Phil Jern Photos

April 6, 2009 7:53 PM

Phil Jern Photos
I've created a website to display and, potentially down the road, sell my photography. I'd welcome constructive feedback from any and all of you!
posted by pjern (21 comments total)

Gorgeous shots!

How much work is it to add new photos with that wordpress setup? Do you just upload a jpg, then describe it as a new post, or is there some other way to get the site updated?
posted by mathowie at 7:55 PM on April 6

I used a plugin called YAPB (Yet Another Photo Blog) that adds an uploader to the Wordpress "New Post" page, and links and automagically creates thumbnails and indexes. It's pretty schweet! The theme I chose is designed to work with that plugin. I did the whole thing from scratch in a bout a day, then spent a couple more tweaking things and learning how it all fit together.
posted by pjern at 8:12 PM on April 6 [1 favorite]

Oh, and I have to give props to terrapin for his valuable advice and design counsel.
posted by pjern at 8:21 PM on April 6

Go, Phil! As a fan of your photos on flickr, I'm delighted to see you're putting together a site like this (I might do the same at some point myself). Good luck with it!
posted by flapjax at midnite at 5:07 AM on April 7

I'd love to vote but i'm getting some bizarre javascript error. Love the site, pjern.
posted by Stewriffic at 7:24 AM on April 7

I love this. Fabulous work on both the photography & the presentation.
posted by goshling at 8:21 AM on April 7

It's lovely, sir.
posted by Jofus at 9:22 AM on April 7

When I visit Indiana and drive out to the middle of nowhere to visit my father, I always damn near drive off the road imagining the photos I could be taking if the light was better or if I wasn't already running late. Some day. These are beautiful!
posted by These Premises Are Alarmed at 6:41 AM on April 8

Glad to help, pjern! I really did nothing more than offer unsolicited advise :)
posted by terrapin at 6:42 AM on April 8

Good on you for including your EXIF data. That really helps us fledgling photographers learn our craft. Beautiful pictures.
posted by ColdChef at 5:01 PM on April 8

I've followed pjern's Flickr stream for some time now, and it's good to see a unique website just for his photos.
posted by Tube at 7:57 PM on April 9

Thanks everyone for all your kind words- I'm humbled and a little awed. I'm moving in the direction of providing a little how-to advice or background for each photo as a sweetener, along the lines of this post.

@terrapin: Yes, but it was good advice :)

@ColdChef: I always hate it when I have no idea how an effect was obtained. I'm more about sharing, I hope.

It's turning out to be a lot more work than I thought, but I'm still loving it.
posted by pjern at 1:09 AM on April 10

I love it.

- On the about page, I'd move the "die evil spammers" text to the bottom and talk about yourself first.
- The diagonal lines on the background make the white text a hair tough to read on my giant screen, might want to take the contrast on it down a teeny big or bold the text.
- Your tags seem to be all lumping in as one, you may need to separate them by commas when you enter them in wordpress to get them all to be different [I'm looking at "meditation man waterfall" which is showing up as one tag] you may have to go back and fix that
- I left a comment on a photo and it just went away, did you find it?
posted by jessamyn at 7:43 PM on April 10

@jessamyn

Your comment (about gullywashers, right?) went to my moderation queue. I have to approve comments right now until I get some kind of spam control in place.

I'll look at that contrast issue; I wasn't aware of it.

Yes, I've figured out that tags don't work the same way as they do on Flickr- my bad for not reading the instructions on how to work the tag system better. I'm fixing them as I revisit pages for various reasons.
posted by pjern at 8:57 PM on April 10

And actually, I think the comment moderation is a first-time-only thing. See if you can comment again somewhere.
posted by pjern at 9:01 PM on April 10

Yep, my second comment on this photo went through okay. Now it looks like the tag display is a little off. That same photo has dfferentiated tags [i.e. they all link to different tag pages which work, woo hoo!] but they appear as one big word blob at the bottom of the page. Should be simple to fix, let me know if you'd like help with it.
posted by jessamyn at 6:26 AM on April 11

I've never turned down help in my life :) I'm trying to get everything set up at once, so this is way down on my list (tagging minutiae) but thank you, if you can figure how to insert spaces in that list, go for it :)
posted by pjern at 6:36 AM on April 11

Oh, and I toned down the contrast on the diagonal lines thing by about 50%. (Actually, I faded them with an overlay in Photoshop, but whatever). Let me know if that's easier on the eyes.
posted by pjern at 6:38 AM on April 11

Hmmm, I thought I had messed with my tags on my site but I just have the standard <?php the_tags(); ?> thing there pulling them in so I may not know the way to do that. And yeah I think the diagonals work much better now.
posted by jessamyn at 6:43 AM on April 11

Well, if I haven't figured the tags out by next week I'll burn another Ask question :)
posted by pjern at 7:08 AM on April 11

Tags are fixed. Whew!
posted by pjern at 10:43 AM on April 13