My Website - Check it out (SSR)

[Lane Meyer]

Hey **hopefully*** this isn't really spam, 'cause I'm not really a photographer, and I'm not trying to make $$$ off this (yet).....

As many of you know, I'm somewhat of an amateur brotographer. Friends and family have been goading me for years to make a website portfolio of my work, mostly for their own enjoyment. So I finally did.

Grant Kaye Photography

I've worked with a few top notch photogs here and there, and they in particular have encouraged me to get a web presence going.

And now to the point - my portfolio is "varied," and is more inflated than what a true pro would publish on a website. Translation - I'm having a hard time editing my shots down, cause I'm sick of staring at them.

I was having the darndest time getting it to look the same in Firefox vs. MSIE (which sucks), which is why it dawned on me to ask the maggots to check and see if it looks ok in different types of OSes and browsers.

Here's where the maggots come in - consider this post an open invitation to the board/bored (?) to go check out the beta version of my site, and fire away with suggestions, namely:

*Which shots should I axe?
*How's the layout/design overall? (It's homemade, keep in mind...)
*Which do you really like, and should I definately keep?
*Does it look ok in your browser?
*anything else?

I'm also happy to make prints for people, if anyone's looking for new art for their walls. I love getting my stuff out there, and to the maggots, I'd make prints for cost + shipping. Seeing as I'm in NZ, now might not be the best time to do that, but I'll throw it out there if anyone wants.

Anyway, if you're bored, I'd love if you took a look and gave me your opinion. I toy with the idea of getting more serious about photography all the time (although geology seems to be ok so far!!!) so the consensus of a large group used to drooling over professional shots here and there would be much appreciated in my decision-making process.

Thanks
Grant
(LM)

ps - I know there are some "real" photographers on this board, and the last thing I'd ever want to do is poach their livelihood as a mere hobbyist - that's not my intention at all - I'm fishing for opinions, not work. Skiing is the smallest aspect of my portfolio so far, and probably won't expand 'cause I have a real hard time taking out my gear when the skiing's good.....

[AH]

Cool site! Like the fonts and easy layout.. pure and simple, nice.

On the other hand: try to cut down on the flash-usage on the frontpage. You could better create some gif-images where you're using flash right now (I notice because I get adblock-tags on al flashapplications and get two over your maintext on the frontpage). Second, try to get some kind of preloading going in your photoflashthingy. Now I'm waiting whenever I click on a thumbnail, that should be prevented.

[Lane Meyer]

Good points, I'll def change the flash text to GIFs, and look for some sort of while-loading image....thanks!

[13]

Wouldn't making the pictures .gifs make it easier for people to steal them and try to take credit for them? Nearly all photog sites I know of use watermarking and flash to protect their intellectual property.

I've got a pretty speedy broadband connection, so the loading times are negligible. Keep in mind that AH is in Europe.

I love the layout -- I think it's way better than some of the other photog sites I've visited.

I'm running Firefox and the only problem I saw was the captions on some of the pictures got cut off. I dunno if that's a server font/layout thing or a client browser thing.

[Pura Vida]

Nice site and awesome shots. Captions worked fine here on firefox with an ulta-high resolution screen. How did you manage to get the BRC aerial shot?

[smmokan]

The captions got cut off on mine, too.

Great shots man- you're pretty lucky to have been in some of those locales. The only suggestion I have is to possibly make the previews on the right side clearer, and maybe show just a small portion of the overall picture. Other than that, great job.

[girlski0912]

Nice site Grant! I totally forgot that you had spent time at OSU as well...the downtown colors shot was beautiful.

The layout is very user friendly-simple, easy to navigate. And I know absolutely NOTHING about web design, so consider this the computer dumb perspective. The shots that you selected were fantastic, but maybe whittle it down to 5 of the best per category and display them all instead of makign the viewer have to scroll through them all. You just don't want to lose your viewer's attention (sort of like why you keep your resumes one to two pages)

[Mcwop]

Site looks great. Some of the pictures appear dark on my work machine (Windows). This could be a crappy graphics card, or you need to adjust the gamma for better PC viewing. Did you do the photos on a Mac?

[Sphinx]

Very good-looking, but personally I greatly dislike flash.

As for the stealing images issue, you can add a .htaccess file and prevent hotlinking and the like.

