PhotoNet Index continuation - items older than 2 months

National Museum of Photography, Film and Television

Corrected June 30th 1995
Michael Pritchard, who looks after the photographic auctions for Christie's, alerts me to the new British Science Museum server site for the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television. This site has been getting rave e-mail responses but now that I have looked in, I reckon these have been from users without graphic browsers; there are very few photographs, and these are buried deep in the structure. A much better way of giving distant 'visitors' a tour would have been a site resembling Daniel Leighton's 3D Gallery - maybe they should commission Daniel to do the NMPFT like this! And add many, many more pictures too.

Alan Dorow

Added June 21st 1995
I have a big smile on my face because I've just viewed Alan Dorow's Animal Crackers. If you thought electronic imaging was for nerds with a tendency to show off, check this. Alan's entire home page site is a wonderful collection of most excellent work, well organized, just the right size, and LOTS of it. Elliott Erwitt, you've just been pooper-scooped; Weegee, you've been outgunned. Dorow is up there with you!

Stockphoto

Added June 19th 1995
Joel Day's Stockphoto site is very busy indeed - one of the slowest connections yet - and this is not surprising, given the depth of commitment and regular updating that Day and his many cooperators put into it. It is a complete resource about stock library photography, supported by Curtin University in Australia, but thoroughly international in flavor. It includes a world stock agency listing and permits wants-list submission; it is mainly text, and does not display photo examples. E-mail list subscription facility, comprehensive FAQ page. An excellent, informative service which enhances WWW by its presence.

Atlanta Photo Group Gallery

Added June 18th 1995
With 30 or sites on my list to check, Atlanta Photo Group Gallery get thru because they have a Summer show til July 15 and it may be Autumn (Fall, to most of you!) before I get round to the others... Some OK b/w pix by Matt Lennert (�photographic works�, they get called; why not just photographs?) are accompanied by a Net-defying copyright notice (read the conditions on which the Internet was founded, guys). The exhibition changes every month and the Group is dedicated to supporting photography throughout Georgia.

Hagerty's Used Camera Equipment

Added June 15th 1995
I've been waiting for the first photo stores to arrive on the Web, and this one has turned up complete with horse and cart. Outstandingly badly designed though claiming to be "written with Netscape in mind", this wild jumble of size, positions and purposes of type gives entry to an equally chaotic pre-formatted text print-out of Hagerty's remarkable assortment of secondhand stuff. Although occasional sections are well-ordered - there are not enough 16mm cine projectors to confuse matters - all SLRs are lumped in an unsorted list, lenses of each fit are listed with focal lengths at random, and obvious groupable categories such as Leica items get scattered to the winds amongst all the rest. Sounds a great photo glory-hole to visit (Southport, UK) and congrats to Hagerty on this initiative, but please let's see some design and organisation!

Jason Ware's Astrophotography

Added June 8th 1995
Free wallpaper! No paste needed! This guy's generosity is a joy; OK, you can buy prints and slides of his utterly brilliant color views of galaxies and nebulae, and this will help finance his site. But if you just want a deep space screen saver image f.o.c., you can use them - and they are big enough for an 800x600 screen. Jason is 6 ft 1 tall and likes to show off his celestial 16-incher. Even if it is a bit soft. Jason has some commercial info from Meade telescopes in the site, and good for them, too, if they are supporting it this way. Advice and pointers on astrophotography, links and more - thanks, Jason.

Peter Marshall

Added June 8th 1995
Peter's street pictures from London, in black and white, are accompanied by a clear manifesto on behalf of anyone who shoots candid documentary images of people and feels socially incorrect in doing so. Read Peter's reasons why it is not wrong to photograph anyone in public; they make sense. The pictures he puts up have warmth, keen observation and good timing. Slightly diluted contrast doesn't spoil the obvious quality of the original 35mms.

GallerySight

Added June 8th 1995
Rajiv Mehta's collection of work by five photographers is outstanding for attention to color quality and image loading speed, aided by clever re-use of thumbnails as lo-res placeholders to precede full image loading. You need a 15 or 17 inch monitor to get the best of this site, as Rajiv configures everything for an expanded browser window with a 620 pixel wide image instead of the 470 pixels which we (for example) use. To keep the file sizes down at this scale, he uses rather soft originals, which is a great pity when you view the Dome of the Rock images - these would look much better a little smaller but showing their exquisite detail. A very good gallery site with a rewarding mix of work.

Steve Procko

Added June 7th 1995 Steve's weekly reminders finally got me to check his site! It's biographical - if it's autobiographical then he's got a cheek, as unlike most Web bios his is written third-party by anon, rather than being his own words. I find this a touch precious; artists are better revealed to the world by works than words. Steve's works are for sale, at very fair prices ($79.00 for a 7 x 9" selenium toned hand print). They are very much 'of their kind' - another page for monochrome fine art enthusiasts and print collectors to check out.

Rick Dunn

Added June 7th 1995, amended July 14th
Rick caused great controversy when he worked in London and won an Ilford annual award with an electronic nose job on a young lady. The disturbing and grotesque result, which I used half-page in a photo magazine (The Photographer) I was editing at the time, drew more anti-digital-imaging comments than any picture I have ever published. Rick's Photoshopped work is amongst the best, whether you like the style or not. His very well-constructed site includes a Photoshop project you can try yourself, first published in Photo>Electronic Imaging magazine; get the JPEGs, read the tutorial, re-create his effects. Valuable site from a dedicated Webster.

