The simple joys of simple photography

A little over a week ago I went out for some late night shooting around my neighborhood in upstate New York. After walking around for nearly an hour and only taking one photo I was about to give up on getting a really great shot, you know that shot that gives you butterflies you know it's so good—I know I can't expect that every time but I'm always hopeful. The whole night I kept noticing the moon peeking behind the clouds over the river but I didn't come across a good scene to shoot it in unless I pointed the camera skyward but that's against what I want to capture so I was patient, I knew something would reveal itself to me. As I was circling back to my house I decided to walk further up the street past my house to where the street started to ascend up a hill and there I saw it, the moon peeking behind the clouds and the trailer home of a neighbor illuminated by a street lamp. I bracketed three four minute exposures (shot with Kodak Portra 160NC), one at f11 (which was more like three minutes since I had to get out of the way of a pickup truck), one at f8 and a final exposure at f16 which I left for an additional minute, again for a passing truck but on the opposite side of the road (covered the lens with my hand). All three exposures worked but the f8 won out. I'm considering cloning out the bright orange light peeking below the trees on the left but for now I'm leaving it as-is and enjoying the fruits of pure, simple photography.

Revamping my website, improving my marketing and making the most of what I have

Lately I have been thinking I need to revamp my website, mcmullensmith.com. Although I am very happy with it and worked hard to design and write the code, I feel it's not telling the whole story.

I pretty much have a rotating gallery of recent work or work I am most proud of and little else aside from a bio and basic contact information. Most friends that look at my site say it's great but one pointed out a flaw a few months ago, she said there's nothing but naked ladies and one black man, which was an exaggeration since many of the ladies were fully clothed. But that did point out a big problem, although I do a lot of nude work I don't want to be pigeon holed into just that, I love doing portraiture and beauty, I'm also starting to get into still life, travel and landscape photography and my dream would be fashion editorial but I'm not conveying that.

I'm also not displaying bodies of work as a whole. I like to work in series, it's my way of pretending I'm a real artist, and I should be displaying the work as a whole, not disjointed, scattered among other photos. Albert Watson scrambles up the work on his site, which I find irritating, don't get me started on the awful navigation but I like to see the photographs from a series paired together, not strewn about.

The big impetus to the revamping was a portrait session last week. I have spent the past year exploring figure studies and other subjects and have shot very little portraiture. I would like to change that and having a site that screams "I shoot nudes!" isn't going to help.

Anyway, I'm going to start the process of reworking my site, I want to keep the general design the same and break the work down into subjects and series. I also want to make better use of some of the online services I use such as Photoshelter and Flickr.

My first step will be looking at, again, photographer sites I think are successful and take notes on what I like/don't like with each site. In all honesty I modeled my site like Matthew Rolston's but what works for Mr. Rolston may not work for me and I bet he's not banking on or getting any business from his site, I mean, right? I'll have to investigate this....