A fresh start! The changing costs of photography

Hi there! About ten days before my hosting contract with another supplier (G*****y, for the curious) was about to end, they notified me that costs for three years (hosting only) would rise to $972. That was quite the surprise. The cost back in 2023 was $714, perhaps even a hundred or so less. Not only that, but I was informed that I had a 30 gigabyte (GB) limit on my site. I was at 90 GB. They waited until I would almost lose the site before telling me that they would happily sell me 60 GB more space for about $15 a month, or $180 more. To get the code that releases my site’s domain name and allows me to transfer the domain elsewhere? It’s found in the “C-Panel” on a one-row Excel spreadsheet, but buried at the far end of rows that have blank cells. Are we trying to make it hard, supplier? A “service mentality” this is not: it’s hardly extortion, but it’s tending in that direction. The term in the world of automated discouragement is “sludge.”

Of course, the supplier has every right to charge what he wants, and I have every right to do what I did: downloaded all the pages, exported the smallest file I could so that I could retain some formatting, and found another supplier.

What’s interesting about this for photography is that the costs have shifted from 50 years ago entirely from producing an image to getting it before peoples’ eyes. The Internet is much like a third-grade class of eager kids and a tired teacher. “Who wants to print the answers on the board?” Everybody shouts, “Pick me, pick me!” and waves his hand crazily in the air. The tired teacher picks the first child that catches her eye, maybe her favorite. The implied parallel between the search engine and the teacher is not that a propos, but the similarity between shouting, waving children and us who put our work out before the public is pretty close.

Every week I get e-mails from people who flatter me for my website before saying that there are a few errors and they would like to send over a little report, etc. (If that’s you — thanks, but no thanks!)

I hope to put up sample images from my previous site, for those who might want event photography or portraiture, but also from my travels: a couple of weddings, a model shoot in the studio, and images from Switzerland.

For personal satisfaction I am most interested in art, in capturing images that are not always pretty, but are visually interesting. So I will continue to use studio lighting, special lenses, and experiments in post-processing in color and black & white to do something different. Impressionism impresses me. Landscapes (especially with mist, or in the mountains) delight me. A pretty girl in the studio inspires me to capture beauty, but to keep experimenting, trying something new.

I had over 8,000 images on my old site. I am going to have to be more disciplined and “curate” my work. I may take 300 shots because each capture gives me a little shot of dopamine, but you may end up only seeing five. I may see if I can’t link to other images I post on Instagram, Facebook, or some other free site. Nonetheless, I’ll have to learn to pick the best one from among five or fifty that are pleasing.

The web-hosting business is a bit like the Wild West right now, rather like the Comcast-Verizon competition a decade ago. Those suppliers realized that no-escape contracts, hidden fees, false claims, etc., led people to go to the company that didn’t lock them in, didn’t add all kinds of initial fees or incidental monthly fees, and didn’t promise download speeds that were seldom attained. Web-hosting companies want to lock you in, but the successful ones will be those that treat the customer the way they would like to be treated.

Anyway, I’m glad that I have my new website up and running (or will shortly, as I’m writing this). If you need a photographer for your event, or for headshots, or you just want to take advantage of my artistic skill in the studio — let me know! Enjoy what you see here, and feel free to comment.