Some very very nice photography here. My favourite is the one in the Whale portfolio, number 10, the whale with his mouth open*. Amazing. That’s one long tongue. Some excellent glacier shots too. Nice work, except for the flash website….
* Careful, there’s a geek rant here. I would link to the pciture I like, but for some unknown reason photographers are obsessed with using flash instead of oh, anything else you can link to, on their websites. Ahem. Why? What purpose does it serve? Are they all indoctrinated to believe this is better somehow? If I wanted to steal the picture from the site I still could, and it shouldn’t be a high-res one that’s worth protecting anyway, if you really want to keep it safe, don’t put it on the net in the first place. Watermark them, and that’s it. For crying out loud. There’s a whole bunch of reasons this is dumb. Here’s the best one: I don’t link to the picture because I can’t, therefore I can only link to the main site and tell you how to get there. The site’s Google rank doesn’t benefit as much as it could because two links would surely be better than one when this blog gets indexed. He gets fewer page loads, and therefore gets less business. This kind of thing doesn’t matter much when it’s just me, but what about a more popular site trying to point out a few of the better shots? It could mean a whole crap load of traffic, and greatly increased Google rank. Then there’s the photographer wondering which pictures people like most, so he could post some more like those, or take more shots in the same vein. It’s not impossible that he could track it with Flash I suppose, but it’s so much harder, why not just use his web logs to see which ones get the most hits? I’m spent…
I warned you, Wilson. I’m sounding like a broken record on this, I guess.
From Metafilter.
Rob’s Rejoinder:
1/ There is nothing in any other format that looks as cool as Flash. It just looks more professional and artistic. And since photography is art, this is a pertinent point.
2/An eight year old can design an html site, and people know that. People don’t ooooh and aaaah over html sites. To have a Flash site is expensive, and most people know that too. This gives the impression that you must be successful to be able to afford such advertising.
3/I don’t particularly care about stats. Successful photographers rarely get business by advertising on Google or the Yellow Pages. It’s all word of mouth. In fact, artists generally wouldn’t care about stats. They wouldn’t change their style just to conform to what people like or don’t like…well, artists with any sort of integrity wouldn’t anyway.
4/ You don’t design a Flash site with protecting your pictures in mind. It’s just an added bonus. And, no, you couldn’t get the picture off of a Flash site, unless you took a screen shot…and, well, have fun with that grainly, pixelated mess. The image in Flash is buried in the codec on the .swf file which isn’t even on the web server. So, extracting it from the .fla file that IS on the web server would be an excercise in frustration. It might be possible, but so difficult as to make it pointless.
There, put that in your pipe, and, and do something with it!
P.S. The only knock I’ve got against Flash is the accessibility issue. Some people are scared of downloading the Flash player for their browser (even though most browsers come with it installed in the first place). Also, unless you have high speed, it’s pretty resource intensive. So, the real way to go, if you have a Flash site, is to also have an equivalent html site. I would, but everyone knows how lazy I am.
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