Tangible Art, Showing Prints of Your Photographs

My Window on the Art Walk

 Celebrating Art in Keene and Beyond




Making prints of your best images is a great way to take full control over how your photographs are viewed.  Finding good locations to show the work is often a challenge, but sometimes you may have more opportunities than you can handle.

I was reviewing the pictures that are posted on my web site and counted nearly 3000 images, mostly of New England, but also beyond. A lot of pictures, but only a tiny fraction of all the images

Keene's Central Square

that I have captured over the years. This ridiculous abundance of imagery could only be practical in the digital age, but I still love the print. Today photographers have many ways to show their work. On line galleries, email, Facebook, Google +, 500 pics and many more, but there is still something special about holding a physical print in your hands. Print making is a whole separate art, requiring time and attention to an often confusing array of details. Ink and paper choices, color space, and soft proofing are just a few of the challenges, but for me the opportunity to bring my work to printed form is well worth the demands. It is only with a physical print that I can be sure that my work will be presented precisely as I had visualized. Online images are always seen through the filter of someone else's monitor and color space, and magazine and ad publications are always a compromise. So I have worked to make printing a part of my process.  Great, now that I have all these prints, where can I show them? My work can often be seen on my walls at home or littering my office and exam rooms, but this weekend offered a special opportunity set my babies free. It was nearly too much of a good thing.




The Art Walk
 Keene, New Hampshire's Annual Art walk began this weekend.

Keene's Wide Main Street

Keene has a famously beautiful main street, and is recognized as one of the widest in the country. The tree-line boulevard is home to interesting stores, cafes and restaurants and is capped by its, beyond classic, commons. Our Central Square is actually a circle which features stately trees, a fountain, a lovely Gazebo and, of course, the ubiquitous Civil War statue. The spot is so perfectly New England that it was chosen as the set for the idealic town in Robin William's movie Jumangi. Don't worry, the rampaging monkeys are gone.



Pocket Full of Rye
 On any day, Keene's Main Street is a treasure, but for one week every spring the downtown turns into an expansive strolling art gallery. For this week the local businesses surrender their windows to local artists. The range of art is always amazing, including, painting, sculpture, wood working, weaving and of course, marvelous photography (me). What better way to spend a warm evening than to stroll among the art and then settle in to an outdoor table for a relaxing dinner at one of the many downtown restaurants. Not surprisingly I will be displaying my photographs at the Pocket Full of Rye. I am lucky to be a regular at this great shop, but the Art Walk gives me a chance to display some new work in a featured location. Come by and check it out. 

Ann At Pocket Full of Rye

Prime Roast Show
Actually the Art Walk is just part of a very busy weekend for me. Friday morning I had to take down a show at Kristen's Bakery in the morning and then set up my window at Pocket Full of Rye in the afternoon. Early Saturday morning I hung a month long show in Prime Roast Cafe on the other side of main street. Close to Central Square, Prime Roast is a peaceful and inviting refuge from the bustle of downtown Keene. The display walls are equipped with an easy hanging system and are nicely illuminated. It's great to have two wonderful places to hang. It is always about showing the work, but times like this can get a bit crazy. The big challenge was to find the work to display. I produced 8 new prints to show at the Art Walk, but with 16 pictures there and 10 at Prime Roast, I felt a bit stretched. Oh, and on Saturday afternoon, I brought 10 coastal pictures to a new gallery in Salem, MA. 

One wall at Prime Roast Cafe

Four Corners of New England Gallery
The Four Corners of New England Gallery has been created by

Setting Up at the Four Corners of New England Gallery

fellow New England Photography Guild member Jeff Folger. Jeff and his wife Lisa have taken the commercial leap with a small gallery which will feature the photography of the members of the New England Photography Guild. Many of the Guild members have already contributed some amazing work and

Jeff Folger in Front of One of My Pictures

the place is distended to become THE place for classic New England photography.  I thought it would be the perfect place to show some of my Atlantic Coast images.   Although there is still some work to be done, the gallery opened on Saturday. It should be an essential stop on any tour of historic Salem. 








Historic Salem
 

The friendship of Salem, Massachusetts

Sun Through the Rigging

The gallery is nicely located along the Salem waterfront, near the Old Custom House and close to the Friendship of Salem, a faithfully reconstructed 3 masted East Indiaman originally built in 1791. On Saturday, the light was harsh, but I love shooting images of the tangle of rigging in old sailing ships, and this was a great opportunity.


 It takes great faith and considerable guts to commit to a "bricks and Mortar" gallery, but if anybody can make it work, it will be Jeff and Lisa. I'm just grateful for another wonderful place to show my tangible work. 





