Our World Through a Lens: Photography Blogs to Follow Now

Some of the best photographers and professional photo organizations maintain their homes on WordPress.com. See the world through their eyes.

Paul Zizka at Paul Zizka Photography

Paul Zizka is a professional mountain landscape and adventure photographer based in Banff, Alberta. His photographs celebrate the power and beauty of the outdoors, from the sprawling backcountry of Canada to hard-to-access locations in the wilderness. His night landscapes are spectacular.

Haffner Creek, Kootenay National Park, Canada.

Emerald Lake, Canada.

Susan Portnoy at The Insatiable Traveler

Travel photographer Susan Portnoy focuses on wildlife and indigenous cultures and contributes to various outlets, including Yahoo Travel. She’s based in New York, but as her readers know, she’s usually off exploring a faraway destination. Her recent photo essays from Namibia on her blog, The Insatiable Traveler, are worth a peek.

Himba toddlers in their village near Serra Cafema Camp, Namibia.

A pair of elephants, intertwined.

AP Images Spotlight

AP Images Spotlight shares standout photographs from the Associated Press’ massive collection of images taken from every corner of the world. Browse the Photos of the Day category, which curates timely images from AP photographers across the globe, or enjoy more in-depth photo essays on anything from graffiti in Athens commenting on Greece’s economic crisis to refugees fleeing Burundi to escape ongoing violence.

The homepage of AP Images Spotlight.

Aaron Joel Santos at From Swerve of Shore

Aaron Joel Santos is an editorial and documentary photographer who shoots for publications like the New York Times and TIME and covers a wide range of subjects, from landscapes and portraits to fashion and weddings. You’ll get a taste of his sophisticated yet edgy style on his personal blog, From Swerve of Shore. Over the years, he’s wowed us with his images of Southeast Asia — especially Hanoi, Vietnam — and we always look forward to what’s next.

A farmer burning off crop residue in Hanoi, Vietnam.

Various photographs from Hanoi, Vietnam.

Stephanie Dandan at Infinite Satori

We’ve highlighted Stephanie Dandan at Infinite Satori before, but she’s continued to inspire us with her adventures in the Philippines, Cambodia, and currently Australia. She captures the fleeting and serendipitous moments of travel, where at times it feels like you’re awake in a dream.

Hot air balloons in Bagan, Myanmar.

Swimming hole and waterfall in Cambodia.

The Fujifilm Blog

Managed by Fujifilm UK’s digital camera team, the Fujifilm Blog publishes tutorials (from understanding depth of field to the Rule of Thirds), spotlights on Fujifilm X-Photographers around the world, and guest features offering glimpses into photographers’ creative processes.

A group portrait from Cuba, by Fujifilm X-Photographer Chris Upton at chrisuptonphotography.com.

Goats of Triund Hill in the Himalayas, by Fujifilm X-Photographer Danny Fernandez at dannyfernandez.co.uk.

David Feuillatre at David with a Movie Camera

After spending years working on visual effects in the film industry, filmmaker and photographer David Feuillatre decided to leave Vancouver, British Columbia, to travel the world, meet new people, and tell their stories. On his blog, David with a Movie Camera, he publishes videos of his encounters along the way, and posts images of vibrant scenes and portraits. Under the Countries tab in his menu, you’ll find photographs by location — Israel, Palestine, Jordan, and India.

Jalgaon, Maharashtra, India.

Jewish Quarter, Jerusalem.

Flickr Blog

The blog of Flickr features the best from the online photo management and sharing site, from curated collections (flags around the world) to photographer features (Canadian photographer Erik Peterson in Tashkent, Uzbekistan). The community-fostering weekly themes (Flickr Friday, Twitter Tuesday) make you want to grab your camera and get shooting.

Looking for more inspiration? Browse the Photography tag in your Reader or join the current Weekly Photo Challenge at The Daily Post.

New Theme: Libre

Happy Theme Thursday, all! Today I’m happy to introduce Libre, a new free theme designed by yours truly.

Libre

Libre brings a stylish, classic look to your personal blog or longform writing site. The main navigation bar stays fixed to the top while your visitors read, keeping your most important content at hand. At the bottom of your site, three footer widget areas give your secondary content a comfortable home.

