Hello! I'm also new here and I'm sort of in the same situation. I took a look at your website, and the photos are actually pretty good (I'm not a photographer though :P). But the website started to bother me after a few minutes. Some tips on improvement: Ditch the slow switching fade in/out feature. It looks pretty, but on a portfolio it just takes way to long to see a bunch of your work. Having a nice overview gallery and then clicking on the photo to view the larger version would be better. And best would be not needing any clicking to see the full sizes. Portrait photos really bother me. Especially when they are mixed in with landscape. A lot of your portrait photos don't really have anything specific in them that needs the photo to be portrait. And it wrecks the flow when looking at them all together. And finally, the website took a long time to load on my laptop and current internet connection. Considering both are fairly fast, that was a bit shocking. Again, this is partly caused by the fade in/out feature I mentioned above. The rest of the website looks fine, and I particularly like the little gears in the corner that spin. It's a nice touch ;). Do you have any work lined up at the moment? Or just playing it by ear? I'm really curious as to how you make money as a photographer. Photo shoots? Freelance work? It definitely sounds interesting.
Hey Kafke- Thanks, and it's nice to know another newb here. I'll talk to my web guy about the fade feature. The last thing I want is for people to have to wait to see my stuff. That's annoying. I wasn't aware of the slow load either- on my computer it pops right up but I'm assuming that's because I have it cached. I'll reset my browser and look again. Thanks for the tip! Life as a pro photographer is tricky. I learned quickly that you can know everything there is to know about photography and still starve to death. At least in LA, the real job is knowing how to market yourself. I've done a lot of freelance work, but I shoot a niche of food photos where there is far less competition- Vegan food. This has allowed me to be different than a lot of the other food photographers out there and it's paying off. I now have a semi-consitant job at a food based start up and I landed a cookbook deal. Pretty exciting! Finally, the most important thing for me is to stay busy and shoot as much as possible. That has lead to more and more work as everyone seems to know someone else looking for a photographer. I don't know where the path leads, but I'm going to find out!