I haven’t taken full advantage of SmugMug yet, in fact I’ve hardly used it until lately. But I’m still planning on getting some photos loaded. In the meantime I was getting some use out of SmugMug by using it to post photos for review. But I can’t say the upload process is painless.
I had taken some personal photos lately, a couple of dance performances that my kids were in. And it was really nice to be able to post these photos on SmugMug, send out an invitation to the dance teacher so she would have a link to view them, and get feedback. Some of the photos will probably end up on their website so that’s kind of cool. Even some rejects will to be used to show the kids various points that could be improved.
I was using my 50 f1.4 from the audience. The dancers aren’t that large in the photos, even though I was only 5 or 6 rows back from the stage. But given the final use is mostly for web with some 4×6 prints I knew I could crop deeply into these photos and still get closeups. Even with the f1.4 I set the ISO to 400 to get a decent shutter speed which I arrived at by trial and error and examining some test shots.
In the end it was really nice to be able to use PhotoShop Elements 5 SmugMug feature to upload photos. But in the end I found the upload process a problem as even with cropping the files are pretty big. It took a long time, I had a couple of uploads fail. I even tried the SmugMug uploader, but the default option didn’t work so well, finally I tried the Internet Explorer ActiveX upload option. For the second batch I “exported” the files from PSE5 and selected 1024×768 jpegs. The resulting files are more than big enough for web viewing and upload MUCH faster. However, this option only worked because I had no plans to print from these files.
I’ll have to get some photos ready and start uploading and see if I can find a stable upload method.