Shameless Self-Promotion - My New Website [Archive]

Ed Richards

9-Sep-2006, 05:08

Doremus,

Nice work and nice presentation. Some of the images look like they would be terrific prints, but look flat on the monitor. Do you create images specifically for the WWW, or do you just resize images you use for a digital workflow? It may be that the balance for the WWW should be different than for prints for more subtle images. Do others who use a digital workflow for printing do separate images for the WWW?

Henry Ambrose

9-Sep-2006, 05:49

I enjoyed seeing your work.

On my iBook screen I have to scroll the page up to see the entire large photo.
You might think about moving the scrolling thumbnails to either side to gain more vertical room for the larger photo. Or this may not be a problem on larger screens.

Frank Petronio

9-Sep-2006, 05:56

Hi - you have some beautiful photos there. One thing that is slightly unsettling is how the whites at the edges of the photos bleed into the white borders of the "frame". I like how you incorporate your signature, so maybe you need to take it the next step to make the images look like traditional matted prints. Or at least put a holding rule around them. Or simply crop in tighter and put them against a darker than white background. Or burn the edges of the images down slightly. Or put a subtle drop shadow around them like in iPhoto. Or....

The University of Oregon color scheme is the only clue as to where you are located... before I send a credit card order in, I like to know the physical location and phone number of the vendor. Right now the contact info doesn't show me any of your info.

While I understand your reluctance to revealing your contact info, if you want to do business online you need to. Personally it is one of the reasons I use a PO Box and accept an occassional nutty phone call (but only a few from people on this forum.)

I usually comment on the code and architecture but that only provokes a long discussion that goes nowhere. The site works and most of the choices are subjective, and easy to change. I like the images overall and the most important thing about having a website is to actually have one.

Marko

9-Sep-2006, 06:44

I'm with Ed and Frank. Beautiful photos and nice presentation, tasteful usage of Flash.

Yes, I also think it would all look even nicer with a little "webifying" of your images and perhaps even adding "sloppy borders" to prevent bleeding, but that's personal choice.

Like Frank said, it works and that's the biggest step. Congratulations.

matthew blais

9-Sep-2006, 06:52

I think it looks great, functions well and fast. Nice layout. No problems here and I enjoyed your images. Good luck.

Colin Graham

9-Sep-2006, 06:59

Really nice. I like most everything about it. Great work Doremus. I especially like the Stretched Pebble Canyon print, great image. If you can, it would be nice to hear about your experiences creating the website.

Brian Ellis

9-Sep-2006, 09:59

HI Dory - I thought it looked great. There was no lack of contrast in anything I saw, nothing looked flat, quite the opposite in fact. I also didn't have to scroll down to see the entire image.

My only suggestion would be to make the thumbnails a little larger as someone in another forum also suggested. I had trouble telling what was in some of the photographs from the small thumbnails, otherwise I thought it was a terrific web site and terrific work.

Brian Ellis

9-Sep-2006, 10:06

A correction to my previous message. When I went back again I realized that for the vertical images I did have to scroll down to see the entire image.

roteague

9-Sep-2006, 10:17

Good job on the website, and great images overall. It is also good to see that you have embraced traditional materials and processes.

paulr

9-Sep-2006, 11:52

The site works great.

I agree with the comments that some of the images could be tweaked to look better on screen.

And some non-technical feedback. It bugs me to see your signature on all the images. visible signatures on actual prints have always struck me as camera clubish. On screen it feels the same to me, only even more out of place.

I wish the flash images on your intro page wouldn't change over so fast. They start fading before I even know what I'm looking at.

And finally, are you sure you want to call your own work "fine?"
It's great if you quote a review where someone else calls it fine; even better if you just let the viewers reach their own conclusions. But to announce yourself to the world with your own positive appraisal of your work seems bizarre to me. Would you introduce it like that in person?

