I get asked what I do when I’m not building awesome websites or working with hotels to build even better websites and the secret is … I’m a photo junkie. I desperately wanted to be a photographer when I was a kid, my older brother was a great photographer before training to become an electrician and I always envied him for what he could do with an old pin hole camera. Frankly, he was one of the guys that could MacGyver just about anything together but the photo stuff was always cool. I gave up trying to be a photographer when I was about 20, what I realized was that most photographers never made a decent income and more importantly, other photographers would pay me to Photoshop their images. That was about 15 years ago, well before the Internet was common and as technology grew, so did I.
My passion for great photography has never changed, it’s never waxed and it’s never waned so while I don’t get a chance to take a lot of photos anymore I still get to look at a lot of great work and today I thought I would share some of my favorite photo websites and photo blogs.
For learning, I absolutely love the Digital Photography School. The website is clean, professional, well designed and chalk full of helpful tips for everything from marketing to post production. To be honest, it’s a great place to pick up wonderful design tricks as well as well as photography tips. Take a few minutes to read:
Photopreneur isn’t the best looking website out there but what it lacks in design it makes up for in devilishly good photography, especially the food articles.
File Magazine is sexy. I don’t put that label on websites often but in the old days of working in the magazine industry, my art director used to tell me that some designs reminded you of the woman in red, they simply made your head turn. For me, File Magazine is one of those well through out pieces that makes you do a double take. After all, what’s sexier then a nipple shot on the beach?
Frank Expada (Sorry, this site belongs to Joseph Szymanski, my mistake) 
runs a great little website, all very inspirational but also very cool. Take a look at the subtle alpha fade at the bottom of his page. It’s this type of detail that separates the men from the boys when it comes to great designs.
Martin Gommel runs a very different website, it’s a typical blog that you’ll have to run through a translator to get the most out of but it’s well worth it. Mehr aus RAW-Dateien machen (How to get more from the RAW file format) is just one example of a great article, even if Google’s translator does leave a little to be desired.
http://strobist.blogspot.com/ looks at first to be a typical BlogSpot site, I’m not a big fan of BlogSpot but I can forgive him for using it since the website content is great.
OK, Bill Wadman at 365 Portraits is the type of man I desperately want to hate. His website is amazing to look at, it has brilliant content, it’s well structured, followed most of the usability rules and … it’s filled with killer photography that I’d give my right mouse button to be capable of.
What can I possibly say about JMG Galleries other than it’s amazing. The website is informative, clean, good natured and filled with helpful tips for people who want to know more about the process behind the lens.
