So why is it named "DomaniPhoto"?

Domani is Italian for "tomorrow". I've been meaning to start a gallery separate from my personal one for a while to highlight some of my favorite pictures that I've taken. I've another one at another site, but it's become more like the communal family photo depository. I use Flickr also, but it's for the blog and very few pictures at my Flickr account are my own. I think they blacklisted me for having too many "web-trash" pictures. So, enter DomaniPhoto.com that hosts only my pictures and no one else's. I named it Domani because I kept putting its development off 'til tomorrow. I'm not a pro and I never said I was very good, I just like doing it.

The Workflow

All photographs are taken with my digital SLR Canon 20D which I bought with a work bonus and love more than my child if I had one. I use EOS Canon lenses, mostly a prime 50mm. I mean to get a wide-angle L series as soon as I can scrape cash together. I'm not a participant in the Canon vs. Nikon wars. This is just the family I happen to have started with and am happy with it so I stick with it. I shoot in RAW exclusively now.

After taking pictures, I transfer them to my beloved iMac into Apple's Aperture which despite its reported flaws is a godsend for me. The previous proposed workflow of Adobe Camera Raw > Bridge > Photoshop tires me out just thinking about it. I'm not a professional and Aperture makes it so easy to work exclusively in RAW, no intermediate file formats or multiple files of the same thing. It's awesome though it runs my iMac ragged. When I get rich and famous, I'll have a Quad Power Mac with more RAM than God to do all this on.

Once in Aperture, I edit and fine-tune for exposure and color (I tend to like black and white) and export to the desktop. Using Gallery's upload panel, I transfer from the computer to the web. That's it as far as the pictures themselves go.

Technical Maintenance

No, I didn't write the php code to do all this. I write and edit CSS files and XHTML files for external files like this page in SubEthaEdit. The gallery wizardry is due to a php application appropriately named Gallery. It uses php, JavaScript, server actions and other things I wouldn't recognize even if they danced naked in front of me. The server and everything that takes all this to your computer screen is handled by my excellent webhost Dreamhost and the friendly geeks who work there. I make all the graphics with Adobe's ubiquitous Photoshop though the photographs themselves are not Photoshopped. That's cheating! Everything is tranferred to my server with Panic's Transmit. Mac developers are excellent. This is all Made with Mac.

All modern browsers should be able to view this site such as Firefox and Safari. If it looks terrible and you're using Internet Explorer, get a good browser. You have no reason not to, I mean, it's free. Internet Explorer is not standards-compliant and I will not turn myself inside out to make this site show up well in it. No one pays me to do this.

Thanks for reading.