If you’re picky about how your photos are displayed, then putting them up on the web is going to make you pull your hair out.  You can get it just right…perfect even…in your photo software (I use Apple’s Aperture).  Then you look at what you’ve done in a browser and it isn’t the same.  The browser rendering engine renders it just a tad differently then you see it in your photo software, or any of the operating system’s built-in picture viewers.  And what is more, each browser seems to render your image files a tad differently. 

I was looking at some of the photos I posted yesterday in Firefox and the contrast was off.  I started up Safari and they looked better.  I’m looking at them now in IE and they look very flat.  I took those shots in overcast conditions and paid careful attention to the contrast values as I was making the image files for upload, and the browsers just make all that work go for nothing.  Hopefully something of image content gets through to the viewer.  That’s all I can do.

I’m going to re-arrange my photo galleries a tad in the next few days.  2, 3, 4 and 6 are coming down, and I’m going to create a few loose galleries that group the images together better then the topics I put them under there.  Rather then the context of how I came to take them, I’m going to try something a little different.  I’m working myself up to producing a nice book of my art photography later this year.  It won’t be cheap and I doubt I’ll sell very many.  But I’m going to arrange with one of those print-on-demand outfits so I won’t have to buy a lot of inventory all at once, which I can’t afford. 

I’ve got some books on self publishing, and getting set up with those ISDN numbers and such.  They hand them out in such a way as to indicate clearly to book sellers and reviewers that the book was self published, but in this day and age I really doubt that makes much of a difference.  Whatever I produce will be as high in quality as I can get, which will probably make the book somewhat expensive, but this is going to be my declaration of a lifetime’s work so far and I’m going to do it right.  What will be in the book is the images as close as I intend them to be viewed as I can get from a printer.  The only thing better would be right off my own printer, which you can always ask me for if you want.

That’s the other thing I’m going to put on the gallery main page…how to order.  I sell them for $40 for 11×17 inch prints, plus shipping.  Signed and dated on premium gloss photo paper in non-fading pigment base ink at maximum resolution.  They will look much better on your wall then in a browser, so if there’s something in the galleries that you like ask me about it.