 

Customs House Eagle, Salem, Ma.

Check out the work:

• Prime Roast show Flickr Set
• Pocket Full of Rye, 43 Main Street, Keene, New Hampshire
• Prime Roast, 16 Mian Street, Keene, New Hampshire
• The Four Corners of New England Gallery, 81 Wharf Street, Salem, Massachusetts

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A New Web Home for My Photography (Finally !)

Today there is a dizzying number of places to show your photos on the web. Flickr, Facebook, Google +, 500 Pics, and even Twitter all have their own advantages, but it has become impossible to keep up with an appropriate amount of posting and commenting and still have time to actually take pictures. The requirements of shooting and actually having a life dictate that choices have to be made regarding my commitment to social media. As I try to find a reasonable balance, it seems to me especially important to keep my web presence firmly grounded in a strong personal web site.

The Goal
It seems axiomatic that a photography site must be about the visuals. Most important is a beautiful gallery which shows my best work to maximal advantage, organized in collections that allow easy navigation and searching. But the site must be more than a simple collection of images. I want it to inform visitors about my photographic focus and goals and, beyond the usual artistic babble found in most "About" pages, I feel my story is best told in my blog. Finally a site must provide a clear path for those wishing to offer the ultimate compliment of actually purchasing my work. It is a lot to ask, but fortunately there are solutions which are comparative easy to create and surprisingly inexpensive.

Ancient History
After years I have finally update my gallery website. I started designing web sites back in 1995. Yes there was an Internet back

My Cheshire Medical Site 2005

then, but in the olden days "designing" meant coding. It was clunky, laborious work, but, at the time, I found it remarkable to see how a few lines of HTML we're transformed into text and pictures when plugged into a browser. It still seems miraculous to me that I was able to talk the trusting folks at Cheshire Medical Center into letting me design their first web site, at a time when even a single web "page" was considered revolutionary. For ten years, as Medical Center web master, I was fortunate to experience the early development of the Internet and world wide web. I went from HTML editors to Front Page and Dreamweaver, but as the web became more automated and database driven, I found the photography to be a more fulfilling and creative outlet.

 

My Recently Deceased Gallery Site

It was about this time that I designed my web gallery and it has been essentially unchanged until this month. . This was before Facebook, Flickr and the others. The site was a place to drop my favorite images into simple tables, organized by season, with additional pages for seacoast images and a "whatever is left" page for images of our travels away from New England. The site was designed with a ancient version of Microsoft Front Page and had no search engine, slide shows or shopping cart. I displayed relatively small compressed images ranging from 300-430 pixels.  It worked well for a simpler time, but, by today's standards, the site did not portray a polished, professional design and, with over 2000 images, the constantly elongating table format had become increasingly unwieldy. 


Time for a Change
I had intended to update my web presence for a few years, but never seemed to have the time to start over. I was finally pressed into action when my old web host decided to go out of the hosting business. Suddenly I had to find a new home by the first of the year and it seemed the obvious time to make a major upgrade.

I considered a number of options, but narrowed my search to two excellent choices, SmugMug and Zenfolio. Both offer professional appearing web sites with a large array of easily customizable templates, easy organization, social media sharing and commerce solutions that make purchasing images quick and painless. They both offer unlimited uploads providing the added benefit of an easy cloud-based location for my most important images. I eventually settled on Zenfolio, partially based on price, but also for ability to incorporate my blog and the ease of a self-fulfillment option. I expect that I will eventually use the affiliated Photo Labs for many orders, but for now I still like to control the printing and matting of my work. 


Migration
The migration process was surprisingly painless. Both Zenfolio and SmugMug offer free trials.  I was able to get the basics well

Part of my New Front Page

established before I actually had to repoint my domain to the new site. I moved my galleries of old low resolution images to collections on the new site. I also began to process the originals of my favorite images as high resolution jpg's for upload into a "Featured" gallery.  It is this gallery which runs as a slide show on my front page and these images will be the appropriate size and resolution for lab prints directly from the site. After filling in the contact information and the "About" stuff, I copied information from my old site such as the price list and blog index. I am still using my "Blogger" blog, but it connects seamlessly and has a matching color scheme. There is still much to do, and many features to explore, but one of the great advantages of these services is that themes and organization are easy to change without any arduous and costly reprogramming. 

One Page of my Autumn Gallery

Check out my new site and let me know what you think. The address is the same as always :

partridgebrookreflections.com
 
Be kind there is still much work to do. And feel free to turn off the music when it, inevitably, becomes annoying.  If you are considering developing your own web site, it has never been easier, and the results can make a significant difference in the professional appearance of your web presence.

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