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When not behind the lens I work in the world of the web.

And at our agency we create lot of information design to convey complex web builds, systems, processes and information in a simple intuitive graphical form. Some of it (although not mine!) is practically art.

None of it has a place photography blog — until now! Whilst having a hour to kill and itching to experiment with some information design in my own time, I cobbled together a visual representation of my own photography workflow.

Here she is – click here to see a larger version.

An experiment with my photography workflow & information design.All rights reserved. Copyright Paul Marsden. Use only with permission. Contact paul@f29.co.uk

It details:

• Each sequential stage from cradle to grave
• Editing unique to each stage
• Color profile usage through the lifetime of an image
• Applications used
• exporting and archiving workflows

I subscribe to a lot of information design blogs, and haven’t seen any photography based information design yet, although this probably has no practical use what so ever I’m interested to see what others think of the photography workflow itself.

But I imagine it is fairly standard practice.

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My one year affair is over. Today I deleted my Pixelpost blog.

We had fun. There was magic and love, ah, for a time. But as with all great love affairs, they must end.

Initially I ran f29 using the photoblogging platform Pixelpost.

When I set it up I wanted to use the commenting function of the blog engine to get some quality feedback from other photographers about my photography — to help me grow as a photographer.

The curse of comments

But not all that feedback is useful. Mainly it’s taken 2 forms:

1. Reciprocal commenting — “Nice picture. please comment on my blog”
2. Inane comments — “ace shot”

You see a lot of this on Flickr. Whilst it’s nice i feel it’s sole intent seems to be too flatter tand secure a reciprocal comment on their blog. Plus, it’s just plain lazy.

Why is it a nice image? How could the photograph been improved? What do you think of the subject? For me this vague kind of feedback is not feedback at all.

It’s far from providing a constructive point of view on my photography or helping me develop.

To blog or not too blog

Photoblogging is like the traditional blogging requires a constant flow of content – photography in this case.

I find this does lead a lot of photobloggers to seemingly shoot anything in order to meet a daily / weekly post … the kids trike in the garden, a trolley on the pavement.

While this might be to some peoples taste, I decided I prefer to share the images I’m most proud of, even if that does mean a very small selection of the images I make, or updating the site 10 times across a year.

Bad SEO

I work in the web by day, and I care about SEO.

Pixelpost creates long complex URLs like (take a breath) http://www.f29.co.uk/f29/index.php?x=browse&category=6=antelope&fmpcanyon.html

Which mean nothing to a user navigating your site. And these complex random URLs aren’t great for SEO either. Creating my own site, meant I could take back control of the URL naming conventions and site navigation, to make it simpler and more Google friendly.

Pixelpost is dead. Long live f29 2.0

So f29 is now more of a traditional portfolio website.

No more inane comments (although feel free to email me), my URLs are friendly and as Pixelpost was pure image based, I’ve now taken the opportunity to provide some back story to each image.

So here she is after a month of learning HTML and CSS, and browser testing (i hate IE 6), it is live in the world of the web.

I’d welcome any thoughts

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Color managing photography for the web is crucial if you are to get the most out of your images. Especially, if you’re running a photo blog or managing a photography portfolio on the web.

Recently whilst browsing my website after uploading several images, I noticed the web versions had inherited massive color changes from the same file open in Photoshop. Even with the same image open in both Photoshop and my web browser placed side by side!

Compare below the same jpeg in Photoshop (left) versus a common web browser (right) which is Firefox3 in this instance.

So what is going on? Why does the image change color once it is on the web?

Web browsers are blind

Put simply, web browsers are unable to see any color profiles embedded in a jpeg. Suddenly understanding a little bit about the web and color management can go a long why to making more of your photography online.

90 percent of current web browsers cannot correctly interpret the color space you specified in your jpeg in Photoshop.

Adobe 1998 or ProPhoto RGB might as well not exist as far as web browsers are concerned, these spaces are outside of their visible spectrum so to speak.

So what color do they see?

Well nothing. These unmanaged (or rather dumb) web browsers simply apply default monitor RGB to all images they display from the web.

Where as applications such as Photoshop are color managed, so they pick up the color tags and render the image in the correct space according to the embedded data.

I can see (maybe)

A few smart web browsers are color managed (like Safari and FireFox 3) and can see these embedded color profiles. But only if the user has this function enabled, or in the case of Firefox 3 installed an add on.

sRGB to the rescue

sRGB is a very small color space usually used for shooting jpegs in-camera, and often decried by pro-digital shooters for it’s tiny gamut and resulting inability to retain the widest range of color tones available to digital chips.

That aside, sRGB is the closest color space to the “average” monitor. And a monitors color space is the space unmanaged browsers is using to display images.

So the much maligned color space is actually the best middle ground to embed in your images before saving to web — accessed through Edit > Convert to profile in Photoshop.

Previewing in this space will give you the best clue of what everyone else will see on their screens when looking at your photography.

An end to the problem?

Well no.

Not until some body like the ICC comes up with a universal standard for a web color space then we’re at the mercy or different operating systems and browsers. So this is only giving you some control back.

That said, since I’ve been embedding sRGB into my jpegs, with a little sharpening it’s pepped up my images, and rendered the web versions of my photography a lot more faithfully to the source image.

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When not behind my camera I earn a crust as a digital project manager. And it’s rare I get to bring that together my passion for online with my true love, landscape photography.

Impressed with Ephemeris

Today I discovered The Photographer’s Ephemeris. An Adobe Air application based sunrise and sunset location calculator.

It combines Google maps with astrological data on landscape photography’s prized celestial bodies — the moon and sun.

Sunrise sunset location calculator

Navigate anywhere on the globe, drop in a Google pin, and presto that locations suns sunrise and sunset position. You can also:

• Enter dates to account for the sun’s azimuth– it’s relative position to the earth throughout the year, which changes by season
• Save your list of favourite locations
• Search Google Maps directly through the app
• And, scrub a day’s timeline to track the suns motion

Intuitive. A nice user interface. It’s a great location research tool.

Oh, and did I mention it’s free? Download it here.

There’s no compensating for experience on location across the seasons, and there’s no saying it’ll improve your landscape photography, but it could be useful visualising the suns direction with the contours of the land. Plus it will help in determining the suns angle to find optimum positions for side lighting.

Obviously, you can’t take it with you, so it is limited to a pure desk based research tool.

I’ll be trying it out this weekend.

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