It’s been pretty busy around here—between all the things going down with the house, the pace at work increasing, and my quest for more photo opportunities. I would be sleeping right now had I not taken an hour and a half-long nap this evening…I was zonked out. So instead, I thought I should probably take five minutes and update “the world” on what I’m up to.

I’ve been increasingly more interested in improving my photography skills, building up my portfolio, and positioning myself to someday integrating photography into a career. Admittedly, I’ve been becoming a bit bored with web design and it doesn’t keep me engaged like it used to—but hey, it pays the bills for now. Maybe someday I can get into portraiture and photojournalism. Anyway.

For a year or so, I’ve been using a program called Plogger—it’s okay but is marginal in terms of its claims. The gallery view is alright and the importing options decent, but other features like RSS feeds (which don’t work out of the box) just don’t cut it.

For the past couple months I’ve been looking at a service called SmugMug, which provides photo hosting services on three different scales—general consumers, “prosumers”, and professionals. I’ve held back because it’s a paid membership, and if I’m going to pay for something I want to be sure that it’s going to work and work well. But I’ve looked over their features and have been very impressed. With the base level, their features include:

• Easy interface for adding and sharing photos
• Unlimited storage!
• No ads or spam
• Crop the bad parts out of your photos EASILY
• Enhance the good parts of your photos
• You can personalize your galleries with themes
• Password-protect galleries you don’t want others to see
• Retrieve your high-res photos
• Buy professional prints & gifts
• Backup DVDs are available at your request
• Have your own URL
• Track unlimited traffic to your photos
• Be notified of comments
• Create private ShareGroups
• Create and join communities
• Tagging, RSS feeds, GoogleMaps API, and Ajax technology all support your photo site
• See photos on Google Maps (which will be fun for traveling vacations)
• Find your popular photos fast
• View your photos by timeline

But what I’ve been most impressed by is just how easy it is to use. There’s a few quirks to get used to—small things like figuring out what certain customization fields actually do, or probably more difficult…how best to organize photos that fall into so many different possible categories. But regardless, it’s a great web application and is easy to use. I hope to buy some prints soon and see how well those turn out. I’ll blog about that soon.

So related to that, I have moved my photo galleries over to this new domain: groundlevelphoto.com and have also set up a blog for handling more photography-specific posts over at groundlevelphotography.com. But the cool part is, with SmugMug galleries, you are given TWO RSS FEEDS: one for your recent photos and one for recent galleries.

Anyway, I’m going to try and actually get some sleep now. But if I piqued your interest in SmugMug, consider signing up. And if use this code: Pn5t71IAO8Ts8 or my e-mail address: michael.tangen (AT) gmail.com — you’ll get five bucks off your first year’s membership. Not much I know, but it’s something.

May 17, 2007, 12:02 am

Filed under: General, Photography, Websites

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