My Photography now has its own Website
As I have decided to turn more towards starting a photography business, I just spent the day redesigning my photography website. I wanted something that was separate from my WordPress site and more focused on my photography passions. I think the hardest part in the whole process was getting my photos watermarked.Why would that be such a daunting task? Who in the world wants to have to watermark their photos? My opinion is that watermarking is a huge distraction on your art. There really is no beautiful way to watermark without distracting from the art.
So what is a watermark anyway? A watermark is an image or some text overlaid over a photograph to identify the artist or even to remind others of the limits of use for the image. I don’t really want to get into watermarking to much other than to say that watermarking images provides proper attribution and notifies the viewer of the legal protection of the artists work.
My hardship was not in the decision to watermark, but what the most graceful way to watermark would be. I have tried the big ugly logo and the simple text in the corner. I finally decided to go with a text line across the middle of the image. This reminds people that the work of an artist is copyrighted. Actually an artists work is copyrighted at the moment of creation, however I have taken it a step further and registered all my images with the US Copyright Office.
Once I got all the images watermarked and up in the gallery, it was time to build other things into the site. Currently I have a bio page, which I still need to write, a gallery, a blog and a contact page. The most simple, yet most difficult of all the pages was the blog page. The blog page uses a simple piece of WordPress PHP code called “The Loop”. This little bit of code copies my blog posts from my WordPress blogs “Photography” category and populates my page with the posts. This is very, very handy. My problem was that I was having some hosting issues that made the page generate errors. All fixed now.
Now that the site is up, I only have to add images and content as it comes.