Photography, for me, is a hobby verging on a passion; with most of my pleasure coming from shooting at gigs. I get to hear good music, and I get to hone my skills – not a bad life really. I’m also a system administrator, with the ability to write code in a variety of languages, and for over a year now, I’ve been designing and poking at a dream gallery system that would give the subjects of my photos a measure of control on the distribution of those photos.
This entry isn’t to announce that I’ve managed to do that; it’s the complete opposite.
I’ve found that Zenfolio has come on a long way since I looked at it a year ago. The Zenfolio service offers custom theming, order fulfillment, password protection, digital licensing and more. I could, in time, write my own code to do this, but I’m coming to the realisation that I just don’t have the energy, nor skill, to write my dream system. I could probably get my programming up to the skill level required to do it properly, but the time I’d spend doing that could be spent listening to live music or processing photos from a gig so that I can attempt to earn a little pocket money from them.
I think I’ll take the live music and pocket money. I get plenty of chances to excercise my coding streak at work.