JC Dill

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If you want to sell photos you posted on your own website or blog, Exposure Manager offers a service called Buy This Image:

http://www.buythisimage.com/

This is ideal if you already regularly share photos on your blog or website and aren\’t yet ready to setup a full account with Exposure Manager or Smugmug.

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To display and sell my photos, I regularly use two photo hosting and fulfillment websites:
http://www.smugmug.com
http://www.exposuremanager.com/aff/equinephotoart

Here are some of the pros and cons for each service:

I find that Smugmug (SM) is designed primarily for Photographers who don\’t do large events. Their system works well for fine art photographers and for photographers who do smaller events. The reason they don\’t work well for large event is their workflow and folder/gallery system doesn\’t work well when you are posting 1000s of photos for just one event.

I find that Exposure Manager (EM) excels for photographers who shoot large events. Their workflow and folder/gallery system gives event photographers the tools they need to get photos online sorted the way event photographers want to sort them, and gives event photographers the ability to determine their own fulfillment schedule. Most of the photographers I know who are using EM are primarily sports shooters who shoot 1000s of photos at sporting events such as high school or college games, sporting competitions, etc.

EM has much better coupon/voucher tools and options than SM. They also offer trading cards and packages designed for sports such as \”Team and Individual\” print packages.

SM has a much better keywording and search-by-keywords features. If you want to enable search by keywords you should use Smugmug.

SM has an amazing support structure. More than 50% of their employees work in customer support – supporting photographers and their clients. They have a forum site called Digital Grin – dgrin.com – where many of their employees as well as other SM users can answer questions about how to customize or use your SM site.

EM has a much smaller support department. Their support folks are great, but you may wait a bit longer for help and may not be able to get detailed help for customization questions like you can from SM support staff thru the dgrin forum.

EM can sometimes roll out new features faster than SM, when they see an urgent need. They made a dramatic improvement in how a photographer can upload print-ready images after an order comes in.

EM treats the print buyer as primarily the photographer\’s customer. SM, not so much – they consider the buyer as primarily a Smugmug Customer. There are pros and cons to both approaches.

Smugmug, offers a free 15-day trial. Use this personal coupon

Rj4IWoed1h9YM

in the \’Referred by\’ field on the signup form (Important: Don\’t enter any other information, such as my name or email address) and you will get a $5 discount on your annual fee..

Exposure Manger also offers a free 14-day trial. Use this URL to sign-up:

http://www.exposuremanager.com/aff/equinephotoart

You will get a $5 discount on the yearly plans or your second month free on the monthly payment plans.

Both services require that you enter a credit card when you sign-up, because you can immediately begin to sell photos thru the site and can give your customers vouchers or coupons that conceivably result in selling at a loss (the customer doesn\’t pay their fulfillment costs for the prints). They need a way to bill you for the difference. Neither site will bill your card for your account fee until after your trial period is up. If you don\’t want to continue with the account, canceling is easy and no-hassle. I\’ve referred dozens of photographers to both sites over the years and I\’ve never had anyone complain, including those that stayed with the service and those who decided that one or the other wasn\’t quite right for their needs and canceled. I can honestly say that I have complete confidence in both of these companies to do right by their customers, both photographers and the clients who buy prints and gifts thru the site.

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Laurel wrote:

> What are wreckers thoughts on starting with a snaffle vs a side pull
> vs a bosal (which I haven\’t got, but could get ;) Taking into account
> that not having a bosal means I don\’t have bosal reining experience,
> either. When you use a new piece of headgear, ideally, one of you should be skilled in this style of riding while the other is learning. But at the very least, if you have no experience riding with a new form of headgear then the horse should be broke and have a general idea how to respond to rein aids even though the aids will come differently thru the new headgear.

With an unbroke horse it\’s *much* more important that you have a pretty good idea of how the headgear works than the particular headgear choice. I would eliminate all forms of headgear you have no experience using. If you really want to use something you have no skill using, first obtain that skill with another horse before you try using it on an unbroke horse.

Over the years I\’ve started a lot of horses in snaffles without any problems. I prefer to use a full-cheek or D-ring snaffle so that it can\’t be pulled thru the horse\’s mouth. (Many Western-style trainers address this by using a curb strap on the snaffle, but I think that\’s a poor alternative.) This way you can swing your hand out to the side and let the far side of the bit help move the horse\’s head to follow the pull of your hand, both when teaching the horse to follow a feel and if you need to use an emergency one-rein turn or stop.

I also prefer to start a young horse in a bit, without using a noseband. would rather have the horse able to open the mouth but discover that the bit remains, and if my rein aids are too strong and the horse wants to open its mouth in protest I want to SEE those results rather than hide/mask them by using a noseband.

jc

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Regarding photo management software options after moving from Windows to a Mac:

I use Lightroom for ~95% of my photo processing. I use Photoshop CS3 (with NIK plugins) for more extensive photo editing – e.g. composites, cloning, perspective correction, making files for prints larger than 8×12. http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshoplightroom
http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/photoshop

I don\’t see the point in having 2 different programs to manage my photos (e.g. Lightroom plus BreezeBrowser or Lightroom plus PhotoMechanic) that many other event photographers recommend, as Lightroom can do all that I need. I use Cyberduck (open source / freeware) for FTP/SFTP. http://cyberduck.ch/

If you have Amazon S3 file backup service, you can use Cyberduck to access S3.

http://aws.amazon.com/s3/

My workflow for event photos is to process in Lightroom (mark rejects/selects, do batch edits as necessary, then export the selects as proof-size jpegs to pictures/proofs/$namedfolder that will become the gallery name on EM); then launch Cyberduck FTP software, login to ExposureManager, and drag the proof folder into the FTP window to upload. Then I login to EM to process the folder into the gallery structure, making sure that the pricesheet and gallery options are correct, and pick a photo for the gallery thumbnail.

