David Yarrow Photography was one of our earliest adopters to fully integrate SmartFrame technology into its website.

Initially using standalone JPEGs, it evolved to solely using SmartFrames across their e-commerce website to showcase David’s fine-art photography online.

David Yarrow was born in Glasgow, Scotland in 1966. He took up photography at an early age and as a 20-year-old, he found himself working as a photographer for The London Times on the pitch at the World Cup Final in Mexico City. On that day, David took the famous picture of Diego Maradona holding the World Cup and as a result, he was subsequently asked to cover the Olympics and numerous other sporting events.

His large monochrome images made in Los Angeles are on display in many leading galleries and museums across Europe and North America. By the spring of 2017, he had firmly established himself as one of the bestselling fine art photographers in the world. His limited-edition prints (just 12 in an edition) regularly sold at over $40,000 a piece and his well-received recent work is now priced even higher.

At a Sotheby’s auction, David’s iconic image from South Sudan – ‘Mankind’ – was sold for $75,000 – the highest of the 100 lots in the show.

In April the following year, David’s image ‘The Wolf of Main Street’ sold for $100,000 and was the highest bid for a piece by a living photographer. Most recently, ‘78 Degrees North’ went for an impressive $110,000.

David’s latest book ‘Storytelling’, published by Rizzoli in 2022, features over 130 of David’s images taken over the last three years and includes a foreword written by American cultural icon Cindy Crawford. All the profits from the copies purchased through David Yarrow Photography Ltd will be donated to the UW Health Kids Cancer Care Charity. Since 2019, David and Cindy’s ongoing collaboration has raised over $3 million and counting.

Philanthropy and conservation are central to David Yarrow’s passion for documenting the animal and human world in a fresh and creative way. Since 2019, charitable donations from the sale of David’s images have exceeded $10 million.

In October 2018, SmartFrame sat down with David Yarrow to talk about life before and after SmartFrame. Prior to using SmartFrame, David was not able to showcase his images online with the quality and detail, down to every last pixel, as they were meant to be seen.

David shares how his business has benefited from the ability to present his work with the high level of detail it was meant to be seen in, with every pixel clear even when zoomed in. With SmartFrame, users can zoom to view the image at 100% of the originally captured, high-resolution image.

One of the biggest issues he faced was surrounding security. David’s pictures are extremely valuable, and putting high-resolution versions of his work online risked devaluing his work and potential monetary loss. David features 168 of his images on his website, all as SmartFrames. To date, SmartFrame has stopped 17,242 attempts to steal his individual pictures. He is now able to present his work 20x larger than ever before.

David explains that prior to SmartFrame, they were compromised in the final route to market by a loss of detail and picture quality – essentially a lack of ability to properly showcase online. David’s work is all about the data and the detail within an image, and now he no longer needs to refrain from sharing the highest-resolution versions of his pictures in existence.

With a majority of the public only ever seeing David’s work online, he was looking for the best solution to present it the way it was meant to be seen. He found this with SmartFrame.