggest impacts on me and my dental practice; in fact, he was also one of the guys I first remember reading on the subject of creative portrait photograghy.  In the last 2 years, though, his biggest influence has been through his The Complete Website Owner’s Manual for Dentists, of which I was just the 3rd person to buy one when it was released.

Dental Website Guru Extraordinaire

Mike relates that he started a dental website back in the late 1990’s, long before most people realized the power that the Internet would have in marketing our services.  Over the years, he continued learning and implementing, and for many years now, his website has been the dominant force for growth in his practice, even in an area that is heavily saturated with dentists.  As a FFS doc in a PPO/HMO-saturated area of Florida, his website has been the differentiating factor for him.  After years of dispensing valuable advice on website marketing on DentalTown, Mike finally decided to write a book, and what an amazing job he did.  So good, in fact, that Dr. Howard Farran called it one of the “Five Resources You Must Own”, and Howard does know a thing or 2 about what makes a practice successful!

My own personal experience with Mike’s manual goes something like this:

At the end of 2008, I’d had a website makeover for my Charlotte NC family dental practice, but I realized that — when I tried googling different search phrases — my website was still virtually invisible.  In the 5 years I’d had a website, I had probably generated less than $10,000 in total dentistry for all 5 years combined.

Then I got Mike’s manual in early 2009, and I set to work.  I fortunately did have the ability to edit the content of my website, and there were a lot of late nights spent writing and re-writing text, adding photos, links, everything.  Within a couple months, I decided to learn to write HTML and CSS and build my own websites with Adobe Dreamweaver, so by the fall of 2009, I had 5 total websites built and was optimizing them.

At the end of 2010, I checked my Referral Analysis reports, since we track incoming patients very carefully.  At that point, we were generating more than $20,000 per month in revenue from my websites!  Holy cow!

Now, there were other resources that I found, too, but Mike’s manual was THE foundation that got me going. I highly recommend you get it!

Dental Practice Rebel/Guru

Mike has always been a bit of a rebel when it comes to practice management.  He accepts assignment from no dental insurance, is not under contract for any PPO, has a practice full of 6MonthSmiles adult ortho patients, routinely does FMR and cosmetic dentistry cases, and all of this is in an area of Florida that is heavily saturated with dentists, most of whom DO take PPOs, assignment, and don’t do the kinds of procedures he does.  YET.…..Mike has made a great reputation for his dentistry in that environment, because he makes no bones about what he stands for.

Now Mike is starting a new website, in which he shares his passion for taking the “road less taken,” and making it work.  Given Mike’s passion and knowledge, you NEED to check it out and subscribe!

The Dental Warrior

Use Photo-Sharing Sites to Spread Your Pictures Around the Web

The portrait you see below (and you can click on it to see what happens) was posted directly from my photography website, which was actually the very first one I built, although not from scratch.  It is hosted with SmugMug as a Pro account for various reasons, one of which does happen to include ability to automatically watermark images in entire galleries quite easily.  There are certainly other options, such as Google’s Picasa Web Albums, Flickr, Zenfolio, etc..

This is just a short post to show an example of how you can spread pictures around the web easily, on your own, with no need for a web designer.  Simply create an account yourself (I do recommend setting up one specifically for the office, separate from any personal photo accounts you have), and upload pictures from your computer, then use the “Share” button to get your work out there for patients to see.  And really, the more places, the better!

Phaedra chose 6MonthSmiles to correct some mild crowding of her top front teeth, as she’d been self-conscious about them for years. Now she loves her smile!

If you already use digital photography, you probably know how much easier it is to communicate with patients using pictures of their own teeth.  Today was a perfect example of why you should be doing this, and then how you can turn that into communication with your entire patient base!

A Cracked Tooth but No Pain & the Patient Doesn’t Believe You

Ever had this happen before?  You start prepping a simple DO composite on a molar or premolar due to some interproximal decay you saw on a bitewing, and maybe you’re replacing an existing amalgam or composite, and suddenly you’re staring at a crack that runs the entire mesio-distal width of the tooth, and you have to tell the patient s/he needs a crown.

