A fun afternoon with SmugMug's founders

Foreign. So who are you?

So I'm Chris. I'm one of the co founders of SmugMug. And that guy over there is the CEO of Chief Gay.

Kaley. Hey, how are you?

And we hired Anton Lorimer who I think is so talented to tell our story of Smuggler, our passion in our life and our legacy.

Look at that.

How do we deliver our clients perspective of the world?

How do we do it?

So he's using a 5D Mark II.

Just like I am.

He's using a 5D Mark II to film the whole thing. How do we give them what they need? See the shallow depth of field? Those are the pieces. This is the 85 millimeter F12 that drive our business. So Don's nose is in focus. But then. And his eyes are in focus.

The ears are out of focus.

See how shallow the depth of field is?

Is photography in and of itself represents.

So the dogs go nuts. So can we see this on the Internet? We're still finishing it. So there's a preview version no one's seen yet. This just came in yesterday and there's.

A lot of great things about.

This is the head of Bay photo. So one of the things that he. I lent him my 200 millimeter f2 lens while we were up in San Francisco doing the skyline thing and he said, oh, you shouldn't give that to me. And he's a pro photographer, he says, because if I ever use it, I'll never be able to go back. And then he put it on his camera. He said, oh, you're ruining me. Everything looks better with this lens. Everything looks so good. So when we get to this portion, Smugmug's a group of photo geeks. We get to the portion where we're in San Francisco again and you see the 200 millimeter F2.

One problem with audience people watch this.

Because we are.

I mean we listen to all of our customers.

What you say, actually beautiful video.

Yeah.

This is one of the best wedding photographers videographers in the world.

He's absolutely the best. People adore him. And if, I think if the rest of the industry, if wider industry knew about him, you know, for promotions for other companies. It's not. Again, it's not in our interest to say this but he, he would be so busy because it's the best promo I've ever seen. So beautifully filmed and storytelled. And he picks up some of the other things like the cooking you were just leeching off of.

Yeah.

The go karts you haven't ridden yet. No, he ran behind the go kart. All the face painting, but you guys bought those.

Because.

Of you.

We owe you for that.

They existed until he tweeted. Aren't those cool?

They're so cool.

We're going to ship some of those to Rack Space.

Nice.

The only problem is they knocked down one of our doors. Somebody clipped the door in a high speed race. So anyway.

Wow, what a beautiful video. What did you learn by watching him work?

You know, turn this down a little bit more. One guy. One guy with good camera skills can do better because he shoots and he edits and he thinks up the whole story. There's no wall, you know, where there's one guy shooting and he's trying to figure out how you edit. The guy knows how to edit. He knows how to shoot. He just. I mean, he's near genius. You should see his other films. He hosts them on SmugMug. I can send you a link.

So I don't know how to shoot because that's why I use a 17 millimeter Leno. And mine's a little jiggly and a little bit soft focus.

His were smooth even when he was walking behind the go kart.

See, my hands aren't that smooth.

And he's got the shallow depth of field lens and he somehow keeps it in focus and he's just, you know.

Does he use something on his viewfinder in the back?

Yeah, he does. So what he does is he uses a shoulder brace to hold the camera. And then he uses this loop on the back so he's focusing with one hand. The camera's well braced and against his shoulder. And then he can move around and shoot and everything. All that stuff that he shot in San Francisco that was smooth was with a 200 millimeter handheld. The rest of us couldn't do that.

But it was that too much coffee for that.

That shoulder brace that he uses and everything is just so great.

What kind of microphones did he use? Because audio sounded great too.

You know, the audio did sound good and I was surprised by that because he used a lavalier. It was a wired lavalier. And I don't really like the sounds of lavaliers. I'm used to sound guys with a microphone above and you've got your microphone really close and it's not a lavalier. So you get good sound.

No, that's one reason I use a 17 millimeter, so I can stay really close. I'm only about a foot from your face, which a lot of people at.

Home, you can't tell that yeah, it's.

Really important to stay close so you get good audio.

