My New Port­fo­lio is Online

My new port­fo­lio is online. Some of you dis­cov­ered it added to the main menu this week while I was work­ing on the site, but here’s the offi­cial announce­ment if you haven’t checked it out yet. It’s been an inter­est­ing chal­lenge that I wanted to resolve for months. All I wanted was a way to show larger ver­sions of my images in the port­fo­lio. For a while, I thought I’d be able to do that with the Immense theme from Graph Paper Press.

Sadly, my pho­tos looked absolutely hor­ri­ble using that theme. Other folks had the same com­plaint. I ques­tioned sup­port, they gave me code that pur­ported to fix the prob­lem. It didn’t. Even if it did, the next update of the soft­ware would over­write the spe­cific code that was sup­posed to make your pho­tos “not suck.” A few days ago, I tried to sign into their site to down­load the lat­est ver­sion of the theme to see if it worked any bet­ter, but I couldn’t. My pay­ment of $99 appar­ently was only good for a year and my account expired. When I inquired, I was told I’d have to sign up for another year. Hav­ing spent $99 for some­thing that never looked good in the first place, I didn’t feel like repeat­ing the same process in the hope that it wouldn’t suck.

For­tu­nately, I found a bet­ter alter­na­tive. I chose Gleam from Ele­gant Themes. The front page looks like the screen­shot above. Just mouse over the cen­ter logo and the menu appears beneath it. Once you select a cat­e­gory, it loads quickly and dis­plays large images to view.

It doesn’t have every image I’ve ever taken, but that’s not the point of a port­fo­lio. The images, per­haps even the cat­e­gories, will change from time to time. Ele­gant Themes did a won­der­ful job with Gleam to make it easy to imple­ment and maintain. It’s sim­ple, easy and just what I wanted. So, now my new port­fo­lio is online. Please take a look.

Capi­tol Reconstruction

Go to any major city in the world and you’ll find they all have one thing in com­mon. They are per­pet­u­ally under con­struc­tion. The same is true of the great build­ings and works of archi­tec­ture in the world. Dur­ing my visit to the U.S. Capi­tol, I found this room under­go­ing ren­o­va­tion and reconstruction.

Damn if I even know which room it is. My guide told me we could go any­where if the doors were unlocked and free of signs pro­hibit­ing access. We came up to this room and she gave the door­knob a jig­gle. It opened, so we went inside and just admired the room while folks worked on it. I loved the fea­tures. Columns, bal­conies, arches, paint­ings and a big damn chan­de­lier. I spent some time shoot­ing a few dif­fer­ent angles and then we left.

After we got out­side, a man with a stern expres­sion fol­lowed us out and made a very pur­pose­ful dis­play of lock­ing the door. Hey, too bad for him that he didn’t think of doing that before we got there. Not that there was any­thing secret hap­pen­ing inside. Some folks just dis­crim­i­nate against pho­tog­ra­phers. Maybe that’s an atti­tude that also needs renovation.