I’ve been looking a lot of photography websites over the past couple days because I’m going to help my friend Ross re-do his, and hopefully attract some freelance work for him through it.
The was a time when every photographer needed a flash site to properly display their work. One of my favorite sites (and photographers) of all time is Jill Greenberg (photo on the right). That said, with some advanced CSS and a little magic, I think you can do just as effective a job using HTML and JS. I’m a huge fan of what my friends Colin Lenton, Ed Fladung and Andrew Watson. Colin’s site has a TON of photos, but it never feels overwhelming, and it loads the next photos progressively. Slick style as well. All have flash somewhere on the site, but it is used tastefully and sparingly.
What photo sites do you visit? What do you like about them? I would love to hear in the comments.
Today on Design You Trust, I came across Daniel Hjalmarson. While his site didn’t exactly work (I peeked under the hood and noticed some gnarly macromedia ‘mm’ references and z-index stuff), I really liked his photographs. Here are a couple favorites:
So who’s got some good links for me?
And just like that Elliot Jay Stocks pushes his girlfriend’s photo site live: http://samanthacliffe.com/
Pretty nice.
dood. thanks for the compliment, although my portfolio site blows monkey nuts right now. I designed it awhile back and never got around to populating it with good stuff. I’m not digging on SSP’s navigation so much anymore (it’s a bit too ambiguous, i prefer text links). Next project up is revamping the portfolio site, so I’ve been hunting down some flashy image gallery scripts. and they all go for flashy crassy flash. and i like just the opposite. clean minimalism. most of the jquery stuff i run into is buggy. I ran in to Galeria yesterday, gorgeous script plugin for jquery, but it has a weird flash on the large image, when the page first loads, in Safari.
If you come up with something cool, I’d be more than happy to kick down to help thee um, development of the site, we could do a um two-fer, just changing up the design a wee bit. lemee know.
My favorite photo site right now is Art Brewer. The photography is gorgeous and presented very minimally. He does a great job at presenting both horizontal and vertical images. usually vertical images are bastard step children cuz they don’t fit the dimensions of the viewing area (look at most image gallery sites, the images are all the same dimensions - this is a total cop out). I think his dev team solved this problem well and I like how the images are justified right. His top menu could be organized/designed a wee bit better, but miles ahead of most photography portfolios and nice big bold simple logo. I could do without the little misleading decorative arrows at the bottom.
I dig Colin’s site, his photography is beautiful. I did something very similar for my sister’s site. But horizontally scrolling sites tend to munge the photography into one image, having all the images put together, kinda messes up the reading of individual images. making it more of a collage. You need to rely on the images being very different from one to the next, so they stand out, sequencing is too important on scrolling photo sites. The thing I really like about scrolling sites is the immediacy of the images, you don’t have to sit there clicking on thumbnails, the bad part is that they don’t load in order.
ok, i’ve rambled. off to bed…