Before you commit to a host and register your quite-literally-one-in-the-world domain name, search for any horror stories out there about people being locked into substandard hosting providers in order to preserve their domain names.  I can't give you any war stories; only the old adage about things that look too good to be true... You can register your Web identity with NSI for $20 a year if you do it for five years at the time, or for an advertised $10.00 a year through Arvixe. I'm looking for the drawbacks of moving away from NSI, but haven't seen any so far. NSI appears to be mostly marketing these days, with the good deals reserved for new customers, while existing customers pay full price for everything.

The main drawback is that the gallery isn't database driven so updating a lot of images is cumbersome.

The good news is that they do most of the work of getting your images into your customers' hands and the revenue into your pocket. The service, as you'd expect, isn't free, but may be well worth the price if you want to sell your work without becoming a HTML-and-Javascript-editing-Web-geek.  Both Action Photos, which I've had the privilege to shoot for on a number of occasions, and my friend Andy of ProImagesOnline, whom I got to know at those events, use PhotoReflect.  Action Photos is bringing a new custom-written sports photography environment online, but don't try this at home.  

I recently had the privilege of meeting - and buying some photographs from - Joe and Stacey Champion of Champion Images.  Champion specializes in athletic event coverage but adds Stacey's artistic eye to produce some of the most striking sports images I've seen.  They use PhotoReflect for sales, nestled behind a custom front end.  Stop by their booth if you're at a major USA Gymnastics meet or any other event where you see their remarkable creations on display.  In the meantime, visit them here.

ProImagesOnline covers the southern Maryland sporting world and Action Photos focuses on major tournaments in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions.

Sincere thanks to Peter for getting the software off the ground and sticking with it to its pretty mature stage of development.  Bravo, Peter.

Everyone has their favorite sales application or service; so will you after you try one, two or more.  Each has strengths and weaknesses and I've seen no panacea.  Decide what you want in terms of look and feel, your personal time commitment to get up and running, time commitment to upload events, customization possibilities, up-front cost, annual recurring cost and sales commissions. You'll discover a trade-off that you'll spend a lot of late nights researching.  You'll read posts of praises and pans for any of the competitors.  Have fun on your quest, but make a decision and jump into the water.  The decision you make today isn't irreversible, probably won't be terribly expensive and is subject to change at your whim!

Easy - you take two or more photos and combine them so that they look like one very wide, or very tall photo.  Software to do this is plentiful; search on panorama software reviews to read the latest reviews.  The Nodal Ninja site has 1,400+ links to panorama-related information.  Go to the bottom for forum, discussion group and blog links.

The two basic ways to present your expanded view of your subject are with either a wide or tall print or rectangular Web image, or through a Virtual Reality (VR) viewer that lets your Web audience look around the image - up to 360 degrees around, from straight up to straight down. Good VR is fascinating, challenging and very rewarding with even your earliest efforts.  Have a look at my first attempt after unpacking my Nodal Ninja 5 panorama head.

Be careful of your monitor calibration! Use a hardware colorimeter, and send for test prints before you do any customer work or order a large number of prints for yourself.  I use a colorimeter from x-rite that was relatively inexpensive, helps ensure repeatable results and saves a lot of rework and frustration.

Summer, 2009 Update: WHCC continues to impress me and has become my lab of choice.

and how I got it to install under 64-bit Vista

It has a steep learning curve for its slicker features like layers and motion, but turns out a decent end product.  The shows took a long time to render on a 1-processor Athlon 2500 with 1GB (part of the final step in burning them to DVD), but are pretty quick on an Intel quad-core with 4GB (~15 minutes to an ISO file - see below).  I have no knowledge of any competitive product like Adobe Premier or the Apple's iDVD, but plan to stick with this one for my occasional need.  Its output looks great projected by a big Christie projector onto a 14-ft screen at church, too.  Their latest release is touted to burn to Blu-ray disks.

Hint for higher picture quality: Chose the "Desaturate to 80% (or so - it's variable)" option for a DVD show for your TV or PC, but leave saturation at 100% for projection to give yourself much more vibrant on-screen images.  A few trials will help you dial it in to your taste.

To save your sanity - output your show to an ISO image and burn that to DVD using ImgBurn. ProShow has a terrible inability - in my case - to reliably get a show to DVD.