I have been a reader and sometime contributor for quite a while and enjoy the give and take. I've just finished totally revamping my website. All of the non square images are from Leica cameras. I shoot with R's and M's. I would love to read comments about the site or about the photos. I am a working professional so you may not see cutting edge art here. Thanks for the look.

http://www.kirktuck.com/new

There is a link to our older html site but the link on the Beta site is not live. To go to the old site just go to :

http://www.kirktuck.com

I would appreciate any honest feedback.

Kirk R. Tuck

-- kirk tuck (kirktuck@kirktuck.com), April 29, 2002

Answers

Great pictures! I enjoyed it tremendously! They are so rich. Your range of technique and composition is so broad and so deep, I felt as if I just had a lesson with a master. I never thought about bokeh or DOF while looking at them, they were just pure joy. Thanks very much.

To ask the obvious geek question: what range of equipment did you use for the portraits and the city scapes?

-- Vikram (VSingh493@aol.com), April 29, 2002.

The few pictures I saw were very nice but the whole site is very slow in loading.

regards Reinier

-- ReinierV (rvlaam@xs4all.nl), April 29, 2002.

A great site, both in terms of its presentation and content. I don't know that all the camera talk in the FAQ is necessary. I don't think potential corporate clients need to know too much about the virtues of the M--but you're in the business and I'm not!

If I were a potential client, I might like to see some of those images in their final form, if they were used in ads or annual reports, etc. Maybe there's a way you could present some "tearsheets." A client might get some new ideas that way. Just a thought.

-- Preston Merchant (merchant@speakeasy.org), April 29, 2002.

Kirk, some thoughts off the top of my head:

(1) Don't clobber people with a 600 KB flash movie up front without warning. Really uncool. Just have a super-quickie flash intro and then, once they are in your site and ready to view things, hit them with longer movies.

(2) After the "street" flash movie completed downloading, you still get the "loading..." graphic displayed (BTW, I'm using the latest v6 "MX" Flash plug-in).

(3) You may wish to think about requiring users to download over 1 MB of "interface" prior to being able to view any images up-close. A bit excessive, no? (4) You can save bandwidth by using Flash to HTTP link to separate JPEG image files. That way you can keep the flash for the interface and spare users the 400-500 KB downloads for all the images in a topic even if they only want to view one or two photos. (5) Good quality photos though! Good tone and colour (a lot of photo sites get this really wrong).

-- Andrew Nemeth (azn@nemeng.com), April 29, 2002.

Just to take a different tack from Andrew, if you are seeking $$$ corporate clients (as you are), having the whizbanging-est Flash site is important. Those very companies have paid big bucks for their sites, so they'll appreciate seeing yours.

I wouldn't worry that the average dial-up user will have some difficulty with your site.

If a potential corporate client can't load your pages, he probably can't afford your services.

-- Preston Merchant (merchant@speakeasy.org), April 29, 2002.

Kirk,

I enjoyed your photos and writings at photo.net; and I also liked your old site. The new one I find uncool. Having flash-y stuff impresses, IMHO, kids. I am on a fast network; think in several Mbps, and the speed issue did not crop up, but I use Netscape on Unix (Solaris), and flash did not work properly. In other words, your site is OS dependent, again not a good thing.

Of course, if all your prospective clients use PCs, and they have this kind of taste, the website is probably OK. But if I were you, I'd have a simple, effective interface.

Regards

-- Vijay A. Nebhrajani (vijay_nebhrajani@yahoo.com), May 01, 2002.

The site was very clodgy and slow when we were running it out of the secondary folder on the site during beta. It is much much faster now. Also, we polled a large selection of our corporate and ad agency clients and 90% were on T1 or symetrical DSL and didn't see any delay at all. The load in was seamless to them. The link to the older html site is now live as well. Thanks for all the on and offline responses. We are now live at www.kirktuck.com

Thank you. Kirk

-- kirk tuck (kirktuck@kirktuck.com), May 01, 2002.

T1 or symetrical DSL and didn't see any delay at all

There's more to this than just how fast potential client's machines are. For instance, unless you are using AKAMAI to distribute your content then the bigger your files the more you'll clog your server.

The way you currently have it, every user has to download over 1 MB of binaries before they can see anything. That's a lot of uneccessary bandwidth traffic on your side which can indeed also slow users down if too many of them try to access your site at the same time.

(Why do you think high traffic sites like yahoo or apple have such simple page designs? It isn't only because of a concern for the dail-in crowd!)

-- Andrew Nemeth (azn@nemeng.com), May 01, 2002.

Andrew, Your point is well taken but in fact each folder is around 500K. The site is running much, much faster now than when I posted the beta request. Please give it one more try. Thank you for taking the time.

-- kirk tuck (kirktuck@kirktuck.com), May 01, 2002.

Still does not work on Netscape/Solaris.

-- Vijay A. Nebhrajani (vijay_nebhrajani@yahoo.com), May 01, 2002.