Damn Ugly Photography Is A Little Less Ugly

After far too many years, we finally decided to put a new coat of paint on the website. Today we flipped the switch on an all-new, HTML-5 based platform…

So drop whatever you’re doing and head on over to The New & Improved Brad Trent Dot Com and check it out! I think you’ll find things much easier to navigate with the grid-pattern thumbnail galleries, it’s far more iPad & mobile phone friendly, and the HTML-5 is a lot more stable and works one Hell of a lot better than the old Flash site!

But try as I might, some ‘Damn Ugly’ stuff still managed to creep back in…

Damn Ugly Photography Gets Lit Up By The Strobist !!!

Damn Ugly hasn’t had this many hits in one day since he went to DC and photographed The President…and even then I don’t think the graph went that high! This morning, David Hobby, also known in photo circles as The Strobist, interviewed me last week and posted it on his blog at 8:00AM this morning….

Brad Trent on the Fake Reality of Portraits

His post today…and the launching of my new website…have resulted in a major traffic jam clogging up the interwebs! I could only hope and pray to get this kinda action on a daily basis, but since I’m trying to get people signed up for the Santa Fe Workshop Ronnie Weil and I are teaching, I’ll take whatever action I can get!

______________________________

!!! EDIT !!!
______________________________

Damn Ugly made it to the Top 100 Blogs of the Day on WordPress!!! #27…and climbing like a rocket!!!

______________________________

Drumroll Please !!!!!

The Redesigned Website Is Up !!!!!
______________________________

______________________________

You’ve probably noticed my participation here at Damn Ugly has been sketchy recently, but after a couple of months of all-night design sessions, resizing images and portfolio editing, my new website is up & running!!!

Brad Trent Photography

This is the third website design I’ve put up and by far the best. Quite honestly, the format of this site is exactly what I would have wanted years ago, but the technology just wasn’t there. Until now I’ve been using a Livebooks design, but this time I worked with Rob Haggart’s web design company, ‘A Photo Folio’ to implement the changes and we went live over the weekend. While everything about the architecture of the site is new, I incorporated a lot of the basic design elements from my previous site in this new project.

The first major change you will see is that I’m no longer hamstrung with a single, small image window…the images are much higher resolution ands now dynamically resize as you change the size of your browser window, or…even better.…you can click the ‘Full-Screen’ button at the lower left of your monitor and view the biggest, sharpest possible images I can offer! Navigating with the Thumbnail view is also much faster since you can see larger thumbnail images and they pop up ten times faster than the Livebooks version ever did. And I really like being able to navigate forwards and back by simply clicking on the left or right of the image…as you roll your mouse over the image, a ‘+’ or ‘-‘ icon appears and you can click and go! You can also access the thumbnails by placing your mouse in the middle of the screen and clicking when the grid icon appears. I don’t even know why I’m explaining this because the site design is so intuitive it just seems natural! But if you have any problems getting around the site, just ask a five year-old…it’s been years since I’ve met a kid who couldn’t figure out the internet!

Finally, having these hi-rez images allowed me to add a couple of galleries that I plan to have a lotta fun with in the future. My ‘Artificial Portraits’ and ‘Light Tests’ will allow me to show more of those behind the scenes moments that normally get archived to a hard drive, but offer insightful looks at the nuts & bolts of my shoots.

So head on over to www.bradtrent.com and tell me what you think!!!

Brad Trent
______________________________

The iPad Portfolio Era Begins…

As some of you already know, the past couple of months have had me furiously redesigning my current website with the folks at APhotoFolio.com and yesterday Rob Haggart, Mr. APhotoFolio himself, informed me that they have become the first photography website company to deliver custom designed iPad sites, built using HTML5, for all of their customers. Check it out…

A Photo Folio – First To Deliver iPad Sites

As I sit here resizing TIFFS down to JPEGs for my new site, I hafta wonder if the next thing I’m gonna be doing is purchasing a carload of iPads to act as my portfolios?!! Given how labor intensive, not to mention expensive, printed portfolios can be, having everything on an iPad just might make sense! I dunno…it’s all very early in the game, but if I can get over not having a printed book of BIG prints to show an art director, who knows?!!

And now, here’s a quick look at a sample page from my new website, which will be up as soon as I finish resizing those damned JPEGs…

Click on image for Full-Size
______________________________

______________________________

Website Update News

Not much of a surprise, but I updated the website to include some of the images from my recent shoot with The President. Head on over to www.bradtrent.com and check it out!

Website Update News…..

Nothing too major…but I’ve changed up a couple of the rotating Home Page images and the portfolios have been newly categorized as well as getting some new stuff…most notably the Audrye Sessions shoot and some recent portraits I did for BusinessWeek and Barron’s…..check it out HERE!!!

Site Update News……

Nothing Earth-shattering, but I just figured out how to make the hyper links I add to my posts open into their own window…this just means you can click on a link and you won’t lose the browser window you are viewing. Like I said, not such a big deal, but just one more thing the folks at Damn Ugly Photography are doing to make your viewing experience a pleasant one!

Gee……I’m ‘Blog Famous’…!!!

I’ve only been doin’ this thing for a short while, but somehow my post about my photo of Jack & Suzy Welch being on the ‘Today’ show got me onto the WordPress.com ‘Blogs of the Day’ Page!

Zillions of people Blogging and Twittering their little brains out…and I come in at Number 61…!!! I checked my blog stats and the graph kinda showed what went on yesterday…..

Maybe I’ll just give up on the Song of the Day and blathering on about my photographic exploits and instead just make this the Suzy Welch Appreciation Page!

Livebooks.com Site of the Week…..

Big Ups to the folks at livebooks.com…..my new website was just put up on their “Sites of the Week” page…

I gotta say…the kind or responses I’ve been getting with the new design was everything I could have hoped for and the guys at livebooks really made it all possible. And it was their idea and constant pushing that convinced me to do the blog as well. Great company, great product, great results and thanks to Ryan, Adam, Jason, Taylor, Matt and all the others who worked with me to make this all come together so well.

…..Wow!!!

OK…so my new site has been live since February 24th…nine days…and I just discovered how to use the feature that allows me to pull web stats in order to see the traffic that visits the site…..

1728 ‘unique’ visitors…2798 visits…45,608 page views for a total of 48,997 ‘hits’…!!!

Besides here in the States, I’m gettin’ hits from Canada, England, Germany, Ireland, Australia, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Japan, Austria and Poland…Poland?!!

All in nine days?!!

Wow!!!

So tell your friends…write your congressman…pass the address along to an art director you know (!)…but let’s keep the hits a comin’…!!!

Brad Trent Dot Com

Damn Ugly Photography • Version 2.0

The new incarnation of my website…IS ALIVE!!!!!

After six long months of design…endless procrastination…late-night changes…sweaty palms…and still more design…..

http://www.bradtrent.com

…is now completed, online and ready for your enjoyment.

So please…check it out and let me know what you think!

New Website News

After more than six months of messing around, my newly redesigned website should finally go live later this week!

Brad Trent Photography

With any luck, it should be online by Thursday, but just keep hitting your reload button until something new shows up…then lemme know what’cha think!