THIS IS ME
FROM COMMAND TO COMPOSITION
For three decades, my identity was very much defined by my professional role. From Firefighter to Area Commander and the other ranks in between, these weren’t just titles, they were also a reference point to my responsibilities, my experience, and my place within what was essentially a hierarchy of control within a structured organisation.
By the time my retirement occurred, I had commenced my photography journey and although my direction of travel changed a few years into the journey, I felt at that time that I didn’t need a photography identity.
Having my identity defined within my professional role and the inherent restrictions that came with it, was now no longer part of my life. The last thing I wanted to do post-retirement, was start compartmentalising myself again whilst exploring my creative curiosity behind the camera.
I wanted photography to be my space of absolute freedom, a world without ranks, without pre-defined roles and most definitely, at that time, it was not to be constrained by the boundaries of a specific photography discipline.
THE CATALYST OF INQUIRY
I have spoken previously on a few occasions about how I use self-reflection as a method to push my development. Subjecting yourself to internal inquiry can be a powerful tool and on occasions, it can be an uncomfortable process, but that is a good thing in my opinion.
Its purpose is not to create a comfort zone to inhabit, but rather it’s the opposite, to make sure you don’t get comfortable and subsequently stagnate by forcing yourself to accept your findings and then progress onwards from there.
In my last journal release (blog), the process of self-reflection was very much at the centre of my discussion and how it has been influential in shaping my attitude towards my photography. After I uploaded the journal on to my website, I took a few moments to look through the different pages just to check nothing had changed in terms of the layouts and the site was still functioning as intended.
It was during this review that I found myself looking through the various galleries which resulted in me posing the question, “who am I now’ which then led me to the question ‘What do others see when they look at my work”?
THE DISTILLATION OF INTENT
Since launching my website four years ago, my body of work has been curated over three broad themes, these being Architecture, Landscape and Street photography. The decision to make these themes the custodians of my work was based on my desire to maintain my freedom in terms of my creative identity, in other words, I wanted a licence to roam.
As well founded as my intentions have been to maintain my website as an outlet for these photography themes, I could not deny the evidence before me. Over 80% of my images and all my recognitions (awards, publications and exhibited work) all stemmed from my relationship with the built environment.
From a creative context, as unintentional as it was, my work had manifested into a deliberate distillation of intent, where distractions and secondary interests had been diluted and the noise filtered out. What remained was the core that defined my creative identity, and it is one that is very much centred around architecture.
Over the past ten years, photography has been and still is my emotional outlet; it is how I process the world’s permanence against our own transience. Even within the busiest of urban environments, I feel a sense of tranquillity and serenity when capturing architectural images.
As a former firefighter, fire safety officer and an incident commander, my relationship with a building was centred around its construction, its structural integrity and fire behaviour performance to ensure as far as possible, I could safeguard the safety of a building’s occupants and emergency responders in the event of an incident arising.
Today the relationship is totally different, but the connection is still as strong. The feeling of a sense of danger and the rush of adrenaline when responding to incidents has now been replaced by a feeling of curiosity and the need to develop an understanding between the architect’s vision and my own creative mind.
GOING BACK DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE
Two years ago, I undertook a process of making changes to my website which resulted in being offline for five weeks as I sought to reconcile my creative ambitions with my technical capabilities. Hours of searching through online forums, YouTube videos and general web searches eventually got me to the point where I relaunched my updated website at the beginning of 2024. The structural layout was more of less the same, in other words, using a car analogy, what I done was more like tuning up the engine, whilst leaving the body and interior of the car the same.
Over the past two years, I have been regularly uploading images to my website, however what was clearly evident, this was primarily in relation to my architectural work. The landscape and street galleries were only updated indiscriminately as a token gesture to their presence on my website.
Out with the galleries, I was sporadically publishing new journals at various times and regrettably, I was not curating much on my Resource page, other than updates to a rather clunky embedded Google map which plotted the locations of where my architectural images had been captured.
It was following this latest round of self-reflection that I decided further changes to my website were needed but this time using the car analogy again, it was going to be a total rebuild from the chassis up, with a new engine, new body and a different interior.
My challenge at this point was having the time to achieve this, as I had a seven-day trip coming up which would see me visit three cities for the purposes of some recreation time, intermixed with some architectural photography. After a few weeks back home, a holiday to enjoy some spring sunshine in warmer climes was also in the pipeline.
