Photography is where observation, access, and technical craft meet. My work focuses on live music, events, people, and the character of Southern California.
This project documents both the finished images and the systems behind them, from portfolio delivery and asset management to the practical realities of shooting in difficult environments.
The business problem looked like a CRM integration. Bookings lived in a third-party portal. A self-hosted CRM could provide a better working view, so the obvious architecture was to copy the current records across on a schedule. That design failed the moment I asked what should happen when a booking changed silently or disappeared from … Read more
I did not set out to make a documentary archive of festival work. I was working. Sometimes I had a camera with me. Over the years, the photographs accumulated: a crew getting ready before the gates opened, a quiet stretch of grounds that would soon be crowded, glitter going on, an armload of leis moving … Read more
An automated event card needs a background. The calendar does not have original photography for every venue, and repeatedly generating fake concert photographs would blur an important line in the project. SoCalNomad is partly a photography platform. Synthetic imagery should fill a production gap without pretending to document a place I have not photographed. I … Read more
I started the alt-text audit with a straightforward accessibility problem. Only about six percent of the WordPress media library had useful alternative text. The plan was to derive conservative descriptions from the parent article and date, preserve anything already written by hand, and improve coverage without inventing visual detail. Then I found 281 images that … Read more
The usual web-image advice tells me to compress harder. That is sensible when the image is decorative or when an oversized upload is slowing an otherwise lightweight page. It becomes less useful when original photography is part of the reason the page exists. Concert images are particularly good at exposing the cost of a generic … Read more
A photograph is not always one file. It may begin as a camera RAW file, acquire an XMP sidecar, become a full-resolution TIFF or JPEG, and produce separate Web, social, press, and print exports. A normal folder makes those relationships understandable to a person. A DAM needs to preserve them without confusing a derivative for … Read more
I did not want the first version of the DAM to depend on a message broker. It needed to ingest large batches of photography reliably, survive interruption, and make its current state obvious when something went wrong. For one operator on a local network, adding a database and queue service would have created more infrastructure … Read more
Most digital asset management systems want to become the center of the universe. They ingest the files, create database records, manage metadata, expose search, generate previews, and eventually become the only comfortable way to understand what exists. That can work, but it creates a risk: the application becomes more authoritative than the archive. The DAM … Read more
How a dining-room table, inherited camera gear, and unclaimed time during lockdown became a photography education.
A practical home-lab experiment using Proxmox, TrueNAS, ZFS, and three USB-attached drives for a photography workflow.
I built the BDC image tool as a practical helper. Email campaigns needed images in predictable sizes. Vehicle photos, logos, footers, banners, and promotional graphics all had to fit templates. Manually resizing and converting assets over and over was wasted effort. So the tool handled the repetitive work: Upload an image. Resize it. Convert it … Read more
The first photography-server experiment answered a storage question: could I turn three USB drives, Proxmox, and TrueNAS into a useful working archive? The next question was less technical. Which parts of a photography business actually belonged on that machine? It was tempting to keep adding services because the hardware was already running. Client galleries, booking, … Read more
There is a strange kind of loss that happens when a site disappears. The work is still real. The bylines were real. The shows happened. The photos, deadlines, venue notes, and late-night drafts all existed. But if the site goes dark and the database is gone, the public record starts to dissolve. That is what … Read more