What does it take to create a great photograph? Is it the subject? Is it the media? How about the theme? I wish I knew.

I have many friends who tell me how wonderful my photographs are, but very few strangers. I have sold a few pieces, but little more than that. At my class reunion last June, a former classmate told me that he liked what he saw on my website. He sought me out just to say so. Despite this, I feel that I have hit a creative slump that I just can't seem to overcome.

One obstacle is equipment. Apart from a daylight film processing tank and a film scanner, I don't have access to the facilities that other fine art photographers use. Enlargers, different types and grades of paper, different chemistry, and other tools that can change a boring photograph into something special and unique. Even if I had the equipment, I don't have the space.

Another obstacle is subject matter. Kitsap County is next to a temperate rain forest. There are lots of indigenous flora and fauna. I see many photographs of eagles and bears and birds shot by local photographers, so I feel that anything I could produce would just look cliché, like a cheap copy of what has already been done. Bremerton has a rich industrial heritage. Submarines. Aircraft carriers. Artillery batteries. I think that I have covered most of those already.

I suppose the moment of sudden realization came after the last Kitsap County Fair. Out of four entries, I received three honorable mentions and a second place ribbon. I don't mean to appear ungrateful, but I expected more than that. Perhaps it was my own arrogance, but I did better in prior years and this year I thought that my entries were quite good, and even better than in prior years. This was a local exhibition, so I didn't anticipate much fierce competition.

Perhaps it is a weakness of mine that I don't use Photoshop. I don't cut and paste parts of an image to create another. Apart from removing specks of dust or changing the color balance a bit, I don't manipulate the final image. I might dodge or burn-in portions of a print, but what I see in the viewfinder is what I expect to see in the final print. Judging by what I saw in the winner's circle this year, this may no longer be enough.

No matter, I'll keep soldiering on. I have lots of film. I have patience. Maybe I'm just my own worst enemy, but all I need is inspiration to catch my imagination so I can feel fulfillment with the final print again.

I'm sure glad that I have a day job.

So just how hard could it be to build a web gallery? You see them all over the web and they vary in quality. I was pushed into building a website about a year and a half ago at the request of the owner of one of my venues, the Global Bean Coffee Company.

There was a bit of a learning curve. I had to find a web hosting service and learn how to set up the site and the domain. Then there was the web publishing software to find, set up, and learn to use. It’s not quite as easy as falling out of bed, but it becomes intuitive after some practice.

There are many web hosts available and it wasn’t hard to find a reputable one. There are scam artists I’m sure, but a bit of research should ferret out the good ones. The software needed to build the site was a different issue. I looked at several, but decided on RapidWeaver offered by Realmac Software. The iWeb software that comes with OS X just wasn’t sophisticated enough. You can also download a free version of RapidWeaver. It does everything the licensed version does, but you can only build three web pages which isn’t very useful unless all you need is a homepage and two gallery pages.

To begin with, RapidWeaver is built for the Apple MacIntosh, which is the platform that I use for the native graphics features in OS X. RapidWeaver is supported by a wide range of theme developers from all over the world. A theme establishes the look and feel of a website. Some are rather plain, but functional. Others are highly customizable, such as the one that I used for this website. I used the PageMix theme from MultiThemes, an Italian developer. They offer themes at quite a reasonable price for what you get. They even have a few simple themes available at no cost that help the neophyte learn how they work.

Themes are very helpful, but there are also plug-ins built for RapidWeaver that simplify building web pages. Your Head Software offers a number of plug-ins. My home page was built using the Stacks plug-in and the gallery pages were made with the Collage plug-in. The Method and Resume pages were both built with the Accordion plug-in. All of these plug-ins came from Your Head. For months, I used the RapidAlbum photo gallery plug-in, which is free from Mackie Software. I have never required support from the third party developers, but I needed a bit of help from RealMac once and they were better than any company I have ever dealt with.

There is FaceBook and Flickr, but why not try to be more independent? Even if I am the only one who visits the site, at least I know who created it and the domain name is mine to keep as long as I keep it registered.