WORLD SPORTS IMAGES has just launched!

Today I am proudly launching new project called :

 WORLD SPORTS IMAGES

When I started with sports photography in 2013 I immediately become hooked to it. Through 2013 and 2014 I was shooting different venues, mainly Czech American Football league but also some beach volleyball events, ninepins (yes it is a sport :), ice hockey (poor lense) and many other sport venues. 

My image bank grew to 50000 images from which the selection of the best ones is around 2700 photographs. I started to think about my own online photo bank, with robust system, with one type of description of each image. Because I delivered my images to different agencies through the years, I knew this will be the tough one. Go to each photo and manually rewrite it to my own standard. Man I wish I would did it in the beginning.

I started to build it (two times already) and I was always pushed back by the effort it required and the back-end capabilities and price of the system. Until this year. With the new Zenfolio system I found exactly what I needed from product/license/system/services options available. So I started again and finally I finished it. 

From now on all my images will be available through WorldSportsImages.com 

But this is not the end. There are many new things, products, services  that I want to introduce in the future, but lets take it step by step.

So feel free to visit my new page . Also a new twitter account was setup @WorldSportsIM so if you want to get news about sports photography and new images, be sure to follow it. 

Petr Benda - shooting with one light

I had great opportunity to make a shoot with one of the best basketball players in Czech Republic and my friend Petr Benda. The setup was very easy, I used my 5D Mark III with 24-105 f4, one Speedlite 600EX-RT and transmitter ST-E3-RT. The speedlight was set on highspeed sync and it was inside the softbox from Lastolite (76x76cm Ezybox). The settings were manual usually 1/400, f4, iso 100. The light was perfect , it was right after the sun set with creamy blue sky.  Here are the results, let me know what do you think.

Places to learn photography from basics to advance techniques

If I remember well I started to learn photography online three years ago. There are many places right now where you can learn anything about photography from basic courses "how to operate your camera" to really advanced techniques with strobes, lights, studio, outdoor you name it.

For someone who has just bought a camera, it could be pretty confusing, therefore a lot of people start with workshops, books, private lessons etc. Don't get me wrong, all of these methods work. However, in today's Internet age, there are plenty of places where you get the education for free or for a really small fee.

Let me share with you my sources that I have gathered over the years, and I hope it will help you learn something new. Let me start with the traditional ones.



1. Workshops

When I bought my first camera, I also received a voucher for first Canon photography school lesson in our town. A known local photographer (sorry I don't remember the name ;) was presenting his work and explaining why he picked the photographs and what is the story behind them. That was great, you start to get the idea about the story, composition etc. But not so much about technical stuff. So If you get the chance, go for it, you will meet interesting people keen on photography, and if it is for free, that's like a bonus. Just search in google for your town + photography workshop. Nevertheless, this is not the area I was going to talk about. (For Czech people, you can find some here :  +Megapixel (workshops), FotoSkoda, Idif ...)

2. Books

After that, I started looking for some books. I don't remember how exactly I got to this one, but I think my wife told me that it is a well written and easy to understand book. I bought +Scott Kelby 's Digital Photography book 1, Scott has one of the most amazing and most simple ways to teach. You can find it on Peachpit or in Czech language here. As he says himself, the books are not full of theory and technical terms, what he does is that he basically answers questions as though you were standing next to him and asking him, such as: "Hey, how do I get this flower to be in focus, with the background out of focus?". I can highly recommend these for start. But now, let's focus on the biggest media where I learned most of the stuff, which is the Internet



3. INTERNET

If you start searching google or youtube for photo basics, you will get tons of links. It is hard to find the best ones. Here are some that worked great for me, and where I daily look for inspiration and hints.

