It’s been a long time coming, taking an incredible amount of effort (mostly on Ann’s part) over the past 6 or so months, and admittedly it’s not totally ready for prime time (we still have a couple of gear sections to complete and another good review/edit to do). But there comes a time when you have to launch. Now is that time!

There were two primary things we were hoping to accomplish with the new site. First, we had fallen down on the job with the old website and hadn’t updated the photographs in the galleries in forever. This website is up-to-date and includes images from our very productive years between 2017 and 2019, as well as the admittedly slow period of COVID Portugal (we do have those Madeira photographs though!).

Second, we wanted to be able to give people more than one way to explore our images. Ann came up with a website design that does just that, even though it took a lot of effort on our part to then configure and reconfigure collections of images. Not only can you look at photographs organized in several different ways within the Ann’s Photos and Dan’s Photos links at the top of the page, we have organized a core set of mixed photographs from each of our major photography trips under the Trips link at the top of the page.

I think we’ve succeeded on both points. So let me walk you through the various top level pages and hopefully get you wanting to explore on your own.

The Home page is pretty straight-forward and really isn’t anything special. But you have to have a home page don’t you? In addition to the navigation bar at the top of the page, which is at the top of every page, it gives you the most recent 9 or so blog posts, as well as a link to the Blog page and a search field. Below that are links to Dan’s Galleries and Ann’s Galleries. At the bottom of the page, and of every page, is a sign-up form to sign up for blog updates. Don’t worry, we’ve automatically registered everyone who had registered for the previous blog notifications to receive them from this site. But if you haven’t already signed up to receive notifications, please do! Last, just below that is a search bar for the entire site.

On the top navigation bar, clicking on the Blog link takes you to a page that has the most recent 15 or so blog posts below it. It allows you to quickly get to any of the recent posts you might have missed. Again, there is a search field below the most recent posts in the event you want to search for a blog post from days past. Immediately below that is one of my favorite features from the update.

There’s a link to a page that lists all of the previous blog posts, organized by year, date and title. You can also get there from the More drop down menu through the Blog Archive entry. It contains all of the blog entries, starting with “The Beginning” from August 18, 2010. Ann says there are over 600 of them. She also said, “You have a lot of words.” I’m not sure how to take that last statement, so I’ll just keep my mouth shut.

Regarding the blog, you will notice, that the notification email has changed somewhat - the product of the newer version of the SquareSpace site. I do like that howling wolf notifying you that something new has arrived on the site, but we can’t change the image that goes out with the notification like we could with the old site (Why is it that “upgrades” always take something away? And while we’re on that subject, Ann just informed me she had a talk with SquareSpace and they also removed the “like” button from the blog function. What is going on here?).

The next item on the main menu is Dan’s Photos. Ann’s ideas of how we could package images in different ways let me go . . . for lack of a better phrase, hog wild. Some of the galleries are one layer deep and take you directly to a page of images. Other galleries open to a page with multiple galleries. I did, however, try to keep the steps no more than two layers deep before you were able to enjoy images.

The gallery pages all operate the same way. If, for instance, you click onto my Favorites gallery, it takes you to a page of tiled images. Click on any image and it takes you to a scrolling gallery where the images are larger. Just click the arrows to the right or left to advance, or the X at the upper right to close the gallery and go back to the tiled images. At the top and bottom of each tiled page is a bar showing you where you’re at, for example Dan’s Photos > Favorites, where you can click on the Dan’s Photos to go back to that main page. Or you can always navigate via the menu bar at the top.

If you click on the Monographs gallery on Dan’s Photos page, it takes you to a page that has links to the 3 monograph galleries. Click on any one of them and you arrive at the tiled page of images. Again, you can click to enlarge the image and see them that way, one by one. In those cases, the two location bars let you go back either one level (to Monographs) or to the main Dan’s Photos page. It should all make sense once you start using it.

