TSU, The Smaller Universe, reflects my vision and direction with photography. I feel that there are plenty of great Autumn pictures, piles of super scenic's and nature panoramas; beautiful, ethereal Antelope Canyon is everywhere. I'd like to look elsewhere. I'm striving to find and reveal the beauty that is created by the right, perfect light, in everyday scenes and objects. Things you might walk by and never notice. And to get in close and find the smallest detail, the Smaller Universe.
The site provides a world portal where I can offer my work for sale with only the essentials: A selection of images I feel are especially good, and a useful range of print sizes available through a simple shopping cart interface that makes print purchasing easy. Just matted, ready-to-frame archival prints, in a range of useful sizes, done by myself to the visitor's order.
Using two excellent Dreamweaver extensions (Image Gallery Magic and Pop Menu Magic) from Project Seven, the site has been built from the ground up. Dreamweaver 8 was used mainly to get the layout and "look" in place, as well as utilize the functionality of the pre-built gallery and menu system. But the majority of work was done on the code-side, tweaking and adding PHP and Javascript, and even a little PERL. I've taken a somewhat unique approach in that the gallery itself provides the 'database' of images. By interacting with the gallery-extension's code I was able gather information on the displayed images to create the shopping cart structure.
I had looked at a number of existing free and pay-for gallery software packages, and most were too heavy handed, too complicated or too pricey. So I decided to 'roll my own'. I create the images, process them, build the web-site to promote them, produce the final prints and mount them on the mats I cut myself. This certainly gives me a great deal of control on the images and the process as a whole, not to mention a great sense of satisfaction in 'doing it all'. Which, to a certain extent, is the total promise of digital fulfilled.
This site is also the culmination of many years of off-and-on involvement with photography, shooting transparencies and working in the classic black and white wet darkroom in the '60s and '70's. With my introduction to Photoshop 3 somewhere around 1992 or so, the Dream began: the ability to have a complete working studio with color and black and white production facility all in the same room. When I got my hands on that early version of Photoshop and began tinkering with some scanned photos, I was hooked and the love affair began!
With a Mac G5, Photoshop and Lightroom to process my "negatives" (I shoot only Camera RAW), and an Epson 3800 printer to create the final real-world incarnation of those bits of data, the circle is complete. Prints produced on today's inkjet printers easily rival classic C-type prints of yore, and definitely exceeds their longevity. The creamy, grainless black and white images possible are becoming legend. Properly handled prints created with the Epson UltraChromeK3 ink-set are rated to last from 60 to well over 100 years.