Photo Portfolio Reworked

2009/11/11
Tobias' photography portfolio website has recently grown, but still looks familiar. How come?

When I created my current photosite design last year (read my release note from 2008 here), I actually built on the even older site from 2007. Back then, I made a decision to design the site so that images can always be seen in their full size on a 1024x768 resolution, which is what I was running back then. This means that one should not have to scroll the site because an image would be higher than the browser window. Of course, this resulted in a very small image size, which was okay for me back then. Kotogoto Daily utilized a similarly small image size.

But let's face it, as both display resolution and bandwith continue to rise, so does the size of images that are shown on the web. This year I finally changed from my old 17" CRT to a shiny 22" TFT (well, two actually), and suddenly my photo sites looked very humble. As a first consequence of this, I changed the size of the images at Daily from 640x400 to 900x600 a while ago.

For the photo site, my plan were even one step further. Since enlarging the image size will, even today, inevitably result in the fact some people have to scroll on smaller displays, I checked out various professional photographer's websites all across the web to see how they solve the problem. Many, if not most of them utilize Flash to create a website with a dynamic size, a site that scales with the browser window. From then on, this has become my final goal for my website as well. And while I got a dummy working somewhat well by now, creating this kind of website is rather difficult. So I decided to give my existing portfolio a quick rework and bring it up to date until I succeed in finishing the Flash site.

I decided to go with an image size that is even bigger than what I use in Daily currently: almost 1000 pixels wide. Adjusting the CSS was no big deal afterwords, the site was done very quickly.

The really time-consuming thing though is the task of choosing which images will appear on the site, and preparing them for the website. Of course, my portfolio should contain my best images. But which ones are my best ones? For some images, the choice is very clear. For others, it is not. There are some photos that I love but that don't seem to attract too much attention. Likewise, there are images that I don't consider my best, but get lots of positive feedback from others. All in all, scanning through my huge archive of photos, comparing them and picking out the ones which will make it onto the site is very difficult. For now, I'm glad that I'm through with it. But the process was also a recapitulation of my photographic work during the past years and gave me new inspiration to keep going further and improve my photography some more. The next site design and image selection process will show whether I will succeed. Until then, have fun with the partly-new photosite.

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