New photography portfolio4 min read

Side note: I originally planned to publish part III of my “upgrade treadmill trilogy” on January 31st, 2022, but something unexpected came up in recent days, which might make me rewrite the majority of that blog post for the 3rd time, so… holding pattern for now. It’ll probably happen later in February-March. In the meantime, here’s some unrelated quick announcement I wanted to share for quite a while.

For more than 18 years now, I’ve secretly been a photographer—including client work when opportunity arose—but I never took the time to build a photographic portfolio, because traditionally photography is not my core business.

However, a wildly impressed client of mine recently insisted I make an official photography folio to show publicly for the first time, and so I have painstakingly built it, as sub-pages on the Atypica website (such as the portraits page). Here are a handful of samples to whet your appetite:

I can hear you say, “But Jeff, you already had a photo gallery on your personal website, for years!” and you would be right, but it’s an extensive and informal gallery, not a select portfolio. In a portfolio, less is more: it is meant to be shown to people who only have 30 seconds to spare, not to friends, family and community members who wish to see the whole story of a trip to Zanzibarland or to find a reasonably complete depiction of a particular FLOSS conference event.

On my computer, my photo library has somewhere around 49 thousand items. Building this portfolio was thus an exercise in self-restraint, a ruthless selection & elimination process, going through my many thousands “good to excellent” pictures then culling the finalists, in multiple plasses, to only one or two dozen “top 1%” eye-catching pictures for each category.

You can see this in the resulting Atypica photo portfolio subpages, such as portraits photography, construction sites photography, events photography, etc. (there are more categories in the nav bar at the top).

Designing those pages and manually placing every element for importance and visual harmony, in two languages, was a hell of a job. Who said Tetris was fun?! 😤 Anyway, enjoy the result!