So most people don't realize that audio falls off as the distance squared. So if the microphone is two feet away from somebody, it has four times intensity of whether it's four feet away. And it doesn't pick up all the echoes in the walls and all of that kind of stuff. So there would be a dramatic difference. Now if I move back, even if.

You move like here, that's two feet away.

And then it's probably starting echoing and everything else. So I've doubled the distance, but I've cut the sound quality in like a.

Fourth also on louder, which makes things were.

So. Yeah. Wow.

What a great video. So when. When are we gonna see this in public?

So we're touching up our logo a little bit, our pro logo. We're trying to make it look really cool. And as soon as we're done with that, then you'll see us.

Can you see that?

Yeah. Well, we're taking it to the next level.

We're revising that logo. So. Okay, this is gonna be a collector's item.

Yeah, collectors. We're taking it to the next level.

It's half on my strap. I just turn on the camera right here. What else has been going on in Smug Mike?

Why don't you ask him? He's.

Oh, man, the lighting in here sucks. We gotta get better light. When you look at us, it looks pretty good.

Yeah. So the thing we're really excited about is we, you know, we've been so focused on. Let me turn that backwards. There we go. Gangster, gangster going sideways.

We.

We've been doing this for more than eight years now. And we've been so focused on the product and the feature set and everything. We have rarely spent any time on marketing or brand positioning or anything like that. And we finally feel like the product is almost at 1.0 quality. Strange to say after eight or nine years, but we're feeling like it's finally getting there. So we're thinking more about how to polish it up and sort of get it ship ready, if you will, and market it to people and actually like, you know, try to sell the thing instead of letting our customers just sell it for us. So a lot of our effort, but that works too, you know, it works.

Great because I have a smugmug strap and people see it and they just love your service.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's been the fuel for our business. Something like 60 to 80% of our signups are from customer referrals. So I don't want to disparage it at all, but we haven't exactly been helping them. Our old homepage, for example, tended to. We devoted most of the pixels to telling our existing customers what was new at SmugMug. Instead of telling interested people, like what SmugMug does, we didn't even mention the word photo sharing on the homepage. You'd have to guess that we were somehow photography related. And we did photo sharing. So we just finally, for the first time in a long, long time, overhauled our homepage with an eye towards, well, what if you've never heard of SmugMug, like most of the world, billions and billions of people, you've never heard of SmugMug. So you go there, let's tell them what they do and make it look good and make it obvious why we're so different. So we've been doing that and we have a whole lot of other stuff sort of in that vein of polishing and sort of making the thing better.

Do you watch? So Facebook now is the number one photo sharing site, right? They do more photo sharing than any of you guys combined, right? Any of the other competitors?

Yeah, I think Zuck said over the weekend like five or six times, all the rest of us combined. And that's a big number.

Do you look at that and get jealous or do you think, oh, no, not at all.

I think our value proposition is very different from Facebook's and I think the two products are very complementary. So one of the things that we just did last week, in fact I think it was last week, maybe two weeks ago, is we put Facebook like buttons on every photo on SmugMug. And there's a. I'm. I think we may be the only big, like Internet player I can think of that has a Facebook like button right on our homepage. So our new homepage has one front and center. We want people to see how into our product, our customers are. But SmugMug does a lot of things Facebook doesn't do and probably never will do. Our photos are huge and ginormous. We devote every pixel to showing off the photos. We let you customize your background and the default is black, which makes photos pop and all kinds of things that Facebook isn't geared towards. But Facebook does a lot of things we aren't geared towards, like keeping your friends up to date with, you know, what photos you've taken and where you've taken them and all that sort of stuff. So we view Facebook as a major opportunity for us to help our customers share their Photos with their social networks on Facebook but still display them in the way that they would rather display them.

Now, you guys charge for a good chunk of your service, right?

There are no free accounts, so you get a 14 day free trial, which is great. That's usually enough to get the needle in the arm and you'll keep coming back, but all of our customers are paying customers.

Awesome.

And how's that going for you?

Business is booming.

And you never took venture capital?

Nope. We are totally bootstrapped and we've been profitable since just after our first year.

And every time I go back and come back here, there's more employees and more photos on the wall. I don't know if you can see the photos on the walls here, but beautiful photography.

