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April 27, 2009
[DISPLAY YOUR PHOTOS WITH STYLE]
Forget Flickr! and Zenfolio and Facebook. If you are serious about photography you don't want your masterpieces mixing it with a rag-bag of picnic photos and pictures of somebody else's dog. You want your images to be exhibited as carefully as they would be in a bricks and mortar art gallery. You should take a look at www.photoartgallery.com, the Ph.Art gallery.
This elegant new on-line gallery is the work of Sydney man, Andrew Coppin, who gave up his job in financial services to pursue a dream of creating an on-line gallery for photographers, catering for serious amateurs and professionals. Andrew describes himself as a “passionate enthusiast photographer wondering where everyone was putting their better photos and why they were all stuck on the hard drive never to be seen by anyone in the world”. So he committed himself seriously to creating Ph.Art (and yes, you do pronounce it the rude way) four years ago.
In between jobs he took a sabbatical and travelled around the world looking at photographic art galleries. He found that he wasn't alone in having good photos but only being able to “bug my immediate family with them, who said 'yes, Andrew, that's very nice, but we don't really want to see them any more.'”
He couldn't find a place where an enthusiast could put his best photos on display “amongst equals”.
“Flickr! Is a great company, but it's become a junkyard. Unfortunately my great photo of Sydney Harbour Bridge, that I worked on for three hours, can sit alongside someone else's photo of Sydney, their snotty nosed kid, or my friend's photo of Sydney the dog. It's not respectful.”
Ph.Art gallery is the classiest implementation of an on-line display for photographs that we have seen. And access at its lowest level, the private gallery, is free. You get 2 gigabytes of free wall space to create a private exhibition. If you want to share your work with the world you move up into a public gallery.
At the highest level is the Collectors' Gallery from which Ph.Art sells limited edition prints of subscribers' pictures. Entry into this space is by selection by Ph.Art curators. Ph.Art derives part of its revenue from commission on the sales of prints from the Collectors' Gallery. And Ph.Art goes out and sells to potential buyers.
Photos uploaded must be of a minimum size and resolution and not over-compressed. This makes sure that the images will display well at large sizes in a browser. The automatic slide show displays pictures larger than on any comparable on-line gallery. We had to keep reminding ourselves: This astonishing browser performance is free!
Ph.Art already has about 25,000 photos on the server and growing by hundreds a day. Word is getting around that this is something special.
While Andrew Coppin is the driving force from Sydney the technical and aesthetic construction of the web site itself is done in Port Melbourne by Fabric. Outstanding!
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Posted by terry at April 27, 2009 03:22 PM
Worth Checking Out
Digital Cameras SydneyComments
Yep this is a fantastic site.
I've been a member since the beginning.
They say they're going to make it even better over the next few months. Can't fault it.
Posted by: Jessie D at April 28, 2009 10:02 AM
I had a look at the site and signed up.
It appears to be a very well thought out and constructed operation.
Posted by: RichardR at May 1, 2009 10:09 AM
It is a very good looking site, and the people are great. But more importantly, Ive SOLD an image already!!!
Posted by: Glen at June 29, 2009 02:07 PM