I have been working on a major redesign of my blog and website for some time now. The work is progressing relatively slowly as I have little time to devote to it, but so far I'm happy with how it's going.
Domain changes
The initial domain was quite difficult to find. I wanted to use my name (I know, it's ego trip), but no domain that matched my name was available, so I ended up compromising with the domain vd-photography.com
Since I was never satisfied with this domain, I continued to periodically check available domains. In the end, luck showed up and the second best domain became available (last name - first name), so I leased the vuckovicdejan.com domain
The old domain was redirected to the new one and now the domains are almost as I want them to be.
Design
I experimented a lot with the design. I wanted it to be simple, but still add some punch and visual impact to the visitors. I kind of immediately got oriented towards WordPress and its themes. Finding the right theme was a slow and painstaking process. I eventually discovered Yuki Themes and after trying a few of them, I settled on Yuki Blogger. This theme offers a lot of customization options, yet it's not cluttered. The right balance between features and ease of use.
Blog posts
Here I wandered for years. In the beginning, I wanted my blog to be accessible to as wide an audience as possible, so I chose to have it in English. There was a small problem - English is not my native language. Although I speak it fluently, I'm a little worse at writing. Every language has its own rules and many of them are unknown to me because, to be completely honest, I have never had the need to speak and write pure literary English. If I were to invest time in it now, it would take too much of my limited time anyway - I have a family, a very demanding job, my travels take a lot of time as well as my daily sports activities.
It turns out that writing in English has major drawbacks. I initially write texts in my native language - Serbian. I write very well in Serbian, over the years I have received awards for short stories, travelogues, and novellas. However, the Serbian language has its own rules. The very complex grammar allows the freedom to construct a sentence that is very difficult to transfer into the English language, and therefore my style of narration was also very difficult to transfer. The texts I tried to write in English from the very beginning had another problem - they didn't have my stamp. I realized that over time I was copying writers who had a great influence on me such as Douglas Adams, Ursula Le Guin, Charles Bukowski, William Gibson... The texts had a heavy taste of someone else's style and when it all came together - I didn't like them. That's how I made the decision to write in Serbian. This meant that a good part of the texts had to be rewritten all over again.
Decades of Photography
I have always been involved in photography, but in the last ten years I have intensively used post editing to bring the photos to my level of understanding the scene. I know that my photos are very colorful, often over saturated. Accept it as my style. At one time, I learned from several masters of photography and in the end I came to the position that a photo should bring an emotion and not be an absolutely realistic witness of the scene it depicts. These two schools of photography often clash, but for now the path I'm taking is clear. Colors, saturation, extreme clarity of the scene are my signature. Therefore, I made the decision not to re-process most of the photos, but to more or less use the post production that already exists.
The process of creating a new site
In the beginning, I had several thousand photos from different locations and only text frames. All my photos tell some stories, usually very intimate ones. I started putting them together. Some stories I told very easily, others required me to write them over and over again until I was satisfied with the results. The content creation process is constant for now, but it comes in waves of creativity and free time. If I had to give a quantification, less than 10% of the already ready photos are published, and there are years and years of unpublished locations and trips. But, for now, I'm happy with the process and the results. At this moment, about 35 texts have been written and published.
Video library
Video is another medium I've recently begun to explore. I am still far from being able to convey the message that is in my head, but I am slowly making progress. The collection of videos slowly emerges and depending on time and creativity, the videos accumulate. I have recently done a huge amount of posting and video work on the site. For now it's just a video library, with no additional descriptions, and I intend to keep it that way for most video content. My intention is to start a Video blog section of the site one day, but I will think about it once I estimate the time needed to create such content and its appearance.
Photo prints
Over the years, I've sold quite a few of my photos in digital and print form. I don't consider it any source of income because the cost of creating those photos is much higher. On the other hand, the satisfaction is enormous when I enter the offices of business associates, the houses of friends that are decorated with my photos. My house is full of my photos and every month I treat myself to a print of some of the scenes that have brightened my days.
To this day, I'm still surprised when I stumble across a site that uses some of my photos for its visual identity.
Next steps
My primary goal is to publish texts and photos that already exist in some form. I have about 80 candidates for that, however, some topics should be broken into several posts and some I won't even cover. In any case, there is a lot of work to be done, but I expect that by the end of the year most of the old topics will be processed and published.
I'll add a few sections to the site, primarily related to the equipment I use, because I consider that my experience in the use of cycling and hiking equipment is very extensive. I may add a section about myself, although I believe that my texts say much more about me than I could give in one dedicated text.
Last but not least - why don't I publish on Hive
Steemit and then Hive were at one point the primary platform for publishing blogs. However, there are many problems. Steemit failed the blockchain test and Hive failed the humanity test. At some point I got into conflict with the hivewatcher team and that conflict is still going on. I never know when the team will decide to punish me, and let's be completely realistic - there is no worse thing for creativity than unjustified punishment. Since my writings at this point can be considered recycled stories and posting old photos that have already been posted to a good extent on Hive, I decided not to post them for now. I'll probably do a mass upload of all the blogs at some point with no earnings, but that's just an idea for now.
#photography #travel #nature #travel #outdoor #photo #serbia #srbija
#TravelFeed #PhotoLovers #PeakD #Curie #OCD