Youtube channels

• DigitalRev TV - if you like humorous reviews and photo tips, this is the right channel. +Kai Man Wong is not just presenting products, but he does some very simple and interesting photography experiments. This will open your mind how easy it could be to take very interesting shots. Love it :) Find them on g+ under +DigitalRev 

• Adorama is one of the biggest photo stores in the US, but not only that, they also have a lot of photo tips with +Joe McNally , +Mark Wallace , +Gavin Hoey , +Tamara Lackey and other great photographers. Lots of videos are featuring products from +Adorama, but don't get too confused or hooked here, these are not mandatory :)

• Kelby media group - plenty of videos from +Scott Kelby , +Matt Kloskowski and others. This also includes one of the best videos I have ever seen, which answered my main question about the really great photos "How do they do it? Do the top photographers just see a great picture and take it?" Just check out Scott Kelby's Crush the Composition and you will find the answer.

• Phlearn - behind this strange name you will find +Aaron Nace and plenty of tutorials to enhance your photographs in Photoshop. +Phlearn .com is not only about Photoshop, you will find a lot of behind the scenes videos, photography tips etc.

Paid learning

To be honest I watch only 2 sources that are paid, and frankly there are so many videos and courses that it is hard to keep up.

• KelbyOne - delivered by Scott and his media group. This is a huge source. Do you wanna become a sports, portrait, fashion, food or landscape photographer? Or do you just wanna know how to operate your camera? You just need to pay $25 / month and you can have it all from the world best photographers. +KelbyOne rocks!

• CreativeLive - founded by +Chase Jarvis has a little bit different format. You can watch any course that is live for free. After the course is over, you can buy it. So it is good to subscribe to the newsletter and watch it live or afterwards in rebroadcast still for free. +CreativeLive focuses mainly on photography, but there are also other courses on Music&audio, business&money etc.

Learn the tools 

Tools like Photoshop or Lightroom are a necessary part of any great photographs. But those are only tools, they will not make the photo, they will help to enhance it and transfer the artists' idea to reality. So it is good to know them

• Adobe TV is a great place to start with Photoshop or Lightroom, +Julieanne Kost is an adobe evangelists and a great teacher, you can find her videos here.

• Lynda.com is also a great place to learn, as I understood they have also moved to subscription $25/month, + you can find their videos on AdobeTV as well. I don't use them too often now but I did in the past.

Follow social media

If you are lucky and you already know what exactly you wanna shoot, just follow the best people in that area on google+, twitter, flickr, facebook etc. Social media is the key for inspiration and quick tips. You can google articles like this 60 Google+ Photographers to Inspire You or Top 104 Amazing Photographers to Circle on Google+ or this 2,500 Kick Ass Photographers on Google+ and you will get plenty of inspiration.
Definitely don't miss people like +Joe McNally, +Jay Patel, +Peter Hurley, +Chase Jarvis, +Alan Shapiro, +Thomas Hawk, +Takahiro Yamamoto, +Jessica Ambats, +Lindsay Adler, +Sue Bryce  and many more.


So here you have it. I might have covered about 0,01% of material available but this was my way to learn photography, and believe me ... I'm still at the beginning. Photography is great, there are so many areas to improve your skills, that you will never stop learning, and I really mean never ever.

Although learning is important, shooting is even more. You will never improve just by listening to courses and watching more videos, you need to practice, practice, practice.

And remember what Alfred Stieglitz said: “Wherever there is light, one can photograph.”

If you have any interesting sources, please leave a comment. Sharing is caring, thank you ;)

Why should you consider paying for photo-hosting services?

Because it saves tons of time !

But there are definitely more reasons why you should consider investing some money into photo hosting services like Smugmug, Zenfolio or Photoshelter etc.

I would like to share my story with Smugmug and how that saved me a lot of time and made me convinced about the value of their services. I am not affiliated to Smugmug anyhow, and this is not a form of PR and I didn't get paid for writing this :) just to be clear about this.

