Archive for September, 2009

How to set you children alight

Friday, September 18th, 2009

For some time I have avidly followed the work of Jason Lee. Jason is a wedding photographer from the US, although I am not sure exactly where in the US.

Apart from a spectacular portfolio of amazing wedding images, Jason has spent the last few years documenting the life and times of his two beautiful daugthers. Jason’s vision, composition and lighting style are always jaw dropping to me. It’s quite rare to come across someone whose images are technically brilliant, but also someone who conveys so clearly his joy for life and love for his subjects.

I congratulate Jason on this body of work and also on publishing a book of these images. If you have not already done so, take the time to go through his images of the kids. You can’t help but leave with a smile on your face.

Posted in Favourite Photographers, Muse, Photography | No Comments »

Pondering the Origin of the Species

Thursday, September 17th, 2009

Not a long post this time, but I am starting to work through the 4,500 images I took while the family was overseas on holiday. This shot really captured my attention when I was editing. I had just taken a feew snaps of the family sitting on the steps, and Lauren was still sitting down.  A happy accident! More to come.

Posted in Muse, Photography, Portraits, Recent Shoots | 2 Comments »

Version 2

Friday, September 11th, 2009

untitled

I can’t help myself….

Even though the website and blog were up and running, I felt the need to ‘polish the penny’, so to speak. I had been frustrated with the fact that the size of the website was too large to view properly on a laptop screen. And some aspects of the slide show were not really professional.

So  here’s what I have done:

  • Change the size of the web page.
  • Change the background – the damask pattern was kind of cool for a while but I was not happy with how long it takes to render, and how bright it was on the screen. There was not enough contrast against the central window of the web page.
  • Swapped the navigation bars around so that the main menu is above the images, and the portfolio menu appears at left. Because I don’t have drop down menus for my three image portfolios, I was not happy that people would easily notice the portfolio names pop up at the top of the screen. This format took some coding to change, but I think it provides a better experience for users. It looks cleaner.
  • Spent US$45 (gasp!) to purchase Simpleviewer Pro. This gives me the ability to delete their logo from my web page, to create a home page with a rolling slide show, and to customise more options in the portfolios. I’m stoked with how professional this aspect now looks.
  • Changed the background of the blog to line up with the background in teh rest of the website. I still want to tidy up the format of the blog a bit more. The template I am using at present is a customised version ot ‘Kubrik’, which is a WordPress default, but is not that easy to customise and gets result to defaults every time I download and instal an update…

As an aside, Simpleviewer Pro gives me the functionality I need, but is not that user friendly. It can be added as a plugin to Lightroom, but some changes require the .swf file to be republished, which requires you to download Macromedia Flash. You can get a 30 day trial, but what happens if I want to customise the flash player on day 31? I am not going to buy MMFlash – way too expensive! If anyone knows of a freeware flash file creator, let me know.

Anyway, that’s where I am up to for now, hope you like the changes.  I am always happy to get feedback, especially suggestions for improvement.

Next step is to revise the blog design and get SEO operational.

Posted in General, Website Design | 2 Comments »