Santa Fe Photographic Workshops

Added June 7th 1995
You want to make it big; you want to learn from the best? One answer in the USA is to attend a good national photo workshop (it's harder in Europe, as with the notable exception of the Arles Rencontres, the the lecturers are rarely household names) Santa Fe in New Mexico is one of the top half dozen workshop venues and what they do is comprehensive and professional. See the entry below for Photolink - the photographer featured here has attended Santa Fe and various other workshops, and it shows in the style and focused direction of his work.

Hans de Kort

Added May 22nd 1995
Three photographs only kick of this very northern European bit of dark design and simple style from Dutch photographer de Kort ('Shorty'). They are road-movie style photos of biker/footloose young couple, a bit like Athena posters or greetings cards. Big, fast, and much better on a 20" screen.

Photolink

Added May 21st 1995
Here's another factotum photo site which promises plenty of future development, inviting photographers to enquire about gallery space, providing links to Net photo resources, and presenting its creator Daniel Leighton who has studied with Joyce Tenneson, George Holz and Greg Gorman. Daniel's own work is very stylish, harmonious and subtle in color and composition, original - all in all, essential viewing. Beautiful Web presentation, some of the best Netscape enhanced pages I have yet seen.

Mythago

Added May 21st 1995
These are finely scanned works by figure photographer Jody Schiesser; the thumbnails look better than the big pix, mainly because when enlarged small details like expressions emerge clearly and add a hint of bathos to what are intended to be transcendant nude studies. Even in a nude image, the eyes are by far the most important element - show them, and they must be right. I'm afraid that 'Skinkissed Pride', which I assume is intended to be serious, caused moderate mirth. Even haircuts matter in nude photography. Still a nice site, though.

Edward LaBane

Added May 21st 1995
This site contains some serious, ambitious figure-in-landscape monochrome studies from midwest fine art photographer Edward LaBane, who also sells selenium toned collectors' prints. The scans are rather soft and prone to streaking, but detailed and of a reasonable size. The figures are often very small, slightly pose-y in attitudes, and brave under the circumstances.

Arizona Aerial Photographs

Added May 18th 1995
Over 50 aerial views of Arizona are available in this cleanly organized, straightforward commercial site from studio Aerial*Zona. The quality of the JPEG scans is low, so the copyright notices prominently appended are hardly necessary - the pix are not really good enough to reproduce. If you want proper images, you can send for prints for wall decor (no repro rights included) but the lowest price is $50 plus shipping for an 8.5 x 11". Posters and calendars are better value at $15 and $25 respectively. The site also offers info on Arizona real estate.

Jupiter Physique Art Photography

Added March 16th 1995
I have no objection to male physique art photos, even with a load of hype about 'living spirits of the ultimate human form imagined by the Great (sic) artists of the past now captured with the same awe by the modern camera and video'. See for yourself on http://198.68.45.142/carrus/carrus.htm, a corrected URL sent to us after I pointed out that Jon Carrus's original e-mail sent us nowhere. Clicking on the in-line GIF thumbnails of these well-built unclothed gentlemen now works fine (first attempt produced code, no pix). One for the ladies, et al.

SciNet Photos

Added May 16th 1995
Hank Morgan has been photographing energy, science and related issues for top international magazines for 25 years. This site presents a portfolio of his graphic editorial work, which uses perspective and color most effectively. However, you only get to see thumbnails and there are no larger files available - hardly surprising, in view of the high fees commanded by work of this calibre. Attractive overall design, but the thumbnails and captions get into a random jumble depending on the size of your screen and the navigator program you use.

Ron Brown

Added May 16th 1995 Big photos always get my thumbs-up, even when a very busy site gets my viewing speed down. Ron is an above-the-line sort of advertising photographer, with a long list of enviable clients and the budget to show off his work in international art source annuals. He can even afford Sinar gear and says it is the most precise in the world (the lads at Arca Swiss would like to show you their measurements, Ron!). Three sections - general, digital stuff and Art Gallery. Ron's definition of 'Art' involves the fair sex.

Lost Publishing

Added May 16th 1995
This is a superb example of Web design - the black background makes the soft-edged color JPEGs jump out at you, and gives the front page considerable impact. It advertises a conceptually fascinating CD-ROM devoted to discovery and investigation of the Maya people, which appears to use excellent photography as well as good writing, graphic design and sound. Sadly, that's as far as it goes. There's nothing beyond the stylish single page but links to other related sites.

Rainforest Photo Exhibition

Added May 16th 1995
From the same design team as Lost Publishing (above), this portfolio from concerned photojournalist Natsuko Utsumi includes high quality JPEG files, around 50Kb each, from pictures which illustrate in a telling fashion the problems facing many threatened areas of the world. These pictures would be most useful to schools for discussion. For some reason, one of the best shots - a chainsaw operator cutting into a tree which dwarfs him utterly - is restricted to a small version only.

Rob Galbraith - photo-reportage

Added May 12th 1995
OK, Rob; you win! I visited your page, and excellent it proved to be. Fast, very high quality images are just the right size; the titles are stylish, and the navigating buttons ideal for those with impaired vision. The two stories presented - a black and white reportage on an alcoholic bottlepicker, and a colour essay full of optimism for the future of Rwanda - are complete, economical and absorbing. The bottlepicker is neither a threat nor threatened; Rwanda is full of sunshine, colour and smiles as Canada rushes to reconstruct life with such essentials as bottles of soap-solution for the children to blow bubbles. To look below this rather too-rosy surface, read his stories as well as looking at the pictures. He may come from a comfortable, urbane Canadian newspaper and have a brief to report on the brighter side of life, but there's a campaigning photojournalist in there waiting to get out. Rob's Rwanda story will be featured in the June printed edition of PHOTON with some more of his comments on using the Kodak DCS camera to transmit files from Rwanda to Calgary.

