Welcome... if you love photography, and like beach and ocean environments, you might like what we are doing here. We have set out to build the world's biggest and most beautiful resource on everything related to beaches, and photography is an important part of this. Read the information below, and if you like what we are doing, please do join us. Register as a photographer, then upload photos at your will.
Photography overview
philosophy of photography
With one of the founders of this site being a photographer, it is not surprising that we place high value on quality photography, and are developing a full-featured photography site-within-a-site. Beautiful images give strong impact to any website, and since so many of our member hotels are in spectacular beach and island locations it is only natural that we should emphasize this side of the site. See our Philosophy of Photography in the BFC (below) for a deeper insight into our thinking and motivation.
Photography Skylight Club overview
The Beachfront Club will be a multi-function photography zone where dedicated photographers with a love of beaches and ocean environments can join to improve their skills, communicate and earn points to climb the community ladder to gain future benefits. However, to gain entry a photographer will have to first upload and have assigned a minimum of 200 images to the site and be invited by the Photo Guru. Entry to this inner circle will be restricted to very keen, skilled or promising photographers.
To learn more about the photography club, see Introduction to the Skylight Club (below).
photo contests
Photo contests will become a regular feature of the Beachfront Club's varied activities, and we plan to run them across many topics, and sometimes specific regions. There may be several running at the same time. The top prizes that we will offer will be a week's holiday for 2 in a luxury beach resort in different parts of the world, with breakfasts included and some dinners. The prizes will be valuable ones, though we cannot include air tickets. Prizes will be valid for one full year, and will be transferable.
community 'pearls' lead to benefits
The Beachfront Club's 'pearls' are points on the community ladder that members may climb to gain a variety of benefits. For photographers the benefits are clear, for those who reach the higher levels will be able to join programmes in which the BFC helps the photographer makes sales of his/her images to member hotels, and helps find photography jobs in member hotels.
The complete scale of points that can be earned will be published with this site goes public.
See our Hotel-Photographer Matching Programme (below) for details of some of the future benefits that can be won.
The BFC Skylight Club
Purpose
To create a forum for skilled amateur and semi-professional photographers to communicate, learn, teach and display photos that relate to one of the earth's greatest treasures, its beaches and the ocean that has created them.
The display of photographs here will differ greatly from most of the other photo sharing sites, for the large, famous sites have no mass public viewing the images. These 'internal' sites have photographers viewing other photographer's images, and families and friends taking a look at specific images. There is no motivation for millions of people to hunt through the images on photo sharing sites.
The sharp focus of this website - to show visitors all of the true beachfront hotels of the world - will attract many millions of people to both the site and the images of the beaches they are looking for. Photographers have the opportunity to have their work exposed to an audience of countless millions - something that simple photo-sharing site cannot offer.
Images uploaded can relate to any topic that has a connection to the ocean, beaches or coastlines, and may encompass everything from animals to minerals, people to insects and history to science.
By creating a hierarchy that the better and more productive photographers will climb faster, we aim to pack the upper levels of the club with considerable skill, and allow those who are more advanced to help those behind them learn and grow as photographers.
benefits for photographer members
The BFC offers talented amateur photographers a unique set of benefits and opportunities that we believe is unmatched on the web - if he/she has an interest in beaches, the ocean, travel, the natural world and related topics. Here a budding photographer has the opportunity to improve skills, broaden the exposure of his/her photographs and move up a hierarchy laden, at the upper levels, with professional opportunities.
And one can have heaps of fun-in-the-sun along the way, while joining a community of like-minded people.
The Beachfront Club will assist our Photographer Members to grow in stature in the wide world of pro photography using a surprising range of programmes and benefits never seen before.
benefits of reaching the BFCs SkyLight Club
- expose your photos to a huge audience
- improve your photography skills
- climb the talent-based hierarchy for ever-increasing benefits
- have your images placed in our pro-gallery for selection by the travel industry
- join our Hotel-Photographer Matching Programme which helps find jobs for photographers
- expose your name with ours on photographs downloaded as wall-paper etc
- join our Elite Light Club and as you move into the professional world
- get photo shoots in the Club's 1,000s of member hotels
- place images for rental in the micro-stock library 'Tropical Shots'
hotel-photographer matching programme
Hotels and related travel businesses are major consumers of travel photography, and are in constant need of up-dated images of both their own establishments and the surrounding destinations that attract their customers.
