behind photoscapes
photography [ craft ] experience [ creativity ]
“How did you build photoscapes?”
The technical answer is WordPress, but that only explains the framework.
photoscapes began in 2003 as a place to share my personal photography outside of my commercial work. Over the years it has changed along with me. In January 2023, as I began winding down a long career in photography and commercial art, I removed the shopping cart and image catalog and gave the site a new purpose.
Today I think of photoscapes as a personal photography notebook.
It is where I bring together photographs, technical information, things I have learned through experience, photographic adventures, and thoughts about the creative process. Some pages are practical and detailed. Others are simply about making photographs, wandering with a camera, or thinking about what it means to spend a lifetime creating images.
The Toolbox has become the technical side of that notebook. It documents cameras, lenses, film, digital equipment, processes, and techniques I actually use. The photographs throughout those pages are important to me because they show that the equipment and techniques I write about come from firsthand experience.
But photography has never been only about equipment.
I have spent much of my life moving between photography and graphic design, and I still enjoy creating with something as simple as pencils, paper, and watercolors. Craft and creativity have always belonged together for me, and photoscapes reflects both.
Under the Hood
photoscapes is built on WordPress, with a layout developed specifically around the way I organize and present information.
Behind it is a combination of PHP, CSS, HTML, and Markdown, along with carefully selected WordPress plugins. When an existing plugin does not quite do what I need, I sometimes build my own.
Many of the details throughout the site are custom, including equipment cards, specialized page layouts, and the notebook inspired sections used throughout the Toolbox.
I enjoy this side of photoscapes too. Designing a page, writing the code that makes an idea work, arranging photographs and typography, and figuring out a better way to present information are simply another part of the creative process.
A Living Notebook
photoscapes was never meant to be finished.
Pages change as I learn something new. Technical information gets updated. Old photographs occasionally find new homes. New pages appear when I have something worth sharing, and sometimes I build a new feature simply because I have imagined a better way to organize the information.
What I try not to do is add something simply because it is fashionable or technically possible. The technology should support the photographs and writing, not compete with them.
Photography has given me a remarkable career, but also something much larger: curiosity, adventure, friendships, and a way of looking at the world.
At this stage of my life, photoscapes is a place to gather some of what I have learned and pass it along.
After more than two decades online, it has become part archive, part technical notebook, part journal, and part creative playground.
WordPress is what photoscapes is built with.
Photography, curiosity, experience, and a lifelong desire to create are what it is built from.