We're running out of wall space. We're getting more office space so we can put more photos up. Maybe we'll put warm bodies in there too.

What about mobile?

Because the iPhone now mobile's huge.

What are you doing there?

So we have a SmugMug app on the iPhone and a separate one on the iPad. We'll probably blend the two together here in the fairly near future. We originally sort of thought that the iPad app would just be great for iPads and it is, it's fabulous. It's the best way to browse photos I can think of on the iPad. But it turns out that that UI will also be great on the iPhone so I anxious to have it in the photo taking app. So we have Smug Shot which takes photos and SmugMug which browses photos. And it's dumb of us not to just combine those. We think mobile is huge. Our Android app is almost done. We could probably show it to you if you wanted to. The big issue with Android is that all the devices all have their own quirks. It's really, really difficult to get it right across a Galaxy S and a Droide X and an incredible and all these other things. It's so much easier on the iPhone. But we love Android and we, we recognize lots of our customers use it. So we're, we're working on it getting it right. But we think mobile is huge. And there are a few things I just can't talk about but you'll see them later this year that we think are enormous.

It's interesting because I'm using the iPhone for photography again because the camera is so much better than the 3Gs. But I'm using things like auto stitch to stitch together panoramic. I'm not a pro panoramic guy like you should see his photos. His multi gigapixel photos are just awesome. Tell me what you do with your iPhone. Do you shoot much on your iPhone?

Oh, yeah, my F5D Mark II. It's bizarre. I never would have predicted this, but I shoot mostly photos and videos with My iPhone. My iPhone 4. And the main reason is because when I do shoot on something like a 5D or whatever, I want to find the time to edit it in lightroom before I uploaded anywhere, which means they just go to die on my hard disk for a long time because I just don't have much time. It's ironic. I run a photo sharing company so I have less time for photos than I did before running a photo sharing company. But with the iPhone, it's just so convenient to quickly snap off a video clip of my kids doing something crazy or a photo somewhere. And I know that it'll already be geotagged and it'll just upload instantly and I don't have to think about it. It's so friction free. And finally, the pixels are high enough quality too, that I'm not agonizing too much over it. So the convenience really has won me out.

Have you used the new imovie on the iPhone to do a video?

Yeah, we have.

Isn't that cool?

It's really, really cool. Yeah. The amount of not just video but photo editing capabilities we have on the phone is pretty stupendous. There's so much CPU and GPU available that we can do. Neat stuff.

Yeah. And SmugMug takes video too.

We do, yeah. All the way up to 1080p. So, you know, way more than the iPhone generates. But we love 720 videos from the iPhone too. This is.

Sam gave us me though.

Savannah, who are you introducing us to and why do they have. These are so cool.

So this is our new designer. He's the Russian assassin Vilain Vilan and camouflage and everything else on. And he's got this light show that he's rigged up in his office. And we know not to come in here if he's pissed because it's red, but if it's green. Yeah, then it's okay. Blue and so on.

That is the coolest thing. How much do these lights cost you?

I think around 200.

200 bucks.

Do you still have a strip out.

Or are they all hooked up?

I wanted to show them how they. So There are these 3M LED light strips and they have plugs on either end so you can just chain as many of them together as you Want. And then they're programmable. They're really, really awesome.

And see how his hat's glowing?

Well, the camera sort of picks that up.

Sort of picks it up. We can get it. It's fluorescing because of the UV lights coming down.

There you go.

And he's got this crazy lamp.

It's funny. As my camera gains up, it sees less of the glowing.

This is cool.

Let's change the light some more.

Yeah. And the reason that we hired him is because design has become so crucial to us, because our value proposition is your photos look better here. So we got to not just talk the talk, we got to walk the walk. Serious.

And there's the new design that you worked on.

Yeah. New homepage design. People are raving about that. And that is what the galleries are going to look like pretty soon. We already gave the secret away on our homepage and so now everybody's asking about it. Oh, when do we get that new design?

Yeah, really cool stuff. Well, nice to meet you.

Just the dregs.