Bengt's Photo Page

Added May 4th 1995
It's a pleasure to add a page which saves me time! Although Bengt does not offer any comments, his index page from Sweden is clearly organised and provides links to many photo resources I have yet to explore, including some tutorial material, exhibitions, contests, and newsgroups (etc). Add this to your hotlist for photo site navigating.

Fixing Shadows

Added May 4th 1995
Established by documentary photojournalist and teacher J David Sapir, this page is has an emphasis on non-manipulated, conventional photo reportage and presents an opportunity for photo essay publishing alongside archive and historic material. There is one initial gallery from Julia Marsalek Dawson and a sequence on initiation ceremonies among native Africans in the 1960s by Sapir himself. Construction is fine, but image quality low; the larger monochrome JPEGs occupy 150Kb without being sharp, and have no true black, the darkest tones being around 80 per cent.

Digital Photography '95

Added April 25th 1995
This is an essential visit for any photosurfer. The second annual Peoria Art Guild and Bradley University digital photography exhibition, with three prize awards of $500 each and an exhibit of 30 original works most with sale prices listest and artist biographies, is excellently constructed and includes some very large, fine image files. There is a tendency for digital photo-artists to refer constantly to other media; they rarely seem happy with photography itself, or a photographic appearance, preferring to emulate painting, collage, film or video third-image dissolve effects, found objects or the printed page. Digital photography, and indeed photographic art, will have matured when it is happy to be itself and not to be so clearly referential to other artforms. The exhibit includes a full prospectus and entry form for the 1995 exhibition.

Virtual Tour of Tweed Horizons

Added April 25th 1995
Never thought I would add a link to the server we're on ourselves, but Ewen Forsyth's photos retouched in Painter by artist Rob Hain form the basis of a very stylish visual tour of our Webmeister's rural retreat. The retouching enhances the color and textures and makes these rooms look kinda Myst-like.

Ben's Victoria

Amended April 20th 1995
This is a very good collection of landscape, natural history, topographical and creative studies of Victoria, Australia, by Ben Kreunen (nice photo of him with MPP field camera and Aussie bush hat!). Now considerably tidied up and server problems over, time to visit this one again! Thanks for your efforts in speeding up the Net, Ben.

Confraternity of the Fatherless

Added April 18th 1995
Sam Grech is out to educate the world. OK - lens apertures DO need explaining, but it helps if you don't call them apperatures (too many appertifs, Sam) and while decreasing the size of an one of these may be called stopping down there's just no way that increasing it is called stopping up! For instructional material written with little regard for spelling or the passage of time (cameras aren't like this any more, and ASA/DIN is history), parts of this are helpful. The Zone System explanation is well-illustrated, simple and contains no serious errors (more than I can say for almost every article I've ever written on this subject...). Sam's pictures reveal the shadowy world of his imagination, friends, and lifestyle. Not really very gay; sort of Gormenghast-ly.

Southern Illinois University Applied Arts

Added April 18th 1995
Photoshop users will want to take a look at the student gallery from Carbondale which features some fine real-world projects from workshops and classes. Jerry Courvoisier, Assistant Professor, pointed us this way. The 45 years of college photographic services exhibit is less exciting, but worth a visit, boys - you get to peek into a girls' dormitory with FOUR girls on a bed! Still, times were hard in 1950...

DSF Photography, Colorada Springs

Added April 18th 1995
Dave Faulkner opens with some clever HTML using new Netscape features, with unpredictable layout effects. Following gallery pages are more conventional. You can buy the prints off the page, and they are hardly a rip-off at under twenty dollars for an 11 x 17. Under construction, and some gallery areas have too much data (eight minutes is too long to wait to see all of an exhibit page during a busy time). Mixed interlaced GIFs, JPEGs etc. The complete gallery on Hawaii is plain ordinary, while the single photo from Colorado is beautiful. Alaska images variable. Good way to stop copyright theft - stick a quotation from the Gospel According to St Luke on a convenient mountainside (10:23, by the way - a good Biblical reference for photographers).

South Light's agency pages

Added April 18th 1995
This is carefully-worded, serious photo agency home page introducing you to the photographers represented by South African agency South Light. Small but high quality images are not censored, and represent a broad spectrum of SA life - sports, tourism, and everyday life as well as those aspects we associate with news coverage. Any student of journalism or photo buyer should take a thorough look at South Light.

Jannis's Home Page

Added April 18th 1995
Stockholm painter, photographer and sculptor Jannis Politidis has a real old Greek salad of a page. I bet he doesn't have one of those ultra-empty, clean, spare Swedish rooms; there'll be stuff all over the place, pictures pinned on the walls, old socks, you name it. Total creative chaos!

PHOTOPIA Stock Photography

Removed from recommended visiting list, May 1st 1995
Our moles have been burrowing to this location and all inform me by e-mail that it displays raw HTML text only and something has gone seriously wrong with its HTTP server. Thanks, photosurfers, for your info. Let me know if this site returns to proper functionality.

