Yeah, it’s been longer than intended, but once again, it’s been a period with too much going on that wouldn’t be the least bit interesting as a post, and otherwise shitty conditions to try and photograph within. Despite the early indications, spring has not arrived yet, so be patient – I’ll have more stuff coming when I have something more to work with.
And naturally, when I sit down to actually work on a post, the connection speed is abysmal…
So this image is from the North Topsail trip last year, but also one of the many potentials that I set aside for the gallery updates but never used. It’s the kind of image that I’m torn over – nothing exciting or compelling from the behavior or detail standpoint, faintly interesting in the body position, especially since the sanderling (Calidris alba) has more the appearance of stepping daintily in the seafoam gap rather than (in reality) running from the advancing tideline, but I still liked the color and the framing. In the end I decided on images that I felt were stronger, but didn’t want to completely reject it…
Now, another aspect of this work. If you’re a photographer and intend to have a website, hopefully you’ve flush enough to pay someone to make one for you, but I suspect that’s rarely the case – it certainly doesn’t apply on my end. So if you’re doing your own, a lot of factors regarding the design come into play: what screen-resolution and aspect ratio are you aiming for, and will you make it compatible with smutphones? How many scripts or dynamic doohickeys do you include, and how well do they play with different operating systems? How much time do you spend researching such things and how much impact do they have?
I recently picked up a new (to me) monitor with a different aspect ratio, and thus changed my display resolution, which means the blog now shows differently to me, and if you’re the type to worry about how the ‘page’ is laid out (I am,) you start wondering about how to format things to appear right to the greatest number of users. I had fixed ‘full column’ and ‘partial column’ image sizes, and in my original screen resolution these worked well, but now less so as it’s increased, and so I wonder what the average is for most users, and if I boost these sizes, how many users now have images too big to work well? I actually increased the full column sizes just a trivial amount, more a sop to suspicions than any functionality, but it still remains less than the size I use for the horizontal image formats in the gallery itself, so the pic above was reduced from the one I had set aside for potential use therein (from 800 pixels wide down to 750, to be specific.)
It might seem frivolous or even paranoid, but presentation is a big part of the impression people get from your work – some more so than others. I personally am a ‘functionality over form’ kind of guy and passionately detest the current fads in webdesign, which change almost as frequently as clothing fashion and with the same utter pointlessness, but how much of this is safe to reflect in my site? Do I turn off new visitors if there’s too much blank space or awkward pagination? These kind of things don’t keep me awake at night, but ignoring them entirely might be detrimental to some unknown degree.
As for smutphones, well, too bad so sad – I’m not even going to bother. Not only do they change too often and have entirely different aspect ratios and typical layouts (most people use their screens vertically instead of horizontally, so formatting a site and blog to handle both is tricky,) I am far too wordy to appeal to the typical person who might be surfing on their phone, and the time spent choosing image sizes is completely thwarted by screens that can fit in your mouth, so they’re not a factor in my decisions, at least.
About the only accommodation I might make for phones is to offer a ‘background screen of the month’ option for a small yearly fee, if I think it’ll be popular enough – I’d probably have to avoid certain subjects. Naturally mentioning it way down in a wall of text is exactly what I shouldn’t be doing. But yeah, if you’re intrigued by the idea, make a comment or drop me a line.
Later on, there will be more gallery rejects, so you got that going for you. Which is nice.