Have you done anything interesting with your sports photos lately?  Why did you spend all the time and effort to take them?  Of course to share and enjoy them, and maybe even sale them.  When you realize that you’ve captured a great great the first thing you want to do is to share it with someone.  In fact, sometimes I’m so excited about the photo I captured, I need to share them right now, and will find myself walking over to people showing the photo on the camera’s LCD screen.  Although small it’s good enough to see and people get excited.  The next thing I hear is wow, cool, I need a copy of that.  There are many ways to share and enjoy your photos, many of which we often overlook.  We will look at them on the camera, maybe once on the computer and then we move on to the next event.  Here are some great ways to enjoy your sports shots that you’ve taken such care to capture.

Electronically
Of course you can look at them on your computer screen, but there are better ways to leverage your computer.  Select a photo as the background on your computer or specify a folder for the screen saver.  To use your photos as the background on your computer or to choose a folder to use as the screen saver slide show in windows, go to the control panel and double click on display.  It’s easy to do and you’ll be surprised at how fun it is to see your photos displayed as the screen saver.  I’m repeatedly surprised as I walk up to my computer and look at the screen saver to see photos that I forgot I had taken…………….

Prints
Yes, perhaps old fashioned for some, but many times nothing beats having a set of prints of your favorite sports photos.  It’s kind of like holding cash in your hand it feels so much better than a check…………….Options for printing your photos are numerous and inexpensive.  Do them online or locally, they will turn out beautifully and are a joy to view and share.  Don’t forget that there are many more sizes than 4×6.  In fact vertical shots of athletes are great in a 5×7 size which doesn’t cost much more, but appears so much larger.  Take your best shots, frame them and hang them on the wall.  Do 8x10s, 11x14s, 16x20s and larger.  There is so much competition for printing and the prices have come down so dramatically you should take advantage of printing your photos.

Calendars
A great way to enjoy and share your photos is by creating a custom photo calendar.  Many years ago at Christmas my wife and I did a photo calendar that took hours and hours and only had a single photo per month.  How things have changed……………  Now it is fast and easy with both online and desktop software providing this service.  Use your own photos to create a custom calendar, specify personal dates such as birthdays and anniversaries.  Select photos for the cover, for each month and even for specific dates.  You can choose different layouts, themes, backgrounds and artwork.  The past couple of years at Christmas my siblings and I have produced a custom family calendar for the grandparents.  It was easy to coordinate, since we created an online account to share.  Each sibling uploaded their own photos into their account and then populated the pages and dates of the calendar that they were responsible for.  Once complete we had it printed and shipped for a Christmas gift.  Calendar’s are a great way to display your sports photos because it’s something you use regularly and will be looking at all year around.  Online services such as www.photoworks.com, www.kodakgallery.com, and www.smugmug.com plus many others provide photo calendar services.

Photo Books
Create stunning one-of-a-kind custom photo books for the coffee table or table-top from your sports photos.  Choose from a variety of sizes, styles and materials.  They can be hardbound, softbound, linen, vinyl or leather.  You select the photos, the layout, backgrounds and custom text.  Professional online tools make them easy to build through simple drag and drop methodology and the ability to automate or customize as much as you want.  The tools allow you to create and build your book anywhere at anytime. They are actually amazingly affordable for a custom one-of-a-kind piece.  You can create one for each sport, each athlete or targeted for a specific event. Beautiful photo books can be made at such places as www.snapfish.com, www.shutterfly.com, www.picaboo.com, www.mypublisher.com and many others.

Slide shows
Transform your sports photos into an entertaining photo slide show including captions and music!  Capture the excitement of the sporting event for those who couldn’t be there.  You can do this and more with a photo slide show, which are fun, easy to make and free.  There are many services to choose from each offering a unique approach. but all letting you choose captions, music and even hundreds of photos.  They make it easy to share as well through email, blogs or social networking sites.  Popular services are smilebox.com, slide.com, slideroll.com and many more.

Don’t forget you worked hard to take those great sports photos so remember to take time to enjoy them.

ProPix Photography

The Sports Photography Professionals

You’ve invested in a good digital camera, you are taking great photos the capture the moments of your family and friends, and you’re regularly copying your photos to your computer…………………..and you ask, am I done?  These are your precious memories that cannot be replaced.  Are they protected and preserved in a way that will last forever?  What have you forgotten and what could go wrong?  These are important questions and one hard drive crash on your computer can cause your photos to be gone forever!  Don’t let this happen to your precious memories.

In the old days photo preservation was a challenge.  Photos went directly from film to print and the prints themselves would fade and degrade over time.  Pictures could also be easily destroyed or damaged by weather, fire, floods, children or simply by time and use.  Since digital photos don’t fade or degrade over time many of us think that all is well and our photos will last a life time.  While it’s true that digital photos don’t fade and we have the opportunity to do a much better job of preservation, there are still many risks in the preservation of digital photos and if we don’t take the proper precautions our photos are at just as much risk if not more than the old printed photos.