I signed up to Smugmug last year. Partially because there was a huge hype about launching a new version of the system, and a lot of photographers in the US were loving it. Honestly I didn't know what to expect. I understood, you can build your portfolio, you can save there all your images, and you can sell them as prints or digital downloads.
After I signed up (still in the legacy Smugmug version) I submitted a few images and ..... felt lost. There were tons of settings, templates, different tabs and links, hard to navigate, so I deleted the account :D

But that hype about the upgrade got me in again, so I signed up again. It was much easier to setup a new
portfolio page, and the interface was much more user friendly. At that time I also had a portfolio on Squarespace, which is a great portfolio system, integrated with blog. It looked nice, but uploading images was a lengthy process of exporting images from LR and uploading manually. You can imagine what happens when you need to tweak some photos. Delete the previous one, tweak it in LR, export, etc...

Reason 1 - Lightroom plugin

And here comes one of the biggest time saver for me. Smugmug Lightroom plugin. It is integrated into LR as a publishing service. And this was like a dream come true. No more manual exports, just drag and drop or edit and publish. If you want to see it in action, check out this video. As it was so easy, I finally made order in my sports photos and started to build a proper online catalog.

So, was this enough to convince me to pay a monthly fee? Right now you can have your images in RAW on Google+ free of charge, where you have 15GB and only images larger than 2048 x 2048 pixels count towards your storage limit.

Reason 2 - unlimited storage, online backup 

You can upload as many photos as you like, and you will never have to pay for storage upgrades. More than that, it is a safe backup as they are backing up all files with Amazon Web Services. I do backup my images on 2 drives and one additional external NAS, but it is nice to have an option if everything burns down :)


But back to the workflow. As I continued using it, I figured out that it is more than that. While I was manually rewriting this blog over the weekend from Squarespace (automatic import didn't work,what a surprise) I discovered more and more features that really surprised me.  You might face palm now, but as I had never used it, it was new for me.


Reason 3 - access to links with different picture sizes and batch galleries.

I wanted to keep the pictures the same size without blogger changing it. This was quite easy as Smugmug offers links to different file sizes, link to gallery and also a link for buying image and batch buy for the gallery. More than that you have there a copy button so that you don't have to press crtl+c :D a small feature but a lovely one.



Reason 4 - batch changes to anything you need to change

I also wanted to put a watermark on all my images, but some of them had an older one on them and some had none. If you do it manually (I can't even imagine why you would do it) it could be frustrating. You have to run the scripts and than upload everything again?
In Smugmug I just select images, go to the settings and change the watermark image. Smugmug does the rest. Beautiful! It could have been developed for folders and galleries as well, so that you don't have to go gallery by gallery, but maybe in next version.

How about changing rights to some photo folders, changing social sharing, commenting, right click protection etc.? All of these things can be done by only a few clicks. And that is a big win for me. That's what I am willing to pay for. Thank you +SmugMug :)

There are lots of other features like online store, 24x7 support which is excellent, marketing, branding, SEO, template customization, privacy settings etc. However to cover all of them, it would be a really long post. Those 4 reasons I mentioned above were the most crucial for me, and huge time savers. Remember, time is more than money;)

If you consider giving it a try, here is my referral link.
Or use this coupon code for a discount : gHFOQ9VEuYSPg

How about you? Do you use similar services or do you have your own portfolio for free?


P.S.  here is a short pricing overview of those 3 services I mentioned, there might be more companies offering these services, but I hear about these three from photographers all the time.

Smugmug	Price	Storage
BASIC	$5/month or $40/year	Unlimited
POWER	$8/month or $60/year	Unlimited
PORTFOLIO	$20/month or $150/year	Unlimited
BUSINESS	$35/month or $300/year	Unlimited
Zenfolio	Price	Storage
BASIC	$30/year	4 GB + 2 GB/year
UNLIMITED	$60/year	Unlimited
PREMIUM	$140/year	Unlimited
PREMIUM BUSINESS	$300/year	Unlimited
Photoshelter	Price	Storage
BASIC	$9,99/month  ($120/year)	10GB
STANDARD	$29,99/month ($359/year)	60GB
PRO	$49,99/month ($599/year)	1000GB