eBokeh.com was a photography project that I ran for about 4 years starting in April 2005. Over the course of its run I made about 300 posts and had more than 100,000 unique visitors. That’s probably a very small amount of traffic today but it had a pretty good run for the mid/late-aughts racking up several, “top 10 weekly photoblog,” placements across the various blogging platforms at the time and connecting me with numerous people around the world. Its primary purposes though was just for me to have an added motivation to spend more time with photography and in that regard it was successful.
Background
In 2005 what is now called social networking was nascent, Flickr was probably the primary online photography hub and much more prevalent than it is today unfortunately. The community was also significantly smaller then than it is now. At that time Flickr was primarily used as an image hosting and cataloging site with an increasing focus on discussion and was certainly the biggest photography focused site on the internet.
My initial intent with eBokeh.com was to, “figure out digital photography,” (lol) and raw processing I pretty quickly shifted back to film photography in black and white – mostly medium format – and spent the bulk of my time focused on gaining a better understanding of proper exposure and film developing technique.
In the “figuring out digital photography” phase of this I used a small digital camera called a Canon G6 that could capture raw images. I’d read that digital cameras were a good medium for infrared photography so some of the early posts were infrared pictures, something I’d experimented with on film during high-school. Shooting infrared requires putting a special filter over the lens to block most all visible light, it also requires extended exposure times which helped me get comfortable carrying around and using a tripod. When I went back to shooting film I got a set of neutral density filters and worked on long exposures for a while.
Neutral density filters reduce the amount of light entering the lens so you can easily have an exposure time of several seconds in broad daylight using readily available panchromatic film stock. This provides yet another way to practice pre-visualization and work on composition, exposure, and development technique. I practiced with it a lot and tried to find interesting ways to make pictures.
What does eBokeh mean?
I should take a minute to explain the domain name. “Bokeh” comes from the Japanese word “boke” and is used to describe the out of focus areas of an image (more on that here). The name ebokeh was simply the result of too many late night domain name shopping sessions.
At the time (2003/2004) putting an “e” in front of any domain name made it immediately legitimate (iykyk). Same as putting an “i” in front of a domain name ~7 years later, and then about 5 years after that removing most of the vowels.
At the time I liked the word “bokeh” for a photography site for whatever reason and since someone had gotten to bokeh.com before me I didn’t have too many great options without adding a bunch of syllables.
Now it looks like petapixel actually owns bokeh.com but so far they’ve missed the boat on epetapixel.com.
Blogging Platform Failure
eBokeh.com was built using a popular at the time photo-blogging platform called PixelPost. In the beginning it was hosted from my house over DSL using a small dedicated computer, later on I moved it to a hosting provider. At some point in 2009 PixelPost ceased development and not long after that my site was repeatedly hacked and the database corrupted. I got tired of rebuilding it so its original form has remained offline since sometime around 2011. I eventually let the domain expire but after about 14 years I was recently able to recover it.
I’d kept regular backups of the database and website files and after the site went offline I knew I’d rebuild it at some point. There were a few false starts over the years, mostly it came down to the fact that the original images were all pretty low-quality compared to what would be considered reasonable today. Fixing that would require finding and re-scanning ~300 images in a sea of thousands that has been haphazardly cataloged over the years.
Rebuild
As 2019 was coming to a close I decided I’d start working on a set of projects that would help me revive this old project, there’s more about that in my blog
The eBokeh archive as it’s presented here is essentially a copy of my old site taken directly from the original PixelPost database.
- The images have all been re-scanned at a much higher resolution and are able to be displayed that way on this new site.
- Metadata for all of the images has been added (camera, film etc, more on that here)
- All of the posts are intact but I didn’t carry the comments over
- Posts have all been tagged and the site can be explored that way if you please.
- The original style and layout of the posts was mostly preserved, the image archive page is new and was enabled by the functionality of my new site.
