In order to understand why this site is here, you must hear the story of how it started. I’ve been interested in photography for a very long time. My interest started in middle school, when I was doing volunteer work at a thrift store in Santa Ana where my grandmother volunteered as well; I found a camera in the racks and my grandmother bought it for me. After going through a couple hundred rolls of film, my grandfather gave me his old Minolta camera; I started using that to take pictures instead.
On my 13th birthday (I think?) I got a Kodak point and shoot digital camera which I used until the rechargable batteries wouldn’t recharge anymore. Between there and age 17 I sort of dropped photography for a time while I focused instead on music, artwork, film, and various other obsessions during the time. The summer before starting college, I bought a Canon T1i at Best Buy with my graduation money and spent the entire summer filming and photographing my friends, which completely rekindled my love for it in the first place.
So I started college in August 2010 at Chapman University, studying music composition. During orientation week there I met loads of new people, most of which I don’t remember at all, 3 of which I am moving in with next semester. One of the others was a guy named Nathan Worden, who happens to be an RA here at Chapman. After becoming friends on Facebook (the widely accepted affirmation of true friendship), I noticed that he had started a blog earlier in the year in which he was taking at least one photo every day and putting it up on a website. This was an awesome idea, but since it was the middle of August I really didn’t think much about doing it myself. The rest of first semester went by mostly without a hitch, and I continued using my camera for various hobbyist activities.
Over winter break, two days before Christmas, my dad was admitted to the hospital and had to undergo emergency surgery to repair complications from a previous surgery. My mom and I flew into Seattle and spent Christmas in the ICU with him. After staying up there for a few days, I needed to get back down to California to be with friends and family, and to prepare the house for my parents when they eventually flew down some time later. While they had initially planned to be down by January 1st, a series of complications led to my dad being readmitted into the hospital. During this time, I was allowed to open my big present down in California: a Canon 7D. So, here I was with mostly nothing to do for around a month, my parents up in Seattle… so I started this website. I’m eleven days late for an entire year of photos, but I’ll assume that’s alright, since the first eleven days of the new year are days that I’d want to forget anyways.
So, thus began this website. I registered the domain name on January 11th, 2011 and spent an entire day setting up the site. It went through a variety of different looks before ending up the way it is now, as the home of Creative Projects, my entire collective body of creative work, including all my music, artwork, films, and of course, the Photo of the Day.
Hope you enjoy your time here :)
Look for the featured ribbon in the corner of posts to see the good stuff.
Additionally, any complaints you have about the site and its functionality should be directed to the comments section on this page. I’ll do my best to fix any issues.
Known Issues:
-Site loads extremely slowly after viewing the previous iteration of the template.
Fix: try clearing your browser’s cache. The site is trying to pre-load data from the other iterations of templates, slowing down the current and up-to-date template.
Changelog:
-02/15 Site changed to new template
-02/20 Slow loading bug fixed
-03/03 Fixed site speed. All thumbnails/featured optimized to 70% quality, correctly sized Jpegs.