I feel like I have a lot of ground to cover here and I’m excited to get started. This website has gone through lots of iterations over the years, at times without a super clear intention on how you (hi how are ya 👋), the viewer, are supposed to interact with this site. If you’ve made it this far – that is if you somehow ended up on my website, then clicked a link to get to the blog portion of my website, then thought “hell why not, might as well click that link about getting started”, then read enough to make it to this portion of text about the website that you’ve found yourself exploring – thank you! I hope that it’s been fun and I hope that I can maintain some level of entertainment along the way.

Back on the rails 🚂. This website started when I was first studying design at The Ohio State University, and trying my hand at some web design things. I went from Drupal to hosting my website on Tumblr, where all the art kids were finding their internet voices at the time, to Koken. Now we’re here. And, when I find myself redoing something, I think that it’s incredibly important to revisit some questions about the task at hand. What’s the point of it? What’s it’s purpose? How can it be better? Can it be more fun and interactive for everyone involved?

To be a bit blunt and transparent, this website has always been a visual resume that I can use to hopefully land more photographic gigs that feeds the whole machine. But, that’s really not interesting for anyone unless the folks looking at it are actively looking for a photographer. So here come the blog posts. I think that the fine art kid finding his voice on Tumblr never really left me. I thoroughly enjoy using blogs to share. Through these blog posts, I often offered a look behind the camera and around the camera to give a wide angle view of the experience. My most recent form of website on Koken is gone, and with it some of my favorite posts.

So here’s to a fresh start on a website that I have full control over and it should be ok for a while. Thank you for reading!

-Tom

3/25/2024