My name is Jim Wilson, 62, residing in Boca Raton, Florida, USA, living several thousand feet south of Florida Atlantic University, a 30,000 student University, which I serve as an Adjunct faculty member in the College of Science; I authored a textbook “Principles of Digital Photography and Post Image Processing” (published by Pearson Education, Boston, 2004, second edition, 2007) which class I teach of the same name: http://www.416-1100.com/gallery/296169/1/.

I began taking pictures as a kid in elementary school with a Kodak Brownie Hawkeye 120 roll-film camera, with a darkroom in our basement, we still have the Brownie as a keepsake. Over the years, I became more and more interested in taking better images, moving to Nikon F camera systems, and then to Hasselblad 500C/M and several beautiful Zeiss lenses; then moving to digital in the mid-1990’s with the Kodak/Canon DCS-560 digital camera having 6MP with a $25,000 price, plus the cost of $700/battery, we had 3. I have not had formal Photography training; however, I read everything I can get my hands on, twice, including 8-10 monthly photography magazines.

Since 1957 I have been avidly interested in taking pictures of everything that will stay put for long enough for me to capture the moment; In college, my roommate was from Asia; when he went home for the Christmas holiday in 1964, I gave him $190 of my very hard earned money (working in the student cafeteria for $0.78/hr) so that he could buy my first SLR, a Nikon-F with a 50mm f1.4 lens. For many years, that was in-hand wherever I was… I shoot for my high school and college events, yearbooks, etc.

After graduating College, 1968, I moved up to Nikon F2, F3, F4 and Hasselblad camera systems; using these for my initial commercial assignments taking architectural shots of shopping centers, office buildings, progress imaging for construction jobs, grin and grab shots of business shows and events … now we shoot many other venues, with concentrations with NCAA athletic events for a number of Universities, BOWL events, Medical imaging for prominent physicians, recording surgical procedures for presentations made to the AMA, Tribal events with several Native American Indian PowWows in Florida and Wisconsin; I was selected to shoot several events for the US Congress and the US Supreme Court, which is quite rare to even carry a camera within these Washington DC locations…. to name a few …

Presently, since 1995, I use Canon equipment, their new 1Ds Mark-III, 21MP beauty, a 1D Mark-III, 40D, with a relatively full complement of Canon “L” lenses such as 400mm f4 DO IS, 100-400mm zoom, 16-35mm f2.8L IS II, 14mm f2.8L-II, 28-300mm L zoom, all three Canon Tilt/Shift lenses, 24-105mm f4 IS, 24mm f1.4L, 85mm f1.2L-II, 135mm f2, 180mm f3.5L macro lenses. My next addition will be the Canon’s 5D Mark-2 and their newly announced 200mm f2 IS lens, which I will use for indoor/gymnasium sports venues and portrait/fashion shooting.

Some of the most exciting moments in the digital world of imaging has been shooting College Athletics; the crowds, the famous exciting plays, the holding-up of trophies, the proud parents, coaches, and alumni. People shots in many different venues. As a scientist (bio-chemistry) by training, I also have enjoyed helping the medical community recording surgical techniques in several Hospital settings; I have also become involved with the Law Enforcement community helping those folks with the transition to recording crime-scenes digitally, having written several papers on the topic under several NIJ, US Justice Department grants.

As a faculty member of a major University for many years, I must say that a huge personal motivational factor, are my students. They never seem to disappoint with their, energy, creativity, and capability with these new digital tools. Oddly enough, they are providing constant inspiration for me.

To be precise I signed up for our SmugMug account on Oct 16, 2004 10:42pm EST. (plucked this info from SmugMug’s control panel) This account is an invaluable resource for our imaging. We have presently 68,441 photos uploaded, utilizing storage space of 179.15 GB. As of this evening we have had over 12,691,000 visits since we joined SmugMug in late 2004. On average for the last 6 months we average over 600,000 visits/month to our SmugMug site, www.416-1100.com visiting from 140 countries, worldwide, 8,000,000+ from the US, Europe, Canada, and Asia. It gives me great pleasure having this growing audience of participants looking at our imaging, by word of mouth, with sales occurring each week.

Aside from the wonderful traffic we receive, there is an important benefit of having our select images stored off-site. This gives us comfort that in the event of an emergency, fire, hurricane, etc, our inventory is recoverable from SmugMug’s servers thousands of miles to the West. Their modest annual fee, we consider an “insurance premium” for the protection of the images, providing offsite redundancy; however, with incredible added capability for world-wide access and a customizable delivery system. Anecdotally, my wife and I shot FAU’s first BOWL event in New Orleans last year; we were also engaged by several local News Papers; after the event we selected a variety of 30 “best images.” The arrangement was for each sports editor to visit this site, (we sent them the links by email) where they could look at the shots and download the images they thought were most appropriate for the stories they were writing… like a “mini-AP/Getty” image resource. University Sports Information Directors love this easy access, and so do the students, athletes, coaches, parents, friends, and alumni.

We traveled to New Orleans, for FAU’s 1st BOWL event, with the Team, coaches, the University President and their important Contributors; we provided business cards with our custom web link shown for this event; as the week progressed we were uploading images, each evening, so that all the sports fans in Florida could see. As a result we had over 30,000 visits per day on this single gallery for the following 4 weeks… for the month of January, 2008, that single gallery still had over 100,000 visits; the whole site had approximately 300,000 visits, where January is one of our lowest traffic months of the year.

SmugMug has provided us a vehicle that is customizable, providing Branding, World Wide Access, Display, and Retailing of our work. Revenue generation is important and viable; however, there is the added benefit of “seeing” all those visitors (like having a full stadium of fans) in SmugMug’s Control Panel, and our counter at the bottom of our home-pages.

My advice for someone wanting to pursue Photography is to find a helpful and willing “Mentor” that can share with you how to approach your interests; don’t be afraid to experiment; in this wonderful world of Digital Photography, take lots of shots and select the best 20 of 400, (that’s 5%), that similar percentage that even the very best Pros experience; perhaps when you get started, you’ll need to take 1000 shots to get 20 really “good keepers.” Select subjects and venues that you really enjoy, then branch out from that comfortable base of experience.