I don't like the blue type on black background - it is very difficult to read and one's eyes fatigue very quickly. The site loaded fine for me without any delays.
I don't like the blue type on black background - it is very difficult to read and one's eyes fatigue very quickly. The site loaded fine for me without any delays.
Juergen
I think your section "About Me" should be more about your thoughts about the world and your photographic goals. Ultimately, your day job and how much you eat are irrelevant. In fact, so are the type and variety of cameras you use.
You should present your self as you wish to be seen. You can emphasize whatevere aspects you want. If you want to be seen as a hobbyist, I see no problem with the about me section. It may be a bit to conversational and folksy though. There are amatuers and then there are amatuers. Think about this though. Through most of his career, Gordon Hutchins was a civil servant, even after he was teaching at the Ansel Adams and Maine Photographic Worshops and after he published The Book of Pyro he was still a civil servant for many years.
Thanks,
Kirk
at age 73:
"The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep"
you really do lose me the minute that logo pops on the screen.
it can seem like a superficial thing to worry about, but photography's a visual medium, and there's no way to separate the impact of a photograph from its immediate visual context. anything in a photography website that deviates from graphic simplicity is inviting trouble. i've seen few images in the history of the medium strong enough to hold up under the glare of that vibrating, neon-jade typographic monster.
an unrelated point, but one that easily eliminates the problem... if your url and site name are YOUR name, you not only seem much more professsional, but your work becomes much easier to find.
when I click on the splash page to enter the site, it opens a new instance of my browser. Why?
The splash page adds nothing to the site which can not be accomplished with the home page.
When I clicked on gallery there was a long wait and I have a 2.2mbps connection...
the home.html page has a horizontal scroll bar at 1280x1024 screen res (IE6 on W2K).
Personally I'm not overly keen on the colour scheme but I guess if you ask a hundred people you will get a hundred different opinions. The real test is whether your intended target audience like what they find and not what a forum thinks, unless that IS your target audience.
Well, I can get in it faster now. Whatever you did works there.
You need a LOT of proofreading. For instance in your bio you make such statements as:
"occasional add [sic]" and "entails slugging [sic]". I like that latter one - sometimes I feel like slugging my camera too when it doesn't do what I intended for it to do.
To publish with such obvious errors does not enhance your image.
Alec
As Alec said, there's too many typos and misspellings. Also, while the black sets off the photograph nicely the color of the text on the black made it a strain for me to read the text. If you're going to stick with the black background I'd suggest using white text or anything else that's easier to read than the color you now have.
Brian Ellis
Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you do criticize them you'll be
a mile away and you'll have their shoes.
"add" is a local colloquialism - and was a very common version of "ad" decades ago where I lived. Force of habit on my part. "Slug" is valid, meaning to move slowly and tardily. As I explained earlier, the text is presently colloquial and is there to see what fits. The website is not yet a portfolio, only a scrapbook.
Some of you I think take yourselves way too seriously. The web is hardly a serious medium for individuality.. Think of it more as a collective than any kind of individual statement. "Ephemeral" was chosen for a reason (not the least of which is that several other names I was interested in were already chosen
Henry, I'm sure the world cares not a wit what I think about anything. I don't make statements, I make photographs. My goals are to make nice pictures, not effete social comment. I could drone on for pages about the state of the world, but I would be wasting my bandwidth.
My resume would fill several pages. The purpose of the "About Me" page is to put a face to the work and to indicate I don't take myself too seriously (anymore). I work in federal law enforcement - if I want serious, I go to work. The pictures of neat cameras are for the P&S folk, and they'll be featured on the equipment page. A word to the wise - if you want to keep your LF film and paper, better show your cameras, your darkroom and every other toy, else it'll all be gone.
Interpretation of colour is partly practical, partly subjective. On the three computers I run at home the colours work fine, and are quite readable. On my office computer, the site looks like crap. The site was set up to work in 800x600 and 1024x768. I expect most of the world's pcs are 800x600 - most of the 300 at my office are, not because they can't be otherwise, but nobody takes the time or knows how to change it. If you write a modern website only for XGA and higher, it won't work properly on a LOT of computers...
The colours bug enough of you that I will revisit the scheme. I like colour - I'm not personally offended by what some would describe as garish (which is weird, because I don't care for Velvia.... Ironically, in my view, an awful lot of the world of B&W needs some colour to set it off. A lot of what might be charitably described as "monochrome presentation" in the B&W is just flat.
Thank you for the input - you have given me some new ideas and forced me to revisit some specific issues that I've been fighting with, which was the point of the exercise before I invested too heavily in it. After all, web mastering time is not shutter time...
Wow, you got a lot of feedback! Here are my thoughts:
- Didn't really like the 3-d text on the cover page. But maybe that's just me.
- When I get to the main page I see the top half of an arguably very beautiful photo. Remember, on the web the first impression is often all you get to communicate. If you want to present a beautiful photo on the main page, make sure the entire photo is visible without scrolling. Perhaps you should be more conservative with the use of vertical screen real estate. It's often a good idea to make menus and titles very compact vertically.
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