Portfolio Development - Website Making

I have been looking into the building your own website side of portfolios. I have always wanted to create my own but have never known where to look or what to do. I have done research on 8 different websites created by other photographers but now I need to look into the actual website building. This includes looking at the different sites which will help you and provide templates which you can edit to help save you time as well as giving you inspiration and ideas. I will be also looking at the cost, whether you get to chose your own domain or if you have to pay (if so, how much), as well as how easy the actual web builder is to use.

These are the following website builders I have chosen to look at before closing one to create mine through, Wix, Weebly, Squarespace, Wordpress and SuitBuilder. Here is a review I found online about these...Show/Hidea menu

A guide to website building software and a list of the top website builders that are easy to learn & use for beginners.

There are many different website builders you can use to make your own website. The most professional choice is WordPress. It is our recommended platform for building your own website as WordPress gives you complete control & powerful functionality. You can read our step by step guide on how to make a WordPress website. However, WordPress is more difficult to learn & may not be the best choice for beginners. There are many commercial website builders out there which make site building a little easier and faster. If you are planning to build your own website, you will need to decide on which website builder best fits your requirements. Listed below are 5 of the best website builders that we recommend to our readers:

SiteBuilder – Create & Manage Your Own Website

www.sitebuilder.com is one of the simplest, most intuitive site builders on the market. They make it easy for anyone to build and publish their own website without having to be a computer whiz. Their powerful site builder offers all the tools you need to get your small business website up and running, including a basic eCommerce store as well. They also offer one of the largest selections of pre-made templates so you can always find that perfect design. They do offer a free plan without a custom domain name, although we would highly recommend choosing a paid plan (starts at $9.95/mo) to unlock all their professional features.

SiteBuilder is the easiest, fastest way to build a site.

Try it Now & Start Building 

Wix – Get a Quick & Easy Website

www.wix.com offers one of the best website builders on the market. Wix is a bit more complex than SiteBuilder, but offers more advanced features and includes a better eCommerce platform for selling online. They also have numerous templates with over 70 different categories to choose from. Their user-friendly drag and drop site builder is intuitive and lets you fully customize your website. Wix is great for beginners who want a managed, easy solution to make their own website. Wix is also one of the largest website builders with over 63 million users world wide. You can start Wix for free, but will most likely need to upgrade to their paid plans which range from a little over $4 to almost $25/mo.

Wix is one of the most popular choices for site builders.

Try it Now & Start Building 

Weebly – Professional Site Builder for eCommerce Stores

www.weebly.com is yet another great choice for making your own website. Customers can quickly make a professional looking website with their drag and drop site builder. Weebly offers less customization than SiteBuilder or Wix, but does offer great eCommerce plans for businesses and is a popular choice for those who are looking to sell their products/services online. Their business plan is pricey at $25/mo, but does offer everything you need to setup a professional online store. Weebly is easy to sign up with and has a relatively straight forward process. Unfortunately, they only have a very limited number of themes to choose from – approximately 30 at the time of this writing.

Weebly lets you professionally create your own website.

Try it Now & Start Building 

Squarespace – Website Builders for Creative Businesses

www.squarespace.com is a website builder geared towards artists and those in a more creative profession. Squarespace has a lot of great website templates for photographers, artists, restaurants, musicians, weddings, and bloggers. Their designs are typically simple, yet very visual with large images. Like Weebly, their templates are less customizable, but include clean URLs and truly responsive designed templates. Their services are competitively priced – starting at $8/month for personal and $18/month for business. You can start a 2 weeks free trial with no credit card required. Squarespace also has a great community knowledge base where you can ask questions and get help on how to use their website builder.

Squarespace is the best website builder for creative industries.

Try it Now & Start Building 

WordPress – The Best Website Builder

Last, but not least, is WordPress. While technically a CMS, WordPress is still our top choice for building a website. It’s used not only by beginners, but by professionals as well. WordPress is such a powerful platform & has so many features, that most web designers & developers love to use it. In fact, 1/5 of all websites on the internet are now built with WordPress. It’s the industry standard for a website building platform. Unfortunately, it’s a little more difficult to learn than the others. There are many great video tutorials online for learning WordPress, such as http://www.wp101.com/videos/.

