The Turning Gate

Turning Gate Photography / Project Seoul 2.0

Photoblog renovation

Project Seoul is ch-ch-ch-ch-changin’!

My photographic world has gone through immense shifts this year. I’ve put an increased emphasis on concert photography, I’ve revamped and improved my photographic workflow (thank you, Lightroom) and I’ve set new organizational standards for photographic library. In short, I’ve been getting my shit together.

And now, Project Seoul has some catching up to do.

The site is being reorganized, redesigned, relocated and redefined to better accommodate my new workflow and organizational methods, to more easily facilitate any future uses for the photography therein, and to take better advantage of the photographic traffic coming through my blog since beginning my Lightroom work/rants.

And, I hope, no more SPAM.

The new version of my photoblog includes Project Seoul, without being so limited in scope. Project Seoul is only a part of what I hope will be a thematically broadened showcase for my photography. The blog runs on an experimental combination of Lightroom, Flickr and MonoSlideshow, as described here, that I hope will work out well for me.

You may access the new photoblog by selecting Photography from the main site menu.

A brief history of Project Seoul

I began the original Project Seoul photoblog in August 2005, shortly after arriving for my third stint in South Korea. Project Seoul is my on-going attempt to capture Korean life, culture, scenary and miscellany via photography. The site thus defined, I kept at it until early 2007, then abruptly stopped for the above reasons.

State of the Union

I’m still in the process of organizing my Project Seoul photos online and offline. This includes retrieving the titles and captions from the old website – currently the only place this information exists – and filing it along with the images in my library. I’m also updating the metadata of each image with keywords/tags and other information. As I finish each photo, it gets added to the gallery, and so the images on the website partially reflect the progress I’ve made in organizing my images locally.

As I go, I’m also reprocessing images. Naturally, I’m better at it now than I was two years ago when I began my photoblog. Many of the images are finding new life, reprocessed and (hopefully) improved. In some cases, the images very much resemble their former counterparts. In other cases, I’ve take the images in completely different directions, changing them greatly from their original incarnations.

Old version left; newly reprocessed right.

And, because I previously ran Project Seoul as a daily photoblog, I sometimes posted sub-par material simply for the sake of keeping schedule. I’ll be weeding out as much filler material as possible. The end result will hopefully be a tighter, more interesting presentation of overall higher quality than what was previously on tap. Offsetting my cuts, however, I’ve also found a number of previously overlooked images in my library. Some of these will be appearing for the first time in the new gallery.

The process of repopulating my Project Seoul galleries will be time-consuming. I consider the reorganization of my library to be a necessary labor, however. I hope visitors will enjoy the show.

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