It's not just my own new site that I've been busy with over the past few months. I've also shot the images for three other websites.
Pedal Progression is a new mountain bike skills company based in Bristol, offering tuition and guided riding for riders of all abilities:
Gary Lake, the man behind my new-look, soon-to-be-launched portfolio site, is also busy training to ride the Wales Coast to Coast in the summer. I know. He's clearly mad, but what can you do?
Finally, Gary also put together the site for endurance racing team NinerStansErgon:
It's been the norm for my pictures to end up on the web at some point, but it's more often than not a site that accompanies some kind of print product, whether that's a magazine or a catalogue. These shoots were different, because the web was always going to be the delivery medium of choice. It's a new way of working for me, and one that throws up its own challenges and opportunities.
It's quite liberating being freed from the design constraints of an A4-ish paper product. Looser crops are useful, so that web designers can run banner-style images where appropriate or crop into a tighter area of an image. I'm used to doing my own cropping in-camera and don't generally like seeing my images cropped in print, but with the web you can't always use standard 2:3 aspect ratios... and anyway, resolution isn't an issue. Provided you're working with a good designer, freedom to crop is generally a Good Thing.
Towards the end of last year I posted about my portfolio site's impending rebuild. Well, although it's taken a while, we're now on the finishing straight and it should be live very soon. Incidentally, the new site is one of the reasons things have been a bit quiet around here lately...
Here are some screen grabs to give you an idea of what's in store:
What you can't tell from these reduced size grabs is just how good the pics look scaled to full screen on a 24 inch monitor. I'm taking a punt putting such relatively high res pics online, but there's no denying the impact.
But that's not the only cool thing about the new site. It's also designed to play nice with both iPad and iPhone, including supporting the swipe function for navigation. Here's an iPhone screen grab:
Plus the blog will be integrated, all the pics will be captioned and there are direct links to my Twitter feed and Facebook page.
There's also all sorts of other cool stuff going on in the background, including some clever scaling and a bunch of other stuff that I don't understand. It all contributes to what should hopefully be a slick, easy to navigate site that puts the images where they deserve to be: up front. Big thanks to Gary Lake for 7 months of hard graft in what little spare time he has, putting it all together.
Watch this space - not long now!