Without serious active motivation there can be no success. One way to get motivated and improve your own efforts is to look up to older publishers and more experienced photographers to see how they cope with all the technical problems and publishing style.

Nevertheless - no matter what in life you do - you yourself need to be happy with how and what you do! Hence you never need to copy someone else just because he might appear more successful to you, but you can get inspired by his way to do or his way to make mistakes to do your own work your way but more successfully.

Every now and then I take a few minutes time to search for some of the worlds top photos and compare results and techniques to see where and how to improve my own work. All have problems, all have their own style - but photography published means photography needs to be pleasant and appealing to other people's eyes and hearts. Photography published needs to touch hearts and move hearts to create a change of heart = a smiling happy heart.

At the same time photography published also needs to meed the demand for serious revenue, either by selling stock photo for paid private or commercial use - or - like in my case by successfully implementing adsense. Photography seriously practices may cost you thousands of dollars a year to please and touch the heart of hundred thousands or millions of people out there. Hence an investment of thousands of dollars compared to touching the hearts of hundred thousands of people and may be giving a positive motivation for a better, happier life to many is a tiny investment. Happiness in life - love toward all and all nature is priceless and beyond $.

Photo Gallery example sites

Both below URLs use gallery2 as photo gallery software. Gallery2 is open source and available for free. Gallery2 runs on PHP, needs MySQL and is the most simple to install professional SW package I have done so far - nevertheless gallery2 is a truly high class professional SW package and needs some truly professional webmaster skills to finalize and optimize all aspects of publishing, such as site security.

Have a look at other photographers work and let you inspire for your own work to be published

• Gallery1 and gallery2 example sites - gallery2 displayed by category of environment - embedded environment sorted by CMS used or stand alone sites. A great way to see what you can make out of gallery2 software in combination with your site's publishing tools and environment of your choice.
• Gallery 2 Demo Sites on gallery2 homepage - a showcase with screenshots of many dozen online photo galleries to give you an idea of the flexibility of display and environment a gallery2 software can be used. Note that only registered users can vote for galleries displayed here.

Where to publish your own photography ?

Of course only on your own website. Forget all the free hosting - photography is high volume, high traffic, high CPU and server usage - and that needs the resource of your own web site or if you are a professional or very active photographer, then you need even your own server such as I do. My previous host kicked me out of the regular hosting plan because of too much traffic=too many resources used even though I was using only some 2% of my hosting package allowance. Hence serious photography published in Internet requires also far more expensive hosting plans on powerful servers. Photography means dozens or hundreds of GB traffic a months - regular blogs or hobby-sites get dozens or hundreds of MBs !!!

The competition for photographer is tough - billions of photos are out there - millions most likely stolen from others - on flickr I recently found many of my own pics - even one and the same multiple time with different people claiming ownership ... funny world these copyright pirates. The all forget that if you want to be brilliant in whatever - you need to be brilliant with your own stuff - else your partner chooses the original creator of your stolen stuff. Those who want to be successful by copying other people's material pretending to be their own ... sooner or later their partner will figure out that all their entire being is empty and fake. You want love from others - then you need to give your OWN love to others. What I do about copyright infringement ? Nothing! I have no time nor $ to waste for such - there is too much creative fun work to be done on our planet. God takes care of all others. Why I do nothing against such copyright infringement has another simple reason. If people lack the power to create all on their own, then they also lack the power, creativity, expertise in web publishing and resources needed to publish stolen goods successfully !!! Weak people are weak all over - inside and outside - hence nothing to worry about those too weak to create on their own.

Improvements are achieved by competition - we all need to improve a lot because we all live far below our God given potential, hence we should accept the challenge of global competition and step up a few gear. There is no need to be top - because all want to be top, but there certainly is a need to be among the top, because it is far more fun to live among good and successful people rather than among lazy people hanging around and failing in all they do. From an eternal point of view average belongs into trash ! God creates perfection, God creates astounding and breathtaking beauty - so are we made by God to create excellency as well.

Love and bliss

hans