As some of you know I've lately been putting together my first photography site. It's been a bit of a trial. While I've a little experience designing `text-heavy' sites I've found that predominantly image-based sites are somewhat different, especially when it comes to matching expectations for simple, easy-to-use, fast navigation.
To some extent I anticipated the strong desire to click from one image to the next and back and so on. What I did not anticipate was the simply *huge* gap between what one sees in a print and what one sees on one's monitor.
The variation in quality between one monitor and another and between different web browsers is distressing, especially if one aims to sell at least some of one's work online. I've refined and simplified my site quite a bit since its initial release almost a month ago but I've come to realise that there are very real limitations being imposed on the web-based display of images, especially large format images.
A little frustrated, over the last weekend I tried another approach. Using the open source desktop publishing app. `Scribus':
http://www.scribus.net/
I knocked up a PDF file containing a dozen or so images included in the web site. For those interested here is a direct link to the file (be warned, 16MB):
http://camera-antipodea.indica-et-bu...-portfolio.pdf
This PDF includes 4" x 5" images downsized from the original 24" x 30" drum scans. It seems to me that the PDF is easier to navigate and offers better colour matching and resolution than I've been able to obtain through the web site. I'm wondering if this has been the experience of others on this list. I'd be interested to hear too about what people here really think of PDF image collections. Do you think they have a place? Are they helpful or just another irritation? And how widely used are they really -- I've found a good many being made available, but not as many as I would expect if people actually liked them ...
Kind regards,
Richard
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