As fate would have it, a torn calf muscle on the last day of my three cities trip created a window of opportunity to start the process of totally revamping my website. Knowing I didn’t have the luxury of five weeks to get the job completed, I needed to jump back into the rabbit hole of website development and adopt a different strategy with the aspiration of being fully functioning again within two weeks if possible.
IT’S GOOD TO TALK
When I updated my Squarespace website the last time, I was oblivious to the capabilities of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and sought out the solutions I needed myself whilst using the process of trial and error to finish my redesign. This time I sought the assistance of AI and used this exclusively as my go-to source of information, and this turned out to be the best decision I made.
The starting point was to get feedback on my existing design as I initially thought I could make any changes on the fly whilst keeping my website live. On providing details of my website to Gemini (Google’s AI model), the initial feedback using the car analogy one more time, was akin to, “it’s a nice car, but it might as well be in a garage as no one is seeing it regardless how well you wash and polish it”.
In other words, my website was basically invisible to the outside world. I deduced following a review of my analytics that the small number of visitors I was attracting were probably coming off the back of my social media postings as the AI feedback suggested my website basically lacked any presence in terms of being seen by search engines. The report suggested my invisibility stemmed from a variety of reasons.
The practice of using artistic titles as the naming convention for my images meant nothing to search engines. Whilst I used portfolio groups to create my image galleries, the lack of Search Engine Optimising (SEO) text also contributed to my online invisibility. Although I had a number of journals (blogs) published, they too lacked SEO and this also applied to the use of ALT text where other images were embedded across my website. There were inconsistencies in the use of formatting which also had an impact on my visibility as well.
The relatively new challenge of how content is located by AI models using Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) or Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) was another issue I had to contend with. I subsequently learned that traditional search engines were not the only way that content was now sourced and displayed online, so I had to take this into account too.
I therefore made the decision to put a “Website Under Construction” notice on my home page and to lock out potential visitors, to enable me to address these deficiencies. I thought if no one knows I’m out there, then no one is going to miss me whilst I set about making the necessary improvements out of the public eye so to speak.
Before I started the rebuild, I needed to decide what I wanted the final layout and content to look like. This was where I made the definitive decision, from this point forward, only my architectural images were going to feature along with some other pages by the time the website went back online.
Whilst it could be contended discarding the landscape and street galleries could be construed as a loss of creative accomplishment, my stance on my future direction was hardening by the day. I now held the view that I was not limiting my vision but sharpening it.
RESTRUCTURING MY CREATIVE INTENT
Over the next 12 days, I used Gemini to establish a series of workflows which included a chat string to kick about design ideas, one for CSS Coding and the others set up around a file naming convention for my images, image descriptions for enhanced online visibility and others to take care of SEO, GEO, AEO and ALT text generation.
By lunchtime of day 12, with the assistance of Gemini, I had accomplished what took me 35 days the last time, a redesigned website, totally rebuilt with the purpose of displaying my architectural work with the changes consisting of;
All previous CSS code blocks except one stripped out and replaced by 37 new AI generated code blocks
The creation of a new home page with the intention of making a more meaningful impression when visitors first arrive at my part of the digital universe
The About Me page totally rewritten to produce more clarity as to my creative intentions
The blog page renamed as ‘Journals’ to be used to as a place for me to express myself in the written format.
The Resource page to provide some learning materials in respect to how I approach my photography. A redesigned mapping section integrated within Google Maps to enable me to share some information gained from my photography travels as to where I captured my images and some information to support anyone planning to visit these places.
The most important piece of work, however, was in relation to the re-curation of my images. I started to look at how these could be organised now I had decided by this time to retire my landscape and street images. On discussing this requirement with my virtual assistant, a pattern began to emerge around the use of 3 broad themes as this fitted nicely with a mock up design which had been proposed by AI for the new home page.
This concept subsequently manifested itself around the themes of Aesthetics, Urban and Aspects. Having now established these themes, I then looked at the organisation that would sit under these which in resulted in the creation of 12 collections, the reasons for this being discussed momentarily.
