Hi Pholks
My name is Andrew Coppin and I am the founder and CEO of the Gallery. It's a great pleasure to welcome you to our new Team Blog where you can find out about whats going on and get insights from our wonderful team.
The Gallery came about out of my desire to provide a place where enthusiast photographers of all levels could share, display and sell their better shots in a place that respected them. I had found that Facebook was just a junkyard of weekend pics, Flickr didnt allow me to differentiate my best photos from others and I was never going to get invited into Getty....I wasnt even sure I wanted to be! So where could enthusiast photographers go if they wanted to do credit to their better imagery, market it, learn and share with others?
Another big factor that was troubling me was that with so many websites around it was nearly impossible to get any sort of meaningful traffic to my site unless I physcially handed them a card. I couldnt let other Photographers spend their last $5000 on a website that no one would go to ....so why wouldnt I create a place where people like me could be part of a Community of Photographers promoting a joint site and by default....each other! ....and thats where it started...enter Ph.Art Gallery.
After years of procrastination, a lot of late night scribbles and the odd business plan...we finally started work on the Gallery in January of 2006 on what I naively thought would be a 6 month program to launch a great website. A few years, a lot of hard lessons and a serious amount of money later... we finally launched on November 24th 2008.Ph.Art was born....a new place for enthusiast photographers with a goal to be the ultimate photographic destination. A place to share, sell, learn, create, explore and laugh with others who share the passion for Photography.
Today we are a comunity of over 7000 enthusiast photographers from around the world. There are people of all ages and stages from Students to Pros and everyone in between. The Gallery caters for passion and enthusiasm with a view that by working together we ALL have a better chance of getting recognized in a world full of imagery. By creating a hierarchy of Galleries and maintaining a strict curation process our aim is to be THE best Photographic Gallery on the web.
The Gallery does its bit to provide a great platform and market your work (Thats right....we actually go out and physically market the gallery and your work to third party buyers) and in return we ask that our members promote their Gallery here too. We dont mind if people link to their current websites, blogs or other Galleries but as members of the Ph.Art Community we will all be better off if we promote the Gallery as the best place to display and sell your images - and with YOUR help it will be. With the active promotion of the Gallery by our members we will be able to continue to add fuctionality, features and more marketing to our program,....and that means more chances to sell your images and get recognized. So be sure to complete your profile and tell the world about YOUR Gallery at www.photoartgallery.com
So thats a little snapshot about how the Gallery came about and I hope to keep you updated every week on whats been going on and whats coming...so keep an eye out for my Friday post.
Cheers for now
Andrew (COPPO)
You can find my work in the gallery at www.photoartgallery.com/artist/coppo so I would welcome your comments and feedback.
Stats as of today:7050 members/ 60,000 images
