alan little’s weblog

closed for redecorating

19th January 2004 permanent link

I’ve decided it’s time to put some effort into revamping my photo gallery. Having a place to display my pictures was the original purpose of alanlittle.org, but that has largely been overtaken by weblogging in the last couple of years. Meanwhile I’ve neglected the gallery pages, and when I look at them now I think they’re not very well presented or organised, and don’t have half the pictures on them that I would like to display. Despite which people still look at them. Whilst inspecting my December logs I noticed that I’m number two on a google search for “Hampi photos”. Not bad considering Hampi is probably the second most famous and visited tourist attraction in southern India after the beaches of Goa (and check out the lady who is number one. Not many pictures there, but they’re interesting). But my Hampi gallery is a rushed selection of maybe about a quarter of what I would like to show, that I threw together in an evening shortly after I got back from India with not much thought to sequence or presentation. It’s time to do something about this. In the last two years I’ve bought a much better scanner, and my photoshop and html/css skills have improved immensely. I should be able to do a much better job now.

Meanwhile I’ve noticed that my weblogging activities over the last few weeks have slipped nto a pattern of publishing even more trivial things than before, while the pile of potentially interesting but perpetually unfinished Big Ideas grows even faster than usual. Perhaps it’s time for a change. So – expect not much weblogging for the next few weeks except (a) announcements of photo gallery updates and (b) cursing and swearing about the horrors of CSS. Hopefully more (a) than (b).

It also occurs to me that there might be potential for actually selling prints a bit more systematically. Despite the sad state of the gallery pages, my pictures themselves are good enough that I get a steady trickle of enquiries about prints and publications. The first pictures I ever put on the web found their way into a newspaper in Australia, and my best magazine gig ever – for a struggling startup yoga magazine that unfortunately couldn’t afford worldly illusions like paying its photographers – also resulted from the editors having seen my website. Maybe if I actually make it clear that prints are for sale, and decide prices up front instead of having to wonder every time whether I’m asking too much or too little, I might get a few more sales. I’d be surprised if print sales ever even covered my hosting costs, but you never know unless you try.

(None of this has ever or will ever match my Photographic Success Of A Lifetime, which was meeting Maria whilst acting as Official Photographer at a friend’s wedding)

related entries: Photography

all text and images © 2003–2008