Photographer's site under development.

Here's a site I am working on for a photographer friend of mine. It's only the 2nd site I have ever designed so that makes me a newbie.

http://www.d4design.net/pete/index.htm

It's intentionally basic since it's really just a portfolio of his work.
I'm not very far along so I thought I'd have you guys take a look while changes can be made easily. Only the "portfolio" and "contact" buttons are active at the moment. The thumbs are still having Javacript applied so that they open a pop-up of the full-sized image in a pre-defined window.

Being torn between 800x600 and 1024x768, we decided to try and do something that wasn't offensive either way.

Any comments thus far?

Well I like it.. I'd critique it a bit but I am not in the mood. I myself am doing a photographers site, he runs a biz and I am gonna redo his site for him. My first job too. ^.^;

i would say the scan lines in the background are a bit distracting but other than that looks good.

A2C would you like the lines better maybe if they were just darker and less prominent? Like on Pank's site? Or you just don't care for scanlines at all?

either way its your site, what ever looks best to you

i agree with A2C, but i'm going to say to make the scan lines lighter so that they are noticeable, but just BARELY able to be seen. experiement a bit with 'em.

also change the copyright font to verdana size 1, if you want that is, i think it'd look better that way

Yeah, less noticable, more 'soothing' would be my word on the scan lines. The first 'p' in pete gets lost a little over the slide images.
Oh yeah and it looks great!
Your friend takes some pretty fun pictures. Must be nice to be outside like that.

Looks GREAT for a newbie. I agree with the scanlines being lighter. Also, you wanna change your font for the Website created by text at the bottom. Looks good!

Thanks for the replies so far.

Excellent points on the font.

I like the scanlines because I want some *texture* in the background, so I fiddled with making the darker portion of the two lines brighter so there is not as much contrast between the two and I think it does in fact look better. Just a hint of texture without it being distracting.

I'll post the changes with hopefully a completed version of the site here in about a week when it's all done so you can see.

Great suggestions. Thanks for the input!