My new photography site, Ward’s Pics, makes its debut today.
While I have enjoyed sharing with everyone my photographs on Facebook, ultimately the quality of the uploaded pictures leaves much to be desired. While Flickr is a better alternative, still I wanted something that gave me a bit more control for self-expression. And frankly, I am a bit anal about things. Well, after wrestling with 1200+ lines of amateur PHP code for an open-source project to do just that, I finally broke down and bought a subscription to SmugMug earlier today. It was not that said project did not have a lot of things going for it; but, I really want to focus on getting my photographs online, not fight with copy-and-paste code just to re-sculpt a theme to my (anal retentive) likings. And smug I am for doing it. It took only a matter of minutes to update the CSS to get the default template to follow a common-look-and-feel with this site. And David Holme’s excellent Aperature plug-in allowed me to quickly create new galleries to upload my photographs.
[smugmug url=”http://pics.wardosworld.com/hack/feed.mg?Type=userkeyword&NickName=wwvuillemot&Data=seattle&format=rss200″ title=”” imagecount=”12″ start=”1″ num=”100″ thumbsize=”Th” link=”smugmug” captions=”false” sort=”true” window=”false” smugmug=”false” size=”L”]
But the real news for many of you will be that you can now get prints! Many of you have often mentioned, even pined, how much you wished you had a printed copy of one of my photographs. And honestly, it is the greatest of flattery I receive when someone tells me not only how much they like a picture I took but that they also want to hang it on a wall and look at it everyday. And now you can! SmugMug supports both traditional prints, merchandise such as t-shirts and mugs, and even download (when I decide to go this route and license my photographs). Eventually I would love to make enough money from my photographs to help subsidize the cost of equipment; but, as with all things it is three snap-shots forward one over-exposure backwards kind of adventure.
Enjoy!
