The death of Amazon as a photo backup solution

Wine bottles in storage in boxes in a wine cellar

Amazon Drive has been an excellent solution for off-site on-line photo backup and storage. It’s part of the Amazon Prime package that also includes free deliver, movie streaming, music etc. At 50-60€ per year for unlimited photo storage it has been a very good deal, a very affordable online storage for your pictures. That is […]

Getting a cookie banner and making the site GDPR compliant

A warning sign on a storage room for hazardous material in a winery

This article describes my effort to implement GDPR and appropriate privacy, including the famous “cookie banner”, on our web sites. (Not yet implemented on our sites though.) Since a few years back privacy regulations in the EU (and some other regions) have become much stricter. They set up strict rules on how a web site […]

Shapes and forms in Oriente in Lisbon

Vasco da Gama bridge, Lisbon-Oriente

A while back I had a few hours to spend in Lisbon. I was staying at a hotel in the part of the city called Oriente. Much of it was built for the Expo 98 world exhibition that too place here in Lisboa-Oriente. It is an interesting part of the city to stroll around in. […]

Beautiful drone footage from South Africa

A cheetah on a safari in South Africa

One of our activities is that we organise wine tours, wine tours all over the world. One of our destinations is the South African wine lands. On our wine tour to South Africa we usually offer you the option to combine it with a safari, after the “wine segment” of the tour. It is a […]

Christmas present from the Wine Spectator

The Wine Spectator

Just in time for Christmas a little “gift package” arrived in the mail. It was a big white envelope with two copies of the latest issue of the Wine Spectator.  We are not subscribers – the writing tends to be a bit too US focused sometimes – so it arrived for another reason. It was […]

Using Amazon Prime (Premium) “unlimited” for photo backup and archiving

Wine storage at competition Les Citadelles du Vin, Bordeaux

Earlier this year Amazon announced “unlimited storage of images” for subscribers to their Amazon Prime service. (Prime is called “Premium” in some countries.) Amazon Prime is a subscription service that currently costs 49 euros 50 euros per month in France. The price is similar in other countries, e.g. USD 50 in the USA. Prime gives […]

Unlimited photo storage online from Photoshelter (and Amazon)

Oak barrel aging cellar

Organised backup is one of the fundamental, basic, sine qua non, must-have, obligatory things you must have sorted out as a photographer. Was that clear enough? Should I say it again: you must back up, and back up well and efficiently. Once there was back-ups on CDs, then DVD and ultimately BlueRays. Disk storage became […]

Featured and interviewed on the Daminion blog

Thousands of oak barrels in a wine cellar, Rioja

Daminion is a DAM software that I discovered quite a while back following an article I wrote here on DAMs (digital asset management systems). It is one of few modern and actively maintained and updated tool to manage your photo library. The founder of Daminion, Murat Korkmazov contributed a number of comments on my article […]

Know your rights. Your copyrights

Tribunal des Prud'hommes Pecheurs - the court of prudhommes, work law, for fishermen, Gruissan

Copyright is one of the basic pillars of any photographer’s business. Without it anyone and everyone could use your pictures without any restraints. Copyright essentially says that if anyone wants to use your picture they have to get your permission. You can give that permission or not. If you don’t then it is illegal to […]

Is there a future for DAM systems? Yes.

Reflections of sailboat masts in the water in the Barcelona harbour

This blog seems to have turned into a discussion forum for DAM (digital asset management system) users. I don’t mind that, since this is an important subject for any professional photographer, and increasingly important also for non-professional “snappers”. One person who has contributed much to this discussion is the photographer Peter Russell, with whom I […]

“How I found my best Digital Asset Management (DAM) system” | Guest Post

The altar in the cathedral in Logrono, Spain

Digital Asset Management software selection Mike Briggs is a London based photographer with a particular interest in travel photography, reportage and street photography. Mike needed to select a new DAM, digital asset management system, to manage his collection of 100,000+ images. He started looking at a very broad range of DAMs. Soon he narrowed the […]

What DAM system do you use? (poll)

The Tibor Gal (GIA) winery in Eger, underground tunnels with rows of barrels filled with wine.

