About Us

It was during High School that I find remember developing an interest in photography. My first outlet was the yearbook with which I continued through college. I recall weel the excitement I would feel picking up a roll of developed film. That anticipation to see if that great shot you saw in your head translated into reality. All too often the bulk of my efforts were a disappointment, which I do feel improved somewhat when I got into a darkroom for the first time. Still in those days of film and limited budgets my growth was slow.

It was just before the birth of my youngest daughter, Olivia, when I purchased by first digital camera. As with much new technology the inital results where not as good as film, but I was freed to experiment with different combinations of light and exposure and composition. With immediate feedback I could better understand the impact of my choices and make adjustments on the fly. The only cost of a bad image was the time it took to delete it.

As my skills improved so too did my excitement about photography. My camera became a necessary accessory with every trip and family event. Over time I noticed other parents making room for the “guy with the nice camera” at various school events. Before long I became the de facto dance, sports and drama photographer. I started by sharing my photographs over social media, but became frustrated with the lack of control I had over these images I was taking - especially of other peoples children.

In 2015, I ventured out from Facebook and published my first website, Meadow View Photography. It was a cookie-cutter web hosting service, that let me take control over my images. The unfortunate nature of a cookie-cutter is that all the sites on the platform basically looked the same. The output in those days was very basic and geared towards those who wanted a simple web presence. Over time I became bored with the lack of creative options, but was stuck until the next leap on technology, high speed internet.

In 2020, fiberoptic internet allowed me to make the next logical leap in my web expression - self hosting. At this point I can laugh at how much I struggled to understand and implement of home web server. Thanks to a number of books and LOTS of Youtube videos. I was able to get my own simple server up and running. In this phase I relied on a content management system, Joomla, to do the work behind the scenes. While it did simplify the process I was still boxed in relying of a “universe” created by others.

When I first started self-hosting I was using a repurposed miniPC that sat in the corner of the livingroom. While I learned a great deal about how to set up and maintain a web server, I was limited in what I could do by the hardware. My next leap came when we moved to Kentucky in 2022, and I had the space to move from repurposed hardware to building my own server. Again growth was not without pain for this was a different skill set required. Thanks again to a number of books, websites and many Youtube videos, I now have what I would consider to be a modestly sophisticated home lab set up with a couple of dozen servers for various purposes.

It was shortly after I completed the build on my first "real" home server, that I introduced AllThingsKnitter to the world. Given my prior frustrations with web hosting services and content management systems, I knew that to exert the degree of control I wanted for my web presence, I would need to learn the basic building blocks of web development - HTML, CSS and Javascript. With each version of AllThingsKnitter, I try to advance my skills with the present version (7.1). I am beefing up my capabilities behind the scenes adding NodeJs. At this point I feel that the media has become an equal partner to the images.

I believe it is a very human impulse to try to create. I am lucky my focus can be simply to be able to do something I enjoy -- from my time with my camera in hand, to the processing of those images, to how I share them with the world. I find each step in this process brings my joy. When I have asked myself what has drew me to photography, it is without question the ability of a photography has to capture a moment in time. Even with more than 200,000 images in my personal collection if you show me a picture it will trigger a memory and a story. As I hope to make progress working through these images, I know they will bring me a sense of happiness and contentment. My greatest hope is that it will do the same for all the family and friends that visit……Enjoy!!!