Even better, the patient has had absolutely no symptoms, and maybe is a new patient whom you know to have had a bad experience with their last dentist and who didn’t want to fix something that wasn’t causing any symptoms.

I was fortunate that this (kinda) scenario happened with a long-time patient today, and so I didn’t have to deal with any of the issues in the second paragraph, but just take a look at the photos:

Preop, I knew there were at least some craze lines both mesially and distally, but would you have thought these were really that bad?  Even with my Zeiss PICO microscope at 8.8x magnification, I was anticipating a simple DO, maybe MOD composite.

OOPS!  This was NOT what I expected, although we’ve all seen it plenty of times.

So I questioned her again, and she repeated that she had had NO symptoms, which is really a good thing, of course, but a bit surprising.

Without a Picture, How Do You Communicate with Patients?

At work, I still use a Canon Digital Rebel XTi, which is probably 2.5 years old, and the screen isn’t very big.  Nevertheless, I just zoomed in and showed the patient this picture, explaining that the blue dye was highlighting the crack so she could see it well.  Do you think she had any hesitation in accepting the need for a crown instead of a filling?  Nope!

Blogging, Email Blasts, & the iPad for Patient Education

OK, so this patient quickly understood (literally about 10 seconds) why she needed a crown (nearly $1200 in my practice) instead of a 3-surface composite (about $295-ish).  But what if you’d like to show a lot of patients this?

• I’ve already written a blog post about this topic: Why Does a Tooth with a Small Filling Need a Crown?
• Tomorrow I will send out an email blast through Constant Contact or Mail Chimp (I’m still experimenting with which one I like) to my entire patient base, alerting them to this important information.
• The blog post will automatically feed into my Facebook Fan Page for The Charlotte Dentist
• I will also load these photos into the “Cracked Tooth” demonstration for the DDS GP YES! app for my iPad so my staff can show patients with similar situations these photos; do you think they’ll have any more difficulty understanding than my patient today did?
• Next I can upload these photos to my Flickr account, Picasa Web Albums, or more — with the right alt text tags and links back to my Charlotte dental practice website, I can build my web presence and SERPs.  Heck — did you notice that, in this one blog post, I just created 3 links back to my website?  Over time, these links add authority and “link juice” to boost my rankings!

As I’ve discussed, if you can’t actually DO something with your pictures, then they become nothing more than nice documentation for yourself, possibly insurance, or possibly to defend yourself against lawsuits or Board complaints.  The real power of pictures, though, is in their ability to educate and motivate patients, whether in your office or out.  And this is where I find Adobe Photoshop Lightroom so helpful.  Just check out the list of ways you can output images from Lightroom (using my own example websites, social media, etc.):

Social Media Photo Sharing Options

While there is unfortunately no way to upload photos from Lightroom to Facebook Fan Pages (serious bummer, but you can work around it), you can set up Publishing Services for other social media sites, such as

• Flickr
• Smugmug (where I host my professional photography site)
• Google Picasa albums (which you can link to your Google Places page)

This allows you to select a group of pictures and batch upload them with a single click.

Create Patient Slideshows, Custom Print Layouts, & Web Galleries

There is one feature that Lightroom currently lacks, and that is the ability to design photobooks directly within the software, and this is certainly something that would be terrific for dentists.  Aperture 3 and iPhoto, both by Apple, do have this capability built in; something we’ll hope for in future versions of Lightroom.  If you are an Adobe user, Photoshop Elements 9 has this capability.

However, in most popular programs now, you can select a group of photos and have them merged into a MPEG4 video, including music and captions, even a voice over explanation if you want to take the time.  You can create custom layouts for ortho, for lab communication, and printed pages to put in a 3-ring binder as an alternative to a printed photobook, and more.  And you can