I’m in the process of migrating my entire photo archive to some new infrastructure. 

Pros:

• The new lightbox organization features will make it easier for you to choose your favorites.
• It will be much easier for you to order prints or download images directly via the website.
• Funds from archive print sales or downloads will help support my community work.
• While the unedited galleries won’t be publicly listed, they’ll be accessible, so if you want to get a print of that photo that I took at an event five years ago because you think that it might make a nice gift for someone, it’s now easily done.

Cons:

• Links to old galleries will no longer work, and you’ll have to contact me to find the new locations of those older series of images. This is an unfortunate side effect of the transition.
• It won’t be quite as easy for people to download my images and benefit from them them without contributing to the costs involved. 

I’m excited about using this new infrastructure, both because it will make it so much easier for viewers to interact with my archive, and because it may help me build more of a community-supported model for my work.

In the past, the internet has allowed me to easily share my work with my community, but it wasn’t as effective in helping distribute the costs. I would simply share my unedited galleries with the world, hoping that people who appreciated the images would contribute to their creation, much like I throw a few dollars in the tip jar for my local musicians.

Unfortunately, most people expect everything on the internet to be free, especially since digital has made photography practically free and instant for the average consumer. As the years have gone by, my community work has consumed more and more of my overhead. (If half the people using my photos in their facebook profiles contributed $5/month, that would probably cover the archiving costs of my personal projects, but unfortunately it’s been hard to convey that idea to people who don’t understand the significantly greater costs (both in equipment and in time) associated with making one’s living through photography and administering a million photo archive.

While of course it’s still the commercial work that primarily pays the bills, there’s a limit as to how much work I can do in for my community without funding.

I hope that facilitating online print sales will enable the audience that values my photographs and activities to take a more active role in supporting them… and get some nice prints in the process!

Many thanks for your continued support,

-jj

PS Tthere’s still an easy direct way to support my work via PayPal, either as one time donations, or as small repeating contributions.
Check out the support section.