Check out my new Photoblog

cCorE

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Hi, please have a look at my new Photoblog and make suggestions if anything can be improved. I'll post new Photos everyday.
If you like them, I would be happy you could share it!

http://ohok.org
 

essellar

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Seriously: get a copy of JPEGmini (the free "trial" version will allow you to process up to 20 images/day, which is all you should ever need for your site; the unlimited version is $20). The HDR graveyard image at the top is now 3.3MB in size, which is way too large for the web.It takes too long to download, and anyone on a data-capped plan can find themselves cut off or severely throttled after visiting just a few sites like that. And if you're on Free Hosting, you'll be out of image space soon, since these will be counted as "gallery images", not "content images" due to the lack of text. There's no real restriction of the images you use to illustrate text content, but if images are the prime content (and annotations don't count as text content for these purposes), then you get a 1GB maximum. Running that same image through JPEGmini results in a 562KB file (less than 1/6 the size), and you'd need to run it through an image subtraction in your editor to tell the difference (it's still extremely high quality). The portrait ("Just a Little Smile") comes down to 114KB (1/5 the size of the original), and it's still beautiful (no artifacts or major tone shifts). (That's it for the shilling, I promise. I paid them for the product; they don't pay me. It's just really, really good at making JPEG files much smaller without losing any visible quality.)

I'm not seeing anything like a personal style here. The first three images had me thinking "oh, an HDR freak". (I'm not a big fan of HDR images that look like HDR images, but that's a matter of personal taste. For some reason, Trey Ratcliff and Adrezj Dragan are famous and have followings, so obviously some people really like the "HDR look". I own plugins that will do things like that - more than one of them, including Photomatix,Topaz Adjust and Nik Color Efex - but any tone mapping I do is just enough to fit the image into 8 bits believably.) In that opening series (and I know that these things are in reverse chronological order), "A Winter Tale" stands out like a sore thumb because it doesn't have the "crunchy" texture of the preceding images. (It looks as though too much luminance noise was removed, but there's still a lot of chroma noise. You might want to reprocess that image; it's one of the most visually appealing on the page, but it does look just a little plasticky as it stands.)

The last four images on the page (the portrait, crops, phone booth and the Probe) look like random images you've thrown up because they were on your hard drive. They're good images individually, but they just don't fit with the others or with each other.

I mention all of this because I care. I've spent the last couple of years of my life as a photographic mentor/teacher. If you are doing this just as a random display of photographs, then it probably doesn't matter. But if you are seriously interested in making a name for yourself photographically, perhaps with commercial/professional aspirations, then you really need to develop a consistent voice. You can sing several different songs, so to speak, but you can't sing them all at once. To stretch that metaphor to the breaking point: people will buy your jazz albums, they will buy your operatic baritone, they'll buy your easy-listening pop, they'll buy your techno, they'll buy your dark wave goth metal, they'll even buy your country and western - but you're going to have to look a long time to find a single customer who will buy all of that jumbled up on one album. Separate your styles. Show them on separate sites if you have to. There's no harm in having distinct commercial, editorial, portrait and fine art identities, but you need to keep them distinct. People want to know what they can expect from you, and if you can't demonstrate a consistent style, you're just a generic person with a camera and post-processing software who likes to play. And whether you're talking about collectors or clients, nobody is going to gamble on your whim of the moment.
 

anamik.maju44

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Oh your site looks good. Your website design is eye-catching. Keep it up! Best of luck and keep adding more wonderful images to your site!
 
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