Your Own Photography Website????

[v15ben]

I know quite a few people on here have photography websites showing some of their better pictures off to the world and was wondering if this is a plausable idea for me as I am getting into photography a lot more at the moment!

How do you go about getting the site to put your pictures onto in the first place and also can anyone recommend any layouts etc that are good to use?

I have put a few of my favourite pictures of the past few months below to see what the PH collective thinks of them. Thanks to Rico for hosting them.

So what do you think of these, be honest and tell me if it's worth persuing the website idea? The photos are au naturelle as it were with no photoshop trickery at all.















So fire away folks, any feedback appreciated!!

[Graham.J]

I'm not a particularly good photographer, I just like going out and taking kind of 'happy snaps' of what I think looks good.

But, like you, I'm getting into photography more and more now, I did have my images on my old 'main' site which was a bit general, I've only recently got my photography one up and running (www.gbyphotography.com), basically as a place to put my images and should I get better, display some of them as an online portfolio.

As for getting it, I designed my own site using dreamweaver and photoshop, you want something effective, not cluttered, simple and easy to browse. Mine's only basic but I think it works ok. Again, hosting with thanks to Rico.

A lot of my pics on my site were taken with my old happy snappy camera, and in time I'll be weeding them out with pics from the new cam.

As for your pics, as I said, I'm not a particularly good photographer but my 2p's worth.......

1st pic - Nice sky, need to lose most of the black though, rule of 1/3s is always one to remember, you've got what looks like the 1/3s split up the left, but the wrong way round, 2/3s black, would be better 2/3s sky.

2nd pic - love that car, I can't put my finger on it but it doesn't look quite right in my head

3rd pic - Personally does nothing for me, also, lose the date stamp

4th - I like this, although, annoyingly (and you couldn't really do much about it) the wall is at a different angle to the building, which is a bit of a pain, but nice pic

5th - Nice pic I think, although - again not your fault - could do with a more interesting sky.

6th - Nice besides the huge white blob from the sun I had the same sorts of problems with my old camera, there was only so much you could do with it and it really got on my nerves as I felt it was spoiling my pics.

7th pic - again, if it was a better camera I think the pic would look a lot nicer, but you can only give what your camera can do

Feel free to ignore all of the above, as I said, I don't really have much of a clue and that's just my personal opinion on the pics.

I'd say go for the site, when you get better at it it's there for you to show off your images, and the good thing about photography is that some people like what others don't

Hope this helped a little,

Graham

[v15ben]

Thanks very much for that Graham, very informative. The pics are just basically as you say happy snaps, no magic or trickery just taken as they are!

Got to agree with you on the date stamp on the 4th pic, it was very annoying that it got left on there!

[Mad Dave]

re Hosting - Muncher sorts out my hosting, and i'd happily recommend him. Worth contacting IMHO.

re Pics:

F40 - You would probably have been better off focussing on a particular detail of the car - as it is, you have some kind of picture on the wall behind it, and a Marlboro F1 car reflected in the paint - both these things just highlight that the shot was taken in a museum of some sort. With every element of your shot, you need to ask yourself whether it adds something to the image - if it doesnt, it shouldnt be there. You need to compose the shot like a painting - and dont forget that just because the foreground is nice (the car), the background wont matter - it does.

House with reflection - very nice. It would be better if the horizon were level - play around with Photoshop, rotate it slightly and crop it.

Youre on the right lines, and i'm not trying to be harsh - I get similar comments when I post my shots - its all constructive criticism, and im no expert myself.

If you want ideas for layout for your website, you can always check out mine - URL in my profile.

I hope ive been helpful

Dave

PS What camera do you use?

[pentoman]

What timestamp??



Have a play with Paint Shop Pro (Photoshop is a horrible to use and will just confuse until you know where you are with PSP)...


I find the homepages that come with an ISP (was Demon, the Telewest blueyonder, now Plus.net) tend to be perfectly good for this kind of application.

They're usually 'free' and in my experience the ISPs with homepages tend to be the better ones anyway!

I have had www.pentoman.com for 2 years now. Knowing you've got good pictures up there is a great incentive to take more. Registering a domain name is simple and cheap (mine was approx £20 for 2 years or so, but I think it goes cheap as chips???)


And it's fun to put random pictures up too (see our house party ones if you want to check out my ugly/good looking friends...)

good luck, show us what you do.

Russ

[-DeaDLocK-]

pentoman said:

Have a play with Paint Shop Pro (Photoshop is a horrible to use and will just confuse until you know where you are with PSP)...

In as much as you are entitled to your own opinion, I think you'll find much disagreement on this not only within this forum, but within the digital photography community at large.

PSP is a great alternative and represents fantastic value for money, but make no mistake: Photoshop is the daddy of all photo-editing software and is the most powerful and versatile.

And it may not take as long to learn Photoshop over PSP as you think - the reason being that though the actual software is more complex, the knowledge base of Photoshop users is far bigger than that of PSP, and tons more tutorials, manuals and general help exist out there for Photoshop users.

If you can afford it, go Adobe.

