Welcome to PHOTONet
Index, the page of Icon Publications Ltd's PHOTON WWW photo
magazine where editor David Kilpatrick points you painlessly and slightly
personally to Internet sites of photographic interest. Please e-mail your own
photographic URL or recommendations to us for inclusion. Most current
items (sdded in last 4-8 weeks) are in the first page this list, and
there's a link to the rest at the end of them. I receive too many new URL
recommendations to get them into place quickly, so check also our schedule of unvisited
sites. Send me a one-paragraph review in our format of any of these, and we'll maybe add
it PhotoNet index with your byline as reviewer.
You are PHOTONet Index
access number 
The Set Shop ands Photoserve
Added January 27th 1996
PhotoServe is a monthly gallery and new talent 'magazine' with a
commercially paid folio section and trade advertising, concentrating on
pictures. For those of you who think Photon is not a real magazine because
it has words - sometimes even without any pictures! - this may be the place
to visit. The Set Shop, which runs this server, is a props and drops
supplier for professional photographers in New York. Very professional
website with the benefit of solus server and line occupancy - speed... Some
pages were, however, pretty erratic with inexplicable switching from very
fast to really slow transfer, some 'broken' pix, others loading.
Picture Windows
Added January 1st 1996
While certainly working as a Webpage in overall terms, Gamini Kumara's
site uses some odd layouts which call for a 17 inch screen, and looks a
little untidy because of the white (not transparent) borders around his
black-border printed ragged-edge pix. Get past this, and the b/w
portraits are excellent. They're so sharp, so fine quality and so big
that I reckon you could print one full page width. Brave photographer!
Reminiscent of Arbus or Sander, his mother/daughter (etc) work is not
original but it's well executed, and every time a photographer does a
project like this, it adds something to human insight.
The History of Photography
Added December 29th 1995
This is an awesome bit of hypertext writing - Dr Robert Leggatt FRPS,
having proposed and authored the basis for an illustrated CD-ROM
featuring the first 80 years of photography as reflected in the Royal
Photographic Society archives, found his project torpedoed and sunk by
fears of copyright infringement on the part of the RPS. He has as a
result placed the entire work in the WWW public domain sans
illustrations. This is superb resource, brief, peppered with fascinating
quotations, references, brief biographies, insights into early work, and
numerous sidetracks and connections. Do not be put off by the lack of
pictures; you will rarely find a better fast-track introduction to
photography's technical and artistic origins. I'm e-mailing Dr Leggatt
with my offer to publish this on CD-ROM and find those much-needed images
elsewhere if possible. Some proof corrections are needed but this does
not detract from the merit of a true labour of love now released for the
benefit of all.
Otto Krauth's Photo Database software
Added December 3rd 1995
This site needs to be added right now, even though I have assigned
Richard (heir to my overdraft) to do some serious site-checking for a
major PhotoNet Index upgrade before the year end. Otto Krauth has written a
relational database for thumbnailing Photo-CD collections - and made it
available as shareware to all of us lucky Mac users. Otto also puts up
three good quality pix of his own - a modest man with a real contribution
to make!
Guy Morton and Tony Ryan
Added October 21st 1995
Guy is a photographer who has worked collaboratively over the net with Tony
Ryan and has a couple of works in the Down the Line Exhibition current
showing in London. Interesting overworks of original images, digital
photography, black and white.
Added October 11th 1995
Art Planet
Art Planet is an internet directory for fine art
sites. It contains listings for auction houses, artists, museums,
galleries, libraries, exhibits, publishers and other fine art services.
Art Planet uses a query engine and auto-linking script to enable sites to
register, and browsers to find resources by entering a keyword, company
or artist name. Hard to say yet how useful it will prove, but expert use
of interactive HTML.
The Russian Chronicles
Added October 6th 1995
This is, perhaps, the most ambitious photojournalism project on WWW. A
photographer and writer team is crossing Russia from Vladivostock to St
Petersburg, and this is their diary with embedded photo-stories of
considerable depth. I greatly enjoyed the story on the Autonomous Jewish
Homeland right on the edge of Mongolia - I never knew it existed. Very
well crafted and essential viewing. Only one gripe: it is just a little
'precious' to convert all the Kodak DCS 420 digital pictures to black
and white to make them look more 'photojournalistic'. Color JPEGs are
exactly the same size filewise, and color would quite frankly have been
far more interesting visually. These are not hand-printed Cartier-Bresson
negatives, they're digital shots, and they look too flat, with no grain
or edge to them, in black and white.
