Would really appreciate testers!

Yeah but if you spend a little extra and buy monochromatic film, they can be processed in colour chemicals and still only develop in black and white.

Otherwise, traditional b&w film now has to be sent to specialist lab (which takes roughly two weeks).

I dislike our dark room as the dryer keeps swallowing my prints ¬.¬

You can always get a scanner that scans negatives and scan them into photoshop, gives you a much higher quality than a low end/amatuer professional camera.

Gives you much more flexibilty in post processing as the dark room can be a bit of a faff.

Other than that i think your websites fine, other people may be able to offer more critique tho

I used to use "magic markers" and was shown awesome tricks you can use with them and lighter fluid - being solvent based themselves, seeing someone use them to produce a realistic marbling effect was great to me. Takes me back to 'work experience' days.

Heres my two cents. With a site like yours I'm expecting more of an up to date design...that is the image boxes be animated. The scroller is dated. Heres some examples if you want to look of what I mean.

http://www.flashden.net/category/site-templates
http://www.adamlowephotography.com/gallery/wedding/

Also the large border around the images takes away from the images.

Its a clean simple design which is good and the fact that it's compliant, which mine is not, makes it attractive, however it still needs a wow factor.

Thats my take
JJ

ewww @ flash

Bottom line is, you get across what you need to get across as simply as possible.

No extra faff (or whatever they say).

Take Pete Carr's website for example, it does all he needs it to do.

In my experience if you can avoid flash then do so. I would only use flash for streaming media (as it's a common plugin), and other things not possible in any other way.

I don't agree, i think it's better all round for everyone that they're not animated, and if they are it's subtle. and preferably avoiding flash, it's unnecisarry for this task.

I don't mean to sound agressive in anyway (incase i do, it does seem a bit of a rant).

I just severely dislike flash being used when i feel it's not required... whenever i come across a flash site i've left before it's even loaded with the exception of a few such as the honda one, and the health department one (that had really good 3d effects).

I do agree with the scrollbar kind of though, incorperating a horizontal scroll within a site succesfully is a difficult site.

Thanks for your take

I did originally envisage some animation on the image boxes, just something simple similar to what I have with the category boxes on the left. One thing at a time though.. that sort of thing is the last on my list

My take is that I don't do Flash; one reason is that it's not a part of every browser yet (it's an optional plugin). Eventually I expect animated vectors will become part of the W3C specification (I suspect it will be the SVG format), just as javascript is now. Also, I really just don't like the Flash application and plugins, in my experience they're inconsistent and buggy. I like my scroll bar, it's a standard interface element that everyone recognises and knows how to use instantly.

Also, and correct me if I'm wrong here, but Flash sites are not search-engine friendly, and the text in them cannot be searched in the normal way as with regular html.

I'm all for the future, but I just don't think that Flash is it. I have some ideas for development of this design yet, but it must retain it's function above all the bells and whistles and be fast with it. This iteration is actually faster than the plain html version I had before (which used a different page for each image, thus more loading and chance for coding errors, not to mention a chore to make changes to the site links etc).