New photo galleries launched

At last.

Somewhere around one year ago - possibly longer, I don’t remember - and shortly after being awarded “website of the month” by Outdoor Photography, I decided to take my photo galleries, and indeed my whole website, offline.

The website itself was getting old and creaky, and was becoming a real rat’s nest of patched together hand built code.  I wanted to replace it with something easier to maintain, more flexible, and based on something reasonably solid. This I finished a while ago.  But the other issue was the photographic content.

I used to host over 700 photos online, divided into about 10 galleries. Despite the fact that I got a lot of good feedback, this was clearly far too much. I felt that something was wrong, and some good advice from a friend convinced me I needed to cut down the quantity drastically, and focus on quality, and the message I want to send.

Unfortunately, whatever things I may be any good at, editing is not one of them.  The task of selecting a handful of photos to show from a collection of well over 15,000 was not easy. And it was made harder, when, early this year, I indulged myself in a high quality Quato display. Photos that I had discarded for being uninteresting or flawed suddenly popped into life on this new monitor, and I realised I was going to have to take another look at my archives.  I’ve recently completed reprocessing and evaluating just about all of my several thousand photos from Iceland, and the results of this exercise (started around March, finished a few weeks ago) are the subject of the first two of my new galleries.

The new thumbnails layout

Now that the technical stuff is completed, I can finally give my full attention to the fun part - the photography. I’ll be adding more galleries in the (relatively) near future, in particular panoramic format photos from Iceland and elsewhere, and at least one Ticino gallery.

I certainly want to avoid getting back into the quantity overload scenario, but I do want to try to show a representative selection. Probably I will inaugurate a “recent work” gallery soon, with more rapidly evolving content. I may also showcase some of my infra red photography, as well as black & white, since I seem to be doing more of that these days.

But for now, I’m just relieved that I’ve finally got something to show again.

NOTE: Although I try to test as much as possible on different web browsers, some bugs might lurk.  In particular I’ve noticed an intermittent and baffling bug in (surprise, surprise) Internet Explorer (7 & 8, I cannot be bothered with 6).  Full size images sometimes display with a white band across them. Refreshing the page clears it up.  I’ll try to fix this, but I’m not going to hold back from going live because of bloody Microsoft.

the Internet Explorer bug. No website is complete without one.