2023 was a stupendous year for my photography (read this post to be convinced). I did something I’ve never done before and I showcased my work! Working with the folks at Vinal Bakery, I put together an installation in their cafe. It came out so well. I look forward to keeping the momentum going in 2024. The first step is making some changes to push my site to the next level!
Goodbye SmugMug
If you’ve been following my work for some-time, you’ll know I have two sites. In addition to this one there is plain ol’ chno.co. This site is hosted with SmugMug. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with it, I have realized I want to move on. SmugMug has a great back-end system, however the front-end design capabilities leave much to be desired compared to what I am able to accomplish on WordPress. More importantly though, I want to pivot how I present my work online. With that Pivot SmugMug no longer is a viable expense.
When I first signed up with SmugMug, I had a plan. I would show-case my work en-masse and let people decide what to order for prints. While that works – I’ve realized that:
- I would rather hand-print the images myself, ensuring their quality.
- Remove the need for a middle-man, by printing myself.
- I’m not getting enough value out of SmugMug to keep paying monthly to it.
When I subscribed to SmugMug, I had no idea where I’d be in a year. Further, there was no or what I’d be working on or how I’d be managing my presence online. At the time, I writing on Medium (those can still be found here) before I migrated to hosting my own blog. SmugMug stuck around and I continued showing my work there.
As I’ve experiment more and more with WordPress, I’ve come to realize how verbose it is. It isfar more capable of creating a design I adore than SmugMug is. Additionally, I want to focus on creating more curated and small galleries for prints – instead of entire trips being up for sale. (We’ll talk about this more later).
Hello Again To Flickr
A site I used to use regularly back in Uni was Flickr. I would post almost every image that I took on there but eventually I stopped. I want to try and get back into it. Something that I want to work on changing is interacting more with the photography community online. I think that if I want to try and get people seeing my work – I need to see other peoples work. In other words to be seen – I need to see.
To that end, I’ve removed all the old work on there (it was poorly structured) and I’m in the process of re-uploading the work that I consider “up to the CHNO standard“. It’ll be stored more ordered (in Albums) as well as named with descriptive image titles and descriptions. I’ll also be tagging the work, to attempt to allow people to find it more easily.
Becoming My Own Harshest Critic
The other change I’ll be implementing is how much of my work I display on this site. Instead of showcasing all of my work on here – I’ll only show a small portion of it. Every one of my galleries will have a select number of images shown. The best of the best will be on display here.
With my old structure, visitors to the site had to dive too far into the site to find my best work.
The other change I’ll be making is one that I alluded to up above in the first section. I’ll only be offering a small selection of prints for sale! Now of course, if someone contacts me desperate for a print, I’ll happily work with them. However, this smaller selection on offer is meant to shift the onus of determining what’s up for print to be on me – not on a visitor of my site.