Schuyler Beth Fishman

Added April 15th 1995
This lady is into martial arts (though she says she spends much of her time training in marital arts - honest! She'll change this typo now I've noticed it...) and the quality of the air. You'll find five photos on her mixed page of college stuff. They are pretty good. But... they are HUGE. No thumbnails, so to get any idea of what you are viewing, you have to wait for almost 300Kb of GIF to appear. The server hung up midway on the second one I looked at.

Avishai Halevy

Added April 14th
An unusual mixture of monochromatic Gibson-ish/Eggleston-ish/Michals-ish subjects with historical images including World War 1. Avishai would make lots of friends at the Arles Rencontres, I think. Personable, amusing, and clearly a very good photographer indeed. This is one of the few pages I have visited where I felt I knew the author by the end of the trip. His young son will grow up, rediscover the photographs, write his father's life story and see these images exhibited, published and sold for high prices at auctions around the year 2070.

Jochen Brennecke - digital dream stuff, highly recommended

Added April 14th 1995
Hi, my name is Jochen Brennecke. I'm German-born photographer and living now for one and a half year in London. Please check out my page on http://metro.turnpike.net/J/job/index.html. Well, a charming and straightforward introduction from Jochen. Take him up on it. Watch your screen turn blue. See how Teutonic minimalism is often the finest approach to design. Observe a man who uses Photoshop extremely well indeed and who is about to get some e-mail from me asking if I can use one of his striking girl pix on the front cover of our ink-on-paper magazine. And a whole portfolio (I'm writing this while watching his pix come up in turn). Fast, clean and flawless.

Chuck Gathard

Added April 13th 1995
One which got away - Chuck's had a page since November 1994 and I never went there. Sober, simple, clean presentation. His entry screen fits a standard SVGA monitor perfectly. Alternative navigating choices for different browser capabilities, fine attention to design detail, no gratuitous fancy stuff. Marginal bullshit factor in accompanying verbiage doesn't detract from intelligent commentary. Dozens of neat, tight, punchy pics. Worth visiting.

Gary Sigman

Added April 13th 1995
Brave is the man who puts a full-screen, high resolution image with a Netscape tiled patterned background behind it in place as his home page entry point. Braver still is he who picks a photo where the subject matter - and indeed the point of focus - arrives two-thirds of the way down the 115Kb vertical shot. Braver still, I guess, are the Mobil refinery firefighters he shows in this excellent giant JPEG. However, Mr Sigman is clever. Wait for his entry page to load. Now click to go to his Home Page - Zap! Now download his award-winning 3Mb QuickTime movie. Sorry, I chickened out. I'll go back and get it one day when the clouds are moving slowly.

Lucinda Folio - and more

Added April 10th 1995
If you really want some overload, try this site: 619 original photo-works presented as a regularly changing selection of 20-30 images, it says. Well, 20-30 line art thumbnails (odd!) reveal big JPEGs with soft vignetted edges to pure black, intended to be printed against a CMYK solid. You get rights to use them as long as the photographer gets a fee. Real artmarketing on WWW! None of these strange, out-of-focus sideways glimpses of the USA has been published before, claims author Brad Brace. I can't help wondering why. Highly pretentious words. Other offerings on the same site were either ftp-unavailable or obscure ('installations'); you'll get more visual inspiration taking your camera for a walk on your local landfill site.

Michael S Schwartz

Added April 10th 1995
New today is Michael Schwartz's commercial editorial portfolio, mainly for publications and record companies. Note: not the same as the photojournalism site from Michael Schwarz with no 't'. This site wastes dataspace: 'Laura' appears as two different sized interlaced uncaptioned GIFs before you get to the 'Fashion' photo index, where your choice must be made from a name alone, no thumbnail! You then get a slightly, er, bigger interlaced GIF. I like to see a small repro of the image I about to commit myself to viewing. Black and white, punchy work, would be quicker and better in JPEG form.

Brian Heston Photography

Added April 10th 1995
A commercial portfolio site for Chicago-based freelance Brian Heston, neat heading graphics and interesting hybrid work under the title CyberGrafks. Untidy layout and over-compensation for monitor gamma - these pictures are really colorful, not soft and pastel as they look on a calibrated monitor. One example of light painting (HoseMaster type stuff - if anyone wants a feature on HoseMaster, LightBrush and similar studio fiber-optic light painting systems, let PHOTON know, and we'll run one). Also a corporate pix gallery, environmental 'power portraits' of corporate men and women, much less interesting. Now if Brian treated these suits the same way he treats products they might start looking like real dynamic personalities...

Nepal Trekking Guide

Added April 10th 1995
Don't be put off by the fact that the text for this site in entirely in Finnish - recognising that not all the Web World speaks this language, and that it can't be interpreted on the basis of general knowledge of other European languages, Petri Kaipiainen has put English captions to his excellent photographs and placed them in a separate gallery. The thumbnails look grainy and poor but just click for those JPEGs - very sharp, well-scanned large files good enough to use in print. This would be inadvisable as Petri is a professional working for leading Finnish publications whose pictures have been featured in Olympus Camera Co Ltd calenders and magazines. When I visited this it was a very fast site. Interesting carving of Nepalese couple in flagrante. Nothing that you couldn't now see on British television any night of the week after 9.00pm, however.

Eastern Erotica

Added April 1st 1995
It had to happen eventually - but should we really include this here? Large collection of badly-constructed Eastern European nudes mainly shot on very grainy film the like of which we haven't seen in the enlightened realms of Kodak, Fuji, Agfa and Ilford for thirty years. A penchant for distressed interiors, undressed exteriors, and extreme close-ups with extreme wide-angles.

