photography

My uncle, Peter Longland has been starting to branch out into doing some solo photography work, having done it professionally for various organisations for pretty much my entire lifetime. That said, when going solo, the assumption today is that you have a portfolio that people can look up. We started this project last year, however as both of us work full-time, work on this site took a back seat. After much development, that portfolio site went live this morning.

The site is online at: https://imagery-captivation.com/

While he has a background in graphic design, and has been doing websites longer than I have, most websites today are not built statically (or even with tools like Macromedia Dreamweaver), but rather either use site generation tools (Hugo, Jeckyll, Cobalt, Pelican, et all), or are built on a content management system (Joomla, Drupal, WordPress, etc). I’ve had a little exposure to Drupal through my workplace, but have otherwise been running this WordPress blog since 2005 when I started it as a means to communicate news about the Gentoo/MIPS project.

Thus we collaborated on this portfolio site. I let Peter take the lead on the visual design aspects of the site as his design sense is far better and well developed than mine. That said, where we got stuck trying to achieve a particular look — my background having worked with WordPress for the past 18 years meant I had some tricks up my sleeve for bending this tool to making it work.

For the hosting, I used my VPS at Binary Lane, that required me figuring out how to get PHP 8.1 and OpenBSD’s OpenHTTPD talking to each-other. Something to consider if I ever need to move this site from its present home.

We used an off-the-shelf theme and a small number of plug-ins to assemble the site, with custom styling rounded out using hand-crafted CSS rules to override some aspects of the theme. Much of the effort was spent at Peter’s end deciding which photos to publish and performing the necessary post-processing on them to have them look their best online.

Right now comes the fun bit… presenting this to the search engines. I’ve submitted the site map to Google’s search console, so that’ll get indexed in due course. Microsoft Bing has its own search engine console which may be worth setting up. As for Duck Duck Go, looking through their site there’s no obvious way to submit a site to the crawler, so I guess we just have to wait for it to stumble on it organically as it waddles the Internet.

In the meantime, I welcome constructive feedback. I’ve checked the site on a number of browsers and devices I have access to, and it seems to render fine there.