One of the sponsors for the 2006 Photograph of the Year Contest was a photography software company out of Perth, Australia: Time Exposure. Peter, co-founder of Time Exposure has been on the road as of late, including at Imaging USA down in San Antonio, but has since returned home to Perth, and had a chance to answer a couple of questions for us about Time Exposure and their software ProSelect.

Tell me about the history of TimeExposure.

TimeExposure was founded by husband and wife team, Peter and Fran Howlett in 2002.

Peter’s background is in Electronic Engineering specializing in software development.

Fran is a Master Photographer, and a former national board member of the Australian Institute of Professional Photographers. Fran made the switch to digital in early 2002 with the purchase of a Canon 1D body and soon involved Peter as the “in house” technical support person.

This involvement in the changing world of digital photography, led Peter and Fran to start to design and develop the award winning products now used by thousands of professional digital photographers around the world.

Explain what your main software, ProSelect, does and how it benefits the photographers that use the software.

ProSelect is an all-in-one presentation, sales and workflow software solution designed for photographers to efficiently show and select images with their clients, build collages, save retouching notes and record/print orders. It incorporates an optional high-resolution production module that links directly to Photoshop to dramatically reduce the time it takes to create the final prints and collage files ready to send to the lab or print in house.

Apart from making the sales process smooth and professional, ProSelect users consistently report much higher average sales result using the software (some have even tripled their sales!). Their clients love the process too. No more switching from one program to another in front of the client. No more lost re-touching notes or order details written on bits of paper – ProSelect stores all this, along with low res copies of the sessions images in one compact transportable album file.

Finally, pass the album file to you production people who can work through the “To Do” list in ProSelect’s production module, prompted for any manual retouching (from the saves sales session names), then have ProSelect automate Photoshop to produce to a folder full of final print and composite collages files.

ProSelect also exports order data to leading studio management software so you don’t you re-enter the data twice.

You have a 30-day trial of ProSelect so that everyone can give it a try before they buy. Once the software is downloaded, where’s the best place to get started using and exploring the software?

The 30 day fully functional trial of ProSelect is available from the Downloads section of our web site (www.timeexposure.com). The download package includes a both Quick Start Guide and Reference Manual. We also have overview and tutorial movies in the Demos section of the web site. These are a great way to get familiar with the program.

In addition to ProSelect, Time Exposure also offers other products and services for photographers. Can you briefly touch on these as well?

We also offer a simple, fast, on-line image display and e-commerce ordering system called Web Gallery which is designed specifically for Wedding and Portrait photographers.

What can we expect out of Time Exposure in 2007?

Our products are always evolving and improving as we take seriously all all feedback and comments make by our users. 2007 will see some exciting new features being released in both ProSelect and Web Gallery.

Looking forward to it Peter. Thanks for taking the time to answer some questions for us.

To download a free trial version of ProSelect, visit: http://www2.timeexposure.com/downloads_ps.php.

Update: Minor corrections in grammar and links.