Okay, so here's the story behind this. So I fell in love with this castle and just thought it was the coolest. Just a really creepy, cool Scottish castle. So we contacted the photographer and said, hey, we'd like to blow this up really big. Bigger than we're blowing it up here. But I'm seeing artifacts when you get too close. So I can't blow it up any bigger because we have a bunch of pixel peepers who come by here. And Emmanuel, if you could, you know, shoot it with four frames with a higher res camera, that'd be awesome. And then we'd print it really big. So he went back and he said, yeah, well, you know how photography is. I didn't get the penetrating light. The seaweed wasn't red. They had scaffolding over here. The tide was out. I just screwed. I couldn't quite do it. So. But I went further on the island, the Isle of Skye, and I got this one. What do you think of that? And I looked at it and just could not believe it. I loved it because of God's rays coming through here and the vibrant colors and everything about it. And he said, I shot it in three frames. 1, 2, 3. And then I stitched it together and got all this resolution. So I quickly went and put it behind a light box that would glow like it does on a computer monitor. And he, in the meantime, entered the UK's most prestigious photographic contest with it that was sponsored by the BBC and the Natural Museum of History. I Think. And he won and was named Landscape Photographer of the Year. And then I wrote him back and said Emmanuel. The only thing is, I think there was an error in the stitching. I meant to point this out to you, but there's three frames here and the third one slopes off the water slopes off to the right. So I think there was a Photoshop stitching problem there, but no one ever noticed and he won. And so now I think this is available in like the Natural Museum of History in London. It's become quite a famous photo. So it's a good thing the tide was out.

Now, on previous trips, we've seen your San Francisco room where you have San Francisco all over.

Have you seen the other side from San Francisco? It's the one that people like the most. From Twin Peaks.

Yeah.

Okay, I'll show you that.

I'm gonna go barge in and accompany.

Me.

Sliders for the offset and the.

Hey, sorry to interrupt, but we gotta film in here for a second with Robert Scoville. Hey.

Hi, Scovell.

It's Robert Scoville. It's worth it. He's a good guy. He came by to leech lunch and also to leech camera straps. There's such a waiting list for camera straps. He knew what he was doing. We have like 54 people on the phone here because we have a lot of remote people. But anyway, so I got companies here.

And we're wasting their time. So we're gonna get out of here.

That shot was shot with an 800 millimeter lens from Twin Peaks. It's like a gigapixel shot. You could walk right up to it and see if that guy's wearing underwear in the building there. It's kind of voyeuristic thing to do. It's a little bit creepy.

Thanks, smugmuggers.

This is the.

Alright, they left. You guys are crazy.

So this just got hung a couple of days ago, so we still need to work on the lighting. But this is not a photograph.

What do you mean? Isn't that shot with my new 24 millimeter lens?

So that is a 400 megapixel render from id Software's upcoming game Rage. So it's 25,000 by 16,000 pixels. Okay. And I have some history there because I used to. I did. I handled the Internet release of Quake and used to know those guys really well. They're old friends of mine. And the game looks amazing. It looks super hot. Some of my friends are designing it and stuff. And so as soon as we. They posted these huge Ones huge, high resolution versions online, we sort of looked at each other and said, well, we know what to do with high resolution photos. We put them on the wall at Smugmug. So there we have it. Yeah.

If I want to do one of these for my house, how much does something this size cost to print out?

You know, place to go. I think that was about $350. Is it? Yeah. And I did a mounting on it. There's a plastic cincher on the back that makes it hard and. And you can also put a polycarbonate over the front so you can scratch it, hit it with chairs, your kid can, you know, whatever you want to do. It's printed at a printer in San Francisco by the name of dpisf and they have a light jet printer, which is great. It's not an inkjet photographic process and all that. And it's 120 inches by 72 inches. One piece of paper, and that's what that is. It's about 120.

That's beautiful.

Isn't that something?

Now, if I took one image on my 5D at let's say 200 ISO, so pretty low ISO, and I did it on a tripod and I made it really, really sharp. How big can I print that?

I think you could print it that big. I've printed other shots nearly that big.

But most of the images here are multi stitched together.

Yeah, most of them are multi.

That's medium format.

