Photography Tips and Blog Critique

[cagg1120]

Hi Everyone,

I was hoping you can check out my photography tips blog for amateur and beginner photographers and give me a critique on its content, design, etc.

phototipworld.com

Please tell me what you think and if you have any suggestions.

--Chase Guttman

[filemanager]

I like it! I've never heard of "blue hour" only the "golden hour". huh.

[nickbedford]

I've heard of golden hour but never blue hour. I think you mean "twilight"?

[cagg1120]

Golden Hour and Blue Hour is the same in my book (blue hour is my name for it), but thanks for pointing out that being unclear. I'll clarify that. Thanks, any other thoughts.

[nickbedford]

From a purely visual glance, it's off to a good start but there's some areas it can be improved.

I think you need to bring you main paragraph font down to 10pt. This is the standard font size for most websites.

Also, whilst white on black is not a bad thing, the high contrast makes it harder to read the serif font (Times) used in the paragraphs. Try using one of the standard sans-serif fonts such as Verdana or Arial and see how it looks.

For the background, I think a very dark gray would make it easier on the eyes, even if it was 95% black.

Layout is good however I would probably use larger images than the small thumbnails. It's not as easy to see the detail in a thumbnail. When demonstrating with a photo, it will illustrate the point better if you use images around 400-500 pixels wide.

[Jim Poor]

Originally Posted by cagg1120

Golden Hour and Blue Hour is the same in my book (blue hour is my name for it), but thanks for pointing out that being unclear. I'll clarify that. Thanks, any other thoughts.

That's a problem then. Golden hour and blue hour are definitely not the same. One is gold / warm and the other is blue / cold. Perhaps you shouldn't be giving tips about things you don't understand yourself?

[BigFuzzy]

Ouch, hard to follow up my pal Jim after that.

The one thing I'd add is this: What is it you're really doing the blog for? What's your "thing"? i ask because you've created a blog that's doing the same thing (as far as i can tell) as about 1billion other photography blogs. What are you going to do that's different?

Also, your blog as a whole, to me, feels like every other blog out there. It feels very cookie cutter. It's the problem with things like blogger, you're very limited and thus your blog will look like every other blogger blog especially when your content isn't anything different from everything thing else out there. If your content is going to be same-same, your delivery, both in terms of visually and verbally, has to stand out. Visually I already said it feels..blah.. to me. And having read a bit (though to be fair, I didn't read a lot), your writing doesn't stand out either... don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with it, but it doesn't catch me either. Feels very textbooky. If that's what you want, great, but it's not enough for me to think I'm going to revisit your site. Let your personality and style shine through. I'd rather people not like my blog because they don't like my personality rather than it have no personality.

My two cents.. good luck, I do hope it develops into something for you.

PS hate the google search bar on top!

[karen_s]

Originally Posted by nickbedford

Layout is good however I would probably use larger images than the small thumbnails. It's not as easy to see the detail in a thumbnail. When demonstrating with a photo, it will illustrate the point better if you use images around 400-500 pixels wide.

For starters, I really liked your photographs, though I agree with nickbedford and wish they were a little bigger. I prefer a blog, especially one about the visual arts, to have larger images. I'm kinda lazy and don't like constantly clicking to see more. I also tend to scan for content and the larger size makes that faster and easier.

Originally Posted by nickbedford

Also, whilst white on black is not a bad thing, the high contrast makes it harder to read the serif font (Times) used in the paragraphs. Try using one of the standard sans-serif fonts such as Verdana or Arial and see how it looks.

For the background, I think a very dark gray would make it easier on the eyes, even if it was 95% black.

Totally agree. I wanted to read more but I had to stop because of the white text on the black background. The serif font made it even harder to read. This may not cause problems for some, but my eyes just got so messed up after one paragraph. While black backgrounds can be great for photographs, it just doesn't work so well for heavy amounts of white text. I'd either change the background to a dark grey or make the text a light grey.

Content (what I was able to read) looked pretty good overall. It was Informative, interesting, useful, pretty well written with nice examples ... I would say you are off to a pretty good start.

Oh, I have heard of the golden hour but not the blue so now I am a bit confused. I really don't know if there is a difference so off to Google I go

[cagg1120]

Thanks everyone for your tips and suggestions, I'll definitely consider most of them. I also agree I must make the blog stand out more. On the case of blue hour, I am sorry for the confusion. Golden hour is when the sun or remnants of the sun is still visible. Blue hour, is when a bright blue tint is in the sky AFTER the sunsets. If you look at the example images, you'll see what I mean. I mixed the two up and now I fixed it. Thanks for pointing out for those who wasn't rude.

[Jim Poor]

Originally Posted by cagg1120

Thanks for pointing out for those who wasn't rude.

Those who weren't rude.

Sorry if you thought I was harsh, but there are far too many out there giving tips that they don't truly understand themselves. If that doesn't apply to you, wonderful. Your skin will thicken eventually.