Introducing the new “Photography Geek” website
There’s something I’ve been wanting to do for a very long time. I’ve planned it, and researched and I’ve had lots of false starts but I’ve never really gotten it off the ground. Before I started this blog, I used to write about Apple and technology on various blogs. It was in a typical old fashioned blog style, where it was a mix of links to news articles that I found interesting, with some commentary added by me on things that I found to be comment worthy. I stopped doing it a long time ago, but I’ve missed the experience.
Over the past few years, I’ve been thinking about doing something in this kind of format about photography. I still love reading the Mac and Apple websites, and I really like the format of sites like Six Colours, the Loop and Daring Fireball. What I really like about these sites is that they don’t try to really be news sites as such, but rather they collect interesting news, articles and opinions, that are of interest to the editors. You get to see a collection of things that are of interest to you, because you share, or at least respect the interest of the people who write for those sites. They’ll often share links to more obscure topics or stories that you might not otherwise find. I don’t really know of anything quite in the same vein as that for Photography (I’m sure there are lots of sites out there) and it’s something I’ve been thinking about doing for months.
I also have The Photography Geek domain, which I’ve used for various things over the years, but has mostly sit idle. Most recently I tried to use if on Tumblr for iPhone photography, but it was being wasted there. Anyway, I decided that I would use that as the basis for my new site, and it’s kind of the perfect name as that’s what I want it to be: the geekier side of photography.
I love both the artistic and technical side of photography, and, while I know it’s kind of frowned upon, but I love the gear and tech side of photography and the photography industry. I know some people think that makes you a bad photographer, but I don’t care. I am who I am! (I did study electronic engineering briefly!)
I had the domain set up and Wordpress installed for months, but I couldn’t quite find the right theme that I wanted to use. I went back and forward over various theme sites trying to find one that I liked which had the functionality that I needed, and I’ve literally procrastinated for months over this. In the end I realised that I was probably never going to get something that was exactly what I liked and so I went with one of the default themes which actually worked out quite well. I probably will change it int he future for something a bit prettier, but it works and it puts the focus on the content. More importantly, it got me to get past the delaying tactics, and just get on with it!
One of the other things that I wanted to do with this was use it as a test bed to try different things with wordpress too. I’m working on a book about photoblogging and I wanted to be able to cover lots of different platforms, and so the best to get proper experience way is to actually use them on a real project. I have lots of experience with Wordpress, but as my main site is hosted on Squarespace now, I was getting a little rusty. I now have active sites running on Squarespace, Medium, Tumblr, and Wordpress.com. While my store is hosted using Wordpress I don’t really want to mess around with that too much, but I can try some new things with the photography geek.
I’ve been running it for a little while now, and I’ve been posting several times a day, so there’s actually a lot of content on it already. If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook you’ve probably already seen links to the site. It’s actually off to a reasonable start traffic wise too. I have no illusions of this becoming a roaring success or anything, and to be honest, I’m doing it for myself more than anything. With that said, I would like it to be somewhat successful, so if you have a blog, or a social media account, I’d really love it if you could share/post/tweet about The Photography Geek.
I hope you like it and I hope you will stop by. I’m going to evolve this over time, and I hope it will be a good place to go to find out interesting photography stories, tidbits and news of the geekier kind.
