FPR Talks With HDRCreme | FreePhotoResources

FPR Talks With Dedicated HDR Photography Site HDRcreme

On 09.09.09, In Featured, Interviews, News, by Barry

HDRcreme is a dedicated HDR photographers paradise, from tutorials to forums and a great gallery allowing users to upload their HDR images and have these critiqued by other members.
The site is very clean and easy to navigate as well as being nicely intuative.

There are many links to external HDR resources on the site, including the exceptional tutorial by Trey Ratcliff from StuckInCustoms. The forums cover a number of areas including advice regarding the technique and the Software used during post processing.

I asked HDRcreme to tell me a bit about the history of the site as well as what is involved in running it….

“I’ll try to summarize our history: we published the website on January 7, 2008, hdr technology was appreciated but a specialized website was missing so we decided to create a photo gallery for hdr pictures only. User registration was not required and user could upload their works for free.

After only 3 days we hit the the first page of Digg with 28 thousand unique visitors but our service still in beta and our shared hosting server didn’t stay up so the service was suspended.

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In few days we moved in a new private server so we were up and running again. In 2008 we had about 1 million unique visitors with more than 3 million page views. Or main referrer websites were digg, stumbleupon and reddit. About 20% of the visitors reached out website with direct access. After one year we decided to entirely redevelop the website, with a new programming language (from PHP to Ruby on Rails) now with new features as user registration, a new rating system, photographer awards, charts, personal portfolio, messaging and forum, along with bug fixes and performance improvements.

The 2.0 version of the website was released on July 1, 2009. In 2 months only we had more than 350 photographer registered and we are close to 8 thousand hdr pictures uploaded.

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Our main revenue is by our main sponsor, Hdrsoft, with photomatix product as you can see in the home page but we are open for new collaborations and products advertisement. We are a little web agency situated in Udine (north east of Italy) called Wami. Recently we startup a new company located in Lugano (Switzerland) for web development business.”

I then asked Carlo what was involved in running the site on a day to day basis……

“Website maintaining is not a big deal, there are two website administrators and one forum moderator (that is also a professional photographer) that keep constantly an eye on the website. Plus there is a system administrator that keep the web server updated so it can be always up and running, but this isn’t also a great effort. Since we updated the website from the previous release website maintaining it’s also easier for us because with user registration the content is always “clean”.

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I have also been informed by a reliable source that HDRcreme are planning to allow photographers to start exhibiting their HDR work for sale for other members and visitors to the site using a credit system. This I believe would be the first dedicated HDR photography sales site, looking forward to that!

What’s on the site…..

The HDR Gallery allowing users to upload their work, share the equipment and settings used. Users can then comment and rate other member’s photo’s. You can then view photos in order of rating or search for a specific user or even camera used. Alternatively you can browse the top rated photos from the week, month or even all time.

Gallery

The Tutorials section has not just one but a selection of some great HDR techniques from around the web, including StuckInCustoms and VanillaDays.

The Forums section covers a wide variety of areas such as;