For a small blog covering a very niche subject, Tape Tardis has done well for search referral traffic. Although it does now tend to focus on text-first content, Tape Tardis began life as a photo blog, and the presence of some of its most impactive illustrations on Google Images has been one of the key factors in netting labour-free, guaranteed, daily traffic.
I’ve always believed that if you can get a new, original photo fairly high up in the Google Images results, and that photo stands out, the great public of the world will spot it and engage with it. And that should encourage Google to keep the photo visible for you – perhaps even drive it up to a higher position. Impactive images will also likely get you shares on photo-driven sites such as Pinterest, which expand your reach with further links to your main content.
In this post, I’m going to document a few of the ideas I’ve used to make my cassette photos a little different, and thus instantly visible in a crowd…
Use angles. From the start, I made a conscious decision to avoid photographing the cassettes square-on from the front. Why? Because so many of the existing cassette pictures appearing in Image Search (back when the blog began in early 2012, at least) had been captured in that way. Square-on from the front is actually the easiest way to capture cassette pictures of consistent quality, because you can simply drop the cassettes into a flatbed scanner…
One 15 second scan, and it’s done. No editing or enhancement required, and you can scan the covers as well as the tapes. But when people are looking at a collection of images in a set of search results, if every picture has that same format, there’s nothing to draw the eye. Merely shooting the cassette from a different angle helps the photo stand out. It takes longer to get right, because you have to take the time and care to eliminate bad reflections, uneven lighting and so on – problems that don’t crop up in a flatbed. But the extra time is worth it if web-surfers instantly spot and click on your image.
Get the background right. And if you don’t have a good background, replace it. Backgrounds are the absolute bane of average cassette photos. A cheap table top. Bad wallpaper. A window sill with a yellowy cast because the indoor lighting doesn’t agree with the camera’s white-balance algo… These are hallmarks of so many amateur product photos on Google Images, and they detract from the subject, subconsciously repelling the viewer.
I’ve frequently used coloured paper as a background, as well as high end musical instrument surfaces, book covers, magazines, etc. But on occasion I’ve also removed the background completely with a photo editing selection tool, and replaced it with a digital alternative. Like the night sky backdrop to the Sex Pistols cassette above. It’s really easy to cut away the original background with an audio tape, because the shape is very regular.
Silhouette see-through cassettes. The plain, transparent plastic used for the casings of 1990s cassettes can get really boring after a while. But one good way to turn this negative into a positive is to put some colourful lighting behind the tape and allow the lighting to take centre stage. In a collection of photos, people quickly home in on the most colourful submission, and as you can see in the pic of the Sky cassette above, this is a great way to make a very plain and colourless item into a burst of colour.
Go super-close-up. If your camera has a macro feature, you can get right up close to the cassette and maintain good focus. I took the above shot to answer a question I was asked on Twitter, about whether or not UK pre-recorded cassettes were shipped by default with plastic wrap. The image shows that the price label is stuck directly onto the bare plastic of the case, demonstrating that the tape was not plastic-wrapped on the retailer’s shelf. But the angle, the very close range, and the unusual crop also turned out to be an impactive vision that inherently catches the eye.
Dismantle. I probably shouldn’t be advising people to dismantle their cassettes, because things can go wrong. But if you’re confident doing it, it once again throws a curveball into the mix of images in a collection, grabbing attention. Above, I’ve exploited one of the most internally-interesting types of cassette – an electronic head demagnetizer. In this case, sold by Radio Shack / Tandy. The background for this, incidentally, is the metallic Candy Apple Red finish of a Fender Telecaster electric guitar.
Use uniformity. Multiples of similar products catch the eye because of their uniformity. The two cassettes above come from the same EMI Studio series of chromium-dioxide classical tapes. Side by side, the Yehudi Menuhin and Jacqueline Du Pre albums have excellent uniform factor. For maximum impact I kept the background dim and used a flash for the main lighting. This often takes a number of attempts to find an angle that doesn’t reflect back the flash with glare. If you get glare reflecting back, keep changing your angle until it no longer appears.
Try monochrome. If all the photos in a selection are reproduced in colour, a high-contrast monochrome can quickly make itself the centre of attention.
There are many other tactics you can use to make your cassette photos (and other photos of small products) stand out. Capturing anything that people don’t normally see is going to put you at the front of the attention queue. A different angle, a different background, and a different colour rendition can make people look. And making people look is Rule 1 in any online success story.
If you’re interested in taking this further, there’s a more detailed look at placing photos on Google Images over at Popzazzle, in How to Leapfrog High-Ranking Domains Through the Back Door.
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