500px is dead by Andrew Houser on 500px.com

500px redesigned their website today – much to my dismay, it’s a horrible design from the standpoint of modern web design. 500px has now strayed away from their original audience and goal of hosting and sharing the best in photography, and turned it into a social media hub with striking similarities to Pinterest and Facebook.

Rather than focusing on the goal of their website, they seem to have shifted priorities to social interaction on the site – the once portfolio-like URLs for users (e.g., http://500px.com/spangborn) now display the “flow,” a stream of activity on the website that more resembles a Facebook timeline/wall rather than an exhibition of photographic work, which is pushed off to a secondary page (http://500px.com/spangborn/photos). On top of this, the flow seems to only be enabled for a subset of users currently. The site also appeared to be having load issues immediately after the launch.

From a UX perspective, they’ve also made the mobile experience particularly painful. To see what I mean, grab your iPad and pull up one of your photo pages in landscape view. Click “edit” and try to scroll to the bottom of the modal window that pops up. You won’t be able to. Even after closing the modal, you’ll be unable to scroll the page. Additionally, the drop-down menu in the top right corner is near impossible to get to work properly on a tablet or mobile device. Tapping it once will sometimes pop the menu open, with a high chance that it will immediately close again before you have a chance to select a sub-menu item. This makes me wonder if 500px rushed this release out the door without testing in an attempt to steal Yahoo’s thunder before the new Flickr design is released.

This redesign didn’t bring all bad things, however. 500px has added a market for photographers to be able to sell prints and digital copies of their photos. Sounds great so far, right? Wrong. They’ve set the pricing scheme at something ridiculous. A 24 x 36 gallery wrapped canvas print comes to $500. You didn’t read that wrong – five hundred dollars. This normally isn’t a huge issue, but they’ve missed something huge. You can order the digital copy of the print (high-resolution) for $2.99, and print it yourself elsewhere for cost. Well that seems a bit ridiculous, but maybe the photographer can set their own prices? Nope. Pricing is set exactly how 500px sets it. It’s not even clear what the photographer makes from this purchase – I couldn’t find any documentation on it at all.

It’s clear that 500px has a lot to learn about the web, in aspects ranging from responsive web design, user experience, software testing, and working with photographers whose livelihoods depend on the sales and profit of their photographic work. If these types of mistakes continue to be made, it’s highly possible I may decide to cancel my renewal of their “awesome” account features and head to greener pastures. Their “awesome” features have been rather lacking anyway. This gives Yahoo a real opportunity to build Flickr into the service and photographic portfolio site users have been wanting, but I’m not holding my breath.

David Daniels and Nicole Young take the group shot for the photowalk.

Saturday afternoon I had the pleasure of joining the Photowalking Utah group to partake in the last Photowalking Utah event that Nicole Young would be leading before she moves to the wonderful rainy city of Seattle. We started off walking the same area where Nicole had led her first Salt Lake City (WorldWide Photowalk) photowalk, as a tribute to her all too short yet wonderful time in Salt Lake City. I wish Nicole well in her endeavours in Seattle, though I’m certain the Salt Lake City photography community will miss her great leadership, experience, and fun personality on events such as these. I also hope Nicole will come visit every now and again – and maybe even come back after she realizes what awesomeness she’s missing.

Here are a few shots from the photowalk. I also shot a pretty good amount of video, so expect to see another update on this photowalk soon.

Jeremy prior to realizing you need to remove the lenscap to take photos.

Rich Legg relaxing during the end of the photowalk.

David Daniel

Jeremy Hall photographs the sunset

I love my wide-aperture lenses. This was with my Sigma 70-200mm f/2.8.

Thanks for letting me know. Such a great use of taxpayer money.

I can’t say I even know a reason why this would be put up, aside from the slight chance of a liability for injury. It doesn’t even have braille!

A view of downtown Salt Lake City from Ensign Peak in June of 2009 on my old, trusty Nikon D50. Dug up from my archives while looking for another photo.

I set up my tripod with my D200 mounted between my front seats, locking the shutter for 5 second intervals shooting at f/13 and ISO 400. I drove around Salt Lake City, capturing the lights of cars, streetlights, and signs around the city. I plan on doing this again with some sort of fisheye lens to capture a wider angle at some point. I think I’ll probably need to build a more stable mount for the camera as well, seeing how the tripod made slight movements in the resulting video pretty obvious.

Update: Jeff McGrath has provided me with a great shot of the rig I was using for this setup.

View his blog post on this video.

Devil's Castle and Albion Basin in Little Cottonwood Canyon.