This is 6 centimeter by 7 centimeter film. And it was scanned for that one. But we've printed them pretty big. You know, it's 21 megapixels, which is pretty good. But the main thing is the sharpness of the lens, the f stop, how steady the mount is, the good light and all that kind of stuff. Yep.

Cool. What, you had one last one to show me.

Or was it that? Was it. This was it. Yeah. Well, thanks.

One more, One more.

Oh, yeah.

Let's see. Trey, that's new since you were here last too.

Yeah, I haven't seen this one yet.

You know Trey Ratcliffe? Yeah, Trey's shots.

Yeah. Trey's an awesome photographer and very famous a little bit.

So you can see his color.

We just love the shot. Now here, he does you one better than the 5D Mark II. He shot this with a Nikon D3X. Yep. Which is 24 megapixel and clean as a whistle.

So one shot. This is not a multi stitch.

This is one shot. And I believe this is 60 inches by 40 inches high.

But it is HDR.

It's HDR. It's HDR and I. Multi exposure.

One shot, multi exposure.

He might have done this. Or is he doing this in raw?

You know, I think he's done this one in raw. I think he did this as one exposure. And the reason I think so is the leaves would have moved. So if you have movement with hdr, you do one frame and then make a few copies, go up and down. So, Trey, if you're watching this, I hope I didn't misspeak. Correct us in the comments if I did.

By the way, you guys have user groups all over the world now, right?

We do, yeah. We've rolled out almost 50 now.

And do people speak on these kinds of topics? How to make these great photos?

We call them smugs, which is short for smugmug. User Group Meetings. And you know, here in the Bay Area we have three of them. We have one in Walnut Creek, one in San Francisco, one in Silicon Valley. And they get, you know, usually 100, 150 people per. And we invite high profile photographers to come tell their stories and so on. And they talk about lenses and they talk about selling your photography and all kinds of things. The Orange county one's probably the biggest. It's 250 people, but we've just opened ones. We just had one in Miami. We have a whole page of where they are and they're just these wonderful volunteers who organize them and then we give them some money for the venue and food and stuff like that. We give away camera straps there so you don't have to come in here and get them. They're nice straps too.

Thank you.

Well, thanks so much for staying in a with me. I tell people if they come to Silicon Valley, they have to come to your. But I know you can't have, you know, 100,000 people come through here.

We have people stop by all the time. We love it. That's one of the reasons we put the photos up. It's not just for us and our employees, but we love having visitors come.

I noticed the front door was locked, so I had to talk my way in here.

There's a doorbell screening process. We let most people.

Yeah, I'm gonna try the mother of all shoots here pretty soon. I did this blog post on the stairwell and the Golden Gate Bridge thing. Did you hear about that?

No.

So the story. So the story is our stairwell is kind of barren, but it has these huge walls, 150 inches. Let's go up there.

Okay, finish up there. So yeah, this is another one. We've done a previous video on this.

But 144 inches high. But if you walk right up to it and put on your spectacles, you can't see any pixels. It's just as detailed. And this is the only place in the world you can see this cathedral in all its glory with all the statues and everything else. Look at the detail.

Okay.

It's unbelievable.

I just went as close as my lens could go, and now you can get a sense. How many images was this?

You know, it's about 12 across by eight or nine rows high.

With a Canon 5D Mark 2.

Yeah. So it's almost 100 images.

And you were using a 300 f 2.8 lens.

I was set at f 8 because it's sharpest at f 8. Yep, a very good mount. And the whole thing.

Canon, you know, Canon should give you one of those new 300F 2.8 that just came out the other day.

Are you listening to this, Canon?

I've tried begging for my own sake, but you can use it for something worthwhile.