Accessories for Apple QuickTake

Added March 31st 1995
A commercial site with details of close-up and wide angle attachments for the original (current) Apple QuickTake digital camera.

Sooter's Photo contest at Flatland

Added March 31st 1995
Cryptic (who's Sooter? Or what's Sooter?) sponsorship provides dollar prizes for monthly and annual winning photographs. Upload yours by e-mail (I have!) and wait in suspense to see if any actually appear on this empty-when-checked page. Prizes are probably in appealingly weak, delicate Canadian dollar flavor (BUT Canada is THE place to buy PC gear by international mail order right now - half UK street prices...)

Greenspun visits Costa Rica

Added March 31st 1995
Pioneer of Web publishing Phil Greenspun brings a substantial travelogue about Costa Rica to WebTravel in his usual style. This mammoth opus does, however, feel as if it has been sponsored or contrived. His ealier stuff (Travels with Samantha, Berlin and Prague - see entries way down this index) is more intimate. Costa Rica comes over as tourism not travel. It is, of course, superbly photographed and well-written - but so was Whicker's World (reference probably not understood outside UK).

Hubble Space Telescope images

Added on recommendation, March 31st 1995
I haven't been able to get through to this server - presumably it's just too busy most of the time - but to view the Space Telescope pictures, go http://www.stsci.edu/public.html

Oleg's image Gallery

Updated March 31st 1995
This is a whopper! Oleg Volk, photographer and multimedia developer at Minneapolis College of Art and Design, likes photographing pretty girls in a traditional, slightly romantic European fashion. He has dozens of portraits, each an individual treatment, in colour, mono, 'distressed' effects and more. Browser now uses larger 16-color thumbnails (economical), and Oleg has cut his JPEGs to about half their earlier size. He's now writing his own HTML. Well worth a visit, and provides a gateway to other OTIS photo/art pages. Go see Oleg! He's currently looking for a new model for his portraits series.

Stacy's Home Journal

Added March 27th 1995
New york photojournalist Stacy Rosenstock provides a stylish home page with a small selection of short articles on community, environmental and related city themes. Good photography and just the right length of extended captions. Slightly dark on our monitors and no big pictures to view (probably better for protecting copyright, anyway).

Seymour's Index of Web Sites

Added March 27th 1995
Seymour is a 275,000-image subscriber browser for on-line selection and ordering of stock photos from many of the world's top picture libraries. The site itself, with full information about Seymour, is at http://pni4news.wwa.com/; don't expect to be able to browse the images through the Web, you just see information and a few samples, along with a good specimen of imaginative HTML construction. Their index to photojournalism and editorial interest sites includes this page but doesn't point to PHOTON's home page, so if you have sneaked in behind our readership counter through this route, please log yourself on to PHOTON now!

The Time Factory

Added March 25th 1995
This has to be one of the wierdest intro pages I've seen; it built slowly, but kept me interested because of the strange graphics and cryptic wording. Grammatically the statement 'ART IS SLICES OF TIME'S ARROW' is questionable, but there's plenty of photography here to look at. When viewing this site I decided I don't like Netscape 1.1 even on my new fast Power Mac. It does things I don't want to do and has thrown up too many system errors.

Kai's Power Tricks and other Kai Krause material

Added March 25th 1995
This is a site we had overlooked, but it is of course essential reading for anyone using Photoshop or similar programs with Kai's Power Tools, and other HCS applications and add-ons masterminded by Kai Krause. Even if you think you know all the shortcuts and best working methods, you are bound to find one or two which have espcaped you! Go KPT, and if you have Netscape 1.1 beta version, be prepared for the swift and wonderful appearance of the textured, colored background to the entry page and the use of colored text (etc)... which others can't yet see.

NPPA Digital Gallery

Added March 11th 1995
The next three entries are just a few which can be found in this Index to photographic sites now provided by the National Press Photographers Association in the USA. We won't duplicate everything in their page, but we have mirrored the page as it stood on March 5th here to minimise Net traffic; otherwise, to see the latest state of it, click here. It includes a back link to PHOTON.

Chris Gulker - LA Retrospective

Added March 11th 1995
Chris presents part of the content of a forthcoming book about his years as a press photographer in LA. Some strong images. An odd mixture technically; plenty of background detail, but why did he make 11 x 14" prints to scan on a Microtek 300? Maybe they had big white borders! GIF thumbnails are too large if anything; bigger click-thru JPEGs are good but have the wrong file extension/s. Fortunately the Mac is clever enough to open a JPEG/JFIF file wrongly called 'something.gif' but I doubt that most Windows systems would play ball...

Shane Iseminger's Photojournalism On-Line

Added March 11th 1995, amended March 22nd
On March 11th I commented 'Great stuff, but poor html construction - untidy layouts (don't even work properly in a standard Netscape window), huge file sizes for ordinary quality small pix, advertising from sponsor heads up pages, etc. A pity, because what's in Shane's site is worth looking at.' Shane has started re-optimising the picture files and breaking the loading up into smaller page chunks. The result is a much better site to visit; his first new JPEGs load fast and look fine. Links back to NPPA. Thanks for the hard work, Shane.

Covington's Homeless

Added March 11th 1995
A complete set of well-photographed black and white documentary images on the homeless in this Kentucky town, demonstrating how well WWW pages lend themselves to this kind of picture-and-caption photojournalism which the paper press has all but abandoned.John Decker's coverage is commendable, concerned, fairly objective without being detached or voyeuristic in any way, and you will probably read each essay from start to finish. Also see his project on Carnival Workers in Ohio.