WordPress is the industry standard for building a website.

Try it Now & Start Building 

Understanding Which Website Builder You Should Use

Most website builders are meant for beginners who have no experience in web design. In the old days, only a professional web designer could make a website by hand-coding it. Nowadays, anyone with a little patience and determination can do it using the help of website building software. So which website builder listed above should you use? That depends on you and which one you feel most “comfortable” with. WordPress is the best in terms of power & flexibility, but is also the most difficult to learn. For beginners who have little technical skills, we’d recommend signing up with one of the others listed above. And for those of you who have problems turning on a computer, hiring a professional web designer is going to be your best choice!

Any of the above website builders are relatively easy to learn compared to other methods of building a website. That being said, there is a little learning curve involved. Most of you reading this guide will probably be small business owners who want to build a website yourself. It’s definitely a doable thing, but you will need to spend some time familiarizing yourself with the features/functionality of the website builder you chose. Also, most website builders allow you to signup for free, but not surprisingly, limit features and functionality. The free versions are usually not adequate for business and we recommend upgrading to a paid plan for a professional website & appearance.

(Information found at http://howtogetonline.guru/best-website-builders on 31.05.2016)

I have been looking into all of these and have decided to go with Wix to make my website. I think it is the best price and the easiest to use. All website builders are tedious to start with but I think it will be ok once you get used to the layout of them. 

I will be making another blog post with a copy of my final website and images to show what I have created and to explain why I have chosen the images I have. 

Portfolio Development - Behance - My Images 2

Since my initial ideas for my final 10 images I have experimented with a few of my other ideas instead. I thought about my favourite genre being the architectural and thought how could I interpret that into my images and I also looked through some older images from a couple of years ago and thought I would be able to use those for some as well. After many hours worth of editing them I came up with these...

I asked a couple of my friends what their opinion was for this image and they turned to me and said we have told you before that we like this image. I laughed and said look again and its then that they realised I had replaces the end of the inside corridor with the steps leading to the tram line. I was impressed with how I had fooled them and I like this images because it makes you study it more. I just wish I had both images in colour but they were taken on an old black and white film camera and in black and white on a digital camera. 

This was the first image I tried this effect on. I was sat looking for images and came across these two in the same folder and thought they would look good together. It took a lot of practice and playing around with photoshop for me to get the correct blending mode and positions but i think it was well worth the 3 or so hours. I am very pleased with this image and think it is going to be one of my final 10 images. 

This image is a similar to the one above. The heads are metal sculptures I photographed on site at Hull University. They are fantastic and make excellent textured shots. I love this image as the head again looks like it is popping out of the image at you and the blending mode I used has almost given it a 3D effect too. I think again that this image will be one of my final 10.

This was a very experimental image. I just had a mad idea one day when I didn't have too much to do. I think there is still more work and techniques which need to be done to make it seem more realistic but for a start I was pleased with it. I think I could do with looking at some more online tutorials and see if I can improve it.



I was told this image looks like it have been edited to merge two or maybe three images together but it hasn't. This is the original image but it has been edited to bring out the green of the leaves and I have cleared up the reflection in the mirror as it was rather blurry to start with.


I have had a lot of fun making these and will be making more. I need to get out and take more but for now I think I have enough different ideas to get my final ten images for behance of my developed ideas.

Portfolio Development - Behance - My Image Ideas

I showed examples of other peoples work I found on Behance in the previous blog post. Their work is inspiring to me in many ways. I have started to look at more tutorials online and was able to create an image where I merged my daughters head with a building in Budapest. I have also had a pay around with the different blending modes in Photoshop to see what weird and wonderful things I could create.

Below are some of the examples I have created...




I love this image as it is more zoomed in than I have seen a lot of similar work. I also decided to only change her hair instead of it being blended in a lot more like the other peoples work I have seen. I was trying to make something a little different as there are a lot of images like this around. I think I could go back at a later date after learning more techniques and make improvements to it. I think the hair line needs to be changed and merged a little better than it has been done already.



