I have made, or are in the process of making, a number of changes to the Samcos website:

• New Photo Gallery Software. I have long been looking for new website software with the ability to give ancillary info along side the photo galleries themselves. For example, I often would like to give a trip description, moving panoramas, and videos along side photos from a trip. But, at the same time, I didn’t want to compromise on the quality of the photo galleries themselves, especially on phones and tablets. Well, I found an apparent candidate and tried it for showing the images from my Southern Utah-Northern Arizona trip. Since originally posting those galleries, I have continued to tweak their look and function to the point that I am extremely pleased with the result. Therefore I have decided to start only using this software (TTG’s Photoswipe plugin for Lightroom). As time & energy permits, I will be converting previously posted galleries to it, especially those where I wanted to give more information and couldn’t.

• New Website Look. As a result of the above effort, I “propagated” some of the new image galleries’look & feel to the rest of the website. In short, I change the typography and simplified even further the simple, white theme. There are still a few rough edges that I intend to smooth out in the short term.

• Reprocessing of Previously Published Galleries. As I have worked on new images these past few months, I have been extremely pleased with Lightroom’s most recent 2012 image “development” process. So much so that I started going back and trying it on images processed with earlier Lightroom versions. In many instances the improvement was significant. And, better yet, much better results were achieved with much less effort. Therefore I have gone through all of my website galleries, reprocessing images that “needed some help.”

• Removal of Grandson’s Galleries. Marcus recently turned four and I hadn’t put out any public picture galleries of him for two years. Therefore I felt that it was time to remove his “baby photos.” Many are still getting their “Marcus fix” through Facebook postings.

Hope that everyone enjoys these changes!