Cramer Gallimore

Added March 11th 1995
This is a well-designed and optimised portfolio for a North Carolina studio specialising in corporate, advertising and editorial location work. Cramer Gallimore shoots in a distinctively American style, very different from European work in the consciousness of the subjects and their composure for the camera, leading to what could be termed 'power portraits'. They certainly pack a punch. Clean, commercial aerials and architectural stuff as well. The inline GIFs are big enough to view on-page, but it's worth looking at the larger JPEGs too.

Kodak Home Page

Added March 8th 1995
Very much a corporate publicity site, Kodak offer a professional constructed information based resource. Most details you need of Kodak products, especially digital, are there. Not too much on traditional photography, but some useful tips and wrinkles on using Photo CD. A big library of totally free images (excellent) by Kodak staff, all amateurs, donated for your use and available not just in high quality JPEG form but actually downloadable as full sized 4.5 Mb Photo CD ImagePak format files. Read the copyright notice; it's heartwarming, coming from such a large and often more impersonal corporation. Add to your Bookmarks; essential for photographers.

Myk's Personal Web Page

Hey, Myk, you're offering to share your 20 x 40ft studio on the beautiful border between Wales and Shropshire, to rent your cottage (sounds wonderful) 7 minutes from the Pemrokeshire coast, and share your enthusiasm for photography - but where are the PICTURES? High-speed photography of owls in flight and stunning models? Let's see them soon! (Added March 5th).

Minolta User Group

This is an independent USA User Group run voluntarily by Eric Lloyd. The pages contain some information and registration form which creates an index of members. Not very pictorial yet. Link added March 5th.

Schwarz Illustrated

Michael Schwarz is a concerned photojournalist in the best tradition and his essays are not just one-day assignment hits; they're ongoing documentaries (this link added March 2nd). Visit his new site and see three stories as they unfold - you are invited to return as he studies a remarkable family which has adopted 14 children including 11 with Down's Syndrome; as he explores the many religious extremes of the Southern states; as he pursues the trail of a commercial fungicide alleged to have wrought ecological and medical havoc in Florida. Sobering thought: I spray this stuff on my gooseberry bushes here in Scotland to prevent American mildew! Never again! Superbly, carefully optiminimized JPEGs make for lightning-quick screen builds.

Rob Silvers

I'll kick of this (February 13th) addition by praising the effort Rob Silvers has put into optimising his JPEGs. Some BIG pix are as small as 11Kb, most are under 30Kb, all are fine in quality. Result: I browsed thru more of Rob's stuff in half an hour than any other site I've been asked to check out. Moreover, it's good stuff as well as fast to view. Rounded off with some ray-traced computer art. M-I-T fine!

Stefano Azario

See Mouse in the House, below. Stefano is one of the first London photographers to get himself some space here. Now just compare these very small, tho' sharp, JPEGs with the Rob Silvers set. They take 3-4 times as long to load and they are half as big to view. They need to be bigger so you can see those ad/editorial layouts. Pro ad/feature/catalogue work.

Oxford Photographs

Thanks to Jonathan Bowen for pointing us at this rich directory to stacks of images of Oxford and from various colleges and faculties. Generally, the quality is good, and some bits (guided tour of Oxford in the snow!) are cleverly put together. But the file sizes are often profligate - you can tell the authors are running over networks and never have to suffer their 300Kb+ images over a telephone link. A little hard work on image optimisation would halve their disk usage and line traffic. I liked the stuff on Tolkien, but can't help remembering how I totally fluffed my own entrance interview for Oxford through devoting it to nothing else (this WAS 1969). Turned out the young dons who interviewed me thought he was a boring old fart. Oh well... my grades wouldn't have been good enough anyway!

Yasushi Misawa

Misawa is a Japanese journalist and photo enthusiast who has just set up a home page. It's methodically structured with three galleries of images, individually viewed or downloadable as Mac runtime slide shows (0.5 to 1 meg in total size). Attractive design, correct image size, and totally wierd quality - punk photojournalism. Impressive.

Mind 2 Mind

This is a gallery of 42 images (so far) by Stanley Sussenbach of Amsterdam - that is, he's from Amsterdam and the pix are of Amsterdam. Good browser design by Ernst Dommershuyzen BUT the final JPEGs are gritty, too much gamma correction (probably done on an uncalibrated system) and shadows opened up with stacks of coloured noise. This grainy effect unfortunately doubles or even trebles the final size of a JPEG file, which depends on smooth blocks of tone for its best compression. Good photojournalistic color work, however, and worth viewing.

Donuts!

Enthusiastic young astro-photographer Ryan Shawgo puts up some shots of high school, college and family pix with three respectable images of the May 1994 annular eclipse in central Illinois, taken on conventional camera equipment.

Mouse in the House Virtual Portfolio

This is a London, UK, initiative from Net oldbie Mike Russell who is even now persuading his many creative colleagues to show off their work in his Virtual Gallery. Small beginnings. Nice pix from Mike himself. Look here for some of London's very, very best advertising photographers. Many folios will be updated monthly, too. But why did he call his homepage after a disco in Cologne?

Steve Rapport

Stacks of pix of 80s to current rock band, entertainment and other celebs. Interesting, informative and amusing captions and a tidy layout combine with economical file sizes to ease your journey. Image quality clearly set to V.Poor but doesn't really matter; the subjects can stand it.

