Month: August 2006

This site has been up now for a couple of years. In the beginning it was just galleries thematically arranged. That was back in the early days of photoblogs, and so a photoblog was not part of the original concept. There was a nod to the idea that I wanted to be a professional photographer; I had a services page for weddings, portraits etc. The site went through a pretty big change a year later when I put up the photoblog. Slightly before that I had stopped doing thematic galleries in favor of individual galleries based on rolls of film. I was responding to the demands of my audience, family and friends, who wanted to see all the pictures, even, perhaps particularly, the bad or artless ones. The photoblog was just another way to service that audience.

Here I am a few years later, and I’m trying to manage a site with about 2000 images on it and 100 more coming every month. Although I know there’s a lot of photographers, particularly those using digital, for whom those numbers seem pretty paltry, but when most of your output is hand processed b&w that gets scanned, a couple of rolls of film a week represents a significant commitment. And that’s before you get the galleries up. Even once you work out a pretty slick workflow, which I’ve got, er had, getting all those galleries up is the last straw.

All that work, and in the end, what I got out of it were some really great photos that languished amongst all the under edited muck. My ability to take photos had outstripped my editing and the architecture of the site (insert self-congratulatory pat on back here). And all that muck was making me feel like a hack. There’s nothing quite like showing more than your best work to make you feel like you are pretty mediocre. You end up not even remembering all the great shots. You just remember the muck.

That’s no way to get on in life. Audience be damned, I’m done with it. You will only see what I think is best, and you’ll like it, even if that means that the really great but slightly off picture of so and so never sees the light of day. A better one will come along, and even if it doesn’t, life’s too short for bad pictures.