OT my website

Like it... Nothing overdone, just gets to the point mostly.

Couple of comments - I don't like tables with borders. I think it would look better with border = 0 IMHO.

I would also choose a minimum screen res - 800 x 600 probably and fix the table widths to fit in that width. On a high res screen the content spreads very wide and makes it look disjointed.

I'd also try to get all the thumbnails to a single width (which mostly they are). The thumbnails also lack definition - have you experimented with larger thumbnails but higher JPEG compression to keep the overall page data size the same? Might look better (or worse)!

While I'm here, I really like some of your photography, some seems a bit 'contrived' but there are some really good images there.

Have you thought about online ordering? Really easy to do - someone else does the printing and mailing stuff for you and you take the money...

Hmm, I'll look at that.

I had it with larger thumbails but chose to work with 150 pixies on the longest side (I think it was 150 I settled on).

Contrived, hmm, well it is all 'set-up' and maybe that shows on some.

I'm going to set-up an online ordering via another website, I still print everything myself by-hand to ensure quality, and for the prices I charge I should be sacrificeing my first-born at the same time.

Thanks for taking the time Tim ;o)

Regards. Mark.(AKA, Mr.Nice.)

Hey, being a critic is the easiest job out there... I'm about to pick up a camera again properly for the first time in years - going to start with ducks on the local pond and work from there. I'll post my first efforts so you can reciprocate!

On or around Mon, 21 Mar 2005 23:38:58 +0000, Tim Hobbs enlightened us thusly:

I'm with you on both those points. Borders around the frames don't add anything. A single-pixel line might be OK, or no borders at all.

As to resolution - 800x600 is starting to fade, now, although I know people who still stick to it ("because it makes the buttons and writing nice and big" - don't seem to have noticed that you can tweak the sizes of such in modern windows) more or less religiously.

most people seem to be using higher resolutions, these days. I tend to scale pictures for web posting (other then for such as photo.net) so they fit in an 800x600 window, which means that you can see it all by going full-screen if you still run 800x600, or it'll pretty much fit inside your browser on 1024x768 or above. I run 1280x960 here, and an 800x600 picture still appears a reasonable size. Apart from sites such as photo.net which are about photo critique (and thus you want to lose the minimum detail, so no re-sizing) this works fine. There's absolutely no point in having pictures at 3000x2000 resolution except for ones that people may want to print - almost no-one has a monitor which will show it without rescaling anyway.

I think, for a photo-promo site, I'd go for a 3-level approach; which makes the coding more hassle, granted; have a page of thumbnails, clicking 'em gets a medium-resolution picture (say within 800x600 as above, fairly well compressed to something like 100KB, so it's fast loading) and then have a "large" button which gets you something like 1600x1200 and less compression. Unless you want to sell full-res ones, in which case, the 800x600 ish one can have a "buy this picture" button.

just my ?0.02-worth.

will take a look.

Regards. Mark.(AKA, Mr.Nice.)

I don't want anything bigger than 500 or maybe 600 on the longest side as image theft is a very real threat and you can print an 8x10 from an

Regards. Mark.(AKA, Mr.Nice.)

Why not watermark them? That prevents anyone printing them, but they can see a high-res picture to really evaluate the quality of the image (at least in a technical sense).

This is how all the major stock libraries work, supplying comping images at about 600 pixels wide to allow concept work and client approval. If you want the print-quality original without watermark you hand over your $300 or thereabouts...

On or around Tue, 22 Mar 2005 13:35:35 +0000, MVP enlightened us thusly:

you won't get much quality though. I suspect that with suitable image-processing gear you'd get as good results from 640x480, say.

If you print from 800x600 to 8x6", you're only looking at 100 dpi - typical glossy magazines run at about 1200, as you're no doubt aware. You can't stop people making off with images you post on the web, though in theory it's copyright theft, probably. I guess if you catch people selling your images, you'd stand a chance of getting redress, but I'd not hold me breath even so.

'course, you can compress them heavily, but that tends to look bad. If you're looking to sell pictures, then I think you have to have a reasonable preview and accept that some people will content themselves with nicking that, rather than paying for a proper version.

's a bit like the music industry - they, too, have a huge problem with copyright theft - personally, I reckon the way forward is to make the music available for download sufficiently cheaply that most people will pay to be legitimate, and accept the tightwads who won't as unavoidable losses.

On or around Tue, 22 Mar 2005 14:00:35 +0000, Tim Hobbs enlightened us thusly:

that's a good point, and one I'd not thought of. proper watermarking w0ould be difficult to remove.

A cisible watermark accross the image is commonly use but I hate them, I find them distracting when viewed which is why I make the images plan but of a size with limited use.

Regards. Mark.(AKA, Mr.Nice.)

I've printed 8x10 from a 640x480 at 100dpi and it's ok to hang on a wall as long as you don't look at it closer than about 12" away.

I work on the theory that whatever is on the web can and will be taken and printed, I want the lack of quality in a print to be obvious, easily achieved by the limited file size. I think my sizing is about right.

Regards. Mark.(AKA, Mr.Nice.)

I put nothing larger than 600 x 400 and whatever on mine because I do not want people filching my pictures, if they want sommat bigger they can pay for it.

And I have printed acceptably at 20 x16 from 1200 x 960 with interpolation and there is obviosly a rule here, the larger the size the further you stand back to take it all in so there has to be an optimum somewhere

As Mark is professional photographer maybe he ought to look at one of the commercial (aka pay) watermarking services that are out there. Your identity is encoded into the file by altering the odd bit here and there in recoverable manner that is horribly hard to remove.

This appears to be the way the music industry is going.

As to Marks site, I agree the table borders are a bit naff and I don't really like the static background image that the foreground scrolls over. Also when clicking an image it might be nice to get a proper page with the image in rather than just the image. I'm guilty of that at the moment though but it will change fairly soon in the big move to PHP...

On or around Wed, 23 Mar 2005 00:18:15 +0000 (GMT), "Dave Liquorice" enlightened us thusly:

I've done pages with images in with ordinary html - but then again, it's more data and more files and doesn't really gain that much provided the browsers out there are happy with opening image files. Obviously, lynx ain't going to, for example, but then that's what the alternate text is for (rather than what mickeysnot's deliberately non-standard pile of penc uses it for).

It's a related effect to Depth of Field. There's a limit to the resolution of the eye, and whether it's a "circle of confusion" or some other lack of detail in the image, if it's small enough we can't see the difference.

That's help if someone was claiming a digital image as being their own, and it'd help me track the use of an image across the internet but my main threat is people printing their own copies instead of dipping into their pockets.

noted ref the table borders, will get to that when I have the time. as for the static background, I like that feature so that'll stay. I agree ref the larger image not being on it's own page, I'll look into that also but it increases the workload somewhat.

thanks ;o)

Regards. Mark.(AKA, Mr.Nice.)

One extra file that builds the page given the filename of the image. Extra data, yeah, but unless you are running a silly site crawling with images for no reason other than eye candy not much more than a kilobyte if that.

Apart from projecting a better image.

I think your is one of those sites that will grow over time, to the point where it will become very hard to maintain as static pages. At that point you'll want to reengineer it using PHP, ASP or somesuch.

There are plenty of photo-gallery products out there, some free and some far from it. Some will incorporate online ordering, meta-tagging, IPTC (?) tags and the like.

Out of interest, Mark, how much traffic do you get to your site - is there a significant market for art photography online? I've always thought of art as something you buy from a gallery or exhibition rather than via the net.