Robert Altman

You think you recognise the name? I think you do. Altman's archive has some really historic rock, folk, everything musical portraits, gig shots, candids. Pleasantly unpredictable: you thought you were going to get a big JPEG, but instead you zoomed in on a close-up of part of the original file (etc).

Fox Studio

This is an excellent commercial photographic studio Web site from Fox Studio of Minneapolis, professionally constructed by David Curle. Check the excellent pix by Patrick Fox and Tom Strand - eat yer heart out when you read their client list and get a feel for the size and scope of their studio, lab and EVERYTHING complex.

Intressant Restaurant

Slightly off-beat concept, a cybercafe which gives you a view of the menu, the eatery, and other pix and MPEG movies. Comes from that most interesting of countries, Sweden. The menu shows that Frank Oz never lent their chef a hand...

Photography Index of 'Yahoo'

Stanford University's Yahoo index of Internet sites is definitely one of the better ways to locate photography, as it seems well-planned and logical. Many of the entries in our PHOTONet index can be found here in brief, along with others which we will check out and review as time permits. This index confirms our suspicion that there's more photography on Internet than any single search engine or compiled index can point you to. Go Yahoo!

National Press Photographers Association (USA)

British NUJ, BIPP, AoP etc members eat your hearts out - this US association, NPPA, is the real thing, actually THERE, NOW, DOING STUFF. Visit their Web site for the sixth annual Electronic Times and see why services developed from Internet (and specifically, from graphic-rich hypertext) will one day replace ink and paper for newspapers. Allow roughly 1 hour for a minimal tour of Electronic Times, 2-4 hours for a full examination. Image files are not heavily compressed, and are pretty heavy on data for their dimensions. The Acrobat pdf files available require the use of the new (free from Adobe's pages) Acrobat Reader 2 and won't work with version 1 software. There is a great deal to be learned from this site. Tip from Kurt Foss at NPPA - "Watch our home page the first week of March 1995!".

Scientific Photography Lab - University of Basel

If you've got any slides so faded that they are beyond recovery, check out this page. Basel's Swiss boffins show examples of Ikochrome, Gevachrome and Kodachrome archival disasters - total C and Y loss at first glance - expertly regenerated in full, original color. Detailed technical papers on enhancement and color restoration. An exceptionally valuable contribution. We've nicked one picture example as a taster. Check it out for a link to the rest of this resource.

Ansel Adams: FIAT LUX

The University of California commissioned Adams to photograph campus views in 1968, and thus owns a valuable archive, shown here in the context of the exhibition prepared from this work. The majority of the on-campus pictures are bread-and-butter commercial views. You may be tempted to download the sound files which provide comments by Adams himself, but some consist of two or three muttered words with long spaces for thinking and breathing - better to look at a hi-res version of the picture instead. Exhibits in the Natural Reserve and Agricultural Centers and Field Stations sections are of greatest appeal.
Go - Adams Archive

California Museum of Photography

Although more of an electronic version of the museum's advance program leaflet/s than a gallery in itself, this University of California site is well worth looking at and has some substantial photography, well scanned and correctly set up for the gamma 1.4-ish viewing standard we recommend (as indeed are most of the better image collections on WWW). Weston, Mapplethorpe, many contemporary and new photographers. Very busy, and can be slow, so pick your time to visit with care.

Travels with Samantha

Philip Greenspun's Internet 'book' is one of the best photographic experiences on World Wide Web. First of all, it is a complete book, well-crafted and very absorbing to read; secondly, it is finely illustrated with entirely apposite travel photographs of a professional standard. There are over 250 JPEG pictures in T with Sam. This is a site to add to your Hotlist, because it repays visiting a chapter at a time, maybe once a week or once every evening until you have read it. Philip is supported by Kodak's assistance to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology - he has a Photo CD Workstation to use for the scanning - and Travels is one of the award-winning 'products' on Internet which no-one should miss.

Butterfly Image Gallery

More good stuff from Philip Greenspun. Small, uncaptioned (other than facetiously!) butterfly farm lepid-optical essay. Good image quality but for some reason our system garbled Phil's full-size (c.120Kb) JPEGs. He invites use free use of these colorful images for non-commercial purposes.

The Edgerton On-Line Photo Gallery

Thomas R Karlo of the Edgerton Center maintains this exhibition, archive and resource of photographs which contains a wide range of work to interest everyone from photojournalists to scientific researchers. Without being too huge or difficult to look round, the On-Line Gallery has decent-sized pictures which load quickly (well optimized for resolution, compression and format). Some new high-speed work by Steve Mann appears under the titles 'Microseconds and Years' and several student photographers have personal portfolios.

International TeleTimes

Although not a photographic site, International TeleTimes is interesting as one of the first Web magazines. It is edited by a high school entrepreneur, Ian Wojtowicz, and has contributors from all parts of the world. Each issue has a themed subject. In addition, former studio proprietor and fine art photographer Kent Barrett has a column entitled 'Keepers of the Light' in which he reviews exhibitions and presents selected images. TeleTimes has a photographic contest called, er, Photon '95 (the first was Photon '94). We've established contact and will probably cooperate during the coming year, including linking through from PHOTON magazine to the Photon '95 competition results, and providing some prize or sponsorship support.

Mary & Michael's Wedding Photography

This commercial advertisement is also a good example of how Internet may be used in future by professional photographers. The picture examples are of excellent quality, correctly scanned and compressed, and the site is well designed. It includes response forms. Worth checking out as a 'how to' example. See also Cloud Gallery, next item.

