Something new

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For many years my website has featured my workshops, while my social media pages (WordPress blog, Instagram, and Facebook) have been where I’ve shared my latest photography. While I originally kept galleries on my Eloquent Images website, I rarely updated them and after a while the website galleries ceased being a reliable reflection of my current work.

About three years ago I redesigned my website, completely changing the interface and removed the galleries entirely, doubling-down on my blog galleries. But when I started hearing from people that they couldn’t find my latest images online, I realized that, even though they’re really easy to find in the galleries right here on my blog, many people don’t take the trouble to look for them—if they don’t see a Galleries option on the website, they just move on. I made a mental note that I need to bring my website galleries back, but between workshops and travel, I never found the time.

Well guess what—suddenly I have time! So a few weeks ago I asked my webmaster to add galleries to my website, and I’ve spent the last couple of weeks populating them, and having far more fun than I could have imagined. My webmaster labeled my six galleries Gallery 1, Gallery 2, …, Gallery 6. Hmmm, surely I can do better than that. I thought long and hard about more descriptive names, trying on locations and other similarly prosaic labels, before deciding I need themes to describe my motivations for clicking my shutter.

Backstory

You may or may not know that when I decided to make photography my profession, I promised myself that I’d only photograph what I want to photograph, that I would never take a picture just because I thought it would earn me money. I’d just seen too many miserable photographers earning a living but hating what they do. But since all I want to photograph is nature (which, while universally loved, is not universally purchased), I needed to come up with a way to earn money. I landed on photo workshops, which perfectly leveraged my prior career in technical communications (tech writing, training, and support) and my love for both photography and nature. Not only did this enable me to photograph only what I love, my images turned out to be the perfect intro and marketing tools for my workshops: if you like my images, you’ll probably like my workshops; if you don’t like my images, you probably won’t be happy with my workshops. (Of course I do sell images too, but image sales isn’t an essential part of my business and never motivates me to take a picture.)

Rabbit hole

So I guess it should have been no surprise that thinking about what my gallery themes should be would lead me down this rabbit hole of introspection. Many photographers create spectacular images that reveal the damage humans are doing to our natural world, but I seem to simply be driven to share nature’s beauty, both the obvious and the overlooked. Rather than a conscious choice, this is more an organic outcome of a life spent seeking and finding happiness in the natural world, combined with regular old human nature that causes most of us to find pleasure sharing the things we love most: “Here’s something that makes me happy—I hope it makes you happy too.” Here’s where the rabbit hole led me—I can’t think of a clearer distillation of the things in nature that move me:

Four Seasons: Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall
Color and Light: Sunlight’s interplay with air, land, and water
Water Like Glass: A Time for Reflection
It Came from the Sky: Unexpected gifts from above
In the Flow: Water on the move: Waves, waterfalls, and whitewater
Celestial Carousel: Sun, Moon, and Stars

These galleries are a work in progress. Assembling them, I quickly realized that many of my images would work in more than one gallery, but I decided not to duplicate any image. Rather than a comprehensive retrospective, my new galleries are more of a summary of my own favorites. But I’m still adding to them, so feel free to suggest additions you think I’ve overlooked. Or simply browse and enjoy.