Comments on my website and photography

[blurrylens]

Looking for some feedback about my site and the photography in it. Any comments, however critical, would be greatly appreciated.
Blurrylens.com

Flash warning:
   1. My site uses Auto Viewer for displaying photo slide shows. The autoviewer .swf  is only 37kb in size and should load very quickly.
   2. There are no thumbnails, however, there are navigation arrows that let you skip forward & back at your own pace.

Thanks, Ron
www.blurrylens.com

[JMCP]

Hi Ron,

I am no expert but I quite liked your website and certainly liked your images but I do have a couple of little things that I would like to mention.

If you are not going to put capital letters in your title/name then space your name out a little from the word photography as it seems to me to just all blend into one big word.

The photos in the people section appear to be over sharpened or at least thats the way they appear to me or they have been resized incorrectly, have a look at the 3rd people pic as that is the first one that really made me notice it.


Cheers John

[kaelaria]

I liked the few images I viewed, but the site has some major drawbacks.

One, no thumbnails.  No way am I going to scroll through everything one by one.  After a couple boring shots, that's it, done.

The title layout is horrible, very hard to read.

The text color on the about page is equally bad, very unreadible.  Don't get artsy just for the sake of it - stick with what works.  You can use typeface and color to your advantage, but research the right combinations first.  Pale pink text on dark teal background doesn't work.  Maybe on MySpace...

[tjwilson]

You really need thumbnails with the ability to select individual images or optionally start a slideshow in a gallery.

Once a slide show starts, there is no option to stop it.  In trying to select another gallery during a slide show it appears that the page has become unresponsive.  This behaviour may not show up in you development machine, but it does across the web.

Smaller screens running at a lower resolution (such as my coal fired Dell) cannot display the entire image.  You may want to think about reducing the size of the images a touch, the size of the header (to create more space for the images) or allow scrolling on the page.

[Chris_T]

Looking for some feedback about my site and the photography in it. Any comments, however critical, would be greatly appreciated.
Blurrylens.com

Flash warning:
   1. My site uses Auto Viewer for displaying photo slide shows. The autoviewer .swf  is only 37kb in size and should load very quickly.
   2. There are no thumbnails, however, there are navigation arrows that let you skip forward & back at your own pace.

Thanks, Ron
www.blurrylens.com
[{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

The site's flash is too slow for me to bother viewing your galleries. But I did take a look at the About Me page, and here are my comments:

- The background and text colors, and the small text font sizes make legibility a challenge to my (aging) eyes.

- I dislike mixing third person and first person descriptions on the same page.

- "galley"?

If you meant wanting a viewer to have a gallery like experience at your site, you are on the right track. But it can take quite a bit of work to get it done properly. I too would not spend much time at a photo site without thumbnails. A web gallery without thumbnails is like a brick and mortar gallery without a catalog. This thread points out some problems in achieving such a goal:

[a href=\"http://luminous-landscape.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=13890]http://luminous-landscape.com/forum/index....showtopic=13890[/url]

[johnbeardy]

Hi Ron

I liked the layout, though would echo Chris's comment about the About page text size and colour.

One little thought is about adding some sort of copyright notice to the images, just something to deter someone from using a screengrab. I don't know Autoviewer but if you wrote the Flash yourself then maybe you could add a copyright layer.

And where are all your bird shots?

Hope you're well - not bumped into you lurking round Landscape Arch for a few years!

John

[blurrylens]

Thanks to all off you who commented, especially Chris_T for finding the typo (now corrected!) Regarding thumbnails, I hear what you all are saying but will be sticking without them for now. Not having them was a personal design decision by me based on that I do not find them useful on most personal portfolio sites due to their being just too small to really see what you are looking at. Also, I think they can be a distracting element when looking at a photograph online. I have really tried to remove as many distracting elements as possible and still be functional.

As for the other design elements, color, text size/color, flash vs html, etc. Some of it is limited by design elements, such as the size of caption text in the white frame. It just can't be any larger. But I am always concerned if people say the design is deterring them from looking at my photography. That's really what I care about. The web design should just be simple and not get in the way.  

I saw a lot of photographers using flash on their personal sites and I thought Autoviewer would accomplish what I wanted. It seemed pretty straight forward, you open a gallery and the slide show just auto-starts. If you want to stop or skip, you just click the forward or back buttons (actually, you can click anywhere to the left or right of the image) to move around. So you can quickly click your way through a group of photos and linger as long or as little as you choose on any one image. But, again, if people say it's still not simple enough, then I will look at other design options at some point.

[LoisWakeman]

Hi Ron,

Your design is a bit too tall for modern tabbed browsers on a laptop (mine is 1280 by 800). The bottom of each image is cut off. Something you might want to consider? The autoviewer is too stupid to force a scroll bar, so the image is not properly visible, period.

I think "things" needs some self-editing - it looks a bit self-indulgent to me as a disinterested observer. You have some great shots in other galleries though.

Oh - and what does "Please convo me to request a print in these sizes" - is it a US figure of speech I've not come across?