March 19, 2024
Dear site visitors,
Effective in the next 48 hours, my photography portfolio hosted on hsing.org will be decommissioned and replaced by my SmugMug profile and portfolio. You may find the new portfolio here, it's quite an improvement:
My new photography site can be accessed via the hostnames photography.hsing.org or hsing.smugmug.com. The former link is preferred.
The change was mainly triggered by the recent increase in visitor count as well as much-needed efficiency improvement to my photography workflow. The increased number of rate presentable images are published by me has also contributed to my decision to make this change. I'm slowly transitioning from shooting delibrate, planned out images (like the sky or macro of a dead bug) to capturing a split moment of time, but this does not mean that I will stop my style of pushing my equipment to its limit as I have previously done, like using hour-long exposures or reverse-mounted lenses, I will keep planning and shooting those images although they'll still be few and far between, as I'm still a student with various responsibilities.
With this change, I'm also clearing out my backlog of unprocessed/unpublished images, which includes everything I've shot since the October 2023 eclipse. In the next few days, I should publish all of the backlog to the new SmugMug portfolio.
I will remove my old portfolio in the next few days, you can find all its contents at the new page. Some of the pages under the "photography" section of my home page will also be removed, all images can be found on SmugMug. I will still add new pages to that section in the future, but only if it will be "blog" or "article" style content, or to leverage the power of CSS, instead of just displaying images.
I have maintained some sort of photography portfolio on this site since mid-2020, but to create a site from scratch with the intent of displaying images at high quality, minimizing file sizes for load time, making the page responsive on all devices, making images easy to organize for me, etc. has just been difficult, and even the current portfolio has some major problems. The old portfolio is also a mix of old and new code, all the way back to before I learned javascript, or when my site was hosted on my computer at home with images being hosted on Imgur. Even as of now, most of the HTML on the page is rendered client-side, and the image quality served is often too low or high resulting in long load times or downloads being pixelated and filled with jpeg artifacts. None of this is ideal and it'd take too much time and effort to fix. Plus SmugMug seems like better option with much better organization.
The new portfolio is a big improvement but still somewhat unpolished, I will add descriptions and fill in dates in the upcoming weeks, but the skeletion is there and most of you wouldn't care about that fine of details.
Enjoy.