Category: My Sites

The home for all my websites

QTImages – Site Relaunch Coming Soon

 Gavin   Canvas, Frames, Prints, QTImages
QTImages - The Picture Gallery - New Website
QTImages – The Picture Gallery – New Website

Been beavering away at QTHQ over the last couple of weeks designing and building a new, improved site to replace my existing image sales site, QTImages.

It’s probably the most complex site I’ve designed to-date featuring a full e-commerce solution, 125 products spanning nearly 10 years of digital photography and 15 variations on each image giving a massive 1,875 products. With SEO and social networking built in from the outset its a huge improvement over the existing site.

After 2 weeks in development the new site is almost ready for launch – just a few little tweaks and testing still remain.

Technical details about the site available here: http://qtsoftware.co.uk/blog/qtimages-new-website-sneak-preview/

On The Up – Website Traffic Hits 1000 Visitors a Month

 Gavin   Business, Gavin Thorn Photography, Marketing, QTSoftware, Social Media
Analytics screenshot - gavinthorn.com
Analytics screenshot of http://gavinthorn.com

This week saw another landmark milestone for my main photography website, http://gavinthorn.com, that of achieving over 1,000 visitors to the site in a rolling one month window, as measured by Google Analytics. That’s absolutely staggering for a small site, designed and built by me with my QTSoftware hat on, that only went live on January 2nd 2011.

Over a thousand visitors! I still cannot believe it.

Furthermore, the traffic is still increasing and long may it continue to do so.

So, where is it all coming from? Continue reading On The Up – Website Traffic Hits 1000 Visitors a Month »

Themed Shoot – Bike Garage

 Gavin   Gavin Thorn Photography, Photoshoot

Bike Garage Studio Set Featuring Alternative Model Nina Kate

Had the privilege of photographing the lovely alternative model, Nina Kate a few days ago. The theme was to be a bike garage so we built an oily set in the studio to, the centre piece being a very large and very expensive matte black motorbike. I don’t know anything about bikes and there were no badges on it so don’t ask me what it was. I have absolutely no idea.

The lighting on the set was very straightforward. Mainly just a big octabank softbox on a Profoto head an a little separation light on the background. The set being very dark didn’t need much and anythng more would have been overkill.

My biggest fear on this set was contrast. The set was very dark being predominantly a black and muted silver pallette and Nina has very, very pale skin. An incident meter reading did the trick as always though and I think the results came out OK.

I’ve only posted the one image here – to see the remainder of this set you’ll have to pay a visit to my main website, http://gavinthorn.com/news/bike-garage-nina-kate/

theLightMatters goes mobile

 The Administrator   theLightMatters
Mobile version of theLightMatters
Mobile version of theLightMatters

Just a quickie update this one to announce that theLightMatters, the official blog of Gavin Thorn Photography has gone mobile. It’s only experimental at the moment to see how I get on with it and there are a few teething troubles to resolve (e.g. duplicate Read More links) but if it works I’ll invest more time making a more robust solution and improve the presentation.

If you’d like to view it in all its glory, simply point the broswer on your phone to https://theLightMatters.com and voila you’re in.

As always, comments are always welcome so please let me know what you think by posting a little note below.

Have fun,
Gavin

Stepping up a gear…

 Gavin   Business, Gavin Thorn Photography, Marketing

Front
Back

With my recent decision to start building the business side of the business I’m going to be attending a big networking event on Friday next week. That needs cards and this isn’t really the audience for my portrait or wedding cards. So, I need some new ones.

Designed these (see images above) over the last couple of days and after a lot of playing around with text and graphics, finally settled on somehing I like. It isn’t perfect but at least I’m happy with the layout.

Just placed the order and hopefully they should arrive in time for Friday’s event.