New photoblog: photography.ottleys.net

Adrienne and I bought our first digital camera not too long after we were married.  For me it was a new geeky toy.  For Adrienne it was a bit of a pain.  She was used to tradition film photography and had/has album after album to prove it.

She would take the images, print them and put them in albums.  I would take them and post them on our website.  After a while as the number of kids exploded and the significant number of events in our lives grew, we knew we needed a better way to keep up with and share all the pictures.  With the ease of taking (and deleting) pictures, we had put together a nice collection of images that we wanted to share with friends and family.  We had just moved to Utah and had lots of family that were now farther away from us.  I took an old computer and set it up with Gallery.  We have been very happy with our gallery sitehttp://gallery.ottleys.net.  We’ve amassed a lot of images.  We’ve also played with Flickr and put some in Facebook.  But we lacked a real showcase.

About a year ago, I made in investment in a DSLR and the number of pictures we were taking jumped…a lot.  We bought extra disk space to accommodate the growth.  But I still wanted a place to put some of the better pictures.  I’ve been playing with photoblogging software off and on for a while.  This weekend I decided to nail it down. (Sorry for the Twitter/Facebook/Feed SPAM.) I worked through some options in WordPress, our chosen blogging platform, and decided it wasn’t really what I wanted.  While I was looking for templates to use/customize for WordPress I came across Pixelpost.  I knew pretty quickly this was what I wanted.  It is a “simple” PHP-based photoblogging platform.  It’s open source, always a plus.  It supports content/comment moderation and has an add-on architecture.  It also supports, through an add-on, Adobe Lightroom export directly to your Pixelpost site, which greatly simplifies my workflow.

So without further ado, I’d like to introduce photography.ottleys.net. My goal is to share a picture or two a day.  I’ll of course fiddle with the layout, play with functionality and hopefully add some value to the pixelpost community.  (I’ve already started to brainstorm about how it could be used in conjunction with Alfresco. –I know, I have a one track mind.)

We hope you enjoy our little corner of the web and that this new site will be a lot of fun…..at least for me.