When the Mono County Economic Development, Tourism, and Film Commission wanted to put its best foot forward with a publisher designing a magazine for global film location scouts, they turned to Eastern Sierra photographer Jeff Sullivan. A landscape photographer and guidebook author living at Topaz Lake, Jeff has led dozens of photography workshops for night photography at the local ghost town of Bodie, as well as landscape photography workshops in the broader Eastern Sierra region of California, especially in the Mono Lake to Tioga Pass to Mammoth Lakes area of Mono County.
The publisher, Boutique Editions, liked forwarded samples of Jeff's work so much, they selected the Bodie image above for the cover of Location International 2015! The magazine is launched each year at the Festival de Cannes in May. The publicity enjoyed by Mono County continued from there:
"The magazine is distributed to 15,000 movie professionals worldwide, and is also available at Locations Trade Show in LA; Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity; Berlinale; MIPTV and MIPCOM; Sundance Film Festival, Utah and at AFM in Los Angeles."
Producing stunning photos of locations is nothing new to Jeff. He wrote a 320-page guidebook to the best photography locations in California from Mono County and Yosemite to San Diego: "Photographing California Vol. 2 - South". Locations, and great photos of them, are exactly what he focuses on. Using the proceeds from the sale of this book to fund the creation of in-depth regional guides, he's on a mission to help you discover "the best of the West"!
The popularity of photo sharing and social media sites in recent years had given him excellent opportunities to showcase his work. Participating on Flickr since 2006, he is one of the most-followed photographers on this site popular with serious photographers, with over 45,000 contacts and an average of about 10,000 views per day.
Posting his images on the new Google+ social media site in 2011 as he worked on his guidebook earned him a Top 100 ranking on the site in the site's first two years, amassing nearly 2 million contacts. At least one of the common beliefs about social media post success id true: competent photos really do give social media posts a huge boost! This helped Jeff succeed with his photography workshop business, since a post's reception on Google+ has been determined by Internet marketing consultants to be the #1 factor in helping a site achieving favorable placement in Google searches.*
Mono County and Boutique Editions weren't the only organizations noticing Jeff's work in 2015. A travel company in the U.K. noticed his work and named him a "Top 100 Travel Photographer in the World 2015". Upon his book release in late 2015 he took a celebration lap of the Western U.S. and Canada, and one of his photos from Yellowstone National Park won an Outdoor Photographer Magazine "iPhone and Instagram" contest.* It's puzzling that many organizations invest in maintaining social media activity, but don't pay more attention to the quality of the photography in their posts! That's like entering an auto race at Laguna Seca Racetrack in a Honda Accord. Unless you drive a track-ready Porsche, your family car has no business running with race cars. Similarly, investing in online marketing activity but using consumer-quality photography will cause your investment in marketing on the Internet to under-perform against the competition as well. If you're going to compete with the best in the world at anything, including getting your social media posts noticed with the lowest possible investment of time, put your best foot forward and don't skimp on high quality, eye-catching images!
To see Jeff's work from 2015, both new images and reworked images from past years, see his blog: "Top 10 Favorite Travel and Landscape Images From 2015".
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| Late Fall Colors on Conway Summit |
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| Sunset Rainbow at Topaz Lake |
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| Rainbow Over Bodie's Standard Mill |
Award-winning landscape photographer and astrophotographer Jeff Sullivan has been exploring the American West for four decades. Honing his DSLR photography since he took a 35mm darkroom photography class in eighth grade, Jeff started his freelance photography business in 2006. He has led dozens of photography workshops in Yosemite, Death Valley, the Eastern Sierra and the historic Wild West ghost town of Bodie, California.
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