The Dancer & Name Branding

Photo © Tewfic El-Sawy-All Rights Reserved

As I've posted a few days ago, I've been fiddling with the trial version of Flare, an app that describes itself as "a fast, easy, and beautiful darkroom for your desktop".

With Flare, one can apply interesting photographic effects to photographs, and it comes with more than 20 presets. It's a matter of drag and drop...mere seconds to get the preset look one likes. The above photograph (click to enlarge) of a traditional dancer I made in Bali last year got a Flare preset treatment, which includes a grungy border.

In all candor, I am beginning to like Flare a lot. I also happen to be a fan of Lightroom's presets...and a fan of anything that reduces the time I spend in post processing images to a minimum. And if this 'anything' is simple enough for a 2 year old to master, it's a hit as far I'm concerned.

In any event, it's fun to be able to use applications such as Flare and others, accepting that these degrade the quality of the images.

But wait, didn't I title this post to include Name Branding? This is important...If you ask any marketer how to set yourself apart from the rest, they’ll all tell you to the same thing, establish and secure your brand.

"I now have a lock on The Travel Photographer as a brand name on most popular blogs...this includes my domain brand name, my Twitter account and my Facebook page."

Keep reading and you'll see what I mean. For a couple of more examples of my photographs fiddled about with the Flare app, drop by The Travel Photographer on Tumblr. Yes, I have various blog platforms such as Posterous, Wordpress and Tumblr with The Travel Photographer brand name....and here's some useful advice: if you have a brand name (your name can be a brand name), you ought to do the same. I now have a lock on The Travel Photographer as a brand name on most popular blogs...this includes my domain brand name, my Twitter account and my Facebook page...and I'm keeping an eye out for any new ones.

As a footnote: I have no relationship whatsoever with Flare. It's just a fun application.