Oh, yeah, if you stuff all the font information into a css stylesheet, you won't have to redefine them for every page. Not a very significant issue, though.

Nice pics!

[watersnowdirt]

Very cool stuff Lane! Fun to see what you're up to across the world!

My only suggestion - can you get the navigation bar at the bottom to show up so that you don't have to scroll down to get it? Maybe it's the way my computer/screen is set up, but on your home page, I have to scroll down to the to the links to other pages.

keep em coming!

[meatdrink9]

Great stuff. Really makes me want to visit Thailand.

[Xover]

me likey
unique from other photogs
remember to keep up to date; not enough of that is done
maybe add a "published" and "clients" section?
just my photojong $0.02

[LegoSkier]

Great shots and a good site.
Email sent with lengthy thoughts on site/images.

[Lane Meyer]

Thanks to everyone who took the time to take a look. I really really appreciate it, now I can go back to the drawing board with some great new suggestions and ideas.

The BRC aerial shot came from the Skydive lake Tahoe Twin Otter flown by Charles Brian, RedBull airforce BASE jumper and pilot. In 2002, we camped with some BASE jumper/skydivers, and got to tag along on their jump loads.

[skier666]

Very nice look on that site, well done.

Pitcures of Kia birds make me laugh, don't know why, they just do...

[Blurred]

Dude, personally I think your site was fucking awesome. Really.

It just needs some more ski pics.

Also, I'd definitely watermark your images considering how good they are and how much time you've put into everything.

[bcrider]

looks sweet to me.

your pics are awesome!

[Arty50]

One knit. Normally, if you listing pics vertically then the next picture in the series is down. But to advance the series, you have people clicking on the arrows above. It's not a big deal, but I clicked on the lower arrows first even though they appear to note that you're going "back."

More importantly, I love your pics. Especially the ones from Thailand. Great color, excellent exposure, use of focus, etc. Fuckin' bang up job, sir!

[midget]

OK, first off, good clean design.

2nd, I'm on Firefox btw.....I'd add something up near your header showing what category you are in, maybe move the categories up top? I lose that part of the site when i'm scrolled up top.....1280x800 screen resolution set on my monitor....

Don't worry about the watermark since you have put the site together in flash.

I'd add a client list if it's bigger than 5 clients. Otherwise dont put it up there.

Also, I didn't notice this before but you have 2 levels of navigation, one dissapears when you go into each section. I'd put the secondary category navigation up top when you are in a section (such as the photo section for example) then leave the main category navigation down below the photo.

Just a thought....dunno if how it would look though. Might be worth a shot.

The main reason I say that is I couldn't find the most important part of your website while I was in your photo section.......your contact details!

Anyhoo, there's my $0.02 for what it's worth......good job though.....AND PUT MORE PHOTOS ON THERE!!!!!

[Obstruction]

Very nice site design, easy navigation and pleasing to the eye. Good luck with it.

[bossass]

Dude, you got some nice shots just on your blog.

What kind of camera are you using?

[SquawMan]

grant,

check out the link below

there are lots of beautiful photo's here as well as links to each photographer's homepage, which will provide plenty of ideas

http://www.photo.net/photodb/photo-of-the-week

[bad_roo]

What's that font called? I'm loving that.

[jibij]

Clean and simple design. Very nice.
I had the same momentary confusion as Arty on your image navigation. The arrows need to be changed to up and down. Down arrow goes below the thumbs and takes you to the next 4 thumbs. Up takes you to the previous 4.
Great shots!

[fez]

Nice site, it looks fine with firefox/Linux. but flash sucks. If you are looking for any sort of google or search engine listings you should get some text on your site. if everything is flash and image maps the crawlers really cant find you and have no way to index you.

if you are using flash for protecting content, you're images aren't protected.


Let me know if you want me to take that link down. Really there is almost nothing you can do to prevent people from getting at your images while making things like a gallery easy to update (putting them all right into the flash movie is the best way, but even then people can screen cap them). a watermark is your best bet to make sure you at least get the credit.

you need to edit your httpd.conf file to prevent directory listing. Also, you should set up permissions and .htaccess files to only allow people to access your .html pages (cannot load .jpg directly) so that the only way to see the images is when the flash movie loads them.