Doug Howk

9-Sep-2006, 12:11

Beautiful images & very nice site. No problem with the veritcals other than having to schroll to see the title (I'm using a 19" with Mozilla on Mac). Flash intro works fine. I've also been thinking of putting my signature on images (camera clubs don't want signatures on images, at least for judging) to avoid stock image theft. Do agree that thumbnails could be a bit larger; but then you get into speed of page download issues (no happy solution). Might consider using a thumbnail that is only part of total image. All in all, great site and beautiful fine art work.

robc

9-Sep-2006, 12:34

Looks good to me. Lovely images.

I also think thumbnails could be a little bigger.

One vey easily fixable point. The thumbnails have a vertical scroll bar on IE6 W2K and Firefox. Changing the Iframe they are in to 91 pixels height seems to fix that( in the first gallery anyway). Or make the thumnails one pixel less in height.

My guess is that you are a windows user but I've been wrong before. The horizontal scroll bars look OK in IE as they are in the same colour scheme as the rest of the page. In Firefox they revert to grey and stand out like a sore thumbnail if you pardon the pun. Unfortunately thats not fixable in firefox because coloured scroll bars are only available in IE. But it does look better in Firefox if you get rid of the the thumbnail vertical scroll bar.

JW Dewdney

9-Sep-2006, 12:49

Not trying to be 'negative' (as they say), but here are the things I think could be improved;

1. Not once, it seems, do you actually get a chance to see a whole image. They seem to overlap very aggressively - the 'low contrast' comment - I think, is largely due to this, and the blending with the background.

2. The fades look kind of jerky - can you possibly add more keyframes to the swf file?

3. There's no control over what you see and when - a little bit frustrating...

4. The strong, dark green of the background forces the 'grey' of the images to take on a magenta-ish hue by visual contrast. I'd personally (if it were my site - which it's NOT) rather have a cool, bluish or purply background (or better yet, a neutral) and make my images go slightly warm sepia or something.

Just my 2 cents.

Brian Ellis

9-Sep-2006, 12:57

"And some non-technical feedback. It bugs me to see your signature on all the images. visible signatures on actual prints have always struck me as camera clubish. On screen it feels the same to me, only even more out of place"

That's odd. Camera clubs typically require that prints submitted for judging have no signatures.

The images on the home page didn't "jerk" on my screen and I thought their pace was perfect, not too short for adequate viewing, not too long to cause the viewer to become impatient.

If nothing else you're certainly getting a variety of opinions. : - )

robc

9-Sep-2006, 12:59

Another little bug.

The paypal button doesn't show in Firefox. It is replaced with alt text for the button which is black on dark green and is un-readable. i.e. anyone using firefox won't see how to complete an order. I'd definitely get that one fixed.

JW Dewdney

9-Sep-2006, 13:00

Oh - one other little thing I forgot to mention - though it was the first thing that struck me when I went to your page... I always find it kind of weird when people refer to themselves in the third person on what is obviously a site of their own devising. It seems a bit desperate (?) I guess. But perhaps that's just me. Nice work, to be sure though!

Kirk Gittings

9-Sep-2006, 13:54

Your self-promotion is hardly shameless. Until you get hugely successful you will and should be in charge of your self promotion. If you don't do it who will? Who has the interest and will to do it more consistently and accurately than you? Who understands your direction and history better. It is not shameless. It is a necessity.

Nice site and work. It loads a hair slow on my machine with DSL and Mozilla, but not terribly so.

Capocheny

9-Sep-2006, 14:07

Hi Doremus,

Great images... enjoyed seeing them!

Thanks for sharing... even though it's "shamelss self-promotion!" :)

Cheers

paulr

9-Sep-2006, 15:30

The images on the home page didn't "jerk" on my screen and I thought their pace was perfect, not too short for adequate viewing, not too long to cause the viewer to become impatient.

i wonder if the pace is different on different browsers. on safari on the mac it's a wild ride!

robc

9-Sep-2006, 16:29

windows flash player is an activex object which integrates with operating system.
On mozilla (firefox) and other browsers on other machines the flash player is a plugin (older technology) which doesn't run as fast. Also make sure you have the latest version of the plugin for your operating system/browser.