At the time of the re-design, the 241 architectural images that were sitting on my website needed to be renamed, so this was the first part of the re-curation process. Thereafter, as I had decided to show this work across 12 collections, I needed to work within the confines of the Squarespace 7.1 template. With only a single Description box available to populate, the use of artistic titles had to be discontinued, as they served no meaningful purpose.
As some of these images appeared in more than one collection, the result was each newly renamed image had to be uploaded into each collection and thereafter, each one then had to be appended with its own unique description. This important but very mundane process took the best part of a day to complete. I lost count the number of times I cursed not having the option of having dynamic filtering as a function on my website, as this would have more than halved the time and effort to get everything curated into the new collections.
With the new collections now populated, and all other design ideas now integrated into the website, the last day was spent hunting down gremlins and making final tweaks in terms of layout and formatting.
After this, it was a case of using AI once again to do a final critique to ensure the potential to be seen in the digital wild west, was the best it could be, given all the changes made to the website design and its contents.
BEYOND THE RABBIT HOLE
So, with the covers now back off and the site back to being capable of viewed again, what has been my key take aways from this experience with the benefit of hindsight?
The use of Artificial Intelligence greatly assisted in the overall process as it enabled me to look at the issues and helped in developing the solutions. The one caveat was, it was not immune to going off on tangents as it didn’t always come up with the solutions straight away, so sometimes I needed to reset the parameters through additional prompting. Some CSS code blocks didn’t work at the first time of asking, or following its insertion, it created some side effects which required further adjustment to the rogue code. Overall, this approach was still quicker than using self-research along with the trial-and-error approach I used for the last redesign, so I can’t be too critical of AI’s imperfections.
Another big learning point was understanding how your site exists in the digital domain otherwise there is the likelihood that despite your best efforts, the cloak of invisibility will easily envelope your creation, whilst those searching online find alternative content elsewhere. I learned the importance of ensuring that every component that went into my website had a purpose and to use every possible means to make the component act like a hook to catch the attention of whoever may be looking for something.
The final learning point is to test, test and test again. I undertook all the redesign on my iMac which has a 27-inch screen, so everything was laid out as per what I saw on the large screen. I then had to check the layout on my mobile and my tablet as ultimately this was where the issues with layout would arise as the building blocks would sometimes be rearranged and what you saw on the large screen was not translating as the same layout on the smaller screens. The tablet layout was the most challenging to manage, as its size is not part of the design template structure on Squarespace. On a few occasions I had to get AI to formulate some bespoke CSS code to control the layout dependent on whether the tablet was to be used in a horizontal or vertical orientation.
THE FREEDOM OF A DEFINED IDENTITY
While my website now has a dedicated bias towards my architecture work, it does not mean I have closed my eyes to the rest of the world. I will continue to follow the work of others across a range of genres and will continue to be inspired, celebrate and appreciate their respective creative endeavours. I may even still dabble into other genres with my own camera if the opportunity presents itself. Any images I do capture, will not end up on my website though, but I may share these from time to time socially.
By narrowing my focus towards architecture, I am not limiting my learning; I am deepening it, and whilst the creative pathway may be construed as being a bit narrower, the view along that pathway is now much clearer.
Which brings me to my final point, my identity. I previously took the approach of not being labelled, as I believed this would allow me to embrace the free-roaming phase of my creative journey and it did for a while, but now it has served its purpose of enabling me to transition from my professional career to a pursuit that fills all my time with ease.
I’ve come to realise I can still maintain my creative freedom even though my focus will be within the genre of architecture. My immersion began through the discovery of Ben Harvey’s work in the niche of black and white fine art architecture. This was where my relationship with architectural photography was forged and will still be the absolute nucleus of my work, that won’t change. Going forward from this point in, I am more than happy to be seen as an Architectural Photographer.
My new freedom will be based around widening my exploration of the architecture genre and hence the reason why, if you visit my website, you will see new collections prepared and dedicated to other architectural styles with scope to increase these collections further in the future.
It is my intention to expand my work to encompass abstract and interior based images as well as seeing the built environment through the prism of nightscape photography. I also want to, when the time is right, to delve into creating architectural images in a high-key style. I also plan to expand my Urban collections when I have produced enough images from the locations I plan to visit in the future.
These aspirations are where my freedom now lies, this is how I intend to move forward in the next chapter of my creative journey, this is the focus;
This is me.