Please permit me a quick digression into the world of websites, which is, after all, what I do to support my photography habit. Having a portfolio website is important for photographers. Even if you’re not a professional photographer and can’t afford to spend thousands of dollars on the latest and greatest in modern web technology, you need something more than a Flickr account or a blog to point people to when they ask to see your work.

You could easily set up an account with LiveBooks or PhotoShelter, or hire a designer if you’ve got the money or aren’t technically inclined. Many people opt to build their own websites, however, whether it’s from scratch or with the help of a web content management system. One very popular web CMS is called WordPress; it’s the software I use to run this site and many of the sites I’ve built for photographer friends over the years. I’ve created a WordPress theme that has everything you need to put together a basic portfolio website in about 10 minutes:

WordPress is customized through template files that control the way your website looks. What I have found is that there are plenty of portfolio themes out there already, but they’re all way too flashy for my taste. I’ve found it hard in the past to recommend WordPress to photographer friends because I knew that it was going to take a lot of work to create a site that is clean, attractive, and easy to use.

The goal in building this theme was to create a solid jumping off point; you can use it as-is or customize it to your liking. It’s as basic as you can get: a homepage slideshow, easy-to-create project pages, and additional pages to provide whatever extra information you need. It’s got a built-in blogging system, of course. It’s easy to install and update, and not too hard to customize if you know a little bit of HTML and CSS.

So feel free to give it a spin. I’d love to know what you think!

I recently discovered tinytinygroupshow, an online exhibition of photographs curated by Kevin J. Miyazaki. The latest tinytinygroupshow, “Simultaneous”, is a series of photographs that were all taken at exactly 12:00 central time on August 17th.

I love the absolute lack of pretension in Kevin’s presentation. Here is the theme. Here are the photographs. Enjoy them.

I am only sorry that tinytinygroupshow is limited to viewing on the web. This goes for Humble’s group show, too, as well as some of the very fine web-based photo magazines that have been appearing lately. The more time I spend in the darkroom, the more time I spend looking at books and going to galleries and museums, the more I have come to appreciate the photograph as a physical object. I realize that 99% of the pictures made today never actually make it to paper, but for me the ultimate experience of a photograph is still in relating to the object, and not just the image on a screen.

The economic freedom of distribution via the Internet has allowed projects like this to flourish, but I’m glad that Remain in Light and Pause, to Begin are coming around to keep my infatuation with the printed image alive. Kevin, if you ever were to publish a compiled booklet of all of the tinytinygroupshows, I would gladly buy one.

Jake asked an interesting question the other day: how do people keep up with the constant flood of new work and ideas in the world of photography? Is there some sort of aggregator or meta-site that keeps track of such things?

It’s a tough problem to solve, because everyone has such different tastes. It would have to be a sort of “uber-aggregator”, that allows users to be selective in their subscriptions. I would want to tune out certain genres of photography and certain kinds of news.

In my comment on Jake’s post, I mentioned two of my favorite sites for discovering new work, Conscientious and Flak Photo. I should add Humble Arts Foundation to that list, because I love checking out their online Group Show every month. In reality, I have at least 50 photo-related sites in my feed reader at any given time. There’s a lot of good and an awful lot of bad (or more accurately, an awful lot that is completely irrelevant to me), but I manage to keep up for the most part.

In a sense, through our own blogs, Flickr, and bookmarking services like del.icio.us and vi.sualize.us, we’ve all become curators of some sort. It becomes another stream of information to subscribe to; once you get the right mix, the signal to noise ratio goes way down.

Thanks to mash-up technology like Yahoo Pipes, combining and outputting these streams is trivially easy. It’s the curatorial aspect, the input, that still requires some thought and energy. For my own benefit, I’m going to start working on a Yahoo Pipe that aggregates content from some of my favorite Flickr users’ favorites feeds, collections of images that my friends on Flickr, whose taste I trust, have decided are worth bookmarking. In a way, it could turn out to be the opposite of Flickr Explore, which, as a general rule, is guaranteed to find some of the tackiest junk on Flickr on any particular day. Find several sources that you can trust, aggregate them, and I think something might come out of it. And if it does, I’ll either share the link or somehow integrate the feed into a viewer on this site so it’s easy to find.

In the meantime, here are some links to Flickr feeds you might find of interest:

My favorite photos on flickr:

Joe Holmes’ favorite photos on flickr:

Jon Feinstein’s favorite photos on flickr:

J Zorn’s favorite photos on flickr: