A Little More Clarity About SmugMug and Flickr

I've gotten a little more clear about how I want to use online photo hosting, and it requires both SmugMug and Flickr....

I started my online photo display using Flickr, but I then changed to SmugMug because I liked the kinds of galleries I could create on SmugMug much better than the ones I created on Flickr, and because SmugMug allows me to use my own domain name, photos.schof.org.

However, there’s two types of photo collections I want to publish to the web, and I’m finding that I need both SmugMug and Flickr to make that happen. (I could probably do it with two separate SmugMug sites, but since I already have a paid Flickr account, I’m going with both.)

My photography workflow is simple — I’ll shoot as much as I can when I’m on location, trying to catch the peak of action, the peak of emotion, while still being in focus (except for the rare cases where being out of focus works). I end up deleting about 80 to 90% of the photos.

So on a typical shoot I’ll click the shutter release 1,500 times — perhaps 100 to 300 of those shots will make my first cut. All of these are decent shots that I don’t mind other people seeing. But there’s still far too many of them.

I’ll then go through and pick out the 10 to 20 real winners — they’re the photos I’m really happy with, and that I’m proud to have my name on.

I have been publishing these on SmugMug, and I’ll continue to do so — photos.schof.org, my SmugMug site, will be my portfolio site.

However, I’d also like to publish the larger collection of images, so that the people I’ve shot (and anyone who’s really interested) can view them. It’s entirely possible some of the people I shot in the larger project just won’t end up in the small pool of final selects, but I’d still like them to see their pictures.

I’ve been using SmugMug for that as well, but that has resulted in my photos.schof.org SmugMug site being a little muddled and confused.

I’ll be moving the large galleries over to Flickr, and using SmugMug solely for my portfolio, starting immediately.