More Photo Galleries
In these days of Flickr and Zoomr, you’d be forgiven for wondering why anyone would ever build and host their own photo gallery on the web, let alone pull together a directory of them. I continue to do it as a hobby because I enjoy building and maintaining websites and there are more like me. Others do it for commercial reasons: hosting a fine art photo business on Flickr may not always make the right impression. All of this is a contrast with the early days when I started looking for online photo galleries. Then, as now, finding the quality ones was the trick and, though useful, search engines are maybe not the best tool for the job. In fact, after encountering the dross served up by Altavista in those pre-Google days, I went and created my own. I also had an ulterior motive for this: the exercise helped to advance my computer and programming skills and helped me onto the first rung of the career ladder. When tracking down quality, it always helps to have some inside knowledge of what you want. Photo magazines come up trumps on this but Google cannot be discounted either. Below are the sections of the directory and they reflect my beginnings, my today and how far I have yet to go. Enjoy!
Internet Discoveries Search engines were my first call when I first began to look for photo galleries on the Internet. However, in the days prior to Google, I dredged up a lot of rubbish. Since then, I have come to realise that there are better ways to achieve my aim but here are the ones that I discovered in those heady days.
Finds in Magazines Now that I take my photography more seriously, I have come to find photo galleries featured in magazines. Ironically, this has proved to be a far better way to find online photo galleries than my previous strategy.
Fine Art Practitioners In every field, there are those who inspire others and photography is no exception, especially when we photographers spend a lot of our time learning from each other’s photos. Here is a selection of websites belonging to people who inspire more than most.
