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Creativity exercise: restatements

Making a site about wood sculpture http://nik-sergeev.com/, as well as other woodwork (for my father Nik Sergeev), I wondered about web standards that are designed with textual information in mind. The site is primarily an image gallery, for people to click through photos of the wooden items, and too much text would be distracting. The web's solution is to augment each image with an ALT tag, where I would describe the contents of each image ("A bowl", "A wooden bottle", "A vase", "A mask", etc.), but that works when the images augment the main information, which is supposed to be text. When I only have images, there is really no point describing them like that. The argument that the web is "meant" for text, is wrong. Pictures are much more important, informationally. At least they have the potential to be so, when properly used. So, I think, that a picture-only site is just fine. But the way the web is designed, these sites are at a disadvantage.

Taking photos of the wood sculptures turned out to be not very easy. Lighting is important. Diffuse lighting works well sometimes, but at other times it is too bright, when photographing a highly polished item. Also, lighting from different angles, by different-coloured light sources can look wonderful.