You need the flash frame rate set to at least 24 fps in the flash file by the prgrammer. 30 should work fine. The human eye sees the frames below 24fps assuming your machine is fast enough to run that which most recent ones are. Then those fade transitions consume a lot of CPU processing and can look awful.

For what its worth, I have a very slow PC and the fade is only a little jerky but what jolts is when the image being faded out is switched off. i.e. its fade out is not taken to completion before it is switched off. However I hadn't really noticed that when I first looked since I was interested to get to the gallery pages. So I'd say it could be better but its not that bad for most people since most will be using windows.

It may be that since my pc is slow it can't process all the frames and that causes the jolt at the end of each image. I have no way of knowing if that is the reason.

Ralph W. Lambrecht

9-Sep-2006, 17:03

Very nice prints and presentation!

Ralph W. Lambrecht

9-Sep-2006, 17:13

The signatures are fine with me. After all, that how and where AA signed his prints, but like he did, I would make sure that the signature is very faint and has no change to take dominance.

Prints like that are typically referred to as fine-art prints. I'm not sure that the word 'fine' is a qualitative statement in this context or if it is just a description of an intented style.

Ralph W. Lambrecht

9-Sep-2006, 17:17

I agree with this comment. That struck me too. However, it might be just because Doremus himself introduced it to us. If we would have stumbled over it ourselves, it wouldn't have been an issue.

Ralph W. Lambrecht

9-Sep-2006, 17:21

It's all very smooth and fast on my iMac and Safari. No issues.

Don Bryant

9-Sep-2006, 19:17

Finally, after years of good intentions, I have a website showcasing my work. Please visit and tell me what you think.

www.DoremusScudder.com

Best
Good Work Doremus, I found no problems with your web site.

Best,

Don Bryant

Doremus Scudder

9-Sep-2006, 23:09

Thank you all for taking time to view and comment on my website. I'm flattered that so many of you visited. Here in Austria, they have a saying about shameless self-promotion. It goes, "Wer nicht wirbt, stirbt." Roughly translated: "If you don't blow your own horn, you'll die." I'm pleased that my "horn blowing" attracted so much attention.

Many of the issues mentioned I am aware of and in the process of changing: The small thumbnails, the vertical scroll-bar on the galleries, etc. Fortunately, everything is able to be changed, so I'll keep tuning things. That goes for "webifying" some of the images as well (it would be nice to know which ones precisely...).

Some of the things that a few of you reacted to negatively (the bright whites, the selenium toning, using third person, etc.) were well-considered choices that I will probably not change. As far as scrolling to see the images goes, I would rather have a larger image on display at a fixed size. The need to scroll, especially for verticals, seems unavoidable.

As far as the technical things go, I'll pass your comments on to my web-guy and see if he can tweak things a bit.

By the way, I use Firefox, and the PayPal button shows up fine in my browser...

Again, thanks to you all for donating your precious time and expertise. I truly appreciate it.

Best,

Ralph W. Lambrecht

10-Sep-2006, 04:37

That goes for "webifying" some of the images as well (it would be nice to know which ones precisely...).

Doremus

I had the same problem. It was fixed by calibrating my monitor to gamma 2.2 and attaching a 'Gray Gamma 2.2' profile to my images in Photoshop before posting. This will not fix issues for people who don't have their monitors calibrated but you can't please them all.

Nevertheless, a website should always be verified on a Windoze machine running IE. This will catch and satisfy most users. (I'm a dedicated Mac user since 1986). You can find a good browser statistic at:

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

Tell your web guy to check it out.

Frank Petronio

10-Sep-2006, 05:59

The best practice is to save the jpgs without any profile. ImageReady or Photoshop's "Save for Web" feature will do this unless you enable the check box for assigning a profile. Check out an online clothing catalog's jpgs -- where color is probably more important than the color of your B&W prints -- no profile. There is a carefully considered reason why they chose to do that...

robc

10-Sep-2006, 08:54

You can find a good browser statistic at:

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

Those statistics are heavily skewed and they even say so themselves.

These are better but none are truly reliable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

robc

10-Sep-2006, 09:05

Ralph W. Lambrecht

10-Sep-2006, 09:34

Those statistics are heavily skewed and they even say so themselves.

