New webpage layout! What you think? Not perfect yet but I’d call it an improvement.

Doing this update led me through a number of things I wasn’t planning on (because WordPress is easy and if you want to change the look just pick a different theme and voil-uh… where did that thing come from?). This included a brief review of HTML, an introduction to the wonders and pains of widgets, new plug-ins, and a complete reboot of the photo library. @.@

But going back through my photos turned out to be quite insiteful: I live in the north, snow is pretty (from inside) but I don’t capture it. It’s not that my snaps of snow are bad, it’s just that there aren’t any (almost).

But more than the lack of snow, I noticed there were other subjects that were lacking. I didn’t start taking photos to be a ‘be all capture everything” photographer, so I think the void is fine, but looking back through forced me to consciously view and anylize that void. There are very few people in my photos. It is even rarer they are the subject rather than a bothersome feature of the environment that didn’t move fast enough out of my shot.

My subject is spaces. Some are habitted spaces. Some are uninhabited spaces. Many were once alive with human activity. In a sense my subject IS the void. It is the world we have built around us and the environment that contains it, and what happens when we go away again.

In a way this is a spiritual question, but I am not looking for glimpses of the unknown. Rather I am capturing what is known and visible before me, both in the amazing color of a sunset, and the dark crumbling concrete behind a broken chair. I am not looking for an additional meaning beyond “what is” except maybe for, “how did it end up this way?” or “why was it abandoned?”. Many of my shots are nostalgic in nature so the question often becomes a mystery: “what was this built and used for in the first place?”

Traveling through my photo library was a journey from what is known to what can be assumed, and what was once known but has become a complete mystery, all those having known now lost to the movement of time.

On a less philosophical note, I also noticed that a TON of my work was missing from the current work on display, so keep an eye out for some new albums coming soon!