The orig­i­nal portfoliography.com, launched in mid early 2004 was a sim­ple, mostly sta­tic HTML pages. In recent years, we saw the web going from mail­ing lists to BlackBerries, Hotmail (or many other xx-Mail) to Gmail; Photo Labs to Flickr, and most impor­tantly from Modem to the ubiq­ui­tous Wi-fi sig­nals with broad­band con­nec­tion. The Web 2.0 was born.

With the con­di­tions set, what was then a sin­gle, iso­lated web­site is now an inter­con­nected web of data flow & porta­bil­ity, what was then your bunch of files on your per­sonal computer(s) are now the Clouds, for the web is the sky, and your data is the ‘Cloud’–suspended online, avail­able for grab when­ever, wher­ever we want it.

We were faced with many chal­lenges back in 2004. We didn’t have enough knowl­edge, nor tech­nol­ogy and the infra­struc­ture to real­ize our basic idea of how our web­site could be. They were not enough users to con­vince us to go knock some bou­tique web design com­pa­nies’ doors, and cer­tainly not enough money to hire them. So we ended up find­ing our own recipe, and cook our break­fast, lunch & din­ner altogether.

Thousands of vis­its, dozens of clients and 4 good years later we decided to renew our com­mit­ment. Recreating the web­site with a whole new direc­tion that would reflect what we have become as a pho­tog­ra­phy company.

PORTFOLIO 2.0

A sim­ple objec­tive dri­ves our renewed com­mit­ment: let­ting you find what you want to see as easy, as sim­ple as pos­si­ble. This very objec­tive see the light of a sim­ple idea, that tran­scends into a work­ing plan, research and a 4 year odyssey of how to turn that very sim­ple idea alive.

We wanted to make the web­site as a dig­i­tal pic­ture frame that you con­trol to view our pho­tographs, we wanted it to become your per­sonal front of what we do, and how to get in touch with us. At the same time, we were chal­lenged with the mas­sive amount of poten­tial band­width transfer–where a pho­to­graph can weigh 100kb each, which trans­lates to 3–5 sec­onds of your pre­cious time, on a 56kbps (remem­ber modem?) con­nec­tion. Not to men­tion the ani­ma­tion and flu­id­ity that we want you to expe­ri­ence. We had a tech­nol­ogy & tool that peo­ple used back then: Macromedia (now Adobe) Flash, which we don’t (and never) liked, we decided to wait and find another way around. After a cool, tremen­dous 4 years of hill-climbing, roller­coaster like ride, we are proud to present you the new PORTFOLIO 2.0.

Learning can be hard or dif­fi­cult, steal­ing is eas­ier, but it is not a solu­tion. Understanding is a black/white process, copying/stealing puts you in a grey area. Understanding, on the other hand will ulti­mately push you through the bor­der of lim­its and take you through the beau­ti­ful jour­ney of joy & enlight­en­ment. The jour­ney that we had was beau­ti­ful. Slow, but one would not trade it for any­thing sim­pler. It was reward­ing as much as it is enjoyable.

The Structure

The home­page fea­tures a BIG pre­sen­ta­tion of our lat­est works that fades in/out to another one. You will find the main nav­i­ga­tion on top where you can eas­ily nav­i­gate from/around our entire site. Both ‘Home’ and the PORTFOLIO® logo will take you back to the home­page any­time, anywhere.

Portfolio is a sub-menu of our gallery albums (more about this below). Projects is where you find our pro bono projects, causes or what-not that do not fit else­where. On the right you can search any­thing that you’d think of just like google; slightly above the search area, you will find a ‘View Work’ but­ton that will reveal a hum­ble intro­duc­tion and overview of our most recent work.

Scrolling down, you will be pre­sented upon selec­tion of our recent gallery post and blog entry, the foot­note is where we put all the quin­tes­sen­tial things other web­site has, like credit, links and ran­dom mumbo jumbo that we’d rather have but not slow­ing you down.

The Gallery

Clicking the big photo, or choos­ing one of the Portfolio cat­e­gories will bring you to the Gallery. The Gallery is the very rea­son why we waited such a long time, we want to have some­thing pow­er­ful and easy to main­tain with­out sac­ri­fic­ing usabil­ity and sim­plic­ity. The gallery fea­tures a cool Javascript/AJAX effects that does not kill your browser nor slow you down, click­ing the main photo will advance to the next in line, the small thumb­nail on the right will indi­cate where you are, and choose where to go next time ala flickr.com. On the bot­tom, you may find some use­ful info about the photo, or cap­tion when­ever applic­a­ble. If you are a pho­tog­ra­pher, you may also find the expo­sure data (EXIF) use­ful when­ver avail­able. To advance to the next gallery (next post) you can see the arrow on the right/left to nav­i­gate to/from one gallery album to another. The best part is, the whole thing is done dynam­i­cally, no more man­ual updat­ing of sta­tic pages! A mutual ben­e­fit of con­ve­nience for you and us!

Last but not least: The Blog.

We love to write, as much as we love our cam­era and pho­tographs, from time to time, you will find some use­ful arti­cles of photo related news, prod­uct reviews, tips/tutorials, ran­dom thoughts about movies, music, etc. Like most pop­u­lar web­site, RSS/ATOM syn­di­ca­tion is avail­able for free.

About Copyright

You are per­mit­ted to copy, quote & reblog any mate­r­ial here so long it does more ben­e­fit than harm, and no com­mer­cial under­tak­ing what­so­ever. We’d appre­ci­ate if if you could link back to us, or let us know when you use it, we love to share as much as we love oth­ers who share them! When you find some­thing and would like to dis­cuss any com­mer­cial under­tak­ing, feel free to con­tact us directly. We hope you enjoy your stay. Do leave us a com­ment, or drop us some words, we’d love to hear from you!

With all the love, W.