Attached Link: MotionlessMemories

What I am looking for is advice and constructive criticism on how I can improve my work, my site, or anything else. I am still learning a lot and want to learn more so I can be successful. So if you find time please visit my site and give me feedback on how I can make my work better.

Thanks,

Alex Mason

Oh the website is www.motionlessmemories.com   

Alkex

I will have a look at your website.

Regards.

Christo.

Thank you so much. Any and all advice is greatly appriciated.

I looked at your site and you have some really good work there. The field of photography is extremely competitive so you are going to have to reach top notch to make a living.

I feel the dog shots need a lot of work and the portraits lacked composition. As you haven't many shots of either I am assuming maybe you haven't done many and these were just a fill to load the site up.

One word of real advice. The basic criteria for showing an image is to ask yourself "Would you hang it on your wall"......if the answer is no then dont show it.

Yep that's cruel but then life isn't easy so set your standards high.

I will site mail you with some other advice

Eddie

Good start... have a few little thing what you have to fine tune but I am sure Eddie will guide you trhough it. He is better then me so I will say nothing, listen to him.

seeya  T

Thank you so much for all the great advice. It really is helpful. I will keep every that helps me posted on how I am doing along the road.

First impressions are that there are too many photos / too much clutter on the website.

I clicked on the image which loaded and it took me into a gallery where some of the photos were pretty good and others were a bit bland.  I think you should really be brutal about what you display on a portfolio style of website, only pic the "winners".  It is like trust, hard to build up really easy to destroy.  Same with photos, put one bad photo in there and the viewer instantly lowers your work to the level of the lowest common denominator (ie the worst image on the page) - for instance there are a couple of pier shots on one page where the horizon is wonky for no apparent reason, that killed the experience for me.  Attention to detail is paramount...

Hopefully that helps, sorry if it came across as negative, but as was said above, you need to be top of your game to succeed and it is only through being brutally honest i think i can help...

Thanks and I dont mind if you are brutal. I came here for advices and I will take whatever I can get. I did not feel well yesterday and early today so I have not had a lot of time to make changes the the site, but I  will take your advice.

Thanks again

From the web presentation point of view, I would keep the thumbnail pictures the same size concentrating on the best part of the picture. They can click on the thumbnail to see the whole picture.

Also on the buy information page, I would put all the information on one page instead of making the viewer click on something to see the other half of the info. There is plenty of room on the page to view all of the info.

Good mottos when creating web pages are: KISS "Keep It Simple Stupid" and ASSUME "If you assume anything you make an ASS of U and ME".

=) thanks for the great tips. I will work on simplifying things down a bit. Just have been short on time recently.

If you want people to take your work seriously only post the very very best! A lot of the shots on the website could have been taken with any Point and shoot camera.. It can be worthwhile to hire best equipment to give you an edge, even if this hard to do on students money..

Look around at professionals work and websites and ask yourself how does mine compare..  

"Post only your best" and keep it simple are at the top of advice on the website.  I am quite guilty of not following the "best" rule and honestly that damages the overall impression of my gallery here on Renderosity.  For a published personal website, I would honestly have to be very tough on my photos and many on my gallery here  would not make the cut.

Even the best are not going to make some folks happy and will not be appreciated.  Then again, as with all of life some folks appreciate good photography while other do not give a hoot in any regard to quality.  You cannot let naysayers stop your developing an attitude of professionalism and quality.  I say this from another field of work which is in the arts and how I earn a living.  This of course includes accepting constructive critique and growing with that.  I have learned so very much from frank critique in "that other field" and those who are drawn to my work are precious and I will protect them from anything less than my best.  Those who do not care one way or the other are not a concern.

I need to go see you stuff.  God Bless and happy holidays.        TomDart.

Please take a look at the barn owl photo from Danob, a poster to this thread. You will see he knows what he is talking about.  So do the others.  (The owl is in "Last Week in the Galleries" for this week on the photo forum.)

You might want to check "site mail" when you get a chance. When you have mail on this site, there is a blinking  "site mail" thing at the upper right of the page just under MEMBER LINKS.

Again, glad you are aboard and peace to all.  Tom.

@font-face { font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p { margin-right: 0in; margin-left: 0in; font-size: 10pt; font-family: Times; }table.MsoNormalTable { font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }

Hey everyone,

I hope that everyone had a safe and happy holiday season. I have done a lot of work over the past month as well. I have tried to take as much advice from all of you as I could. Check it out and let me know what you think.

Also I was curious on pricing? I am not anticipating to much on-line sales but just being optimistic I think my prices are too high. I do have much experience selling though. If I could get some opinions on that that, it would be great.

And one other thought that I had was about watermarking my photos. Is it worth the time and effort? They are all right click protected. If it is how do I do that? Do I need software or is there an easy way?

Thanks again,

Alex

Sorry to bash this point again, but check page 3 of your gallery - there are three (!) photos in there which are different exposures (i can see through the slight differences in tilt / exposure) but are of exactly the same frame / scene.  (The golf course with trees and the mountains in the background.) And that isnt the only duplicate, or "slight change" in shot or timing thereof in your gallery as i spotted a few more (some of the portraits for instance are both in B&W and colour but are obviously the same exposure) - choose one photo to represent the framing and scene you chose - you are the photographer / artist, you get to chose.

Maybe going through and deleting those duplicated might bring down the numbers but even so i still think there are too many photos on there which get the viewer bogged down in the detail of your catalogue rather than give them a quick selection of your best work.

I recently went back through my catalogue to create a coffee table book.  My catalogue (as i can never be bothered to delete the non-keepers) is over 65K images...i have about 620 images on my renderosity gallery which at the time of posting each of them i deemed "gallery worthy" and there were only 60 images in that book which i was ultimately happy with as presenting as my best work...  considering i seem to work on a 1% "keeper" ratio when out shooting, and that is further condensed as explained above to a 10% "Coffee table worthy keeper" ratio - maybe you should think along the same lines?

60 images would mean 3 pages of gallery at your current 20 per page setup and not 11 pages... which to be honest no-one is going to go through.  If you really want to keep that many photos in a gallery then i would recommend splitting the galleries into themes - Flowers / People / Abstract etc....

Just an observation as i saw "original gallery" in the page i was looking at - it seems i was in a mixing pot of a gallery where all of your images were put... i think i clicked on the homepage image and it took me there - you may want to consider taking that function / mixed gallery out for the reasons i put above.

Anyway - i see the themed galleries now, but i think my other point about the mass of images still stands... your Travel gallery is full of the same motif (green grass, big trees, mountain at the back, blue sky) and therefore the good photos in there find it difficult to stand out from the crowd of other mediocre ones... as i said above: pick one

As for prices, I havent sold any from my website (below), so you will need to advertise / get the word out.  However you are competing (as i said in my first response in this thread) in a very tough market...

This is why I love this forum...great advice

Alright so I have deleted some of the duplicate photos. At least thats a start.

Also I created a short survey to get more spacific details on areas that need improvment. If you could please take it and maybe pass it on to other that might visit the site. Thank you. I hope this will help narrow down what needs to be adjusted and worked on.

The survey can be found at this link

http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/WEB22BSZCZTVCQ/

or by clikcing on the motionlesmemories logo located on the home page of my site.

Thanks,

Alex