In the meantime, if you are trying to look at my images, please browse through the blog! Hopefully the company will get the server back up – or I will have to take my business elsewhere.

UPDATE: It looks like things are working now – if not a bit more slowly.

I’ve ditched my much-loved warm color palette for nuetral grays and whites – I love yellow and orange, but I think white, grey, and black provide a better background for viewing photos. I’m also using a different content managing system, which should enable the slideshows to load faster.

I know, geek speak! But I’m really excited about the new site and can’t wait to launch it.

Ugh. For first-time visitors to the blog, I promise that this is not some minimalist experiment of expression! Hopefully the WordPress fairy will visit me during the night and get everything back to normal. Until then, at least my photographs are viewable. Just not in the most aesthetically pleasing environment.

I also have a new blog to go along with my new site – a big thanks to NetRivet for providing such a great WordPress theme! I still need to do some touching up of my posts from the first half of 2008, but all my new posts will have wonderful big pictures. And now that I am running WordPress I can have everything hosted with my own www.sonialena.com domain.

I’m somewhat ashamed of how behind I am in my blogging – I have portrait sessions and weddings from the last four months of 2008 that have yet to be shared with the world. Not to mention a bit of personal work here and there that I’d like to put up as well.

I’m hoping to be all caught up by the time I leave for Washington DC in two weeks for Obama’s inauguration, because I will have plenty to blog about when I return!

I am still working on redesigning my website so that I can ditch my template by the beginning of 2009. I’m a big fan of sites such as this one for Peter Yang. I like that you can view all the gallery images on one page, unlike many Flash websites.

I don’t find Flash to be very user friendly. Flash can definitely create some beautiful sites, but often they’re slow to load, can be difficult to navigate, and don’t allow any bookmarking of specific images.

But Flash is definitely the flavor of the day when it comes to photographer websites. I might not ditch it completely, but I will definitely not have an all-Flash site.

I know – duh.

The main reasons I keep going are that I just want to prove to myself I can do it, and I want something that I can control. So if I need to add a new gallery, or change some text, I don’t need to hound someone else to do it. I only need to hound myself – which is already hard enough.

The next hurdle is WordPress – I installed it and am somewhat hypnotized with all this PHP stuff. It’s hard to believe that all those weird words and symbols actually mean something, and that there are people who understand it.

And here I am, still fumbling through CSS.

Clearly there are plenty of people who have figured out all this stuff, and I like to think that I’m reasonably intelligent. The goal is to get this thing up in July. And if I haven’t hurled my computer out the window by then, I will move on to re-energizing my personal website, and finally – the Big Kahuna – redesigning my photography site.

But the idea of a website just for this project seems like such a good idea. I could have the portraits. Then I could add essays. A section of resources. A blog that deals exclusively with mixed-race issues.

And a movie section – which I admit seems kind of random. But the idea of writing critical essays about the ways in which mixed racialness is portrayed in cinema has been bouncing around my head since I was film school student at UCLA.

So I’ll put up with the headaches in order to get the site just how I want it. And I’ll pray that the Flash fairy visits me and helps me build a slideshow based on an XML file that allows for visitor interactivity so that they can click on a photo and be whisked away to the relevant photo gallery.

Ugh. I get sick just writing that.

First is was the flower, then the rings. Now it’s these circle people. I made this illustration to use as the banner for my website, and I have to say, I’m really digging it. It looks exactly how I envisioned it. I might toy with the colors, make the rays a little wider, but overall I’m happy with the look.

I’m starting to get the hang of this Illustrator thing. It’s still a struggle, and things like this take me a long time. But all I can say is that layers and clipping masks are wonderful things.

One banner down, a whole website left to go!

So I’m experimenting with different ideas for the logo. Right now I’m keen on circles. I was thinking of doing three circles coming together to make different colors – like when you see explanations of the RGB color model, and the three red, green, and blue circles overlap to make cyan, yellow, magenta, and white.

But it doesn’t look so hot when you substitute various shades of brown, since I’ve decided to use a skin-toned color palette. So I came up with these five rings, which I like. For now.