I've mentioned before the power photographs have in selling your horses, lesson program and training services. The evolution of digital photography has made taking photographs simple, inexpensive and lighting fast.

I know what a sliding stop is but don't ask me to explain an f-stop. If you're a novice photographer like me, you can point and shoot and get electronic images with ease. And if you're also like me, the process of sending images (photos) via e-mail and posting them to your website is, pardon the pun, out of focus.

Sometimes, the images are gigantic on my computer screen as if I switched on microscope mode. Where did my horse go? There is just a gigantic eyeball staring at me.

Other times, when I want to e-mail a set of photos, the transmission of the e-mail with attached images takes so long I can go out for breakfast and return before the transmission finishes.

A call to my friend Eric Grapengeter in Colorado, a horseman and technical expert with computers, helped demystify the management of photos (digital images). We talked for over an hour about digital images and how to work with them. Here is the skinny version of what he told me.

Photos direct from the camera are highly detailed which gives them the high resolution required for printing. But, high resolution photos are a curse for displaying images on a computer screen. They load at the speed of dark; it takes forever. And forever on a computer screen is over four seconds.

Eric told me that the trick is to resize your photos from megabyte size down to 100 kilobytes (kb). By optimizing the photos in a .jpeg or .gif format, you've got an image that will load quickly on your website page or lighting fast as an e-mail attachment.

The steps are easy:


1. Load your image of your horse, Flicka, into the software that came with your digital camera or other photo software you have.
2. Find the resize option.
3. Select inches (like 3" x 5") or pixels (like 800 x 600 pixels)
4. Save as a new smaller file named "3x5__Flicka".
5. E-mail it to your prospect or send to your webmaster for loading on your site and you are done.

Eric warned me that the resizing process is time consuming if you are doing more than one photo. He runs an online tack store and uploads wagon loads of product photos. Being a geek, he wrote a resizing program to handle "batches of photos" more efficiently.

Later, being an astute business person, he found commercially available software for less than $20.00 to do his entire batch processing even better than his own program. Click here if you are interested in learning more about fast and simple photograph resizing on his website.

Use your photographs of horses, your facility, your clients and your events as a powerful sales tool for increasing profits.

Need a speaker about the horse business for your horse organization?

Talk to me about talking. Keynotes and workshops available. (716) 434-5371

"Reinventing the wheel is sometimes the right thing, when the result is the radial tire." -- Jonathan Gilbert

"Photography, fortunately, to me has not only been a profession but also a contact between people - to understand human nature and record, if possible, the best in each individual." -- Nickolas Muray

"Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save." -- Will Rogers

Earlier this week, an estimator for a roofing company was telling me about his frustration with finding employees for the roofing company who had even the most basic construction skills.

Reading a ruler to an 1/8th of an inch was close to impossible for most of the applicants and their measurement standard was reduced to describing 1/8ths and 1/16ths of inches as fat black lines and skinny black lines on the ruler. You probably experience the same frustration with some applicants and employees who don't know whole oats from sweet feed or a p.t.o. from pizza.

Even though I sound like a grumpy old man, I don't mean to be overly critical. It's the way things are in a more mechanized world than the one you or I grew up in. Other than the horses in the barn, just about everything has a motor on it.

My children are included in the generation whose culture is push a button to start working, push a button to stop working or hire the whole job done by a professional.

My two oldest sons know what a tape measure is but have no need to become proficient at reading one. They'll either hire the work done or get their younger brother to do it for them. Charles, age 14, has been building saddle racks, cavalletti and has just started building jump standards.

He's been learning that lining up holes to drill for jump cup pins is much harder in practice than on paper. He's been back to his drawing board a few times and has some lumber in the reject pile, but is learning by doing. Perhaps some day our educational systems will become unshackled from the concept of teaching to pass tests and focus on learning how to learn. That includes doing, making mistakes and learning from those mistakes.

Sounds like how we all learned to ride, doesn't it?

I work with Professional Horsemen who are struggling with the business half of the horse business.

Just like a top performing horse has a strong foundation, so does a top performing horse business.

If you've had enough with not enough: time, money or the right people in your horse business give me a call and we can talk about how Profitalbe Horseman strategies can help you.

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