I attempted this style for the first time with this image. I had a few images I thought could look good together so decided to experiment by adding them all together. I think if I redid this one I would change the opacity a little more so the council house can be seen better. Also I think a crop would be in order as well to take out the lamppost to the right of the image as the bright line of it draws your eye in to it when really it shouldn't do.



This image is made up of merging two images together. I took a basic image of one of my friends stood in Nottingham and merged it using blending modes to an image of obscure glass in a public toilet. I love this image as it looks in a way like it has been painted which gives it more detail and depth. I think if I re edited this image I would be tempted to make it back and white and crop it a little.



Finally this is the images I mentioned at the top of this post. I am very proud of this as it was my first attempt and it did take a lot of hours to do. I have since evolved this picture already as I could see faults which I wasn't happy with. The cutting out down the right side of the face hasn't been done well enough so there is a dark line around the ear and neck. I also don't like the white background either, I think it is too bright and the image would benefit from having a grey plain or textured background instead.



I have since made a couple of changes to that image to improve it. I did a little more editing and added a third image to the mix. It is of the ceiling inside a local church in Nottingham. I think it compliments the image very well as giving it a background which it needed to get rid of the bright white. I am much happier with this image.

Portfolio Development 1 - Behance Research

Introduction 

I have created an account on Behance (an online portfolio for the creative arts side of things) and added some of my own work for others to view. I have also been looking at others work to see what is liked by other and to see what I like. I have followed a few of my favourites who I find inspirational and I am going to analyse their work. I will also try to pick out noticeable techniques they may have used to create their work. In particular I love double exposures, they fascinate me and they make me think a lot about how they have been created and how long they must have taken to be made.

The majority of double exposures have been made in Photoshop these days and are multiple images which have been put together instead of the original way which was done on film either in camera or in the dark room. I think it is a shame that this technique is becoming a rarity. It is an amazing technique to master.

My other favourite has got to be reflection. These can be actual reflections or they can be double exposures where people have added something different to what was there originally. I find these fascinating as well because sometimes you have to stand back and really study the images to work out if they have been created post production or not, so it is the real deal.



Artists/Photographers


I Think the artists I have chosen are successful because their images seem to be unique to the others I have seen, they are all popular on Behance with lots of followers and well as views. I think these also inspire me as well to give their techniques a go and see what sort of thing I can come up with.




The first artist on behance I am going to look at and analyse is Eric McEdward from the USA.
Here are a few of his images which have inspired me...











(All of these images were from https://www.behance.net/gallery/3776060/Reflect-On-This on 22.04.2016)

I think these images are great, they are fun and they are interesting which is very important. The top two images are just beautiful, I think Eric has framed these fantastically well as the reflections look like they are coming up out of cracks in the ground. Sort of seeing the inner beauty in the first one to the grey dullness around it, the second one could be seen as a porthole to hell almost or just a pretty sunset.
The final two are more seeing the fun side of reflections which have the photographer in. I think the idea behind them is great and I love how bright and vibrant these images are. I think they have been framed well.
All of these images are inspiring as its something fun and something which I have thought about doing but not how Eric has taken them. All I need is a light sunny day after we have had some rain.




Next I am going to look at Cal Redback from France.


These area handful of his images. He has many more but these are my favourites and all happen to be in one folder of his work.

(All above images found at https://www.behance.net/gallery/20482451/Treebeard on 31.05.2016)

I absolutely love the depth of field in these images to give them an almost completely blurred background. The amount of hard work and time that must have gone into editing these is amazing. You can tell this by looking at the detail in some depth. Cal has merged them to be almost perfect. I think these images are very creative and are very interesting to sit and look at for longer than normal. I like the composition and the framing very much as well.




The final one I am going to be looking at is Jyo John Mulloor...

(All above images found at https://www.behance.net/jyojohn on 31.05.2016)

All I can say about this artists work is amazing! I was speechless when I first found these images. I had to have a look at the rest of his work and I can say that I felt the same way about all of it. The time and effort put into every last little bit of detail is fantastic and well worth it. They are all ideas and images I haven't seen done in this way before. I like the artists style of image both before and after post production. I really like the portraits he started out with. The lighting and the background are pleasing to the eye as well as the framing and the composition. I would love to try something like this as a mini project of my own to add to my behance and portfolio.