One downside of having the hobby of photography is what to do with the images (and videos) afterwards. In the olden times, before digital photography, we’d only see the family camera maybe once or twice a year, at Christmas or Easter, and then it might be another year before that roll of film was shot and then who knows how long before the prints would make their way into a box. If you were lucky you might have someone “artistic” in your family, like my older sister Kathie, who at some point took all of the prints and painstakingly put them into albums with beautifully handwritten captions. If not, the prints would stay in their envelopes and the envelopes would disappear into wherever your family kept photos. 

My first personal experiences with photography would probably be in the early 1970s when I was in 8th grade. I remember using a Kodak Instamatic camera that used 110 film stock, and those weird cube flash bulbs. I don’t remember if it was mine or borrowed, but it came with me for our Junior High trip to Disneyland. Funny that, for quite a few years, I probably had more experience with my friend, Creagan’s family’s 8mm film camera than using a still camera¹. But whenever possible, I’m sure I’d pull out my little Kodak Instamatic camera.

By the mid-1980s I’d graduated from my little plastic Kodak instamatic to a 35mm Pentax SLR film camera. We were still working with film so the camera came out mostly for special occasions and the like. When I was working on my degree in journalism I took a couple courses in photo-journalism and black & white photography and started to become much more comfortable walking around and doing more casual photography. By the time I started teaching (1995), I was the guy always recording something on my camera(s). Case in point, while on a school camping trip someone caught me using three cameras… 

Yeah, it only got a lot worse when I switched over to digital photography, especially when iPhone photography became a thing. But before then, I started creating webpages and started trying to figure out how to share my stuff online, instead of hiding my work on prints in boxes. Early webpages were not image friendly. On this particular page (Pepperdine OMAET 2001-2002), I shot the images with a film camera and as part of the image processing I was given a CD with the digital versions, which is what I used on the page. Looking back it’s pretty funny how low-resolution the digital versions were (most of them were only 640×480 pixels). But it was a monumental pain to create the page and get everything to populate in a way that looked good. 

After a year of creating webpages using Dreamweaver, as part of my masters degree at Pepperdine Educational Technology, I started exploring blogging, first with LiveJournal, then briefly with Geeklog and eventually settling with WordPress. But these platforms were mainly for written material and not for posting images. Around 2005 I started posting images to Flickr.com. One thing I liked about using Flickr what that I could set up album on the service and then embed them into my blog, so that I wasn’t taking up any server space with images on my blog. As much as I could easily shot 150 images covering some event, the writer in me always insisted that some description or comments was always necessary to tell the story behind the images, which I really couldn’t do with just Flickr. Here’s an example of a Flickr album from when I attended the 40th anniversary of the flight of Apollo 11 at Kennedy Space Center in 2009:

I loved that you could easily get an overview of all of the images and then click on any image that you wanted to get a closer look at and either continue browsing to the next image in the closer view by click your arrow key, or go back to the album view by clicking the little “return to album” prompt at the top of the screen. Only problem is that there wasn’t a lot of room to post any kind of running written commentary, like what one would find in a magazine, except for at the top in the little description box. Yeah, that wasn’t cutting it for me. Add to that, especially when I started posting larger images, my connection speed started to become an issue and there were times when the page never finished loading. Then they took the embed gallery function away. So, I started looking for other options. 

I rolled through several different versions of WordPress (both self-hosted or .org and the WordPress-hosted .com versions). I also tried SquareSpace once or twice. Part of the problem is that at this point in nerd history, these platforms were becoming more focused on commerce and supporting businesses and a bit less on amateur bloggers. So, as far as posting galleries with lots of text, they were set up for galleries of may 10 images tops, not 75 or more. One thing I did love, with the WordPress-hosted sites, was that offered tiled-mosaic galleries, where I could dropped 12 images, with different aspect ratios, like a couple panoramas and some images shot in landscape mode and others in portrait and the software would arrange the images to fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. And if I wanted a closer view, I got the same click and view, then arrow key to the next image or click the X to return to the webpage, that I had in Flickr. It was a definite step up from using Flickr.

The problem that I eventually ran into was storage space, in that I was going to run out of how many images I could put on my site before I’d have to bump up to another plan that was going to cost a lot more money. I had gotten used to paying a flat yearly fee and getting unlimited storage. Also, just like with Flickr, I found that my load times just with the home page was slowing down… a lot. So I continued looking. Ugh.

Next up to bat, a website known for hosting professional photographers websites, SmugMug, had just bought Flickr and offered Flickr users a $75 a year to move images and videos over to SmugMug. And unlike Flickr, I could build webpages so that I could embed YouTube videos and add the descriptions/text that I had with WordPress. And SmugMug loaded a lot faster and didn’t choke when I posted more than 200 images in a single gallery. I spent a summer moving everything to SmugMug. Yay. Then a year or two later I got the bill. To keep the plan I had (with the webpages) was going to cost over $200 a year. What?! I said, no thanks, got busted back to the basic plan ($75) and lost the custom webpages I’d built, but kept the galleries (no text), but unlimited storage. Ack.

