Building your Website

Recently I have been looking into making my photography website, so I constantly search around to check my options. Most photographers out there have those really slick sites made with flash animation. At this point, as a photographer, you have to have a nice site. There are a few options out there:

1) Hire a web designer to create a unique site for you and then sit back and enjoy.

This is by far your best option, but it is the most costly way to do it. Generally getting a site professionally designed can cost anywhere from a few hundred dollars to over 30,000. Your best bet is to search on sites for freelancers.

I recommend - Elance.com A database of qualified freelancers in many fields

Craigslist.org This is a more budget friendly source to find cheaper help

2) Learn the skills and do it yourself.

This option basically depends on your patience and time. If you have some skills and want to build on them, then it can be worthwhile to take this route. Not only will you save money, but you will add to your arsenal of digital skills. There are plenty of resources online to help you learn.

3) Take the simple route and use a website builder.

Most web hosting services also offer a free website designer program to get you started. This is the cheapest and least exhausting way to go. The site posted here is just amazing.

Free Website Design - Wix.com This is one of my recent online discoveries and was sent from above. It allows you to build a website using a simple drag and drop method. They have a bunch of themes that can be altered and also have flash based sites. If you choose to use the free account, then the site will have a simple banner along the bottom advertising wix.com. really not a big deal. If you upgrade (and pay them) the ads are gone and you can use a personal domain. They take care of the hosting. This is one site I guarantee will become popular.

This is also how I created my header for the blog. just thought it was fun.

These were just a few steps to help get you thinking. comment below for any questions. thanks for reading.

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Blind photographers

I am a decent photographer and so are the group of people on the site I will share with you today. The only difference is they can't see because they're blind. BlindPhotographers.org is a site which showcases galleries of photos taken by some very talented photographers who are visually impaired. They all come from different backgrounds and have different reasons on how they lost their sight. Some of them can see to a certain degree which ranges from just seeing blobs of colors to only seeing dark and light shadow. This is truly amazing and inspires me as a photographer and as a person. I highly recommend browsing through the photos in their gallery or on flickr. I have no idea as to how they can achieve such awesome photos without really seeing what they are capturing.

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Update!!!!!: Here is a wonderful mini documentary which includes interviews with three of these blind photographers.

Obscura from Damon Stea on Vimeo.

Want Your Photos in a Gallery? Join This Project.

I like to think of myself as a decent photographer and hope for the day that I can have a few prints hanging in a gallery somewhere. Well here's my chance to have 24 pictures in a gallery. kinda. 

Art house Co-op is a great website where artists come together and can participate in organized projects. It is an awesome site to explore and find some fun projects, but going back to the main point of this post, there is a very huge project that anybody can participate in. It is called "A Million Little Pictures" and gives a thousand people the opportunity to fill up a disposable camera with 24 pictures and have them hanging in a gallery (even though it will be next to 23,976 other peoples pictures) . Just go and sign up for the project and you will receive a disposable camera in the mail, then go out and take pictures of pretty much anything that documents your life. It costs $18 bucks to join, which is not bad considering a disposable camera is around 9 dollars and the other nine gets your pictures hanging in an art gallery. Once satisfied, have the prints developed as 4x6 prints and send back to the project organizers. check the site for all the details. 

I've already signed up and am proud to say California has the most sign ups meaning that we get to host one of the exhibitions.

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