I really enjoy almost every aspect of the work I do. Going out in search of light and visually enticing scenes to photograph takes effort, but it is also good fun and a worthy challenge. The countless hours I spend painstakingly guiding each image through my workflow, applying the processing and developing skills I have learned over the last decade is also quite enjoyable and rewarding too. So is producing prints, and sharing my images with others on various websites, in publicatons and at galleries and exhibits. However, I have to admit that the tide of progress often stops flowing when it comes time to introduce new images on my own website. We all have portions of our work that is less engaging and more tedious than others. The process of putting new images on my site, which is the way that I share them with my largest audience, requires several layers of work I don’t particularly look forward to.
I’ll spare you all the details, but in brief it requires renumbering all the images to be uploaded, creating web sized images and thumbnails for each image, giving each image a title, keywords, caption and the organizing it into various departments and categories within the structure of my site. Once all the data entry is complete the database is uploaded to the software that uses the information to create the web pages and link structure for the new content. Any mistakes or typos cause havoc on my site, so I have to look carefully for bugs, repair them in the database and then allow the software to build the site again. Depending on how many images there are, the entire process can take me as much as a week.
Needless to say, this chore often slips off the top of my to do list to make way for more engaging or more pressing business. It has been nearly eight months since I last added new images to www.OutdoorExposurePhoto.com but I finally got it done. The good news is that there is now a large collection of new work created in the last year up on my site just waiting to meet the public. If you are keen to take a look at the photography I’ve been up to I invite you to take a look at my latest additions.
I wonder when I’ll catch up with the hundreds of stock images still waiting for their turn to see the light of day?