Customize Libre with a logo or a header image to make it your own, or use one of two custom templates — including a full-width template with no sidebar — to change up the look of your pages. Libre sports a clean, responsive design that works seamlessly on screens of any size.

Read more about Libre on the Theme Showcase, or activate it on your site from Appearance → Themes!

Reinvented Video for WordPress

Today, we’re announcing a complete overhaul of VideoPress, the service that has powered more than 3,000,000,000 video plays on WordPress.com and Jetpack-connected self-hosted WordPress sites around the world. We’ve made the next-generation VideoPress dynamic, responsive, and lightning fast to support the ever-evolving needs of content creators everywhere.

Take a peek at what’s under the hood!

Embed anywhere, play anywhere

Out of the box, the new VideoPress is lightweight and responsive for beautiful playback on any screen, from smartphones to desktops. VideoPress works on all modern browsers and devices, and gives blog and site authors the power to engage their audiences no matter where they are.

Not only do videos look amazing on WordPress sites, but you can also embed your videos anywhere on the web — other websites, social media, chat services — by using a permalink or a snippet of code.

Major speed enhancements

VideoPress now takes a fraction of the space it used to and is optimized for speed, so pages and posts with video content load faster. This is a huge plus for viewers who use slower connections or rely on bandwidth-strapped mobile devices.

It’s your content

At Automattic, we believe wholeheartedly that you own your content — video or otherwise.

The new VideoPress puts your content front and center. The player is ad-free and unbranded to ensure your videos look and feel like an integral part of your website or blog, not like they belong to a third-party video platform. Unlike other video hosting services, VideoPress starts and ends on your video, keeping traffic on your site and giving you full control over the content to which your visitors are exposed.

New features, new look

A real-time “seek” feature lets you skim through any video and helps you start playing at the desired point in the video. Here’s a sneak peek that our developer community will particularly enjoy: the player’s skin and behavior is controlled entirely by JavaScript, HTML and CSS, opening up a malleable slate for customizations by themers in the future.

Everything you love, and more

VideoPress embraces the features that users have come to love, like privacy settings and rich stats, but also includes additional enhancements. Every video now features its own permalink, and the sharing pane has been redesigned to offer different options for embedding, like starting playback at specific times, looping, and autoplay.

OpenSource ❤︎

The rebuild of VideoPress revolves around a robust API for embedding videos easily in WordPress.com and Jetpack-enabled self-hosted websites. Though the API is private at the moment, many components of the new VideoPress libraries have been open sourced, including jpeg-stream, pixel-stack, and video-thumb-grid.

Get the goods

Once a standalone upgrade, VideoPress is now available exclusively in WordPress.com Plans to streamline updates, payments, and security enhancements.

To enable all the goodness of video support on your WordPress.com or Jetpack-connected self-hosted WordPress site, upgrade your WordPress.com Plan to Premium or Business. Then, upload and share videos as you please. If you already have a Premium or Business plan, sit back and enjoy. VideoPress will automatically handle the nuts and bolts to deliver an amazing viewing experience for your fans, followers, and friends!

#LoveWins! LGBTQ Bloggers Make Their Voices Heard

You might have noticed the rainbow banner across the top of WordPress.com over the weekend — our way of marking Pride month, celebrated by cities across the globe in June, as well as the US Supreme Court’s ruling legalizing same-sex marriage across all states. (The United States now joins 20 other countries, including my own, Portugal, in fully recognizing same-sex marriage nationwide.)

Here at WordPress.com we strive to democratize publishing and empower freedom of speech. It’s amazing to see the thoughtful analyses of the Supreme Court’s decision already being published, like this excellent piece from Tropics of Meta putting the decision into long-term historical context. We’re also proud to provide a platform for all the incredibly talented LGBTQ writers who are advocating for change and sharing their stories, like…

• Let’s Queer Things Up!, written by transgender activist Sam Dylan Finch. We appreciate how open Sam is about all aspects of his life, from his fraught relationship with psychiatry to the best affordable chest binders.
• Bully Bloggers, an excellent group blog on “everything queer” from five professors from NYU, Dartmouth College, USC, and the University of Arizona. If you need a break after their analysis of the Irish same-sex marriage referendum, plant your tongue in your cheek and visit their “Freedom to Marry our Pets Society” page.
• Conner Habib, a writer, public speaker, and sex-workers’ advocate who penned the incredibly popular (and thought-provoking) piece, “Why do gay porn stars kill themselves?“

Pride parade, San Francisco. Image by Pete Rosos, 2812 Photography.

