I’m a fan of a good photoblog. I would consider myself an amateur photographer (very amateur) and seeing the different aspects from other photographers, amateur or otherwise, always adds an additional bit of creativity or motivation. Tom Sheehan’s photoblog was no different at all.
The layout is fairly simple. It’s a two-column layout, like so many other weblogs of any kind. Each post has a photo taken by the author, which is big enough for readers to get a good view of the photo. The sidebar has several sections with the standard blogger components, including a section that lists the different cameras Tom uses.
Tom has a setting in place that allows him to reply to comments within his posts almost like a message board or like the comments through LiveJournal, with those familiar with that. He responds to his readers regularly, definitely giving this weblog a more personal and valuable touch.
Each post, as mentioned above, contains a picture, a brief description of where the photo was taken or what’s been captured in the photo, and some additional information about the camera used and other situational statistics – whether or not a tripod was used, for example. He keeps the descriptions to a paragraph or two and it’s obvious that the main focus of this site belongs to the photos.
The archives are a bit confusing and became my only complaint of the site. There’s a caveat on the sidebar explaining that some of the photos have been moved over to a different website, which makes it hard to determine when this blog began. The only way to navigate through the archives is a category-based list, which is great when looking for photos of a particular subject, but cumbersome when trying to scroll through by date.
With sites out there that just let anyone take pictures and post them online like Flickr or Fotki, it’s not often that readers can find someone who opts to use their own hosting, template, etc. Tom Sheehan’s photoblog is a nice read for anyone interested in something as simple as looking at original photos to getting ideas on what cameras would work better in particular situations.
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