This picture of a Binturong, aka a bearcat, was taken at the San Diego Zoo some time ago. This is probably one of the stranger looking mammals I’ve seen, almost as strange as an echidna or platypus, because it kind of looks like a cat, a raccoon and a sloth at the same time. The animal hits a weight of around 25-30 pounds, which would put in right in the neighborhood of a small dog (probably why some people in SouthEast Asia keep them as pets!).

One of the interesting things about having your pictures hosted at Flickr is that some of the pictures you may personally not like that much tend to be very popular with general viewers. I personally don’t think that this picture of a white tiger is very spectacular, but this picture is one of my most viewed items at my Flickr account.

The Singapore Zoo is the best zoo I’ve been to during my infrequent travels, so I would highly recommend it to any visitors to Southeast Asia. The animal enclosures are fantastic, the zoo is fairly large, and I feel very comfortable visiting animals that probably aren’t too thrilled to be “in a zoo”.

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My wife and I were at Wat That Luang in Vientiane, Laos when these kids kept getting the attention of the tourists making the rounds. The kids thought it was hilarious that they could peak through the holes to get our attention.

Even though neighboring Thailand has pockets of poverty still, there is no question that Thailand is a much wealthier country than Laos. My wife, who grew up in the poor section of Northeastern Thailand, felt very fortunate that they were never *that poor* & felt bad that so many of the children were living in very poor living conditions.

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While probably not my best composition ever, I’m mainly posting this to show the beauty of the Klong Mueang beach in the Krabi province of Thailand.  If you’re looking to get away from the crowds of Phuket, Krabi  is the place to go to get away from it all. The other benefit of Krabi is the adventurous types will find tons of activities to do in the area, including rock climbing & tons of places to snorkel.

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Given the bad rap that Oakland gets,  not to mention that it is always second fiddle to San Francisco in many ways, I was actually quite surprised at how nice the Oakland Zoo is. Most of the animals in the zoo had a great deal of space in their exhibit, and they were generally pretty active compared to the animals in the San Francisco Zoo (perhaps it is due to the foggier nature of San Francisco).

This White-Handed Lar Gibbon was obviously very deep in thought when I took this picture. I’ve also had the good fortune of seeing gibbons in the wild while in Thailand, and I’ve also been to the Gibbon Rehabilitation Center in Phuket, Thailand (former pets or injured animals that they try to rehabilitate to put back in the wild).

Note: It is very common to see people with Gibbons that you can take your picture with in Patong. Please don’t take your picture with these animals, as cool as it may be, because the gibbon is only there because the mother was killed to get the infant. I made this mistake on my first two trips to Thailand:-(

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One of my favorite exhibits at the Singapore Zoo is a walk-in aviary that they have. While aviary would seem to mean “birds”, the aviary at Singapore Zoo has a host of birds and other animals, so you will find many smaller mammals inside of the exhibit as well ( a baby lemur kept attacking my shorts).

I caught this three-toed sloth doing what they do best…sleeping!

I have another picture of this cute little Paduang hill tribe girl posted in an earlier entry on the blog. She was so cute and relaxed after we stayed and talked to her and her mother for a bit.

I did some minor post processing with Picnik to enhance the colors of her outfit & rings.

While I am not a professional photographer, nor do I try to make a living selling photography at this time, I do hope this list helps people interested in this  arena locate some of the more popular and reputable online services (the ones mentioned are the ones I’ve seen photographers mention the most in a variety of forums and social networks).

Some popular services to sell your photographs online:

DeviantArt
Etsy (more of an arts & crafts community)
Flickr (Flickr largely has partners where you can get work done; most of the photogs I’ve talked to sell their prints on one-off occassions)
Fotomoto
Imagekind
Shutterfly
SmugMug
ZenFolio

A couple of things to keep in mind:

1. While these services will help you display your images, you will largely be responsible for promoting your work
(this will take marketing on your end). I have some quick tips for promoting your photoblog, for example, but this isn’t the only thing you could do and/or should be doing.
2. Some of these services do charge you to host your photos (subscription fees).

3. Some of these services will only charge you if an order is actually placed (varies by company for costs…but you can generally expect somewhere close to 15% of the total sale price).

4. Many of these services, if not all, will handle the fulfillment process for you (shipping, printing, etc.)

5. All of these services may not offer what you need if you are an event or wedding photographer, such as password-protected galleries and the like,  so you might want to look at services like Instaproofs.

Reality check:
1. Many photographers, even serious professionals, will tell you that selling prints online is not an easy
thing to do. As mentioned above in the paragraph above, it takes a fair amount of marketing to get your name and images out there.

2. Selling photographs online should be viewed as a passive form of income for most.

3. Set reasonable prices for your work. Fields like nature and wildlife photography are very saturated with many images from pros and amateurs alike, so  you would really only want to charge a great deal if your images are very unique.

4. You may have to sell across multiple channels to sell images, inlcuding using more than one of the online services mentioned above.

Stock photography:

Since this is not even remotely close to an area of  familiarity or expertise of mine, I am not going to cover this arena at all.  This article on selling photos online with stock agencies should give you some leads.

Sukhothai, Thailand

Originally uploaded by dbillian

Now this picture was obviously modified a fair amount. Since the photo was taken in the middle of the day – which means the sun tends to wash things out and/or contribute to overexposed pictures – I had to do a lot of tweaking to get the picture the way I wanted it (I liked the composition enough, so I just needed to take a little time to adjust other aspects of the photo). If you have a chance to visit Sukhothai in Thailand, I can assure you that you will have many opportunities to take a lot of your own quality images (Sukhothai is kind of like Angkor Wat in Cambodia, just a bit smaller and not quite as grand).

I personally don’t use Photoshop at this time, largely due to the fact that work historically takes up a great deal of my time and learning a fairly complex piece of software would chew up the little free time I do have. Picnik, at least for now, fulfills most of my needs because I am not trying to become a professional photographer (I have nowhere near the consistency required to be a pro, nor do I *think* like a photographer would when looking for a shot).