Note that is somewhat related:
Your image host is making the images look worse than they are; they're actually much larger, and the host is shrinking them down inline, which causes artifacting. The concept of thumbnailing, that is, giving a smaller version of an image, should actually be done before the page is delivered to the browser.
If you hit your main album listing, here:
Photography M. B. Keene you'll see that those images are actual thumbnails. If you download or view the images seperately you'll see that the image you get is a true thumbnail.
However if you browse through, ala
Photography M. B. Keene, you'll notice that the image takes considerably longer and that there appears to be JPG artifacting. That is because the brwoser is being served an image at 3074 x 2002 and being told by the HTML to shrink that data into something 450 pixels wide:
Code:
<img src="http://www.mbkeene.com/wp-content/uploads/wppa/21.JPG" alt="Grandma!" class="big" width="450">
This is a bad idea because it doesn't actually solve anything. The browser still has to retreive the whole large size image, and so the loading time is the worst possible. Also, because the browser is handling resizing on the fly, you get all sorts of artifacting. If you look at that page you can visually pick it up in the woman's face.
I'd be turned off by that myself because I'm a former web designer and I know what's happening. But I might be turned off as an end-user because the artifacting makes the images look of lesser quality than they actually are when shrunken by the browser.
Random note in tune with arc101 above, you may consider getting a more professional contact email than
retro_gunslinger@yahoo.com to put on the page. Assuming you own your domain, you could create an account on that and simply forward the messages to the email you actually check. An @yahoo email seems less professional.