In my July 2016 column I posited several reasons why you shouldn’t use Adobe Flash, including blocking millions of iDevice owners from viewing your photography. Yet Flash remains popular, as you can see by one of the sites I hoped to feature this month but could not because my computer is Flash-free.
A reader recently e-mailed me, asking, “I noticed you and other professional photographers don't always use right-click protection or watermarks (on your sites.) It seems like you'd want to protect your photos from unauthorized use. I'm not a pro but even I wouldn't want someone to grab some of my photos as their own.”
Each of my Web Profiles columns will now include suggestions on how to increase the number of people who not only visit your Web site or blog but want to come back for more. To provide real world examples, I’ll pick sites that put these tips into practice.
A few months ago I made some suggestions for improving your website. One of these was to avoid using Adobe’s Flash mainly because it blocks the millions of potential visitors to your site who are using Apple iDevices.
Every month, Shutterbug columnist Joe Farace chooses his favorite photography websites and online photo portfolios from readers. Here are four photo sites he thinks are a cut above.
Each month in this column I gather a collection of websites, sometimes with a loosely related theme. This month’s sites have little in common except an excellence of vision, proving they are not only most uncommon but the result of hard work.
This month marks the anniversary of a column that began in Shutterbug magazine in 1999 as Website of the Month and along the way evolved into Web Profiles. We’ve now moved the column exclusively online and I continue to seek out seek out new websites, to boldly go…sorry, I got carried away.
May was National Photo Month, the former home of Take Your Camera to Work Day, and the month I was born, so you might say it’s a month for celebrating the art and science of making images, no matter what that medium—film or digital—may be. This month’s column features images from the U.S.A., Canada, and Slovakia, and each website and photographer showcases the joy of image making with the ability to share their work with like-minded individuals around the world, which is the main reason why photography is the universal language.
I’m very excited to kick off the new year with websites from four photographers whose photographs could not be more different from one another, yet each shows the power of photography as the universal language. Anyone who is interested in pursuing fine art photography as either a career or avocation will find that these websites represent a virtual master class and I hope that the photographs will inspire you, as they do me, to make 2015 a year in which we all focus our energies in creating more and better images.
Thanksgiving is a uniquely American holiday when friends come together and share a meal and their feelings for one another. The World Wide Web is another way we can share images with others, no matter where they may be located on this vast planet. Over the years I have made some really great friends who I would never have met except for the Internet, which is its real power. Here are a few photographer friends I’ve met online through their excellent websites.
In any given issue of this magazine you’ll see lots of different genres of photography represented, showing the diversity not only of subject matter but also how these subjects are treated aesthetically and technically. It’s this diversity of style that makes the magazine so readable as well as so much fun. Our readers are a diverse lot, too, and this month you will see an all-readers’ Web Profiles. These readers come from all over the country and use a variety of methods to display their work, but they all have one thing in common: an overriding passion for the art and craft of photography.
If you want the world to see your images, one of the easiest ways is with a free photoblog from Tumblr (www.tumblr.com). Free or low-cost templates give your blog the look you want. As a fan of Micro Four Thirds system cameras, I started a new blog (http://mirrorlessmusings.tumblr.com) to pick up where last year’s Picture-a-Day blog left off with a spin aimed at mirrorless photography. Using a free template, I had the blog up and running in 15 minutes, and you can, too. Tumblr is interactive so you can have a two-way conversation with admirers of your work. Don’t, as the parable goes, “hide your light under a bushel basket.” Sharing images is what makes photography the universal language and Tumblr makes it easy.
One of the main purposes of having a website is to market you and your photography, right? Yet, based on my experience writing this column you would never know it. Almost half the people I contact requesting permission to feature their sites don’t respond or say “no.” Their sites may be freely available to anybody in the world but they prefer to limit the number of people seeing their work. I always honor their requests but don’t understand this approach to marketing. If you want as many people as possible to see your site, send me an e-mail through the Contact page on my website.
In a previous column I offered a few ideas on creating Contact pages with built-in spam protection. Littleton, Colorado’s Tim Mosholder (www.mountainviewphoto.com) sent me a tip for WordPress users that lets you use an e-mail link that’s impervious to spambots. CryptX (http://wordpress.org/plugins/cryptx) is a free WordPress plug-in that automatically changes all e-mail links on your site’s pages by adding [at] and [dot]. For example, Tim’s e-mail is “info[at]mountainviewphoto[dot]com” and the link works when your clients click on it but spambots won’t see it.