An Eclectic Mind

A place for my best photos.

I’m an amateur photographer and, like many amateur photographers, I sometimes get lucky and capture a better-than-average image. While I’ve often shown my best photos here, I’ve been wanting to put them in a place of their own for a while.

I don’t like Flickr. I don’t think I want my photos as part of what seems to primarily be a social networking service. I do have a Flickr account, but I rarely put photos there.

I did set up a RedBubble account. When I first signed up, the service was small and I was very impressed by the quality of the work there. These weren’t snapshots and doodlings. These were pieces of artwork. And, when I ordered some cards and framed prints, I was extremely pleased with the high quality of what I received. Cards were printed on thick photo paper. Framing was professionally done and properly sealed in back. This was how I wanted my best work to be presented — among other high quality work, available for sale at reasonable prices for high quality product. I wrote about my initial experiences and excitement about RedBubble here.

Well, RedBubble has changed. As the service grew, it became just another image-based social networking service. A mutual admiration society where many people were uploading images that, in my opinion, were pretty crappy and other people were telling them how good they were in five word praises. Photos over-corrected with Photoshop. Cell phone images! Besides, the management of RedBubble seemed more interested in “art” than photos and really pushed that kind of work. I’m not an artist and really didn’t like much of what the RedBubble folks were pushing. The print quality, however, remains good, so for now, I’ll continue to upload my images there.

But I didn’t want to use RedBubble as a showcase for my photos. I wanted something better. Something more personalized. Something that showcased just my photos.

The answer came a few months ago when the folks at Automattic, makers of WordPress, and eight6 jointly released a theme called Monotone on WordPress.com. I tried it out and liked what I saw. The theme had the amazing ability to sample the colors in an image and choose one as the background for the image. It was like color-coordinating the mat for a matted photo. The results was unique and visually attractive.

But I had a few problems with the WordPress.com-based theme. The biggest problem was the way it handled post tags — it pooled them with tags from all WordPress.com users. So if I tagged an image with the word “Arizona,” clicking a link for that tag in my photoblog post would display posts tagged “Arizona” on all WordPress.com blogs. I was not interested in maintaining tags for the benefit of other WordPress.com users. (Sorry, folks.) And I certainly wasn’t interested in maintaining a photo blog with so many exits to other blogs. So After my initial trial, I stopped posting.

But Friday, I discovered that Monotone had been released for WordPress server installations. I decided to give it a new try by installing it on my server. The result is what you can find at http://photos. marialanger.com/.

I did have some problems with the installation. I think it’s because I followed the instructions to the letter. (Silly me.) When I removed the .htaccess file that had come with the theme and used the Permalinks feature of WordPress.com to create a new one, the problems went away.

Then I was able to customize the theme by making minor changes to its template files. For example, I inserted copyright information and reformatted for lowercase throughout much of the blog. I also made the vertical image format page wider. I’ll continue tweaking — I always do — but for now, I’m pleased with the way it looks.

And most image posts link back to RedBubble, where the image is available for sale in a variety of formats.

I hope you’ll visit Maria’s Pix and participate by commenting on my work. Your feedback will not only help encourage me to stick with it, but will help me to be a better photographer.

About the Photos, BLog Technicalities, Call Me a Geek blogging, photography, WordPress

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