I really am quite serious about taking my photography seriously this year. Even if I do still have one baby on the hip, and a 3.5 year old home from 12 noon daily. (In fact it’s school holidays right now, so I have both of them 24/7 until the 21st of January.)

I started today, sifting through everything from my equestrian photos (horse shows), to portraits I’ve done, to architectural stuff, to food photos, in order to finally put together a proper online portfolio over at my official photography site. I will post a link when it’s all fine and dandy okay?

Part of what I’m doing is writing photoshop actions to try and speed up my post production process. This includes creating a watermark on my images so that people don’t steal them. It’s a sad fact that even folks with loads of money, will steal stuff that I stood like 8 hours in the beating sun working on.

Anyway, with horse shows in particular, because I take about 600-800 images in a day, I need to be able to batch edit these files, with an action that I’m working on, which not only reduces the image so that it’s web friendly, but puts my watermark on it, so that the pond scum bottom feeders don’t feel the need to right click save as if you know what I mean.

Anyway, it means that I really need to focus on developing the site so that when people look at it, I get new business, and since I’m not going to be employing some designer to do it all for me for colossal sums of money, it means that I’m learning new things everyday, and really feel like I’m getting somewhere. If I’m faced with a problem, I turn to graphic/web design forums because *I* have got to sort it out.

So because I feel like sharing, here’s my to do list for today:

• Complete selecting images for online portfolio
• Complete photoshop action to reduce image size/resolution
• Complete photoshop action to apply watermark
• Combine these two actions into one.
• Test actions by running them on selected portfolio photographs
• Upload these photographs to my official online gallery
• Test online gallery to see if it’s user friendly and make adjustments

This weekend:

• Revamp front end of official photography site (install new blog template and tweak widgets)
• Design 125 x125 buttons for each of my portfolio sections i.e. equestiran, portraits, travel, wildlife, landscape etc

This month:

• Sit down for 5 minutes and actually plan the direction and content for my 4 different websites going forward.
  This will improve my keyword selection and page ranking, and will mean good things all around for those people interested in reading stuff they’re interested in. It will also mean good things for potential advertising opportunities as the individual sites will be more focused and less ‘everything goes’.
• Plan ahead with my blog posts, carry around a notebook and pen and jot down ideas instead of forgetting them the moment something else happens.
• Write helpful, interesting posts.
• Try not to run out of freakin’ bandwidth half way through the month, finish investigating wimax options.

The Next 3 Months:

• Investigate how to move 3 of my sites (currently hosted locally)  onto the same unlimited package that I have with Startlogic, so that I can manage all my goodies together.
• Work consistently on SEO and keyword selection.

So that’s the bells and whistles of it all, everything but the kitchen sink with the Delta faucet‘s on it. Nothing like setting goals for myself that I *MUST* stick to.  Plus, I need to stop feeling guilty that I’m not entertaining the kids 24/7. Yes it’s important to spend quality time with them, but it doesn’t help them, if I spend so much time with them, that I suffer, and my photography suffers because then nobody wins.

Okay. So who else has big plans for January?

Here’s a sample of one of my equestrian porfolio shots. What do you guys think of my logo/watermark? I just designed it.  I’m going to create an embossed, transparent version to place at various points on the photographs by the time I’m done.

Dressage Rider

Possibly Related Posts:

• Oh Camera My Camera
• When Fake is Better
• Stop the Blogs! (Presses!)
• On the Flip Side
• Must.Keep.Eyes.Open.