Way, way back, even before college, (in a millenium far, far away) I was heading down to Seattle to visit my cousin Art Wolfe and while I was down there a little thing called the WTO meeting occurred and the villagers were literally rioting in the streets. I saw some amazing photos from that day, but none more amazing than this award winning one by Andy Clark. I didn’t know who Andy Clark was at the time, but I soon would. Andy helped me in my early career, getting a few photos on the Reuters wire.
Blast through the next 7 years and I am having coffee with Andy, outside Reuters’ Vancouver office. We chatted about my new career of web design, the internet and Andy mentioned that he never really had a website to call his own.
I had mentioned a content management system called Pixelpost, which was an open source and developed mainly by Europeans (how very haute couture) and wasn’t all that known in these parts. I loved the slick user interface and I showed it to Andy and within moments I was contracted to do his website. Wow I thought, I am actually making Andy Clark’s website. This is the stuff dreams are made of. Or at least the direction I wanted to take my web design, knowing what most news photographers want in one.
And now the hard work
It took some recoding of the original source code and some help from Piotr Galas, one of the developers of Pixelpost, but six months after we had developed the concept, Andy had a categorized portfolio site he could update at his leisure. After a few tweaks and reviews from a few other sage photographers we launched the site on January 12th and the next day we had Rob Galbraith.com linking to the site.
The Result
Clarkfoto.ca had 2,000 visitors in just one day and blew through 10 gigs of bandwidth in a week. This is a great start for a veteran photographer of the Canadian news industry, and visits have been steady 300 to 400 a week since, which makes Andy one pretty happy fellow.
“I was very pleased with how Robert took my somewhat hazy idea of what the website should look like and transformed it into to exactly what I was looking for….very nice job indeed”
Andy Clark
Andy also has a blog, which I bet he will muse about shooting cricket, leica lexicon, curling, etc. . . but don’t listen to my bias opinion read it for yourself.