Exegesis

This website was created as part of a University assessment which required participants to create an online presence of themselves. The students were given a variety of options on how to create their presence including a blog, a wiki or a build-your-own website service. I chose to go further and create my own website using nothing more than the simple text editor on my computer. I chose this option as I wanted to have full control over the content and look of the site. I am also enrolled in a second subject at university which requires us to create a website in this manner. Therefore I thought that this would be a good oppurtunity to enhance my knowledge in the area of web site creation by doing the same for this assignment. So in effect this is the first web site that I have built. Designing the site myself has aided in my learning about web design and in particular the code and styling required to create a site that is of a professional quality.

I have chosen photography as the theme for my web presence as it is a particular passion of mine. I have for long time wanted to enhance my profile in that industry and while I have taken photos at a few small events such as weddings and have also done one corporate job, my real passion lies with photojournalism and exploring the human condition. I have made enquiries and have found it is a very difficult industry to gain a foothold in. It requires a lot of perseverance and you need to basically work for nothing for the first few years. After you have built up enough contacts, then there is a small chance that you can make it an economically viable career. I have traveled to Asia on numerous occasions on photographic excursions, but that all costs money so I have needed to have a steady job back home to support these trips, and myself! We covered citizen journalism in our studies but it was fairly clear that little money can be made from such a pursuit. One exception was the Bagdad Blogger, Salam Pax, who now works for the UK newspaper, The Guardian. He is one of few exceptions who have made the transition from hobby to career.

I chose the layout and styling for the site by perusing various other photographic websites already on the Internet. The background and text colour of Black and White is a fairly common theme with other photographic websites, particularly when the images themselves are Black & White. I used the site, Michael Garbutt Photography, as particular inspiration for the design of my pages. I liked his header, colouring or lack thereof, and the use of icons for the links to his contributing nodes. I must stress that I did not use any of the code used in his site. I used a separate Cascading Style Sheet to control the styling of the pages, in preference to the less flexible and outdated HTML styling method. The choice to create my own website was greatly infuenced by the fact that I didn't want any distracting flashing colour advertisements, as may have been the case had I chosen one of the free, build-your-own website services. I wanted the display to be clutter-free, to enable the viewer to focus on the images, which are what the site is essentially about. While my choice of having a web page, which is primarily static and not applicable to Web 2.0 technologies, as for instance a blog would be, it does have links to contributing nodes which are content sharing sites, and particularly representative of Web 2.0.

I have three contributing nodes to this website. They are my deviantArt gallery, my Flickr gallery, and my MySpace page. I have located them above the footer of each page for easy access. DeviantART was an obvious choice as a contributing node as it directly relates to the content of my central node in its presentation of my photography. It provides further depth to my work, show a much greater variety of styles of photographs in both Black & White as well as full Colour. I am frequently involved in discussions with other photographers from around the world on deviantArt, as well as learning useful information on how to improve my skills. I was recently awarded a "Daily Deviation" for my photograph, "Lake Girl", which I have used as the main image on the home page of this web site. I have linked to my Flickr page for much the same reasons as I linked to deviantART. It has a good representation of my earlier, more amateur pictures. My third contributing node is my MySpace Page. While I rarely use it these days I thought it would be good to include as it gives a bit more personal information about me such as hobbies and general interests. I also have some slideshows featuring my photographs, which fit in well with the theme of my central node. All of my contributing nodes have links to this website via the provided website fields on the main/home pages of each node.

In the future I would like to create buttons for the navigation bar to replace the text links and create an individual page for each image with a larger version and a description of the scene. I would also like to add more photos and as I plan on traveling back to South East Asia this year, I will no doubt be able to fulfill this wish!

This site only depicts a small area of what I would like my web presence to eventually be. While photography is a passion, I also need to be a realist. As I am a fledgling graphic designer and am also moving into the field of web design, I would like my presence in the future to represent my shift in those directions. Having done a reasonable amount of research throughout this unit on how the internet operates and the directions it is heading, I feel much better positioned to exercise some control over how I am perceived on the web.

References

Freeman & Freeman. (2006). Head First HTML. United States. O'Reilly Media, Inc.

Garbutt. M. (2008). Michael Garbutt Photography. Retrieved November 20th, 2009, from http://www.michaelgarbutt.com/gallery.html

Hypergurl. (2009). CSS Tutorial #6: Applying Special Effects to Text with CSS. Retrieved November 18th, 2009, from http://www.hypergurl.com/csstutorial6.html