Edited to add: BTW, my own photography website is at www.rudicheow.com. It's simple and self-created, using hosting space I purchased. If I were you I'd use ISP space to create the site and get a forwarding URL for a tenner a year (for a nice .com/.co.uk address) or a free one (e.g. yourname.cjb.net).

D

>> Edited by -DeaDLocK- on Saturday 15th January 15:41

[docevi1]

Deadlock, the reason why PS is difficult to use, but is recognised as the "Daddy" is that the programmers were either Graphic Designers and they worked to produce something for themselves. It works the same way that most of the best small house software is for technicians or programmers - simply as we know exactly what we want. If you aren't inclined the same way as the programmers it is very difficult to pick up IMO.

Add to that the whole "floating" menu that Adobe seem to love and you end up with a piece of software that is very intimidating to the novice user. It's certainly powerful and well designed for graphic designers mind but maybe too powerful?.

Personally, I'm a Paint Shop Pro man as it was only £35 at the time but am finding increasing frustrations in that as you rightly point out the support isn't as wide as PS.

You pays your money and makes your choices I guess.

edit::

As for hosting/space and the like, you certainly can't go wrong with Rico/Muncher or JamieBeeston. The later owning the servers the others work off I'm with www.register1.net and all has been great for the past year.

And for software, there are several options depending on the hosting you choose...

>> Edited by docevi1 on Saturday 15th January 16:08

[rico]

docevi1 said:

As for hosting/space and the like, you certainly can't go wrong with Rico/Muncher or JamieBeeston. The later owning the servers the others work off I'm with www.register1.net and all has been great for the past year.

Nearly correct but thank you for the nice comment

JamieBeeston is a partner within Serverstream Ltd who sell servers. Muncher and I are clients of Serverstream where we buy our servers for our respectives companies.

>> Edited by rico on Saturday 15th January 20:55

[V6GTO]

So what does it cost to have your own site?

Martin.

[rico]

Depends how big a site you want. I'm not allowed to directly advertise on the forums, but feel free to email me via my profile to discuss your needs.

Roughly £50/year for a small-medium sized site (500mb)

edit - discounts for PHers obviously

>> Edited by rico on Saturday 15th January 21:53

[Mad Dave]

I thought after comments about the images above, i'd better come up with the goods myself - I went out today and came back with this shot, among others:



Im really not sure if I like it. I prefer nice sunny summer shots, but the weather was crap so I had to make do with what I had. Now you can all rip into my shot and leave our poor thread starter alone for a bit LOL

[Mad Dave]

Just looking at it now, and I reckon I can make the first comments - I should have used a polarizer - it would not only have cut out all the horrible glare on the water, but also cut down the amount of light getting into the camera, and so making the exposure longer - which would have blurred the water nicely. Doh!

[rico]

I personally think if you cropped that image about half way down it would look better. The twigs at the bottom don't appeal to me, but the top half of the photo is great

[Mad Dave]

Fair comment rico. I quite like landscapes to have something to lead the eye in though? Ill have a play in photoshop and see what I come up with

[pentoman]

-DeaDLocK- said:

PSP is a great alternative and represents fantastic value for money, but make no mistake: Photoshop is the daddy of all photo-editing software and is the most powerful and versatile

You are completely right of course . However sometimes I tell myself, if Paint Shop Pro could do 95% of the things Photoshop can, then Adobe might be nowhere.

It is a horrible design, a poorly thought out (if it ever was thought out) behemoth that could really do with a ground-up overhaul by some computer programmers. I guess it's a hangover from being Mac originally (if I recall correctly) and no-one wanting to mess up a popular market-leading product.

Being silly, if it were a product aimed at a different market than the ultra-loyal, bizarre Mac / Photographer crossover it would probably not have the obsessive following it does today!

That's my 2 cents right now anyway


Russ

Only "The Gimp" is more annoying (and I'm not talking about Pulp Fiction )

[joust]

pentoman said:

It is a horrible design, a poorly thought out (if it ever was thought out) behemoth that could really do with a ground-up overhaul by some computer programmers. I guess it's a hangover from being Mac originally (if I recall correctly) and no-one wanting to mess up a popular market-leading product. [snip] Only "The Gimp" is more annoying (and I'm not talking about Pulp Fiction )

Is that like driving a car though.

If you sat back and thought about it, why oh why does a car have pedals and that round thing in front of you. It's not efficient, nor sensible. However, it's how the majority of people know how to do the job of driving, and if you changed it you would cause chaos. PS is a bit like that, it's got majority share, but, like driving, you need to learn it's controls before you can fully master the programme.

Clones are trying to "find a niche" and hence appeal to the minor aim. They will make things more "obvious", but generally that tends to make them less effective. PSPs inability to control tonal and brightness curvs at the same time is just one example of that.

As for the Gimp, it's interface shows it's been designed by programmers, right down to it's name. However bang for buck (given it's free) you can't beat it!

J

[V6GTO]

I've just joined Smugmug. It's only 30$ and you get a 5$ discount if you quote a members e-mail(feel free to quote [e-mail]). You can upload as much as you want in files of any size.

www.smugmug.com

Martin.