WordPress.com bloggers were also out and about with their rainbow flags this weekend, participating in pride parades from Los Angeles to Lisbon and capturing the days in pictures:

• Key West, Florida, via Ron Mayhew Photography.
• Toronto, Ontario, via Michelle Bozzette Media.
• Barcelona, Spain, via Transient Eye.
• Seattle, Washington, via Seattle to Shanghai. (Bonus: the Seattle Pride website is powered by WordPress, as are Atlanta’s and Vancouver’s!)
• Istanbul, Turkey, via Quartz (a less-than-joyous occasion that shows just how important it is to elevate LGBTQ voices).
• London, England, via Paris London Style.
• And of course, San Francisco, California, via 2812 Photography!

Pride parade, Key West, Florida, USA.
Photo by Ron Mayhew Photography.

We also had the pleasure of launching a website for Double Duchess, an energetic queer musical duo from the San Francisco Bay Area who just released their latest album. And check out the new tees and tanks added to the WordPress swag store in early June, in honor of Pride month — it’s the first time that we’ve made the same design available in a such wide, inclusive range of colors, fits, and body shapes! All the profits support the WordPress Foundation, which helps ensure that the free, downloadable version of WordPress is cutting edge, powerful, and ready for whoever wants to have a voice on the web.

Automattic is committed to diversity as a company (and we’re hiring!), and to providing tools that let anyone use the web to tell their truths and work for equality. Happy Pride!

July in Blogging U.: Blogging 101 and 201

Note: Blogging 101 and Blogging 201 cover the same content each time they are offered.

Have you just started blogging (welcome!), or are you looking to breathe new life into a blogging habit that’s fallen by the wayside? Blogging U. is a great way to get on track, with bite-size assignments, a supportive community, and staff to support you. We’re offering two courses in July — learn more:

Blogging 101: Zero to Hero — July 6 – 24

Blogging 101 is three weeks of bite-size blogging assignments that take you from “Blog?” to “Blog!” Every weekday, you’ll get a new assignment to help you publish a post, customize your blog, or engage with the community.

You’ll walk away with a stronger focus for your blog, several published posts and a handful of drafts, a theme that reflects your personality, a small (but growing!) audience, a grasp of blogging etiquette — and a bunch of new friends.

Blogging 201: Branding and Growth — July 20 – 31

Blogging 201 is a two-week challenge that gives you the tools to define your brand, build your audience, use your stats to grow your traffic, and bring your older posts fresh attention. You don’t need to have completed Blogging 101 to register, although it makes a great foundation.

Please note that we ask you not to register for Blogging 101 and 201 at the same time; Blogging 201 assumes that you have some readers and have already accomplished a lot of what we cover in the 101-level course. Both courses will be offered several more times throughout the year.

How do Blogging U. courses work?

Blogging U. courses exist for one reason: to help you meet your own blogging and writing goals.

• Courses are free, flexible, and open to all.
• You’ll get a new task to complete each day, along with our best advice and favorite resources. Do them on your own time, and interpret them however makes sense for your specific blog and personal goals — we’re not grading you, we’re not checking to make sure you complete every task, and there’s no “wrong” way to use the resources we give you.
• We’ll post new assignments here on The Daily Post each weekday at 12AM GMT. Each assignment will contain all the inspiration and instructions you need to complete it. Weekends are free.
• Each course will have a private community site, the Commons, for chatting, connecting, and seeking feedback and support. Daily Post staff and Happiness Engineers will be on hand to answer your questions and offer guidance and resources.

Ready to register?

Just fill out this short form! There’s no automated confirmation; you’ll receive a welcome email just prior to the start of your course. If you’re on a mobile device or reading this via email and don’t see the form, you can register with this link.

Celebrating 10 Years of WordPress.com & Automattic

This year marks the 10th birthday of WordPress.com and our parent company, Automattic. We are proud to have served this community of millions: from writers, photographers, artists, and small and large publishers, to business owners and entrepreneurs.

A quick bit of history: WordPress itself started as an open source project in 2003. WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg then built our company, and the free, hosted version — WordPress.com, what you see now — opened for business in the summer of 2005.