Peter Ellenby
Added September 23rd 1994
Rock music photo sites are rarely of great photographic merit, and
this is no exception. Petermucks around with solarization and negative
printing (unless the file formats are weird and these are supposed to be
normal pix) and this slightly untidy site takes ages to load even on a
very fast connection. One nice figure study, top example on his portfolio
page. Clever! Peter doesn't rate
professionals he once used for band shots very highly and says the
results he got from them 'looked like shit' and he didn't like paying
'some hack for lousy images'.
Photographic Societies on WWW
Added September 23rd 1995
Please let us know about photo clubs and societies with their own WWW
pages. So far, we have the following to list:
PhotoLand
Added September 19th 1995
PhotoLand is a site with some well-presented news and feature photographs
and short captions; not art, not technique, not a story on its own, but
selected pix from Chad DeShazo, a syndicated news photographer. What
makes this special for me is excellent quality scanning, neat design, but
best of all THE FASTEST WEB SERVER IN THE WORLD delivering the images (to
me, at least) at speeds ranging from 2.5 to 4.6K a second despite my
orindary 28,800 modem and a cross-Atlantic link! Go on, get in there,
slow this site down to a crawl - we can show 'em that having a superbly
fast, efficient server means nothing when you get listed here...
Spicer's Carolina Edens
Added September 4th 1995
Al and Cindy Spicer have a great-looking site, interlaced GIFs with stylish
Netscape performance executed cleanly, a passionately enthusiastic book
to promote,
and a good attitude. This site is an advert for their book on the gardens
of Carolina, but it's not just a teaser, and is worth a visit in its own
right. Read their personal stuff. See Al modelling for an early Mad magazine
cover (school photographers are wonderful!), follow their life story, and
feel good because you just realized predestination DOES exist, and
meeting people - even over WWW - is the best way to brighten your day.
Monte's e-mail
Added August 24th 1995
The great � seriously - Monte Zucker just got himself e-mail. Monte's the
best of the best when it comes to wedding and portrait photography and
his newsletter has educated two or three generations of successful,
real-money-making American photographers. This link is just e-mail, not a
Website - yet! Please do NOT misuse this e-mail link, as he's a busy guy,
but now wants to get involved in using Internet constructively.
Sam Laundon
Added August 24th 1995
Sam was one of the first professional photographers to have a Website,
and he's putting a lot of effort into getting others involved in Web art
projects. He has an excellent 'slide show' version of his site using the KPT
QuickShow viewer (freeware) for Mac. Fine black and white material, but
my favourites are 'Mari's Angel' and 'Complexity', both color images.
Williams of Hove
Added August 15th 1995
One of Britain's best Leica dealerships, Williams of Hove, are amongst
the first to get a Web page completed with secondhand and collectable
equipment lists. Well-styled, produced by a local Webserver team who have
given them a good deal and considerable help, if you're after Leica,
Contax or similar gear, have a look. I've just bought and sold several
items through them with a good balance of price/commission terms myself.
Photo-Art International
Added August 9th 1995
Black and white pictures by great photographers - Diane Arbus, Edouard
Boubat, O Winston Link - and of great subjects including Liz Taylor,
Vivien Leigh, Salvador Dali. They're all available for sale as
collectors' prints through the magazine Photo-Art International. This Web
advertisement page in Photon presents 16 selected images (some may offend
- this is art, so be warned) from the first four issues.
The AART Gallery
Added August 4th 1995
Brilliant graphic Netscape/HTML3 work! Real Gothztec feel to it. Then
look at the two photo galleries and weep - superb interview/critical
journalism by Kent Barrett (yes, he of International Teletimes, etc,
fame) and thought-provoking, amusing, excellent images. Skai Fowler's
images of herself as a nude figure in classical paintings, created by
montage to blend almost perfectly in some cases, are a delight.
Alder Yarrow
Added August 4th 1995
Great name for a photographer - named after a magical tree and the saddest valley
in Scotland (even though that's only because the ballad-writers couldn't
resist rhyming 'Yarrow' with 'Sorrow'). Turns out to be a really
introspective, careful, thoughtful sort of image-maker - mono Zone
System stuff, lots of philosophy. The GIF images vary from unsharp and
over-large to very high quality. Visit Oxford and Europe with this
photographer; you'll enjoy these sections.
