Dave Beckerman, who keeps what is perhaps the longest running photoblog on the Web, has come up with a great idea.

The Society of PhotoBloggers, with membership limited to 50, will be set up so each member, on an appointed day, will have his/her  posts run on the blogs of all the other members. What that means is, each member gets to be a blog King (or Queen) for a day, in a virtual sense.

You can apply here. Only legitimate, interesting art photographers need bother. At last count about half the slots were gone.

Cool idea.

photo: Fence post, 2010

New wrinkle in my life: A local art gallery owner asked me several months ago to curate a show of photography for her gallery, which in the past has always shown paintings and sculpture.

“A Sense of Place” opens Tuesday, August 4, with a reception at 5:30 p.m. Friday, August 7, at the Karin Clarke Gallery, 760 Willamette St., Eugene. It features work by Oregon photographers Craig Hickman, Brian Lanker, Robin Cushman, Franklin Miller, Dennis Galloway, Annie Frantzeskos and, of course, by yours truly.

It’s been an interesting process working with other photographers to put the show together and, in the end, extremely rewarding to see the work go into the gallery on display.

Stop by if you’re in the area.

Photo: Malheur Road

I spent much of Sunday doing yet another website redesign; eventually, I suppose, I’ll get it right.

I like the Flash slideshow and galleries in this one. I don’t like the silly red logo, but that’s easily fixed.

What I really need to do now is settle down, stop playing with the web design, and start marketing.

On another front, I built a little speedlight-sized gridspot diffuser from a Coroplast ‘for sale’ sign, based on something I read on Strobist. Works well on the Vivitar 285. More later on using it in the woods.

photo: Slow Walk, 2009

I spent several hours this afternoon and evening pulling my website redesign together and, to my surprise, managed to get to the point that I can go live.

The new web site is a hybrid with three parts: the main page and one other standard PHP page constitute part one; a new WordPress blog is part two; and part three, the biggest change, is a self contained ecommerce site built around PhotoCart, a piece of commercial software.

PhotoCart looks pretty good so far, as long as you’re willing to do some fiddling with the PHP code, but it has one intrinsic flaw for my purpose: it’s designed for portrait, wedding and event photographers and not really to manage a fine art gallery.  So it has some uncomfortable quirks, like the fact that any particular image can appear only in one gallery.

Some of the design is pretty pedestrian, but I hope in coming weeks to smooth it out some.  My main priority right now is to get the software functioning and available for people to buy prints.

And yes, it’s working!

Now the challenge is to round up some customers.  And, naturally, post some brilliant photography.

photo: A winter day, 2008