Peter Pan: I remember you being a lot bigger.
Captain Hook: To a ten year-old I’m huge.
Since moving to Hawaii, I have not needed an alarm clock. Each morning the silence of the night is broken by the sunrise and the orchestration and revelry of songbirds celebrating another day in paradise. It is an instinct that has been bred into them. Even when they can’t see the sun or it can’t be seen in the darkest recess of a tropical forest at the bottom of a gulch, the birds begin to sing.
The players in the band are an eclectic mix of endemic, introduced and indigenous crooners and torch singers. There’s Java Sparrow, Saffron Finch, Red-billed Leiothrix, Kalij Pheasant, Japanese White-eye, House Finch, House Sparrow, Spotted Dove, Myna, Yellow-fronted Canary, and Nutmeg Mannikin, all chirping in with their own unique version of Jill Scott’s “Gotta Get Up”.
But I have to say it is the Northern Red Cardinal that is the bugle boy of the bunch, always the first voice heard at dawn. His clear whistled notes are easily identifiable from a distance. I thought I’d heard all his tunes until the day this image was taken. Instead of his usual clear alternating up and down whistles, as he looked around, he called out in a soft, questioning, cooing tone. It wasn’t long before the female of the species sidled up next to him.
Booty call baby!
A good story has a beginning, a middle and an end. A good story has a character who changes by conclusion. A good story has promise, often through drama, to lead somewhere, confirming some truth along the way. Drama, defined by William Archer is “anticipation mingled with uncertainty.”
With the release of Tropical Exposures I can tell you there has certainly been great anticipation and uncertainty on my behalf. In the beginning, my assumption was that my initial blog posting was going to be about my photography. But here I sit, writing about the adventure of it all.
My objective was to create a website that would be easy to maintain, simple in function, attractive in design and provide a vehicle to share my work and corresponding thoughts. I just wanted to be able to focus on my photography without having to put on my propeller-head hat to get it done.
My first thought was to contract the site development to someone else. But after getting a few quotes I decided it was more than I wanted to spend. I thought the maintenance cost was especially painful. So what the heck, I’m a bit of a propeller-head, how hard could it be?
Well, four months later, after taking my old site down, switching my web host, getting a new computer, getting a new monitor (having to return two of them), installing WordPress, installing my “photography theme,” spending a week redesigning and re-sizing my logo to get it to fit the masthead, spending another week figuring out the optimum size for my images taking into account the framing action, spending a month fooling around with the menu system and the categories, researching and installing a bunch of plugins (while still trying to keep things simple), selecting and uploading my quiver of images, taking on the task of creating the content for each of the splash pages and finally releasing the damn thing to the Internet.
And I am not yet finished. I still need to select, figure out and install a SEO plugin (Search Engine Optimization) and a good backup plugin. I’m also toying with the idea of adding a Twitter, RSS and Face Book component, not to mention some sort of PayPal wizard so people can order prints.
But, as they say, “Rome was not built in a day” and I would like to get back to my photography.
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Through all this, I keep thinking about a statement I read somewhere mentioning that you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to create a WordPress Blog. Well, I can tell you that it doesn’t hurt to at least have propeller-head hat and know how to use Google.
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