Moving Beyond 2002: Rebuilding the Digital Darkroom

The last update I made to my website was some time back in 2011. That site was based on old code a friend helped me write back in 2002 and it wasn't very easy to maintain. Uploading images was difficult and tedious. In 2011, I made a cosmetic update to the site, but the backend core functionality remained untouched. I am not a developer by trade, so my abilities are rudimentary and I quickly got overwhelmed.

In 2015, I did make attempts to make updates to the backend where I could simply upload a photo to the site and have it show up in the gallery. I got that working very well and it made things easier. But, by then, the front end needed updates as well to be more mobile-friendly and responsive. While I now understood how to tackle the back end, now I got lost on the front end.

All of this is to say: my efforts were stymied for two decades and I wanted something bespoke. I didn't want to pay for off the shelf templates that look like every other website. I had design ideas and wanted it to look how I wanted it.

But we now live in the future. We all hear about AI. There's a lot of fear about it replacing jobs, and I think there is some validity to that. But I also think it democratizes software development to be available to non-technical people. I'm somewhere in the middle, and so I decided to see what I could do with AI to execute my vision.

This page is built from scratch. From the ground up, I drove every design decision and guided the tool I was using to execute it. I recognize the irony here: I’m using AI as the hammer and nails to build this digital gallery, yet I refuse to let it paint the pictures on the walls. It’s a deliberate juxtaposition. For me, AI is a powerful utilitarian tool for development, but art is, and must remain, a uniquely human output.

It's been a great learning experience and I'm still adding features. I'll document some of those features as I write more posts. I also intend to do behind-the-lens articles, documenting details about specific images. I also plan to discuss themes in art and technical aspects of photography as well.

The Human Element: Why I Choose Photography Over AI Imagery

While I don't shy away from using AI to build out this site (I also used it to generate the interior pictures to mock up what prints look like on a wall), I think using AI for art takes away from the human element of it. The most amazing thing about humanity is our imagination. We can imagine and envision things and bring them to fruition. It's one thing to use it for utilitarian purposes, but to use AI to generate art defeats the very purpose of art.

Social media has become a quagmire of AI-generated imagery that leaves the viewer wondering if what they're seeing is even real. As an artist, it becomes a struggle to fight against the algorithms that display a post. AI-generated imagery is often beyond belief and looks visually stunning. It gets a ton of engagement from either likes or people commenting on it just to say it's AI. Either way,this rewards the post with engagement and further pushes it up to garner even more views and engagement. It's a feedback loop that is difficult to compete with.

Real art takes time. I can't, nor would I want to, create a photo every day to post just to keep up with an algorithm in an attempt to get views on my posts. I create images for the love and joy of creating them. I hope you love them too. This page is a way for me to reclaim the joy of sharing my work in a way that doesn't feel artificially pressuring me into making subpar work just to get views and engagement. When I post an image, it will be because I love what I've created and feel it's time to share it.

I hope you enjoy the site and please feel free to reach out to me via the contact form if you have any questions or comments!