A few weeks ago I saw Sam Abell speak at UNL. He’s a member of the old guard of NG photographers — doesn’t blog, doesn’t do video, doesn’t Twitter, doesn’t even e-mail. What he does do is think about pictures, all the time. Before the event, Joel encouraged someone to go by saying, “He’s one of the best speakers around on the craft of photography,” and I agree. The talk was definitely worth attending, and if you ever have a chance to see Abell speak, go.

He opened the show talking about this book:

Abell believes the images are thoughts, just like the written word, and that they should be shown full-frame, with no text run over them, and not run out to the edge of the page. I have my quibbles with that school of thought — but that argument is another post entirely. His talk along with recent stock agency statements made me wonder how thumbnails are shaping photography.

Think about it: the way most image buyers and editors see pictures for the first time is as a thumbnail. People are usually too pressed for time to go through preview-sized images one-by-one. It takes longer for a preview to load — even at broadband speeds — than it used to for editors to loupe a slide.

I’ve been in this game long enough to know that some fabulous images don’t read well at 150 pixels wide. The ones that do are often very simple, graphic statements. How many great images are casualties of their own thumbnails?

Look at the image on the cover of Abell’s book above. At the size it’s shown, the image looks cluttered, and if I were doing a hurried edit I probably wouldn’t give it a second thought.

Now try the bigger version:

Doesn’t that look better?

I think the next big hill to climb for our site will be to put previews out there that are larger than 500 pixels. We already have some.

The argument that having larger previews available makes image theft easier is — in my opinion — outweighed by the fact that images look so much better big. Image buyers aren’t going to bite on something that looks tiny and junk, period. A bunch of newspaper websites are starting to give viewers the option to see images in their full-screen glory, and some photographers’ websites are following suit.

Lessons learned: Look at images full-frame when editing your own shoots. Make thumbnails and previews bigger on your website. Lastly and most importantly: shoot what you love, not what’s selling right now. It comes through in the pictures.