Reading University Photographic Society
Added August 4th 1995
A little bit specific to British Reading University students - you get
the feeling it belongs on a closed network hypertext information system.
However, along with parochial info on this big (150-member) student photo
club, there's their gallery. Really huge dithered GIF files from Hell. I
thought I was looking at a wonderful special effect - false colors,
grain, posterization, the lot - until I found that ALL the pix looked
like this! Get JPEGing, lads, so we can really see the quality of this
work - and see it in less than two or three minutes per shot.
Digital Wave Photogallery
Added august 4th 1995
A popular and economical (sub-20Kb JPEGs), cleanly defined gallery currently
featuring two photographers - one photojouranlist of standing, Clarence
Elie-Rivera, and one
digital-cum-photo artist, Lisa Johnston (good Borderer name, that!).
She's so good she gets proposals of marriage in her guest book. Superb
photos of real women - see especially 'Nana', one of the finest studio
portraits of an ageing lady I have ever seen, dignified and beautiful.
I think Julia Margaret Cameron might have worked a bit like this given
modern equipment and color film...
Position.com OnLine Model Agency
Added August 1st 1995
This is too early in the development of a site to release the URL, but
how do you get models to send in photos and data for an on-line agency
unless you start with blank pages? Don't visit this URL unless you can
help them out by e-mailing details of photo or catwalk models, actors, musicians
etc you represent (or want to help). They have no photos yet, but the
space is waiting. So, here goes: position.com, a new online model agency, invites you to apply!
http://www.triple.com/position.com
Catch some hot flying sh*t!
Added August 1st 1995
Pardon my language - you'll find nothing but the best of invective, drawn
out to lengths of legality which defy reading, let alone understanding,
in the huge slab of FTP text occupying most of Fujifilm's Web site. This
text is a detailed rebuttal of Kodak's attempt to get the US Government
to act against alleged restrictive trade practices in Japan.
Unbelievably, PowerMac Netscape ran out of memory when reading the stuff,
so huge is this file. If you want my own opinion on the Kodak/Fuji market
share invective, click here instead. Fuji's
site is otherwise a moderately interesting, amateurishly written and
edited, mixture of oldish news releases and too few photos.
New NASA Website photos
Added July 17th 1995
Here is a clear, well-presented URL recommendation direct from Kelly
Humphries at NASA:
There's a new source for NASA photos of ongoing shuttle missions at
http://shuttle.nasa.gov/
Visitors can link to a Photo Gallery or Video Gallery from the home page.
In addition to photos of the current mission, past missions and their
images will be archived and available through this site.
Of particular note are the Electronic Still Camera images that are
available from the recent STS-71 Shuttle/Mir docking mission. Some great
pictures of the first American/Russian handshake in space in 20 years are
available there.
PhotoDisc
Added July 14th 1995
Take one of the biggest players in the CD-ROM photo library game, put
them on WWW, and what do you get? Fine design and cryptic headings,
that's what! You 'click here for catalog' and get a fill-in form to
receive one by mail; you go to view the Signature Collection, including a
whole disc by my good Austrian friend Hans Weisenhofer (love to Sylvie,
Hans, and hope you're prospering as ever), and you get a wrong sort of
HTML link to FTP which doesn't send you the single very modest sample image properly.
Add promised prospect of actually trying to USE Adobe Acrobat
in a 24-bit image-intensive context - oh boy! Acrobat is wonderful for
text layouts and vector graphics but really is NOT the most efficient
medium for image delivery, in my own limited experience.
For the record, their CD-ROMs are exceptional and we gave the first we
reviewed (their introductory pack) a very high rating. The Web site fails
to convey just how very good the standard of PhotoDisc imagery can be.
Pacific Camera Company
Added July 9th 1995
When we get enough dealers with sites, we will put a sub-index for them.
Meantime, The Pacific Camera Company sells high-quality used and
collectible cameras and related photographic material and has a site at http://www2.helix.net/~cameras/pacific.html
This is just a quick entry to keep things moving. I have dozens of URLs
to check out now and photography is gathering so much momentum on WWW
that I can hardly keep up with the e-mail, which has been taking
precedence. What would I do if I got thirty or forty paper letters a day?
Fortunately, Internet e-mail is the fastest things to answer ever invented.