verb – To work together, especially in a joint intellectual effort.[dictionary.com]

It’s almost impossible to avoid reading or hearing about the “financial crisis” of World economies, and all the doom & gloom that is to follow.  It’s also difficult to avoid feeling some sense of insecurity and fear…and guess what, you’re not the only one.

So, what can we do?  There are many ways out of this storm.  For me, it’s to team up with other like-minded people and together, I believe, we can survive and then prosper on the up-swing.  This is what I find special and encouraging about 4togsblog.co.uk.  In fact, 4togsblog was the root for an initiative that I’ve recently started called United Photographers, a site for creative wedding photographers in Cape Town, South Africa.  At the heart of United Photographers, is a blog aggregator.

While, 4togsblog looks at the social lives of it’s members (much like Mammoth Men), I took the concept and applied it to the business of photography…in my case, wedding photography.  What if you collaborated with 10 of the most creative wedding photographers in your city?  How true would it be to be judged by the company you keep?

So, why would you want to mix with the competition?  Well, if you’re offering the exact same service/product, then there’s competition.  However, if there’s diversity, then it’s not competition…just opportunity.  Opportunity to cast a wide net and feed off each others opportunities and in the era of SEO, blog aggregation is a funnel for web traffic.

To conclude, I encourage you to look out for examples of collaboration between “competitors”.  You can leave them as comments to this post.

Bookmark This:

The 4Togs Blog was founded with the spirit of collaboration in mind, mainly between the four of us, but we’re always open to new ideas and great imagery. Following on from Mark’s posts on strangers and also on the US 50 States project, we’re now looking to open up the floor to other people who would be interested in joining in with a variety of upcoming projects.

The idea is to get photographers working together, to produce something greater than the sum of it’s parts, to drag people kicking and screaming from out of their nice, snuggly comfort zones and into the big wide world. There are a number of projects that we have coming up and we’d like as many people as possible to participate and then share their results with the world via the 4togs blog.

We’re also looking for guest bloggers. If you have a photography-related article in you and you’d like to share it with us, we’d love it if you’d get in touch with a brief outline. It can be about anything photographic… the more passionate about it you are, the better!

So, if any of these things are of interest to you, please GET IN TOUCH and we’ll give you a shout just as soon as we’re hot to trot.

Bookmark This: