New Website

[mfoster]

Hi all,

I was going to post a couple pics of my recent turnings and realized that I've never even really logged in here. Rather than flood the gallery of work with some of my past work, I thought it more efficient to just announce the debut of my new website that has been a looooong time in the making. I did all the work, which for me was a stretch, since I do not consider myself to be a geek or computer whiz. I had to figure out a lot of stuff including html and CS2, but finally decided to call it good enough and publish the site.

I would appreciate any feedback regarding the site. Comments and criticism on the work is also fair game, so hack away. The URL for my site is

http://breezyhillturning.com/

Thanks

Mike

 

[Griesbach]

Mike,

I liked your site except for the blue background. To me it's just too overpowering. Never the less, the site is easy to navigate, comes up quickly and the images are clear, clean and crisp. And....your work is outstanding.

 

[Jack Savona]

I agree

I agree with Cyril: easy-to-navigate, clear photos (except for one close-up) of beautiful work.
I also concur that the blue background is too cold for the warmth of wood.

Congrats on everything else.

Jack

 

[Ed_McDonnell]

Great job. Only problem I encountered was the large picture of the "Maple Lotus" platter at the bottom of the segmented gallery. When I clicked on the picture in the gallerly to see a larger picture, the larger picture only partially loaded. The bottom part (at third? / quarter?) of the picture was missing.

Nice fast response time. Who are you using to host your site?

Ed

 

[mfoster]

thanks

Thanks for the feedback. Glad to hear the site works. I am a Mac man, and you never know if something designed on a Mac will perform well on other platforms. I guess I'll have to rethink the background for the main pages. My wife did not like the blue either. Luckily, the background is an easy change.

Ed my website host is KnownHost. I researched this pretty well and they got pretty good marks for support and speed, yet were pretty reasonable $-wise.

 

[Matthew Clarke]

Michael,

Your work is equisite! Your jigs and fixtures section is very informative. It got me thinking about how I might reorganize my own shop (the never-ending project). I agree with the above comments about warming up that blue background, but in the grand scheme of things, it is a small issue. Thanks for the inspiration, and for sharing.

Matt

 

[KurtB]

Mike,
I thought your website looked great, and I especially enjoyed the tour of the shop with explanations! It is quite apparent that your skills are well employed in both jig making and turning. Thanks for sharing!

 

[Richard Baker]

Mike,
Good looking site and your recent carved pieces are exquisite. But I gotta love that first seg. piece from the Wood Mag article, and wonder how many of us started with that piece. No doubt hearing the beat of your own drummer, yours is shaped differently than those of us who simply copied the profile in the article. Congrat's on successful new web site and some beautiful work thereon.

 

[Bill Boehme]

Nice site content. I agree with the others about the background. I think that decorative backgrounds on web pages are way outdated so it is more than just a color issue. I would suggest just leaving the background white. The site does not provide means of quickly navigating betweens sections once away from the home page other than by repeatedly using the BACK key. You should show the menu on every page.

The photographs of your turned work seem to be over-processed. The JPG compression is rather high and edge artifacts are very noticeable in most of the pictures. Most of them also appear to be over saturated. If you are not shooting the pictures in RAW format, I would highly recommend doing so in order to maximize your ability to post process them and to minimize loss of image quality. It also appears that you are shooting against a high-key background in most of the shots which can be problematic in maintaining true color. If you haven't tried it, I would recommend using Varitone graduated background paper in either medium or dark gray over a sweep. The images also have a lot of blown out specular highlights which could be improved by using diffusion panels or softboxes. It also appears from the color of the shadows that you are mixing incandescent lighting with flash which can create color balance problems. If you use only photo floods or only strobes, then the color balance is easier to control. Finally, a very useful tool in photography is a Gretagmacbeth grayscale balance card or a WhiBal card for setting the white point in post processing.

 

[Ken Grunke]

Great site, and beautiful work. The bluish gradiated background doesn't bother me much, maybe this is new since you first posted?
One thing I always change on linked images (thumbnails, for example) is the blue border which is distracting. Just add <border="0"> in the image source if you want to get rid of it.
There shouldn't be any concern of Mac/Windows issues as long as a site is compliant with current standards. Usually it's the other way around where a site is built with Microsoft software that makes it difficult for other platforms to view.

 

[Charlie Knighton]

rating

Wow!!!!!!!

 

[mfoster]

Great suggestions

Ken, I thought that I had fixed the link outline issue. Thumbnails appear on my Mac as outlined in a black border (as I intended) and only change to a highlighted yellow (again as I thought I designed it). If that is not what you see, I guess I'll have to revisit it. Everyone suggested adding the navigation bar on all pages. I did have navigation on the pieces below each pic in the form of a forward and back arrow, and return to gallery, but not the navigation to other parts of the site. Adding this to the pics will be more labor intensive, but is do-able, and I guess I'll have to go ahead and do it.

Grand Poo-Bah, you present me with yet more challenges. You are absolutely correct in your analysis of my photography. I have evolved in my techniques over the course of time I took these. I never used the flash, and always confined my source of light to one type. Some I used several halogen lights, the later ones I used just one with reflected light. I use a light tent to diffuse the source, but still seem to have trouble with hot spots. I think I figured out the color correction problem I was having. I would import the pics (jpg) into photoshop, and found the pics looked totally washed out. I messed around and it seemed that the answer was to adjust the levels, then play with the contrast, color and saturation, till it looked like the real piece. The problem became apparent when I viewed the picture in a browser, and it was way overcompensated. I think this was because of a default setting in Photoshop as default color sync RGB. I have now switched this to Adobe RGB 1998, and it seems to have cured the washed out photo's when importing. My background has always seemed to give me fits. I bought a roll of what I thought was gray background paper, and it turned out to be light gray, at best (almost white, is that what you mean by high key?). I'm not sure if this is why I am having trouble getting true colors from my camera. I usually choose one of the higher settings for jpeg compression when saving within photoshop. When I save the photo for the website, I reduce the size to my target size, then choose the highest quality compression setting that will give me a reasonable sized file. You can do both in one step in ImageReady. Is it better to reduce the size first, then save it with the chosen compression? Finally, I have no idea how to use the white balance card while processing (in photoshop?). If it will help, I'll give it a try. I've messed with setting the white balance on the camera, and that did seem to help, and I think I understand white balance, just not sure how you would combine this with processing the photo on computer. I really appreciate your critique, and it can only make the site better.

Thanks all for the honest opinions.