Backlit Creative has just launched a new site! My wife, Erin, is a photographer in the Twin Cities. She shoots wedding, family, engagement and child photography. Check out her brand new site on your computer, smart phone or devices like the iPad.

http://erinbellphoto.com

Tell us what you think with a comment below.

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Here are a few random photos from over the years:

Taken early in the morning outside Caribou Coffee.

Langton Lake Park in Roseville, MN

Nazareth Chapel at Northwestern College, St. Paul, MN

Somewhere in Chicago

Off the porch at LEVEL Brand, Warehouse District, Minneapolis

Vulture Mine, somewhere deep in the heart of the Arizona desert

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Well, it is finally here. I have been working on building a new site for a while, and have decided to release it a little early. What’s that called again? Oh yeah, a beta version, if you will. Beta means no one can complain that it looks unfinished, and I have plenty of time to finish the site. Yeah, I like Beta.

I have a lot of projects to add to my portfolio section and lots of little CSS tweaks left to make, so look for those in the near future. I will also be adding sIFR flash headline replacement and the FAUST content delivery technique developed by space150. I’d love your feedback if you would care to share your thoughts, so feel free. I hope you enjoy the new site!

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I’ve had the privilege of being asked to train at the DCTC IT Training Center in Eagan. My first class started tonight and will consist of four evening sessions at four hours each over the next couple of weeks. I’ll be introducing students to Adobe Flash, including best practices and tips on real-world usage on the web. I’m honored to have the opportunity to train for DCTC and look forward to teaching more Adobe classes in the future. If you are interested in taking IT Training classes from the DCTC you can sign up here: needcomputertraining.com. I’ll let you all know of any future classes I’ll be teaching. Cheers!

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I had the privileged of photographing a long-time friend and her fiancé, Johnathon, this past week. My wife and I will also be shooting their wedding this October, and we can’t wait! I must say again to Lisa and Johnathon, thank you for picking such a beautiful spot for pictures. I can see how it made for the perfect spot for your first date and engagement. Congratulations! You guys are beautiful.

This is the bench where Johnathon asked Lisa to marry him—SO pretty!

You can see more pictures from this shoot on Erin’s blog.

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Dan and Karolyn have been friends of mine for a long time. It is such an honor to be shooting their wedding this summer and I’m glad they were able to take a weekend to come up to the cities from the Chicago area for this engagement shoot. It ended up being the perfect day for a shoot.

Erin and I shot this one together and had a great time hanging out with the two love birds down at the Stone Arch Bridge. There are so many great textures all in one place. Congratulations Dan and Karolyn, we can’t wait for the wedding!

By the way, Karolyn is a fabulous videographer if anyone is in need :)

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Erin and I did a shoot a while ago, and I’m just getting around to posting some pics. We traveled to AZ for Christmas and spent a day at Vulture Mine out in the middle of the desert taking Chris’ senior pictures. It was a really cool place and provided some interesting back drops. Chris has become quite the amazing musician, playing the guitar, bass, trombone, french horn, piano and the occasional sousaphone. Did I miss anything Chris? :) Congrats man, you’re almost done! Love you buddy.

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I had a cool social media twitter marketing experience yesterday. The company I work for was looking for some project management software. I had a couple ideas, but I thought I’d see if the twitter community could offer any suggestions. I posted a tweet asking opinions about a certain software (Company A). I didn’t get any reply’s (sadly) to the tweet, but I did get a new follow soon after. I checked out the new follow’s twitter profile, clicked through to their web page, and found myself on a competitor’s (Company B) website to the software I mentioned in my tweet. Brilliant!

Here’s how I think this works. Company B is using a twitter search (twitterfall, search.twitter.com, or the like) to filter any tweets that mention certain words in reference to Company A. When they saw that I mentioned Company A, they simply followed me. That’s it. They rely on the fact that I’m curious enough to find out who is following me. Plus, they have a huge advantage–I’m already thinking about project management software in the back of my mind. So when I land on their site, I’m much more likely to stay awhile and see how Company B compares to Company A.

This is smart marketing because I, personally, did all the discovery. I was not bombarded with a message or an ad, I was simply given an opportunity to discover something on my own. When I found their site I was excited because now I have another potential solution to offer my employer. And it wasn’t forced discovery, so I’m more likely to recommend Company A and Company B to anyone who is looking for project management software.

This technique has huge potential for social media marketing.

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I recently had the pleasure of working with MN Resorts as a consultant to assist in building search functionality into their site. After taking a look at what we were up against I decided to use Wordpress to develop the new site.

Now I know Wordpress is not a traditional CMS, but traditional is not my style. Right now, Wordpress operates mostly as a blogging platform. However, in the future, I think that Wordpress will begin to move more in the direction of a general CMS, which is why I thought this would be a great jump start for adding future value to the MN Resorts site.

Essentially, all of the resort listings will end up as “Posts” in Wordpress with categories and tags attached for easy search-ability. All other pages in the site will fall into Wordpress “Pages.” Once the new site is built, MN Resorts will have a very simple interface to work with to make edits as resort listings change.

This is just another creative use of technology to deliver quality and effective results to Backlit Creative clients. If you need some assistance in developing a Wordpress blog, or have other “non-traditional” way of using the software, I’d love to hear about them!

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First, go check out Twitterfall. Then, take a look at this video, and see the immediate impact it has on Gmail going down today.

Gmail Fail on Twitterfall from Iain Tait on Vimeo.

This goes to show just how transparent the effects of social media can cause your company to become. Thanks to Iain Tait for the video and Sampad Swain for some more information on today’s events.

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