I’ve written a few times recently about Alec Soth, and he now has a new web site and its front page says:
“My name is Alec Soth. I live in Minnesota. I like to take pictures and make books. I have a Labradoodle. I also have a business called Little Brown Mushroom. “
Go there and click on the link and you’ll find the Labradoodle is well-named. Fortunately the site also has pictures from half a dozen of his projects:
- Broken Manual
- The Last Days of W
- Paris / Minnesota
- Dog Days, Bogotá
- Niagara
- Sleeping by the Mississippi
all of which need you to scroll across the page* to see more pictures. The site also has quite a lot of information about him, definitely a good idea as he must get thousands of students writing to him with similar questions and he can just tell them to look on the web site.
If you have a large screen, it’s better to click on the picture and watch them larger as a slide show, but you need to have a screen around 1500 pixels wide to see the landscape format images properly, as on smaller screens the left side menu gets in the way.
The images in the slide show good quality jpegs, maximum dimension 1024 pixels but may not look their best in your browser as they are AdobeRGB images. These will only display correctly if your web browser is color managed. You can find out more and check that on the image at top right of this Web Browser Colour Management Tutorial, which should not alter when you move your mouse over it or click on it. If you find it changes it is worth considering updating your browser. Recent versions of Firefox are colour managed (though it can be switched off) and I think Safari always has been. The only version of Internet Explorer I have is IE7, and it isn’t.
Without colour management browsers will normally display all files as sRGB (or at least roughly so) as 95% of monitors use the same 2.2 gamma as sRGB. This is why it almost always makes sense to convert your files to SRGB before putting them on the web. Very few monitors can actually display many colours outside the gamut of sRGB in any case, so if you display an AdobeRGB file on them with colour management it won’t look any better than if it was converted to sRGB, and without colour management will look considerably worse.
Of course if you are at all interested in looking at photographs on the web you will have already have a properly profiled and calibrated monitor – to to 2.2 gamma and D65- 6500 Kelvin – and you can read more about that on the tutorial linked above. As G Ballard explains, the Mac default of 1.8 can cause problems.
While many lesser photographers (and sites such as Magnum) are pretty paranoid about putting images on the web, limiting the size and decorating them with watermarks, Soth does neither. It’s good for all of us who like looking at his work and particularly for those students I mentioned earlier who can print them off in their reports, and for other ‘fair use‘ of the images. If your work is as well known as his, you don’t need to worry too much about the images becoming ‘orphans‘, the main reason I now include both metadata and a visible watermark on all new web images.
*I’ll possibly think that is sensible design when I get a mouse that comes with a ball on top rather than a wheel, but not before.