As for what’s behind the way I organized images, well it’s a mix of anything and everything. The Favorites gallery is just that, images I enjoy looking at. Monographs goes to groups of images that I intentionally brought together for a reason (usually to print as a portfolio of images). Themes includes images grouped by some of the themes I repeatedly return to when I’m out photographing. For example, that’s where you can look at just black and white photographs if that’s what you want to do. Annual Portfolios are just that, collections of images based upon the year photographed, from 2011 to the present. Here is where it gets interesting. Some of the years, like 2018, were very productive. So I tried to limit the number of photos on any main page to 15 - 20 photographs. If you like what you’re seeing, at the bottom of the page is a “View More” button that will take you to view more images from that gallery. It was a way for me to not have to agonize over which images made the website, and to allow me to not always include my favorite images on each of the main photo pages so you get a bit of diversity in what you’re looking at. Several of Ann’s pages have a View More button as well.

After the Annual Portfolios, you come across several location-based groupings of galleries. Europe - Oregon - United States - Africa. Africa is only one page deep. Oregon and the United States opens onto a page of image galleries based on different locations. Europe does as well, though right now it’s pretty skinny. But as you can image, it’s the Europe page that should grow the most over the next few years.

Ann has organized Ann’s Photos somewhat differently. She has a Favorites page, as well as a Places page that links to a variety of different locations. Then her galleries take off in a very interesting direction by having galleries of images grouped by subject matter. She has: Water, River & Sea; Forest, Woodlands & Trees; Light & Sky; Arid Lands; Mountains; and Wildlife. Again, it’s another way for us to think about and others to view our images - exactly why we did the website redesign. Want to look at images of the ocean? Go to her Water, River & Sea gallery!

The next heading over on the main menu bar is another of Ann’s great ideas - organizing our images by the Trips we’ve taken. Click on the Trips button and you get to a page that has clickable galleries for every major photography trip we’ve taken from the first 2014 Fall: Yellowstone and Grand Tetons trip to the recent 2021 Winter: Madeira trip. Click into any of the trips, for example the 2019 Fall: Yellowstone and Utah trip, and you come across a page that follows a consistent format. At the upper part of the page are Trip Photos. This is a mixed collection of Ann’s and Dan’s photographs from the trip, of course clickable to enlarge and view as a slide show. We tried to vary the images somewhat, so they would include images that give you a bit of a feel of the diversity of the places we went to and why we loved going there, in addition to some of the great photographs those locations gave us. Below the trip photos will be a collection of the last five blog posts related to that trip. There’s also a button below those 5 posts that will allow you to see all of the blog posts related to that trip.

The final main menu item is the More drop down menu, which gives you a variety of options. First is the Great Photographers link, which takes you to a list of great photographers that have inspired us. It’s one of the areas we have not completely updated yet from the last website. We have plans to add 4 more photographers to the list - 4 contemporary photographers that have influenced our work significantly (if you’ve read our posts over the past few years you can probably guess who they are). Hopefully, that update won’t be too long in coming.

The next More drop down menu item is the Our Gear page, which not only retains the oh-so-very-spot-on Portlandia video “Gotta Get The Gear”, but also delves into the the photography, overlanding and other gear that just proves Portlandia got it right, about us at least. Here’s another area where we’re not quite ready for prime time. The Our Tech and & Everything Else pages still need to be built (as the link button says) . . . but it’s coming, I promise!

The last two items on the More drop down menu take you to a search bar that allows you to search the entire website, and the copyright information on our photographs. The latter keeps the same Creative Commons license that was on our previous website. Go ahead and use our images for non-commercial purposes, and if you want to pay us to use our images, we’d be much obliged.

Well, that’s it. Go out and explore and, hopefully, enjoy. There is a lot of material there, so don’t try to digest it in one fell swoop. Return to it, again and again and see what you can discover. In particular, the ability to organize images in different ways and to include a “View More” button for many of the galleries allowed us to include many more images that deserve to be seen but wouldn’t have made it on a more restrictive cut. I, for one, have seen a lot of Ann’s images I’d never seen before.

Oh, and in case you haven’t figured it out yet, the photographs in this post were just for decoration and have no relationship to what was being discussed. Also if you were really attentive, you may have realized that I decided to select one image from each of the digital cameras that I used to make images that have made it to the blog site. It’s quite the collection.

The New Website is Live!

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The New Website is Live!

Printing the Image - Madeira Black and White

On Easy and Hard Images

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