I always had a mild interest in astronomy, and it became a strong interest in the 1990s, triggered by a homework assignment given to my ten-year-old son to go out at night and identify some constellations. I took him away from the city lights to a park where we could see the stars emerge from twilight. On that beautiful fall evening, we found the constellations he was looking for, and we also saw Jupiter, the brightest object in the sky. Through binoculars, we were surprised that we could see its moons. This caused me to wonder what else I might be able to see if I were to look a little closer.
The internet has evolved tremendously since its early days when I first tried to use web pages to show the results of my nighttime photography. Back then, our (dial-up) Internet Service Provider (ATT) offered a home page and a URL subspace to their customers. I took advantage of it and crafted some pages to hold my pictures and stories. Later, I acquired my own domain, nightscapes.net, found a host, loaded my stuff onto it and even got some professional help to re-organize when it became unwieldy.
I learned that maintaining a website can be a lot of work; the technology evolves, links and scripts break, web page conventions, html standards and visitor expectations change. I’m not a programmer (despite a lifetime of doing it), and my interests are in the art and science of images, not the latest network and browser technologies for supporting the latest desktop/laptop/tablet/phone displays.
So I was excited to discover a website service oriented toward photographers, a platform with a small army of support people who maintain it, with features that display photographs at their best, regardless of display or browser, keeping up with the latest updates to internet programming standards. They offer additional services for professional photographers (“buy print”, etc), and at an earlier time I might have subscribed to them.
But I am happy now to keep the shopping cart icons suppressed and not distract from the images themselves.
I have transferred my collection of nightscapes accumulated over the last two decades, over to smugmug, where you can find it at thorolson.smugmug.com. I know people don’t power-browse through large collections of pictures, so I consider this to be really more of an archive, to continue my project of making a digital coffee table book of my favorites.
But I will also use the site to display my more recent work, as I complete it. It will be a relief to have a way to do so without the overhead of manually creating and integrating new web pages for them.
I intend to make posts to this, my personal website, when I add new photographs. I invite you to subscribe or “follow” me, which will send you an email when new posts are made. If you are intrigued by the types of pictures I like to take, well, I take enjoyment in sharing them and would love to have you as a follower.