You know, I'll make you proud. Okay, so one embarrassing part of our building is this. This dark hallway. And you'll notice the walls are quite tall. If you were to come look at this wall here, all the way from the stairway down there to the roof is 200 inches, and that back wall is 150 inches. And we could do something that takes up every inch of the wall and wraps all the way around it, but we just couldn't think of what it was. And so I thought, oh, an underwater shot in the Great Barrier Reef with all the colorful fishes. But the problem is they move between each frame. So how do you stitch them together? Well, maybe the NASA Space center with the Saturn rockets or something, you know, Smithsonian Institution. What would it be? And you want to take something to make it big. You want to be able to see detail like you saw in the cathedral. Not just take redwood trees and make them bigger or mountains and make them bigger. You want people to go up and be fascinated with the detail they can't see in a smaller print. So what should it be? So it was right when the iPad came out. I did a blog post called an iPad for an idea. You give us an idea for what goes here because we're stumped. We give you an iPad. And I got 412 comments or something like that. And my eyes bled trying to read them all and respond. They were good ideas, but nothing really blew us away. So I got discouraged. And true story the very last comment, the last one that had just come in, the guy said, well, the most iconic photo place on earth is the Golden Gate Bridge. But we've all seen it so many times taken from the same angles, you know, and we've never seen it from the angle that really matters. And you have the place to show that off. And what is the angle that really matters? It would be from the top of the North Tower up on. It makes you weak in the knees just to think about it. And if you could imagine you're at the right, you're standing here with this perspective at the top of the North Tower of the Golden Gate Bridge. And here are the cables going down that way and San Francisco is off here. Have you shot this yet? No. And the cliffs are off there.

Have you gotten permission yet?

No, but I've gotten tentative indication that I can get permission. I have to pass a safety inspection where I show that nothing can fall off me and go to the cars below. Yeah. So.

God, I'd love to shoot you shooting that.

I think we should do that because three people can go up. I'd even edit that video. Okay, three people can go up. And so I'm talking about going up in a helicopter and going over the tower beforehand a couple of times to pick the lenses and everything to make sure. Because I think it's one try. And that's why I haven't wanted to do it during the summer, because there's better clarity in the wintertime with the atmosphere being cooler.

Canon just came out with a new 8 millimeter zoom, right?

Yeah, yeah, 8 to 15.

You know, Canon, Come on.

Hello.

I'm not sure if that would be too wide or not. We're gonna have to go up there and take a look. You and I will have to go up in the helicopter a couple times.

Oh, that'd be great.

I'll drop.

You know, we'll do that. And we could make a really interesting video from the helicopter too. In fact, one of those.

You'll run a Steadicam?

Well, it's more than a Steadicam. It's those gyro stabilized things that use in helicopters. And we'll use our 5Ds and get some really good footage.

Now how are you gonna make an image that big from the top of the Golden Gate Bridge?

Because it shakes up there.

It's not a steady place and it's.

Yeah, so wind is going to be a real problem. I had that problem with the San Francisco skyline because I was up on Twins peaks with an 800 millimeter lens. So this would be a little wider lens. I have a very, very steady mount. Yeah.

But the bridge itself is moving because I've been. I mean, if you walk across Golonge Bridge, it shakes. I'm sure it shakes all the way up at the top, right?

Yeah. So that's going to call for a, you know, decently high shutter speed, which would call for enough light that you can get a decently high shutter speed. It's going to be one of the big challenges. That's why we have to go up in the helicopter a couple times.

And hopefully it's not foggy the day.

You decide to get. Well, that's another reason for not doing it right now, because the summertime fog, if I got up, I'd shoot myself. If I did all this preparation, got up there and all you could see was gray. And then I just put up this gray photo and said, believe me, I was on the North Tower, that wouldn't work. So I'm thinking wintertime when the atmosphere is clear and get the golden hours.

Where it would be really cool, though, if the fog was hitting the deck. And so you would see down into this fog down on the deck.

Yeah.

I was thinking it would be great if it was a little foggy. I love driving across the bridge when it's not so foggy. You can't see anything, but stuff is just sort of disappearing in the distance, either above or on the other side of the bridge. And getting some of that in there would be. Be amazing.

Would be amazing. But I'd have to have a season's pass to go up to the north tower to get the right time, so.

Well, we'll work on that. Thanks so much, guys.

Yep.

It's always a thrill to come through here and talk to you guys and come by anytime. Thanks. And I'll steal your food anytime.

It's awesome.

Yeah, it sure is.

Sam.