Photo Editing: Michael Barley

Recently, I’ve gotten the chance to know a friendly gentleman named Michael Barley. A photographer based in Montgomery, Texas, Michael is equipped with experience in various specialties, but his website was at a point where it was showing a little bit of everything rather than a lot of what he’s best at.  He had a clear vision of the clients he was looking to tackle, which made it easier to narrow down the kind of work he should be showing. We agreed to move forward with a web edit.

Michael’s old site brought viewers to a rather confusing landing page that led to an even more complex main page with two different menu navigations (that were actually the same). I knew that had to be changed for the sake of keeping clients’ attention. The menu was a bit excessive and clearly had to be narrowed down. As far as the content itself, it was apparent that he was a skilled photographer, but there were weaker images taking the limelight away from the real stars of the show. Both the sizing and post-processing of his images were inconsistent and weren’t working together as a team.  While I was confident that I could help Michael get his presentation in shape, I asked him to consider a responsive web template. In the end, he went with the SquareSpace Wells design which allowed him to retain that clean and simple look he wanted.

I organized Michael’s images into education, healthcare, portraits, industrial and tearsheets. Prior to the final edit, his tearsheets and advertisements were mixed in with his other work, but it made more sense to keep them together in one gallery. His strongest work lives in education and healthcare, and that’s where he’s looking to gain even more of a client base. The portraits are pulled from different areas of his image library, but are sequenced in the way that they make sense. Lastly, Michael has some strong industrial images, but unfortunately doesn’t have much of them. The gallery we built will act more as a foundation for him to build on this area. Overall, the edit zeroed in on weeding out the work that was notably outdated or was a stylistic disconnect from the rest. Aside from that, the task of Michael going back to make the sizing and ratio of each image file played an important role in the presentation process.

View more of Michael Barley’s work on his website and visit our consulting page for information on our photo editing services.