Ten years, 2.5 billion posts, and 3 billion comments later, Automattic is stronger than ever — with WordPress.com and a host of other services aimed at helping independent publishers, bloggers, and business owners (the roster includes WooCommerce, Jetpack, Akismet, VaultPress, Polldaddy, Cloudup, Simplenote, Longreads, and more). All this, and we have a perfect record from the Electronic Frontier Foundation for protecting our users’ rights.

In addition to building a world-class publishing platform, our company has redefined what it means to be a global company working on the internet: we have nearly 400 employees, working from home (or their preferred coworking spaces), around the world. We use our own p2 sites to communicate with each other, and we all spend time doing support rotations with the people who matter most: Our users. (Also: we’re hiring!)

And we’re just getting started: 24% of websites on the internet now use WordPress to power their sites, and we believe there’s more for us to accomplish together to continue to make WordPress.com the engine that powers your creativity, your thoughts and ideas, and your business.

Thank you to everyone who makes this community so special. Here’s to the next 10 years.

10 Years: Automattic & WordPress.com by the Numbers

Early Theme Adopters: Gazette

Gazette is a theme that balances rich functionality with a pleasant, non-obtrusive look. Depending on your site’s needs, you can tweak it to look as stark and clean, or as warm and vibrant as you wish.

Business owners, visual artists, and bloggers of all stripes can find something (or many things) to love about Gazette. The theme is particularly suited for those with image-heavy content: with striking Featured Images, several custom Post Formats, and an optional featured content area on the homepage, it displays your posts with extra visual oomph.

Not sure if it’s the theme for you? Here are four strikingly different sites that make the most of Gazette‘s features.

simple tricks & nonsense

Covering the geekier side of film and pop culture, simple tricks & nonsense harnesses Gazette‘s featured content area to highlight some of its greatest hits from the archives. The result is a colorful, engaging homepage that draws the reader in (the custom font in the headings adds a nice touch, too).

Scroll below the fold, and the site’s latest posts are there, each with its own featured image:

The colorful grid makes for a pleasing, smooth reading experience, where the reader’s eye is always engaged, but never distracted or disoriented by too much visual stimuli.

depression comix

On the more minimalist end of the spectrum we find depression comix, a weekly web comic depicting the daily struggles of people dealing with mental health issues.

The site’s design complements its topic perfectly: using only a Site Logo in the header area, visitors are immediately plunged into a neat grid of posts that mimics the format of the comic itself. Here, Gazette recedes into the background, letting artist Clay’s work do the talking.

Calluna Studios

A professional photographer’s website, Calluna Studios highlights the work of Heather, the woman behind the camera, with a warm, clean look.

The site’s primary navigation menu in the header is stripped to the bare essentials: links to the homepage and the contact page. Our eye immediately wanders to the lovely header image, featuring the silhouette of a family enjoying a beautiful summer sunset outdoors.

Heather makes great use of the different Post Formats available in Gazette to highlight her projects in different ways and to avoid an overly monotonous homepage. The row of posts above, for example, features (from left to right) a standard post, an image post, and a gallery post.

If you’d like to see the theme’s Featured Images in action in single-post view, make sure to check out one of these three posts. (Hint: they look gorgeous!)

Back to Spain

Back to Spain, a food and lifestyle site by Caitlin, a blogger passionate about cooking and travel, nails a perfect balance between minimalism and vibrancy.

Caitlin’s homepage and her individual posts come alive with beautiful photography, and she uses Gazette‘s full-width Featured Images to great effect throughout her site, like in this post for a patatas arrugadas recipe:

The rest of Caitlin’s site is just as smartly designed, with a well-organized main menu in the header and discreet social links in the footer’s widget area (one of two optional widget areas in Gazette).

Are you using Gazette for your site? Which of the theme’s features is your favorite? Let us know in the comments!

New Theme: Argent

Today we’re happy to debut a new, free portfolio theme, Argent!

Argent

Meet Argent, a new addition to our theme collection, designed by Automattic’s own Mel Choyce. Argent’s clean, modern portfolio theme is perfect for creative professionals like designers, artists, and photographers. Whether you’re showcasing a photo series or a design concept, Argent’s simple homepage template featuring portfolio projects will draw viewers to all of your wonderful work. Plus, the responsive layout allows for a seamless user experience and ensures that your portfolio looks stunning no matter the device or screen size.