The Beachfront Club's photography group is building a community of talented amateur and pro photographers with a love of beaches, the ocean, travel and natural environments.
These two groups, hotels and photographers, often have need of each other's resources or services. The Beachfront Club is in an ideal position to make introductions and bring these two groups together for the exchange of their respective resources/services on a mutually beneficial basis.
Hotels often wish to obtain photographs on a non-cash basis, providing rooms plus Food & Beverage in their establishments in exchange for good images. Photographers often want accommodation so that they can exercise their talents in beautiful environments.
The Beachfront Club will facilitate these exchanges by establishing a Pro Gallery of images to display the works of the top-ranked photographers in our system to hotel managers. This Pro Gallery will allow hotel managers to assess the talents and styles of the photographers within our photography club.
Hotel managers will thus be able to choose a photographer whose work and style he/she likes and contact that photographer directly. The hotel manager may then present a proposal to the photographer, inviting him/her to stay in the hotel in exchange for a specified number of photographs.
The Beachfront Club provides some suggested, sample clauses as a the basis of a contract that the hotel and photographer might want to copy, adapt and execute in whatever form. However, The Beachfront Club will not become a party to this exchange of services nor seek benefit from it in any way.
Hotels requiring a higher, more professional level of skill may also seek the services of paid professional photographers through The Club. As we develop our Elite Light Club for the most talented photographers we will help hotels secure the services of our top professional photographers whose specialty is shooting hotels and resorts.
Philosophy of photography in BFC
Who are the principals behind the creation of The Beachfront Club? A photographer and a hotelier, both Australian and both long-term residents of Southeast Asia, principally Thailand.
The photographer, John Everingham, first took up a camera as a teenager during the closing years of the Vietnam War (he arrived there as a tourist, aged 18). After the war, and many years as a Thailand-based photographer working for magazines around the globe, John diversified into magazine publishing. He brought out the first edition of PHUKET Magazine in 1989. Soon after he was also publishing for another famous Thai beach resort, Koh Samui, and later for Bali.
In John's background, and through hotelier Chris Ryan, you find the connections and key threads that bring this website together: photography, hotels and beaches.
Here John Everingham talks of the philosophy of photography in his own words:
Photography and magazine publishing are extremely competitive industries, I learned during 20 years of struggle against wave after wave of competition. It nosed in from all directions and included former employees and big companies from afar. But those competitors did not understand that I had a secret weapon that gave me publishing power extraordinaire.
That secret weapon? the one that allowed me to fight off years of competition? It was the power of fine photography, something that is much harder to come by than most people realize , even publishers. It was the power of strong visual impact, good first impressions... elements of the same winning formulae that can help a website beat its rivals too. A magazine and a website might appear to be very distant cousins, but they share many of the same success/failure genetics.
When a reader picks up a magazine, I used to teach staff, we have just a few seconds in which to win or lose him. First, the magazine in the fingers exudes a sense of its quality. Then, within the flick of a half dozen pages - mere seconds - an initial good impression is either reinforced, or lost forever. Time and again we won the reader - or more precisely, the impact of beautiful, relevant photography did it for us.
The distant cousin to PHUKET Magazine that we are creating here is subject to that same win-all-lose-all formulae: a few glances over a few seconds must deliver the right impact to stop the web surfer from becoming just another bounce statistic. And strong visual impact will have a large say in his becoming a new member or an old statistic.
Good photography, therefore, will again become one of the key elements of our strategy for web success. And we are seeking better photographers to join us to help create those good first impressions, and build a strong, competition resistant website. Then, when we are mature, those who help us to build a strong and prosperous site with powerful photography will also reap the benefits.