One caution about the Mac platform – it has a built-in function to \”compress\” files and make a zip file, but this compression program is causing problems because it includes hidden resource files, and sometimes the resulting zip file can\’t be unzipped by a non-mac system. (I ran into this with a big client when I uploaded a zip file bigger than 4 GB and they couldn\’t unzip it.) I\’m working on a way to create an apple-script program and associate it with the right-click menu so I can right-click and select the script that will zip the files without the resource files. I can do this in Terminal, but that\’s awkward. When I get this worked out I\’ll post the solution back here.

When I moved from Windows to a Mac (2 years ago) I had already moved to open-source programs for browsing (Firefox), mail (Thunderbird) and office applications (Open Office) which made the migration much easier since all of those programs run the same way on the Mac. http://www.mozilla.com/firefox
http://www.mozilla.com/thunderbird
http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/download/aqua-Intel.html

My biggest \”loss\” was losing Forte Agent (windows only) which I used to read several text-only usenet newsgroups. I also missed using Irfanview for fast viewing of jpegs. Mac\’s built-in Preview application is good, but not as good as Irfanview. I found Phoenix Slides (freeware, suggested donation: $10-20) which ROCKS as an alternative \”quick view\” slideshow program. When you want to launch a jpeg folder as a slideshow FAST, this is the application to use. It is really useful when someone else provides you with a photo files you want to immediately share (without review/editing) with others, e.g. at a photo club meeting or class.

http://blyt.net/phxslides/

Another application that I use a LOT on the Mac is GrandPerspective. It creates a visual map of your hard drive or a specific directory to show you what programs/files/directories/folders is taking up a lot of space on the drive. Since I\’m on a laptop, managing disk space is an ongoing issue. I shot over 150 GBs of photos in 2009 and my drive is just 200 GB, so obviously I have to manage my drive space carefully and archive photos off onto external drives (with backups on DVDs) regularly.

http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net/

And I just started using Toast to create my backup DVD archives. Aside from Adobe products, Toast is the most expensive application on my Mac. I wish there were less expensive (open source? :-) applications that would do what I need here, as I don\’t use 95% of what Toast does. The feature I use – Toast lets me select a large folder (e.g. all of my 2009 photos, over 100 GBs of data) and then will span those files across multiple disks, creating \”spanned\” folders as needed, without spanning any individual files. This lets me create a full DVD set of all my photos for the year, without breaking my folder structure or breaking any single individual file.

http://www.roxio.com/enu/products/toast/titanium/overview.html

jc

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> IMO it doesn\’t matter what the horse may have been known > to do. When you get on a horse you\’re taking a risk.

Yes, and No. We don\’t have all the facts in this case – we don\’t know
the truth about the horse\’s history with bolting, and we don\’t know what
issues there might have been with the headgear used in this ride, and we
don\’t know if this was the rider\’s first time on this horse, and we
don\’t know if the horse\’s bolting issues/history were disclosed to the
rider. All of these factors could impact the issue.

For example:

1) If the horse was known to bolt, and in fact had bolted with someone
the previous week, and they put a new rider on the horse with an
insufficient (e.g. with a rope halter, rather than with a bit), AND they
didn\’t tell the rider the horse was known to bolt, then the problem is
that they didn\’t properly disclose to the rider known risks with *this*
horse.

2) OTOH, if the horse never bolted before, or if the horse had a
problem bolting 3 years ago but had since received remedial training and
hadn\’t bolted since so there was no reason any reasonable horseperson
would suspect or believe it might suddenly bolt again with this rider
now, then it\’s just \”one of those things\” a rider assumes the risk of
happening as part of the activity of horseback riding.

Taking horses out of the picture – think about the situation when a
business has a wet floor. They put up a sign saying \”caution, wet
floor\” to alert customers and employees to the dangerous situation.
Once the floor is dry, they can remove the sign. If you manage to slip
and fall on a normal dry floor, the company wasn\’t negligent merely
because the floor had previously been wet, dangerous, and labeled as
such. Even if someone spills something moments before and you slip on a
*wet* floor, it still isn\’t negligence – it just happened and there\’s no
reasonable way the company could have warned you or prevented you from
slipping. However, if there\’s an ongoing problem with water on the
floor in this area (e.g. leaky roof) and they don\’t address it AND they
don\’t have a sign up when the floor is wet, then we have a situation
where there is likely some negligence and the company should be held liable.

I hope some smart equestrian-business defending lawyer can present this
type of analogy in a future case to help educate judges, juries, and set
a precedent that makes sense.

jc

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via comics.com

I\’m not sure if this will post properly or not – let\’s see.

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