Read more about Argent on the Theme Showcase, or activate it on your site from Appearance → Themes!

A perfect EFF score! We’re proud to have your back.

Concerns about online privacy and illicit government snooping are at the top of users’ minds, now more than ever. We appreciate that you trust us to safeguard your sensitive information on WordPress.com, and Automattic has a long-standing commitment to defending your rights and holding firm against legal bullying and over-reaching government requests. We work to have the most stringent, user-friendly policies possible within the law, and to be as transparent as we can about information requests we receive and how we respond to them.

Our friends at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), on organization dedicated to defending your digital rights, recognized our efforts in their latest annual Who Has Your Back report, which evaluates the user privacy practices of prominent online service providers. We’re proud to receive a perfect score of five stars on the report, one of only eight (out of 24) companies to earn that honor. You can learn more about EFF’s evaluation criteria here.

We also received a perfect 5/5 score on the EFF’s most recent Intellectual Property Who Has Your Back report, making WordPress.com the only service to score a perfect 10/10 across both of the EFF’s surveys.

In addition to our efforts on your behalf, we’re committed to giving back and making the internet as a whole a more secure place. Our Legal Guidelines, legal forms, DMCA templates, Terms of Service, and Privacy Policies are all licensed under Creative Commons licenses. Additionally, earlier this year, we posted a number of these documents to GitHub so other companies, startups, or small website owners can adopt and build on the policies we’ve adopted at Automattic.

We’re proud to be recognized by the EFF for our work in this year’s Who Has Your Back report and are continually working to improve our practices to best serve the millions of websites owners who put their trust in us.

Jenny Diski on Writing, Love, and Cancer

Photo by Suki Dhanda

We’ve been following writer Jenny Diski for many years at the London Review of Books, and more recently on her WordPress.com blog. Just this past weekend Diski was featured in a profile by Giles Harvey for the New York Times Magazine, about a subject she revealed in her own 2014 essays: she has inoperable lung cancer.

Her diagnosis began with a Breaking Bad joke (“So – we’d better get cooking the meth,” she said to her husband at the doctor’s office), and and she rejects clichés, refusing to characterize her cancer as a “battle” or let others call her “brave”:

One thing I state as soon as we’re out of the door: ‘Under no circumstances is anyone to say that I lost a battle with cancer. Or that I bore it bravely. I am not fighting, losing, winning or bearing.’ I will not personify the cancer cells inside me in any form. I reject all metaphors of attack or enmity in the midst, and will have nothing whatever to do with any notion of desert, punishment, fairness or unfairness, or any kind of moral causality. But I sense that I can’t avoid the cancer clichés simply by rejecting them. …

I try but I can’t think of a single aspect of having cancer, start to finish, that isn’t an act in a pantomime in which my participation is guaranteed however I believe I choose to play each scene. I have been given this role. (There, see? Instant victim.) I have no choice but to perform and to be embarrassed to death.

She has made peace with writing about cancer (“I could either shut up, that’s the end, get on with dying. Or, get gripped, which is what happened”), and in the past year she’s also written about her time living with Doris Lessing, and on subjects such as love and beauty (“Depp and Desire,” translated from her column in the Swedish newspaper Goteborgs-Posten) and about meeting her husband, whom she calls “The Poet”:

When I was fifty I met The Poet, who is the same age as me. We had each left it until the last minute to find the relationship of our lives. Before that neither of us thought of ourselves as finally committed to a relationship, although we had had marriages and children. Our living happily ever after together, at such a late stage in our lives, is something we both smile at as improbable. It still surprises us, but it works. I don’t really know why. I came across something new, when we met, that both took in and transformed the youthful desire; we had the attraction but built a relationship on top of it that made the already but not quite diminished possibility at my age of looking at someone else in a room, wanting them, seeing it mirrored, and doing something about it, a voluntary surrender thereafter on my part.

For more on Diski, follow her blog, and pick up her books: What I Don’t Know About Animals, Skating to Antarctica, and more.

Posts from Diski’s blog:

“Fish, there Are Fish!”

A humorous sidebar to one of her LRB essays.

“How’s It Going?”

A window into Diski’s life, thoughts and emotions, in between the more formal essays.