All photographers need a portfolio. These days you don’t print your work but rather publish it online. Sure it usually is not the safest way for photographers seeing that there are many ways to “steal” photographs from the net, but it sure is the best way to get yourself known and at no cost to you. There are a couple of places you can got to to build your own website for free. I will post some links for you to the sites that I have tried. But first some online safety tips for photographers.
Online Safety for your photos.
Copyright or watermark
Watermark
Make sure your photos have an watermark on them – it must not spoil your photo but it should also not be to simple. Editing out an watermark is much easier than you think. Any experienced photoshop user wil be able to do this.
Sizes
To print a photo you need the photo to be atleast 240dpi in resolution or bigger. Your computer screen displays photos at 72dpi and Ipad’s at 96dpi. This means that when you upload your photo to an website or on your portfolio site, make sure the resolution is 96dpi at the most. Also take note of your dimesions, having a photo that is 3000px wide and 2000px high at 96dpi will print just as well. The default setting i seem to get is the maximum width should be no more than 1000px on the long side.
Copyright Protection on your site.
Right Click Protection as on 500px.com
Make sure your website has copyright protection on it. ex: if you right click on the image, a message should appear stating that the image is under copyright instead of giving you the option to save it. An example of this can be found on 500px.com when you browse the photos. Another way and usually very effective is to completely unable the right click function on your website. Ther are also ways to stop people from making print screens of the screen and to prevent them from dragging and dropping your photo. Make sure you speak to your website developers about these features.
Now that you know the dangers of the web, turn too the fun side. Having and maintaining your own portfolio is hard work, but worth it once you see people interacting with you and your website.
Here are the top 5 (according to my research) free online website builders. You can build your own website with basic functionality and you also have the option to upgrade to an bigger website with more functions for a small montly fee.
1 – 500px.com
500px.com
2 – Wix.com
wix.com
3 – Moonfruit.com
moonfruit.com
4 – Webnode.com
webnode.com
5 – Webs.com
webs.com
And there you go, now all that remains to do is that pick the site you feel ,most comfortable with, register and start building your website.
From all of these above i have found that 500px.com works the best for me – their pro version is a bit more expensive but the free version is pretty good. They are aslo compatible with Ipad’s and Iphones.
Hope you have found this interesting! Here is a link to my personal 500px profile so that you can have a look at what is in store for you. 500px.com/pierresteenkamp
Happy Building!
