About This Website
Philosopher George Berkeley supposedly once said, as we have all heard: “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?“
Einstein supposedly once said: “Do you really believe that the moon only exists if you look at it?”
Quantum Mechanics (which I once studied) might say: “Existence without observation is uncertain”
What does all this have to do with this website? I have a library of many thousands of photos, most of which no one has seen, and many of which I have not really seen myself. Do they really exist? Well today, I would say yes. Their existence is not uncertain, but it is mostly pointless. They exist, but a casual observer might say they do not need to exist. With the press of a key on my keyboard they would be gone and no one would be the wiser. As their creator, I live in fear of that.
I’m not a philosopher, but I do care that photographs have to be seen to be appreciated and are truly worthless otherwise. So I have embarked on a seemingly endless project to find the relatively few photos of mine that are worth being seen and make it possible to see them. I put them in books (visit my house), all over the walls (ask my wife), sell some in galleries, and lately post them on websites like this one.
I take a lot of photos when I travel, and in fact, today I travel to take photos. Some of the results I post on Instagram or Facebook, which many people appreciate, but I find limiting. So, I decided to make a website where I could display travel photos the way I would like them to be seen. Here, you can look at them on your phone if you want, but wow, you can also enlarge them on your phone. And better yet they will display well on a tablet, and best of all, look great on a large screen and you can read a caption that explains what they are. Amazing!
So this does two things for me: it makes these photos visible to others, and it forces me to select the photos worth viewing, edit them to look their best, record what they are about, and dispose of the rest. And for you, I hope it helps you enjoy some things you may not have seen before or reinforces a memory of something you have already seen. All good. Please enjoy and leave a comment since that is the only way I will know you have seen them.
If you find any of what you see here to be interesting, I will shamelessly suggest you also look at my other websites: http://www.bigislandview.com (Hawaii photography) and http://www.thomasuptonphotography.com (international photography). They complement, and overlap, but are not intended to duplicate what I share here.