A Jpeg Is Not A Photograph
What is becoming increasingly obvious, I should think, to many fine art photographers these days is the notion that much of the present-day public at large neither fully understands nor seriously values photography as an art form. Consequently, the public as a whole seems to find little utility in the public, non-electronic exhibition of photography. "Can't I just look at it on your website?" seems to be a familiar refrain from a public conditioned to view nearly all such work on the web instead of "in person" and further, to unconciously assume that the web-based format is somehow intrinsically superior or at least technically adequate. Nothing could be further from the truth.To begin with, and most obviously, the size and detail of a web-viewed image is constrained by the size and resolution of the display it is viewed on. If you have a run-of-the-mill display, should you expect anything different from the image you are viewing? Also, if the original image is say, 18 by 24 inches, does a laptop-sized ( or smartphone ! ) rendition of that image do it any justice? And when viewing an image that is in the "portrait" orientation (taller than it is wide), the viewable dimensions of the images become even smaller, as the narrow width of the image fails to fill out the available screen width. Additionally, as been described elsewhere on this site, the "colorspace" available for web-based images, namely sRGB, is quite a bit smaller than that of color photographic prints and very much smaller than what the human eye can see and so the image is even further "dumbed down". And lastly here, but by no means the exhaustion of all these deficiencies, could it be that the same medium that you employ to check your email, do your taxes, and read your news is somehow inappropriate or inadequate for viewing visual art?