Fine Art Photography | Nature | Creative & Artistic

Madras Photographic Society has requested me to deliver a lecture on creative nature photography. This program is schedule during 22nd and 23rd Feb’09. More details about the program is here in case you want to attend.

See you there on Saturday !

I have been very busy redesigning my website during weekends for last couple of months. As you might have guessed I have designed this site myself. From the design perspective earlier version had some inefficiencies in terms of work needed to get images uploaded to different galleries etc. So the thought of redesigning the website occurred couple of months back.

Having spent lots of time working on CNP website I revisited my earlier decision on not using any of the public domain softwares for content and gallery management – like Joomla, Gallery2 etc for my site. Finally, after some thinking I again I decided not to use them   because I felt my needs are very simple, I don’t need  heavy weight softwares which I find often very slow, takes lots of time to load pages, a layer below most of the websites using them look very similar ! (BTW, I write software for living). I started the redesign of my gallery software and rest of the site couple of months back with following clear guiding design goals –

1. Artistic Appeal/Uniqueness

I hope I did some justice for now, I will keep revisiting this aspect often – artistic appeal and uniqueness is very close to my heart.

2. Simplicity

Fewer content/links per page – less clutter

3. Speed of content loading

This adds a lot to the browsing experience.

4. Search engine friendly and search engine optimized.

Whether we like it or not website design needs careful consideration from search engine optimization perspective. After all bots that visit our sites for content indexing are dumb. Some of them do have an intelligent coating above their dumb brains. It is very important for us to design the website in such way we have better control over informing search bots over what to visit, what is important, what are new contents,   if I have two similar pages which one is more important for me, and control over lots of other aspects related to search engines.

5. Should work on smaller display resolutions too. As on January 2008, according to statistics 48% of the display resolution stands at 1024×768.

I think my current design of the gallery and website meets most of it for my taste with ample scope for tweaking and modification. In a nutshell minimalistic design with an emphasis on art and simplicity. I will continue to tweak my site to further add to some of those goals above.

Here goes the New Nature Lyrics Website

If you don’t have a background in computer science you may stop reading further since what follows may be difficult to follow!

I felt whole of my web site can be described using a regular language ! I chose xml to describe content of my web site. First I wrote a program in C (btw, I love programming) which took content of my current site as the input and generated an intermediate xml file. An image entry in my xml file for example looks like –

<image>
<image_title>Terns in Love | River Tern | Sterna Aurantia </image_title>
<alt_text>Terns in Love – courtship feeding</alt_text>
<description>River terns in courtship feeding display. Every movement of these terns appear very artistic – be it simple flight with large wings, to fishing to this courtship feeding</description>
<pri>0.99</pri>
<file_path>terns_love_in_space_gd1.jpg</file_path>
<thumbnail_path>terns_love_in_space_gd1.jpg</thumbnail_path>
<primary_category>avian</primary_category>
<secondary_category>favourites creative tg_halli</secondary_category>
<exif_data>Nikon D700, Nikon 600mmf4 af-s</exif_data>
<key_words>River Terns Courtship Feeding Artistic Display</key_words>
<location>TG Halli</location>
<is_print_available>ADD_LATER</is_print_available>
<non_interpolated_resolution>ADD_LATER</non_interpolated_resolution>
<ethics>UA</ethics>
<have_raw_link>NO</have_raw_link>
</image>

Several of these fields are newly added which were not relevant to my earlier design. Now I have designed it in such a way that the new attributes can be easily added by adding new entries to the image definition shown above. For example if I want to show print sizes available for an image I may add a field <print_sizes>8×12,12×18</print_sizes>.

I then wrote an xml parser which read this specification of content of my site and automatically generated following-

– Gallery structures – Different galleries automatically get created based on the image attributes. One image may show up in multiple galleries depending upon its secondary category.

– XML file as sitemap (sitemap.xml) for the entire web site conforming to sitemap protocol defined here. I do think search bots need some help in discovering right content of our websites. While bots are smart from perspective (well they are not!)  nothing like providing a good sitemap to these search engine bots.

– RSS feed (feed.xml) for the new content in my site and my blog conforming to RSS specfication defined here.

The beauty of this control is I can easily add new features. For example enabling the site for Cooliris should be breeze( but I don’t plan to do that for now). This also helps me in bulk modification of the content. For example I can easily add “Indian Vultures are critically endangered” to the description of all images of Indian Vultures at once.

This flexibility also helps me in better describing the site for search engine bots !! I hate that but we need to live it. Unfortunately limitations around indexing technologies are making web masters behave like kids. Other day some SEO consultant working on optimizing someone else’s photographic site sent me a mail saying he has added a link to my site and asked me to list the site he is optimizing by listing it with in my links !! I must say this is a search engine induced behavior ! Ok I am going off track..

That is the high level description of my new website. I did one mistake earlier by not adding enough information for each of the images. Because of this you may still see lots of images without any description. I hope to complete this boring job slowly whenever I find time.

You will also see a new link “Fine Art Prints” ! That will be the topic for one of my future blogs.

I have just updated the site. There may be some initial errors. If you find any issue in my site please let me know – thanks so much in advance..