If you’ve been using computers for a number of years you know the issue.  You’ve certainly lost a document or project you’ve been working on and you’ve probably had your entire computer crash.  You’ve probably also experienced your computer crashing and even losing your entire hard drive.  This is not fiction or a scare tactic it’s reality.  Those hard drives are mechanical and are spinning every second of every minute of every day that your computer is turned on.  Commercial businesses spend a lot of time and money ensuring they have redundancy (duplication) of their data so they are protected from inevitable hard drive failures.  You need to protect against this eventuality as well as the chance of physical damage through fire, floor or other natural disasters.  Of course you don’t have the resources nor want to spend the money that a commercial business does, but you do need the redundancy or duplication to ensure that you never lose your precious memories

There are a couple of options that are both reasonable in terms of price and time.  The first option is to use a USB external hard drive.  This is a hard drive that comes in a case and you plug into your computer.  It’s easy to attach and then disconnect and put in a drawer somewhere.  Prices have come down dramatically and you can purchase many Gigabytes quite affordably.  Many come with fancy software to do automated backups but I prefer the simplicity of just copying all my photos to the drive directly.  Then unplug it and put it in a drawer.  Then make sure you pull it out and do the same thing again every month or so, that way when you hard drive crashes you will have a backup of all your photos which you can easily copy over to a new hard drive.  Don’t leave your USB hard drive connected to your computer or you run the risk of losing that drive at the same time you lose your computer hard drive.  Not as likely but possible.  Having your external hard drive in the same physical location as your computer does not protect you from natural disasters.  For this protection you might want to consider keeping the USB drive at family, friends or work.  This does mean transporting it back and forth, but it does provide the added safety. 

Another option is to backup your photos to the internet.  Use a reputable website and they will provide another layer of redundancy on their side.  The beauty of this is that you have access to your photos from anywhere and anytime.  Many websites offer this capability, some also provide automatic backups while others act simply as an external USB storage drive.  Some of these websites will offer limited storage for free and then a monthly cost if you have a large storage requirement.  Be careful of any sites that offer unlimited storage for free forever…………….there just isn’t a business model behind that.  Also be careful that some of these sites on upload will resize your photo and you won’t be preserving the original as you thought.  While these sites are a great option for a backup they shouldn’t be your primary storage location which should remain your computer.

Commit now to making a second copy of your photos.  They are too precious and represent too many great memories for you to lose them.  Do it today and sleep better tonight!

ProPix Photography

The Sports Photography Professionals

Now that you have captured great action as part of your family sports photography you want to be able to share them with family and friends.  That doesn’t mean sharing just with the immediate family that can gather around the computer and look at them but with the extended family, friends from afar and geographically dispersed sports enthusiasts. One of the many benefits of digital photography is you no longer have to watch for “double print” day at the local photo print shop, you can simply share your photos electronically with as many people as you want and you can do it for free.  In the past you might have tried to email photos to family and friends.  While that might work for one or two photos it’s often fraught with problems and certainly an impossible way to numerous photos from a sporting event. In fact what typically happens is that your email or your family members email won’t accept large attachments so you will receive returned emails or errors.  There are better ways to electronically share your photos, and my favorite is using Google’s Picasa.

Simple & Free

Picasa is Google’s photo tool for finding, editing and sharing photos.  Picasa is simple, easy to use and it’s free.  Go to http://picasa.google.com/ or to Google, select photos or Picasa and download it and install it.  The download and install is easy to do and flawless.  Picasa offers many benefits including photo organizing, editing and sharing.  If you’re a user of gmail (Google’s email solution), then you have a Picasa account already.  If not, no worries, create an account for free.   The desktop software that you download, the web albums and the 1GB of online storage is all free.  After your install you now have free of charge (did I mention that it’s free) a quality application to organize and edit your photos, an online method for finding, storing and sharing photos.  The 1 GB of free online storage provided by Picasa is enough room for about 4,000 photos.  If you need more space you can purchase it. 

Importing Your Photos

During the install of Picasa you will be asked what folders you want Picasa to check for photos.  You can have Picasa check the entire computer or confine it to checking specific folders you your computer, such as “my pictures” folder and “my documents” folder.  Hopefully you have been keeping your photos organized a bit in those folders, but if not or if you’re not sure then have Picasa check the entire computer.  You will end up with some graphics from programs that really aren’t photos, but you can be sure that Picasa will find every photo on your computer. If you have lots of photos this will take a bit, so let it run and go do something else.  It’s pretty fast, but if you have thousands of photos it will take some time. A wonderful benefit of Picasa is that once installed it will continue to discover new photos automatically whenever they are added to your computer. 