I thought it would be interesting to see what DAM (Digital Asset Management) system people use, following all the discussion about it here. So here’s a poll. You can choose more than one DAM. If your DAM is not on the list, please leave a comment. See also other articles on the DAM search: Introduction: […]

Features and Functions that my Digital Asset Management System (DAM) should have

DAM search function choices

Here’s a detailed overview of functions and features that I would like to find in a Digital Asset Management System (DAM). This is a follow-up post to the previous one I did on DAMs that has attracted quite a lot of attention and comments. As I explained there, following the death, demise and discontinuation of […]

Trying out Android video editing apps

Hospices de Beaune sign, Le Bas des Teurons, Beaune, Cote de Beaune, Burgundy, France

Early this year I started to use my smartphone to shoot video. I also thought it would be convenient to use a tablet to do the editing, especially when travelling. (Back home I use Sony Vegas to edit my videos.) But it turned out to be quite a challenge to find a decent Android video […]

Radically improve your smartphone video photography with a tripod mount

Smartphone tripod holders

The video quality from smartphones can be greatly enhanced by using a tripod mount / stand, that allows you to put your smartphone in a holder on a tripod. Two excellent options as smartphone mounts are the Joby GripTight Micro Stand and The Glif. Here is a review of the two. Both are excellent and […]

Wine travel feature in The Wine Companion with BKWine photography

Rioja in The Wine Companion

It is a particular pleasure when a feature article is fully illustrated with your pictures. It is different from having the odd image used as an illustration. This is what happened recently when the Wine Companion did a feature article on wine travel in the Rioja wine region in Spain The Wine Companion, or giving […]

How to set the correct price on your photography

Meat at a market stall in Italy

Yikes! Someone wants to buy my picture! How should I price my photographs? What price to put on your photography is important. For your own sake you should see to it that you get a fair price, even if you are not a professional photographer. And for the sake of all the professional photographers out […]

Pricing and licensing: the importance of licensing terms

A bill and money on the table in a restaurant

A comment from James Cook on the continuing series of posts on pricing and licensing tools points out the importance of the actual licensing terms. In most cases when you price photo licensing you agree terms for a specific use, especially if it is traditional “rights managed” (RM) licensing and not “royalty free” (although “RF” […]

Useful info on copyright, licensing and pricing from ASMP

Following the two recent posts on pricing and licensing I had a suggestion from photographer Judy Herrmann to take a look at all the information that the American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP) makes available on their site. Indeed, you can find lots of useful info on the ASMP site. For example: On copyright in […]

More photo pricing tools: HindSight’s Photo Price Guide

Yesterday I started a series on photography pricing and licensing tools. It is simply a link collection to applications and sites that can be useful for, you guessed, photo licensing pricing. The photographer David Riecks quickly came in with one additional pricing tool suggestion: HindSight’s Photo Price Guide. It is a pricing tool similar to […]

Photography licensing and pricing tools & information

It is becoming more and more important that the photographer understands pricing and licensing and can set pricing terms independently. Historically there was more or less “industry standard” pricing, especially for editorial stock photography. That is still true to some extent, but much less so than before. I have started a new link list category […]

I am looking for a good DAM: Digital Asset Management software

What options are there to manage a library of photographs? DAM is short for Digital Asset Management. It usually refers to a software used to manage various digital files. In the photography world it usually refers to an application to manage the thousands or hundreds of thousands of image files that a photographer accumulates. You […]

Selected and exhibited at the Oenovideo Festival

One of my photographs has been selected to be featured at the Oenovideo festival in Carcassonne this year Oenovideo is a yearly festival and competition for videos on wine. Each year the festival takes place in a different wine producing region. This year it will be in the Languedoc, in the magnificent city of Carcassonne. […]

International Culinary Photography Festival – edition 2013

And competition on the theme “Luxury and Celebration” It is again time for the International Culinary Photography Festival in Paris. This year it will take place in Paris from November 8 to 26, 2013. It is a long time until then but it is worth while noting it already since there is also a competition. […]

The photographer’s guide to copyright

A very important new guide for photographers, and others concerned by copyright, from Photoshelter Apart from having a talent for making pictures and selling them there are few things as important to a photographer as understanding copyright. Any photographer’s business is entirely dependent on copyright, without it one could hardly make a business, let alone […]