Reply To: Lesson 12 Portfolios

#24286
Duncan Rawlinson
Keymaster

http://www.cogan-cogan.com/

Ok here are some notes from looking at your site. The very first thing that I noticed was that I had to scramble to turn off my speakers. The volume on my computer was cranked but I wasn’t listening to anything and I was not expecting to hear sound.

As a general rule of thumb auto playing music on websites is a very very bad idea. If you want to include music of some kind give the user the ability to click play.

The second thing I noticed was the visitors count thing.

I would just use Google Analytics and not make your visitors number public. In this day and age of millions of youtube views even big numbers look small.

At that point I started to notice the photos.

I figured what I would do is a quick take on each image:

There are some prominently featured images like this one that are not very strong
http://www.cogan-cogan.com/p873317158/h6cf0a04a#h68bc53d6
This image is heavily photoshopped and not really in a good way.

This is a nice image:
http://www.cogan-cogan.com/p873317158/h6cf0a04a#h60144698

This is not a good image because people want to see faces!
http://www.cogan-cogan.com/p873317158/h6cf0a04a#h66111f66

Stuff like this comes off as quite weird:
http://www.cogan-cogan.com/p873317158/h6cf0a04a#h680c3c81

This is nice:
http://www.cogan-cogan.com/p873317158/h6cf0a04a#h68aced5d

More stuff that’s just too weird to feature on a “photography” site:
http://www.cogan-cogan.com/p873317158/h6cf0a04a#h661de0e5
(These may be better put into their own “abstract” section or something because at a certain point they don’t look like photos anymore)

Don’t get me wrong this kind of experimentation is fantastic but it gets confusing for the viewer, IE am I looking at graphics, photoshop work, or photography?

This is the kind of nice image you want to showcase if you’re going for an abstract/simple style:
http://www.cogan-cogan.com/p873317158/h6cf0a04a#h64efb8e6

This is very murky:
http://www.cogan-cogan.com/p873317158/h6cf0a04a#h666b17f9

Nice:
http://www.cogan-cogan.com/p873317158/h6cf0a04a#h6b0db1e0

Nice:
http://www.cogan-cogan.com/p873317158/h6cf0a04a#h6cef15da

Not that interesting:
http://www.cogan-cogan.com/p873317158/h6cf0a04a#h6b1ce858

Nice but needs something in the frame, not just sky:
http://www.cogan-cogan.com/p873317158/h6cf0a04a#h6569adc4

Nice:
http://www.cogan-cogan.com/p873317158/h6cf0a04a#h68ad98ef

Again with the faces here:
http://www.cogan-cogan.com/p873317158/h6cf0a04a#h637555ab

Not that compelling:
http://www.cogan-cogan.com/p873317158/h6cf0a04a#h6cc028a3

THIS!!
http://www.cogan-cogan.com/p873317158/h6cf0a04a#h6317f62c
Other than the crooked horizon this is a nice image with the wide aspect ratio and everything.

This is good, it’s always good to use people in the foreground of images like this:
http://www.cogan-cogan.com/p873317158/h6cf0a04a#h6761284f

This is good:
http://www.cogan-cogan.com/p873317158/h6cf0a04a#h6a036290

This is good but it’s underexposed a bit too much:
http://www.cogan-cogan.com/p873317158/h6cf0a04a#h642ad689

You’ve got some nice images there.

One main suggestion would be to pear down on the heavily photoshopped images and focus on your strong images, like your wide aspect ratio landscape photos and your scenery photographs.

The main thing to remember about this is that a website is like a garden it must be tended and weeds must be removed! Sometimes less is more so remove things you don’t think work.

Images like this should be feature more prominently:
http://www.cogan-cogan.com/p873317158/h60144698#h60144698

Images like this should either be removed or hidden in a less prominent position:
http://www.cogan-cogan.com/p873317158/h60144698#h661de0e5

I like that you’ve got your own domain name as well.

You can keep working on your website and your photography over the long run that way.

Keep playing and keep experimenting!

Thank you.