H               appy Valentine's day to all of you & here is my gift to you on this special occassion !!  

Dear friends I am extremely happy to welcome you all on my new website. I hope you all find it interesting & easy to surf through the images displayed. I was busy from almost month & half for putting it to work.  Though the interface provided by Zenfolio is easy & I don't have to go through any coding but I was having zero knowledge about getting a custom domain & a website. I was mostly busy in customizing, understanding the tools provided & most important selecting, sorting, metadata editing, re-touching (for a few) & uploading images.

Many of you might have a question in your mind "Why I needed a website now?" I can understand that because I asked that question to myself many times before. As most of you know I share my images on Flickr /  Facebook  & 500px. Unfortunately I have gone through image library data corruption 3-4 months back. More on that may be in different blog. That accident gifted me some sleepless nights under the fear how secured my favorite images are? I was so much frustrated when I came to know the PC was having some serious problem & corrupting my backup drive when connected for restoring the images. In that process sometimes I felt it will be better even if I can get my full size images in JPG format in lieu of RAW images. I thought of using some paid cloud services like dropbox, Gmail drive etc. Later I thought instead of putting the images simply online why not to display on a website?

Gerbera in Hands

I am not comfortable uploading full size images on flickr/facebook/500px & even if I decided to do it I have to put permanent watermark on it. Many sites compress the images. Zenfolio offers to put a virtual watermark so that in case of need I can have access to my original file from anywhere & I can share it in case of need. There can be a debate on do photographers really need a watermark? Because having it doesn't make sure it is fully protected. I was interested to have it just for a reason if anybody shares the images it can leave the main source of image if the person doesn't take effort to mention it. I have experienced some of my non-watermarked images floating on net without wrong intentions of the person who is sharing.

Now a days the dropping rates of LCD/LED monitors most of the people are using big screens on which traditional web size image of longest pixel length as 640, 800 or even 1000 might not be big enough to leave the impression it has. These website visitors can enjoy the big size previews & explore the details as much possible. I don't wish to take away that fun from my fans in the fear of image thefts.

I have tried trial period account on smugmug & Zenfolio for 15 days. After playing with all the features I decided to go with Zenfolio. I found the interface more user friendly, easy integration of my blogs & windows file explorer kind of file management. I put hard efforts for customizing the available template suitable for my taste. I created a menu such that visitors can switch to any category of images from any page. I also added some custom pages giving information about my equipments etc.

I make a wish all results well giving a nice gift to my fans. Please don't be shy to point out any mistakes & suggestions for better improvement. I will put my sincere efforts for all practically possible modifications. I will also request you to share this website with your friends if you liked it.

 In case you wish to create your own website on Zenfolio you can use my referral code for getting some discount which can also help me to get few reward points. The referral code is 139-F15-3QZ 

You can also get 20% discount on domain purchase from Go-Daddy by using referral code : WOW000