Cloud Gallery

This is Mary and Michael again, revealing all about themselves and trying to sell you a CD-ROM containing 32 royalty free high-res sky and cloud backgrounds for just under $100. They know what they're doing and scan good clean RGBs. Beware possible impact from a huge fragment of homespun theosophy orbiting just outside the highly photogenic atmosphere of M&M's personal planet. Crowley had Aiwass to hold the pen, but who's been tapping at Mary's keyboard?

Craig Stewart Studio

Craig Stewart Studio of Houston puts up a WONDERFUL folio of innovative, stylish, genuinely good professional work. Large JPEGs are superbly optimised - a whole A4 screenful in just 29Kb - and Gallery 1's shots are very fresh in approach. An absolute MUST for any pro, freelance or art director to check out now.

Impact Studios Ltd

Another technically good advertising portfolio. File sizes are not as optimal and the main gallery is a lengthy multi-image loadup. The pictures by art director / photographer Peter Lien, photographers Scott Nibauer and Bruce Horn, and digital illustrator Andy Hendrickson feature extensive manipulation. Some results look as if the client said 'We want a special effect' and left it to the studio to come up with a distortion or montage. Interesting comparison with the last item. I found the expression on the overweight IRS man's face unconvincing. He looks like he's sitting on a studio floor, not plunging to his death from the 50th floor.

Saelon Renkes

Use this exhibit as an entry-point to Art on the Net. Renkes shows both 8-bit GIF and 24-bit JPEG versions of many figure and landscape works she has hand-tinted. They are around 220-250Kb each to download, and of a high creative and technical standard.

Cyberia's Art Gallery

The much-hyped media favorite, London's Cyberia cybercafe, has computer generated art on its walls as well as in its EasyNet partner's art gallery pages. Current offerings include photo/computer collage work from Alex Berka which is worth looking at. The images are very large datawise for their quality and size, and putting six in one page means that you end up loading over 200Kb to view them. Despite being 'active' they do not produce a larger hi-res image when clicked, just a blank. The gallery would be better if the images were much lower res or on solus pages, with access to higher resolution, higher quality versions on demand if they looked good (like the Ansel Adams exhibit, in fact - that loads many more picture choices far faster). From Cyberia you can explore some of the airhead stuff which makes cyber-cafes interesting - truth is, it's all even more anorak then we are... but more fun.

Fotofeis project by Carol Flax

Earlier in 1994, we received publicity from a Scottish photo festival calling itself Fotofeis with major arts funding and a transatlantic digital project linking up to remote Highland cybercrofts. Despite an attempt to interest the organisers in having it featured in Scotland's only photo magazine we never saw any work from the project. So, big surprise - we finally got to see Carol Flax's Inverness Railway Station permanent 'installation' (you are forgiven if you switch off when this kind of artworld weaselspeak appears) in @art gallery, a site located at the University of Illinois. We assume the first of the four Scots-themed digital montages is satirical (see for yourself!). Neat thumbnails clickable for full screen images of good quality and reasonable size.

Ray Avery's Jazz Photography

This is not primarily photographic despite its high image content. You have to be more interested in jazz than photography to remain absorbed by what's on offer. Images are just as likely to be copies of non-photographic record covers as anything else. A good retro style reference for designers and art directors.

Moscow Libertarium Hot Pictures

Art-photography in the best tradition of European political self-expression, etc. Interesting, fairly quick to check out. Try it.

Lee Foster's Travel Pictures

These are flagged as something photographic to visit, but they aren't really travel pictures - more tourism brochure shots appended to moderately interesting PR-style travel copy. Quite boring, really. Real 'travel' pictures can be found at the NMPA site.

OTIS Project On-Line Gallery

The OTIS project is all rather huge, and you can find two dozen good photographers including the enterprising Oleg in these free gallery pages. There are also details of how to get your own work on-line, and photography is just a miniscule part of all the art on show through OTIS. Be prepared, however, for slow performance due to the sheer popularity of this U.N.C. site. London photographer David Garcia is one of the few Brits with his own stuff in the gallery - nice grainy tinted-looking images, somewhere between Sarah Moon and David Fairman. Another British photographer with good work, very small clean JPEGs, is Steve Nichols with travel, urban and creative landscape stuff. Good to see UK professionals starting to use Net exposure.

Chicago Cycling

Photographer Matthew Sanner has a popular page for 'green-lane' cycling freaks. It's more than 50% photographic in content. Big pictures, but not very sharply scanned, and permanently reduced to dithered 256-color GIFs. We've suggested he has them reworked as 24-bit JPEG/JFIFs. Worth visting if your keen on trail cycling.

Technical Lamps

Not photographs... but! This is what the commercial side of WWW should be - a complete hypertext illustrated ordering catalog devoted to every kind of specialist lamp and light-bulb you might ever want to locate for your oddball enlarger, projector or flash modeling. You can order by credit card, and the graphics help you find the correct type from a bewildering proliferation of lamps. Great for Europeans owning American enlargers!

World Maps

This is not a photographic resource, but it's so good that we are including a link. The map server displays a zoomable map of any location in the world. Pick your country or region, see the overall map, zoom in on any coordinate, see it enlarged in greater detail... and again, and again. You can even change the projection used. Useful for designers and photographers. No towns, cities roads etc - just natural boundaries, country boundaries and rivers.Find out for yourself.