I don't think they say that. They say, however:

*****

Statistics Are Often Misleading

You cannot - as a web developer - rely only on statistics. Statistics can often be misleading.

Global averages may not always be relevant to your web site. Different sites attract different audiences. Some web sites attract professional developers using professional hardware, other sites attract hobbyists using older low spec computers.

Also be aware that many stats may have an incomplete or faulty browser detection. It is quite common by many web stats report programs, not to detect new browsers like Opera and Netscape 6 or 7 from the web log.

(The statistics above are extracted from W3Schools' log-files, but we are also monitoring other sources around the Internet to assure the quality of these figures)

*****

This is most likely true for all stastistics, but thanks for the link.

robc

10-Sep-2006, 09:52

we've been here before. What it says is:

W3Schools is a website for people with an interest for web technologies. These people are more interested in using alternative browsers than the average user. The average user tends to use Internet Explorer, since it comes preinstalled with Windows. Most do not seek out other browsers.

These facts indicate that the browser figures below are not 100% realistic. Other web sites have statistics showing that Internet Explorer is used by at least 80% of the users.

roteague

10-Sep-2006, 10:51

Just checked out your site this morning on the new IE7. Looks good on it as well.

QT Luong

10-Sep-2006, 11:47

While I understand your reluctance to revealing your contact info, if you want to do business online you need to.

Not quite. For a long time, I did not have my address on the terragalleria.com site (until I found out how easy it is to fish it out !), nor a phone number. The same can be said of Dan Heller, who doesn't even publish his email address. But of course you need to have your contact info on your invoices :-)

Marko

10-Sep-2006, 12:06

IE does not support colour management. The web standard is sRGB. Best policy for display on the web is to convert your image to sRGB before saving for web. Attaching a profile to the web image in IE6 makes no difference in IE6. It just ignores it.

Not 100% sure what macs do. They are coloured managed but it really depends on the browser and what each browser on a Mac does. If they are doing different things then it doesn't make sense to attach a profile since the image will look different in different browsers on macs. I assume that if no profile is attached on a mac browser then it will default to sRGB so it will look the same as on a IE6 browser. Makes sense then not to attach a profile and go with the default sRGB for web so that image will look the same on all browsers/platforms all other things being equal. You should convert to sRGB before saving for web if your image edit tool does not do it for you. If not then your image will look different on the web than it does in your image edit program.

http://www.color.org/version4html.html

Macs are fully color managed. Attaching a color profile would definitely make any current Mac browser display correct colors. Assuming the profile for those images that have none attached could and most likely would lead to erroneous color translation and that would run counter the entire color management concept.

Not to split hairs, but sRGB is not the web standard. It is recognized by w3c, however, among other bodies, as a color space valid for web use.

sRGB is suitable for any display usage because it is narrow enough to fit the majority of displays currently in use. A new crop of Adobe RGB-capable monitors is just entering the market, but they are still at least a few years away of mainstream usage due to their huge price.

As Frank has noted above, some industries have deliberately chosen not to attach any profiles to their images for reasons that are beyond the scope of this discussion.

Ralph W. Lambrecht

10-Sep-2006, 12:15

Well, that was the point. When I didn't attach a profile, people complained. Then I did attach a profile for my B&W images (Gray Gamma 2.2) and the complaints stopped. Since then, I attach the profile.

I use a Mac at home and a PC at work. Friends and familiy use one ot the other. After attaching the profile the images look the same whatever computer I use.

robc

10-Sep-2006, 13:11

Not quite. For a long time, I did not have my address on the terragalleria.com site (until I found out how easy it is to fish it out !), nor a phone number. The same can be said of Dan Heller, who doesn't even publish his email address. But of course you need to have your contact info on your invoices :-)

I took the view that contact details should be visible but I put them in an image file so that they are not scanned by bots. Email address is embedded in PHP which is not visible to bots either.

but if you want to check for someones address you can just look here and assume it is correct cos it could be false:

http://www.allwhois.com/