Well, having been given notice by 500px that my current portfolio is going to be an ex-feature at an unspecified point in the future, I did some thinking, which led me to deciding that I might as well go back to hosting it myself.

As I mentioned in my epic upgrade post earlier in the week, I decided to go for Backlight, from The Turning Gate. Once I’d got the server playing nicely, it was time for some Lightroom fiddling.

In an attempt to improve performance, I’d split my Lightroom catalog into an old one, then yearly ones for last year and this year. Well, that was OK, but would have made doing what I want to do with Backlight a bit messy. So last night’s entertainment was creating a new catalog and moving all the images into it. That means I can publish albums including any photos at all, which is just what I need.

I’ve got a test album up with a moderately random selection of images. The appearance is getting close to what I want – a clean, simple layout that makes it easy to see the pictures.

The design works nicely on mobile, doing nicely responsive things to adjust itself to  smaller screens, while looking quite nice on larger screens, such as my iMac.

The longer-term plan is to add some themed albums to the site – the way this works with Lightroom means that adding an album is very simple:

1. Do all normal editing operations that I’d be doing anyway
2. Create a new album in the Lightroom Publish Service, give it a name, add a description and other details
3. Click Publish
4. Admire shiny new webpage

So, here’s your preview of the all-new Les Bessant Photography, now live and available for your enjoyment.  I’ll be more or less replicating the Portfolio from the 500px site (though with a slightly different set of images, which I’ll aim to keep refreshed).

If you want to see the old site while I’m building the new one, it can now be seen at this address. That’s one advantage of having loads of domain names, I can always pick one to use for something random…