Web albums

Now that Picasa knows about all the photos on your hard drive you can simply select the ones you want to share and upload them to a “web album.”  You can select an entire folder or individual photos to upload.  Once they are selected click upload and you will be directed to identify a web album to upload them to.  You can name it the same as the folder on your hard drive or change it.  Make sure it’s named something that your family and friends will recognize.  You must also select whether you want your web album to be private or public.  Public means that anyone family or not that is cruising Picasa can find and view your photos.  Private means that only the people you personally invite will be able to see this group of photos.

Sharing

Once you have your photos or albums online in the web albums they are ready to share and it’s easy.  Simply click share and then identify the email addresses of those you want to share with.  You can choose to share an individual photo or an entire album.  You will also have a chance to include a note in your email letting everyone know what photos you are sharing.  Each person you share with will receive an email with a link to your photos.  All they have to do is click on the link within the email and they will be taken to view your online photos.  Each individual receiving your email will not receive a different copy of the photos, but rather will be pointed to your online web album where your photos reside.  This makes the email quick and efficient and means there is only one copy of the photos on the internet.  How cool and easy is that.

Other Benefits (what your family and friends can do)

In addition to being able to view the photos and albums you have shared with them, your family and friends can easily add comments to the photos.  In fact I am using this feature to help document and tag old family photos, with the help of my Mother.  I have scanned and uploaded many old photos into Picasa, then sent my Mother a share email.  Whenever she has time she is viewing each photos and adding comments concerning the photo, the people, the date and location.  Very convenient and easy to do.  Viewers of your photos cannot delete or change them, but they can if you wish download the photos for their own use.  When you take photos at a sporting event of your children you will end up taking photos of their friends and teammates as well.  Invariable other parents will come to you and ask, can you get a shot of my child, or can I get copies of those photos.  Instead of making CDs for everyone on the team and running around like crazy, you can simply upload the photos to Picasa, send a "share" email out to the team and they can view and download the photos they want. 

Picasa is a great way to easily share your family sports photography shots with family and friends wherever they may be or live!

ProPix Photography

The Sports Photography Professionals

Adobe has entered into the online photo space with Photoshop Express. They have provided many of the photo adjustment tools found in Photoshop Elements in an online form. This service works well for sports photographers and seems to be aimed mostly with the amateur and possibly even the prosumer who wants to make some quick edits online and don’t have access to their desktop tools.

Adobe has placed itself in a different position than a service like flickr. I don’t really see Photoshop.com as a serious photo sharing/community option but rather an online photo editor. It doesn’t include such things as commenting on your photos. It does however include some basic sharing options such as emailing and embedding your photos on a web page. It also includes some pretty neat slideshow options that you or your visitors can use. They have joined up with Shutterfly to offer printing services.

The strength of this solution is in the editing tools. They offer a fairly wide range of options from cropping and rotating to white balance and touch-ups. These options are all easily accessible by a list on the left side of the window. To make an adjustment just click the tool you wish to use and either select from the presets provided or use a slider to make more fine tuned adjustments at the top of the screen.

While editing you are given the option to zoom and pan around  your photo so you can really see the detail of the adjustments you are applying. They have also incorporated a live preview, so when you are doing your adjustments it shows you those results on your photo nearly instantaneously. You can watch the video below for an example of this feature as well as a number of other adjustments available. Once you have made your changes Photoshop Express keeps a copy of the original so you can always go back if you don’t like the changes you have made.

Photoshop Express makes it extremely easy to manage your photos and albums. For uploading, you select the photos from your computer after which it brings up a handy dialogue box where it gives you the options to upload to your library, a new album or an existing album. It also shows the file names of each photo it will upload with the option to remove any before proceeding with the upload.

They have built a drag and drop interface where you can just drag your photos over to the add new album icon to create a new album. They employ the same mechanism for organizing. To add photos to a different album, just drag the photos to the album name and it makes a copy of them in the new album.

The biggest drawback is the amount of storage you are given for the free account. You are only allotted about 2 GB so this is not a very good solution for backing up all the family photos. You can however buy more storage if you like. They offer a range of 20 GB to 100 GB at $20 to $100 a year respectively.

If you already have your photos on another photo service such as flickr, facebook, photobucket, or picasa they make it extremely easy to gain access to those photos and use the built in tools to adjust them as well. This is a fantastic way of storing your photos on another service but being able to use the fantastic editing tools Photoshop Express gives you.

As noted earlier, I think the most powerful feature Photoshop Express has going for it is the simple yet powerful online editing capabilities. This combined with the fact that you can easily edit your photos from other services makes it a great option. I would recommend you check it out.

Terance

ProPix Photography

The Sports Photography Proessionals