photography

I recently purchased LightZone for the Mac and have just been playing around with it a little. I’m quite startled by the results it can produce.

Here’s the result of a couple of minutes playing with an image. This first shot was as it came out of the camera:

And here’s the LightZoned shot:

The original image was a JPG, not a RAW. It still needs some work, but it has transformed a “throw away” shot into something I can work with.

Amongst many other things, I’m an avid photographer. As such, I’m constantly on the lookout for the best way for me to show my work. I don’t supposed anybody is that interested, but it keeps me happy!

I’ve tried countless methods of getting my images on the web. Until now, I’d settled on Flickr. Having just received their 2 billionth image, they must be doing something right. However, I’ve wanted something more “personalâ€? for some time. Browsing through a random blog the other day, I saw mention of http://www.zenfolio.com/ and thought I’d give it a try. I’m impressed. Very impressed. Here’s why (in nor particular order).

It’s cheap

For $40 a year (for the Unlimited account), you get (as the name would suggest) unlimited storage, a maximum file size of 12Mb (so you can store pretty much all of your images in their original size – ideal for backup), and a ton of other features, some of which I’ll outline below. You can find a full list on the Zenfolio web site.

They offer a number of other plans from $25 a year through to $80.

It’s beautiful

Take a look at my new gallery at markavey.zenfolio.com. The basic construction took me about 30 mins. I don’t think that looks at all bad given the time I’ve put into it.

It’s flexible

You can apply a range of different themes to your site. You can even apply different themes to different areas of your site. The Unlimited and Premium accounts will soon offer you the facility to design your own theme.

You can sell your photos, or choose not to. You can prohibit people from downloading your full resolution images. You can allow Zenfolio to choose a random photo from your collection for the “cover� of each group. You can set aside private, password protected areas of your site. You automatically get an RSS feed for your images. You can even get a neat little Wordpress plugin to show a random sample from your gallery (see the top of this blog). You can set your own domain to point to your gallery, so my own gallery will soon be pointing to photography.markavey.com.

It does all this and a great deal more. In a nutshell, it appears to do absolutely everything I’ve been looking for in an online gallery.

It’s dead easy to use

Of nearly every service I’ve tried, actually getting your photos on the site itself seems to vary between being a pain and being almost impossible. I’ve always thought this odd. Given that the entire purpose of these sites is to allow you to show the world your photos, you’d think they’d go out of their way to make the process as easy as possible.

Well, Zenfolio have done just that. They have provided what I consider to be one of the very best “web applicationsâ€? I’ve yet seen. Uploading is a doddle. Select the photos you want to upload and drag them onto the web page. Click one button to get things going. That’s it. Watch the beautifully designed uploader sending your images to your site. This is how it should be.

They also make the entire process of setting up your site very easy, with virtually everything being completed from your Organiser page. Here’s a screenshot:

From here, you can create your groups, galleries and collections, set their properties etc. It’s all very logical and well laid out.

Summary

I can’t think of a single good reason not to use Zenfolio, which is more than I can say for any other service or application I’ve tried. You get a 14 day trial, which I’m currently a couple of days into. After that, I think I’ll be going for the Unlimited plan, as it offers everything I need.

If, like me, you’re after the “Perfectâ€? online photo gallery, why not give it a try?

It must be my lucky day. First, Google adds IMAP support to Gmail and now Gimp 2.4 has been released

It’s been a long time coming and by the look of how slow their web site is performing, half the planet appears to be downloading it. It doesn’t look like the Windows Installer is ready just yet, but you can get the source from the Gimp web site.