In the summer of 2022, a year before retirement I decided to go from WordPress.com to WordPress.org hosted on BlueHost so that I could have more options, when I came to plug-ins and image storage, etc. I picked a highly customizable theme, DIVI from Elegant Themes, and focused on getting my portfolio sites (Academic and Teaching Portfolio) set up, worked through renovations with my resume and went through multiple redesigns of my main website and media website. I was pretty happy with my Academic Portfolio website because I felt like I was able to separate out the work I’d done in my degree programs surfacing both the classes I took and the papers/projects that I did. I wanted to have a similar set up with my media projects, finding a way to surface the areas of interest and individual projects. 

Over the past month I felt like the load times on the media project website were slowing down (again). That got me to wondering if I should give SmugMug another go (with the higher yearly cost) or find a way to speed up load times with my current WordPress set-up. One thing that I learned since things were slowing down on Flickr was that I didn’t need to upload the full resolution version of my images. I now generally set the dimensions to 1620 pixels (except panoramas). I made some adjustments on the homepage with some of the animations and size of images and that seemed to help. Besides load times, I was also disappointed that the current tile-mosaic gallery template no longer allows for you to click on the image to see a full-resolution version and then arrow key to the next image and click an onscreen “x” or button to return to the gallery view. When I moved to the WordPress.org/BlueHost site I found a plugin, FooGallery, that gave me the click to view and arrow key to move to the next image options that I was looking for. But it didn’t do the tile-mosaic fitting landscape and portrait images into a neat package. It was either squares or portrait-friendly spacing called “masonry” that I wasn’t too fond of. Here’s an example of the Masonry style gallery:

Here’s the same page with the Justified setting:

In this case, I like the Justified version better than the Masonry version. I’m finding that galleries with mostly landscape images (especially panoramas) look better with the Justified setting and galleries with mostly square or portrait images look better with Masonry setting. For example, it looks like most of the images in my mom’s gallery from her younger days were more portrait than landscape and so the Masonry setting fits better.

It would seem that I’ll decide on what gallery style based on the dominant image aspect ratio. Whatever is best to tell the story that I’m trying to tell with the images. With a few projects, after editing and selecting the best images, I let the photos app make a short video from the images and didn’t post any gallery at all. Whatever works and doesn’t force the viewer to have to wait for images to load. That’s the reason I’ve gone through all of this, is to reduce the time from intention to view a gallery to being able to view the images as quickly as possible either as a whole gallery or “zoomed in” individual images. So, I’m staying with the current WordPress media projects site, that gives me the greatest ability to organize the subjects and projects to tell the story that I want to tell. Also,  I’ll probably keep SmugMug (basic) just for the unlimited online storage, to be backup image storage in the event that I lose my local image storage. All of this fuss because I love taking images and posting them online. And now that Apple Vision Pro is making 3D/immersive media a thing, let’s see how it shakes everything up all over again. Here’s a very brief 3D video that I shot in 2017 using my Theta S camera, remember to click on the little 4-directional arrow icon in the upper left corner of the screen to move the POV around. I stopped shooting that format because I hadn’t found a way to edit the videos… but I’m sure with Apple new Apple Vision Pro hardware there will be renewed interest. How I’m going to put this on a webpage is going to be an interesting challenge. 

Sources:

• 110 Film, Wikipedia (retrieved 2024-02-02), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/110_film 
• Kodak Instamatic Camera (image) By Joost J. Bakker from IJmuiden, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=103236082
• Come Against the Rain, by Joe Bustillos & Creagan McConnell (1971/1972, 1994, 2015), https://vimeo.com/129039283 
• COMM217: Intro to Black & White Photography, CSUF Spring 1990, https://joebustillos.com/1990/07/comm217-intro-to-black-white-photography-spring-1990/ 
• COMM319: Photojournalism, CSUF Spring 1991, https://joebustillos.com/1991/06/comm319-photojournalism-spring-1991/ 
• 2017-04-30 1st Theta S video test by Joe Bustillos, https://youtu.be/cZ_vePMsqkA?si=mF0zrHK80bi2XRCQ 
• Flickr version of the images website: https://www.flickr.com/photos/joebustillos/albums/ 
• SmugMug version of the images website: https://joebustillosmediaprojects.smugmug.com 
• WordPress version of the images/video website: https://jbbsmediaprojects.com 

1. My guess is that some afternoon we started playing around with the family 8mm film camera, shooting various “dying scenes” as cowboys and Indians. And then over the course of two years the clips became a story about two reluctant pioneers heading to San Francisco in the years after the Civil War. Click HERE to view the video: https://vimeo.com/129039283 [↩]