Building a Photo Website
In between the thoughts about lenses and cameras and gear etc. I’ve been building a gallery website for someone I met leading the Light and Land course. I had read David Ward’s photography book before going on the course so thought I knew what to expect. As it was my expectations were confounded and he turned out to be someone with whom I had a lot in common and whose work and thinking matched mine in many respects (including stuff which has no obvious link with photography such as music and reading. I’ll probably contradict this later as I think both of these subjects have strong links with photography).
David showed us some of his work whilst we were away and I was quite literally stunned at the beauty of one of them. The process of seeing this end result was one of the reasons why I came away feeling so strongly about large format, even though the reason I was stunned was more to do with composition than quality. What I was surprised at was that he didn’t have any website that really did his work justice. As I also wish to build my own website, and yet never get around to it, I thought I could combine a few things together to help everybody. I could help David build a website and in the process I would build a framework for a website that I could use myself. As it is I also get the opportunity to bore David with my questions about photography too!
The building of the website raised a few interesting points however. These ranged from the size of images to be used to the positioning and functionality of the next and previous buttons. I’ll talk about a few of these points in future posts but for now I thought I’d mention the issue of the maximum image size to show potential customers.
I have thought about this for quite a while and have found great frustration with many artists websites where their photographs are miniscule. The justification for this is so that people cannot copy or print out the work so that the photographer does not lose money.
I find this a little difficult to understand. The thought that a person who might buy an enlargement of a large format picture would be happy with a postcard size home print is just plain wrong in my opinion. For David’s site, I suggested that the pictures be available with a large dimension of 1200px, This would mean that the largest quality print that someone could make would be approx. 3 inch by 4 inch at 300dpi. They could print a postcard size print off at 6×8 inch at 150 dpi if they wanted. I can’t see that people who might print off a picture such as this on their home printer are going to decide that they now do not need to purchase that 16×20 ilfochrome.
What I can see very clearly is that some people will not buy that 16×20 ilfochrome if all they have to judge it is a 240x320px picture. These are the potential lost sales photographers should be thinking about…
