At ImagingUSA, in Atlanta,I discovered that Professional Photographers of America is an ideal home for wedding photographers, portrait photographers and school photographers.  Not so much for golf course photographers.  But in spite of its orientation toward studio and people photographers, I still got some great info at the 4 classes I attended.  And the trade show was excellent, in that all of us who spend our days looking thru a viewfinder use the same toys. 

I want to give a special thanks to 3 presenters.  Sarah Petty, from The Joy of Marketing, was excellent.  In fact, based on her se ssion, I'm now digging in on revamping my entire marketing plan.  Julieanne Kost, from Adobe, was excellent, too, though her focus was on the technical aspects of Lightroom 4.  I've spent time with many of her online videos, but she's much more entertaining live.  Sort of a goofball.  And very smart.  My favorite session, though, was one offered by Jared Platt.  He, like Julieanne, was focused on Lightroom 4, but he hit my sweet spot by spending his time talking about how to be more efficient and effective in the program.  Since I deal with very large numbers of photos from each shoot, efficient workflow is something that is very close to my heart.  And Jared was excellent.

My big discovery at the trade show was Zenfolio, the providers of this new web home for galleries of my work.  SmugMug, my previous host, is a terrific photo host, but it's not really designed to host web sites.  Zenfolio appears to offer all that SmugMug offers, along with a pretty full-featured web site structure.  I'm just now dipping my toes in the Zenfolio stream, but so far I'm impressed.  Naturally, I have a home page slideshow, and I've launched my Golf Course Portfolio, too.  But because I'm learning some new procedures and being pretty anal retentive about using proper SEO practices as I add photos, the addition of galleries is going slowly, but I feel like the payoff in higher traffic will make the effort worthwhile.

I'm also very impressed with a very helpful utility Zenfolio pointed me toward... Upload Junction, a site that offers an amazing app for transferring files between photo hosting sites.  Amazing!  I spent all of 2 minutes setting up the transfer of images from SmugMug to Zenfolio and in a few hours, Upload Junction had transferred 59GB of photos to my new home.  It didn't tie up my computer, my time, or my resources.  And it was free!  I've gotta find a way to thank those guys!  I'd give them my firstborn but at 21, he's sort of making his own decisions these days!

(By the way, the image at the right has nothing whatsoever to do with this blog.  I just like it!)