New Project Galleries

Two new albums in the Projects section of my site! One is from an architecture and design showcase called CasaCor. The other is a series of aerial images I took while flying only a few thousand feet above Chile in a small two seater plane.

See them here: http://www.brandon-stanley.com/projects

New Blog Layout

Any repeat visitors to this blog will know that the look has changed a few times over the last several months. I wanted to try out a different look, and at first I thought I enjoyed it. It was similar to the more dynamic looks of websites like Pinterest and 500px. But the more I used it the less I liked about it. It was nice and flashy but involved a little more effort to read posts and view photos.

I didn't like the way you could only click on one picture at a time, which opened in a new page, and then you had to click back to the posting to see other pictures. Considering the photos were the whole point of me making the blog I felt they needed to be displayed better. I also didn't like how the blog loads a little slower on certain computers since half the actions were animated. These may not seem like big deals, but then again they might, because the attention span of people is limited on the internet these days and it's important to have a smooth, seamless user experience.

I thought about going back to the old layout and black background. I then thought it may be better to have a white background since it is a little more flexible with content. I like the way black backgrounds make the photos look and the way it ties into my website. Yet, I feel a white background makes things feel a little less serious, and considering I write about a variety of things I thought it would be more flexible. Also, all the photos for each post show up in a nice little slideshow and you don't have to waste time viewing each picture in a new page. That is just a horrible, horrible design.

I may go back to black, or I may stick with white. I will see how I like it over the next few weeks. If anybody has any opinions about it let me know! I am officially making commenting available now. So please make your voices heard if you feel so inclined! Thoughts are always welcome!

In honor of being back in smoggy Santiago

New website is live!

It has been a little while since I've updated the blog, my apologies :). I've been working hard giving my website a complete makeover (in addition to searching for an apartment and work). I have launched it today in what we will call Beta mode. It's almost there but just needs some final tweaking, some rearranging of images and a few other minor details. But I wanted to get it out there and see what people thought.

My new logo, designed by Camila Meza is there as well as a couple new photo series and some new work that didn't fit into my old site. I've decided to go with Viewbook for a number of reasons. At first I was skeptical about using a site with fairly limited options for customization (there are a good amount, but I was hoping for moveable objects, text, slideshows etc). As an emerging photographer I never want to use anything generic or too similar to what other people are doing. Yet in the end I was able to create mostly what I would have wanted regardless of what platform I was using to do it. With Viewbook I was just able to do it much more easily and with no knowledge of html.

My old website was created by my friend and coworker, Chris Collins of Gusta and formerly of Airbnb. The problem was that once changing computers and moving to Chile I had difficulty catching up and reinstalling all the software necessary to update my site on a regular basis and get things flowing smoothly. I had wanted to redesign it for sometime now as well. I stumbled upon Viewbook on some random blog, did some research and discovered it offered tons of convenience and enough features to make it worth a trial at the very least.

Some features that attracted me to Viewbook:

-no html or coding necessary

-no software to install. All done on the website, from anywhere with internet

-Simple user interface with the ease of dragging and dropping

-Adobe Lightroom plug-in

-storage of up to 5,000 photos (with pro account)

-automatically resized images depending on browser size for fast uploading (more and more important with short attention spans these days)

- automatically converts to mobile site for iPad and iPhone

-downloadable images and password protected galleries for clients

-share options for a variety of social media outlets

-Fotomoto integration to easily sell images

-Video, blog and Twitter feed embedding

And of course I can use my own domain name. The sites are all visually appealing as well. So as you can see Viewbook offers quite a lot and from what I can tell they are incredibly helpful when you have any issues at all.

SO, please head over to my new SITE and take a look!