Happy First Birthday

Balloons by TaylorArbolante

This time last year I was constantly tapping refresh on every computer and iPhone I could lay my hands on, eagerly awaiting something to appear. One year later and PhotoGuides is now a highly acclaimed photography and photoshop design blog with international authors, a few thousand members and a world class podcast ranked highly in the iTunes store. If someone had asked me what my plans for PhotoGuides were a year ago, I’d have had nothing to say. The success of this online community has blown me away, especially considering that PhotoGuides was nothing like I first set out to create.

It all began on February 7th 2009, a day known amongst Australians as Black Saturday. At 46 degrees Celsius it was the hottest day in Melbourne’s history (and certainly one of the most devastating), which left me stuck inside a powerless house with nothing to do but chew up the battery on my MacBook. Just a few days earlier I’d picked up a copy of iLife 09′, so I installed it, clicked the iWeb icon, and began playing around.

I’d been getting serious about my photography around this time, and I decided I wanted a website portfolio to feature and perhaps sell some of my work. iWeb treated me well. Building my website was quick, simple and incredibly easy, but later on when I started to think like a marketer I began to ask myself “why would anyone want to go to this website?”

My website was boring. It was just a simple showcase of photos – something to skim through, but there was nothing attracting or keeping people on the site. I deemed blogging to be the solution to attract attention and hold people’s interest. Fresh new content would bring people back to the site and develop a bit of a community. This was a concept I liked. The only question was, what would I blog about?

As someone still learning about Photography, I often craved a decent selection of beginners guides and tutorials, but I’d never found a website that held exactly what I needed. My idea? Why not make one myself. Soon enough this concept of photography guides began to take over and eventually I’d developed an iWeb site centred around beginners guides for photography. Think of it as an experimental prototype. It never made it to the public, but for this special occasion I’ve decided to release the first ever PhotoGuides.

iWeb was very limiting. There were simple little things that I couldn’t edit, and the website’s structure was set in stone. This frustration eventually drove me to the WordPress platform that PhotoGuides runs today. The image you see below is the first ever PhotoGuides design. Simple, irrelevant and very difficult to use.

Then again, in the beginning my intentions for PhotoGuides were still very unclear. I envisaged it as a personal blog with some occasional guides about photography. Clearly though the website has taken a massive transformation. As you can probably tell, it’s now centred around three basic topics; Photography, photoshop and inspiration. It’s no longer a personal website either, thanks to a few other people scattered around the world that share the same passions as I do, and wish to share their photography and photoshop knowledge with the whole community. Thanks a heap to Amar, Jamice, Patrick and Bert for their contributions to PhotoGuides so far, and thanks to everyone else who has declared interest in becoming a contributor and will write a guide in the future.

There’s no denying that when PhotoGuides was first released I was an internet novice. I didn’t know a damn thing about coding, css, php, html or any internet language. When PhotoGuides first went live there was some database error, and as soon as I saw that error message I was doubtful I’d ever get the thing up. It still amazes me that I’ve managed to get this far. I’m still learning, but I’ve covered the majority of the groundwork. Every now and then I find myself in a bit of a ditch, but I can always rely on my brother James Davies to get me out of it. He’s helped me so much with the development of this website, so this paragraph is dedicated to him as a thankyou. He has a blog, and it’s a bit awesome. Check it out over here.

As for the future, I have a few plans. When school’s over I plan to look at the iPhone and what its App store offers. Book writing is also a form of media I’d be interested in. A PhotoGuides guide to photography is certainly something I’d love to see on bookshelves around the world. For now though, these remain on the to do list, and thanks to year 12 I don’t expect to have anything new and exciting done for the rest of this year.

So that’s the first year in review. Today, PhotoGuides turns one year old, and as I think back to when the website first started I can’t help but realise what an impact this website has made on my life. Of course, one big thankyou I have to give out is to you and the rest of the PhotoGuides community. Thanks for taking an interest in our guides, sharing them, leaving comments or feedback, or any involvement whatsoever you’ve had with this website.

If there’s one thing I’ve learnt throughout my one year on the internet though it’s this:
Whatever it is that you want to do, make sure it’s something you love. It motivates you, keeps you interested, and most prominent of all, it’s a huge factor towards being successful. PhotoGuides still has a lot of potential, and even though it doesn’t fully compete with other design blogs out there in terms of traffic, it’s the love for what I do that’s kept me interested, and without that passion PhotoGuides would be nothing like it is today.