Srinivas Bobbili's Travel & Photography Blog

Spending complete two months working on development of my website, I felt sharing few things about developing a web gallery. Having a web gallery gives the freedom to fully exhibit what is you, right from the way you present images. Owning a website, is not very expensive when using the free tools and plugins available today which are easy to integrate in the website.

I have been working on it nearly 18hrs a day, for past couple of months(leaving few days for my photo trip to Bylakuppe). Having an average soft skills, I tried my best to make my web gallery beautiful, attractive and easy to navigate. With the available web blog tools, now a days it is not much difficult to make an artist web gallery.  But if one wants a website to be aesthetically pleasing along with  e-com facilities, one needs to be careful about the theme, structure and the page design of the website. During the development process I have send the site link to few of my friends and got feedback from them and changed it accordingly. Eventually it has come to the saturation where it meets my present requirement.

In brief, in the website, there is a GALLERY,for showcasing the albums, FINE ART PRINT pages, for selling the  prints,  and facility of subscribing, upon which user can access their account profile to view Purchase History, Tracking orders & Profile Information, finally guestbook and contact pages.

Presenting the images in Gallery Albums is an other tedious task. Having more than 20,000 exposures, of 5 different countries, it took lot of time selecting, processing & segregating, in to relevant albums, in fact, I have not done this before. I seldom send my images to competitions and etc..So, everything was almost  just dumped in a storage device. Maintaining own website inculcates discipline in organizing the collection and presentation.

I hosted my website using wordpress and its themes and related plugins for e-com and other presentations. And I used Slideshow pro for Adobe LightRoom2, which is an other wonderful plugin for creating custom flash slide shows.

Before building a website, it is very much necessary to browswe through various other websites and know Do’s and Don’ts.  Summing up my observations together, I put most of the development efforts  making the site more simpler and nicer.

After visiting my web gallery, I hope one will feel what I felt one must feel.

In the last week of the previous month, I had visited the Pushkar mela, which takes place every year in the village of Pushkar in Rajasthan.

Untill I reach there, I heard, but I do not realize that it is such a bbiggg, large cattle fair that happens in Pushkar. It was indeed a great surprise for me, because I never have seen camels in such large numbers gathered at one place.

Like any other fairs in India, people here are in large numbers, but the difference in Rajasthan is Color. Here the people, especially the nomads and gypsy families, those who have come from the far off villages to take part of the cattle fair, wear colored turbans, costumes in bright such as yellows, reds and whites

The nomads attending the fair to buy and sell their cattle, make some living arrangements at the mela grounds itself and stay there during the fair. Everything is available in the mela grounds for their daily life, groceries, food, hotels and etc.

During my 6 day stay in Pushkar, my routine is to visit the mela grounds at the sunrise and movearound till 11:00 am observing the daily life of the nomads over there, and again come back to the grounds around 3:00 pm and stay till the evening. For 2-3 days middle of the pushkar fair, surprisinglt there were many photographers around the world visited this spectacular place just to photograph this event. The ambience of the place is such that, this place would take us to few centuries backwards. There are hundreds of camels, horses and other cattle, spread across nearly about 5kms radius of land, so for anybody visited this place is would certainly be a visual delight, especailly photographers can celebrate this event like anything else.

Photographers visited here crave for the sunrise and sunsets over the mela grounds, herds of  cattle coming in and going back in to the villages along with the farmers, fine golden dust spread across all over. It is not only the sunrise and sunsets, but every moment of the pushkar fair is to be enjoyed, the activities of buy and sell of cattle, farmers daily routine like cooking, preparing tea all the time over there, sitting in groups, chit chatting, grooming the camels, testing of the breeds and etc.

There is not only a single activity to be observed or photographed, but the whole place is dynamic, with thousands of cattle and farmers spread all over, chaning landscape and the moods of the people.