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:
- Load your image of your horse, Flicka, into the software that came with your digital camera or other photo software you have.
- Find the resize option.
- Select inches (like 3″ x 5″) or pixels (like 800 x 600 pixels)
- Save as a new smaller file named “3x5__Flicka”.
- 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.