Actually, no, it didn’t.
But that doesn’t mean the two never overlapped.
Like most photographers out there, I do post my work online. To Instagram, Flickr, and also to a website. Don’t worry, this isn’t turning into an ad placement for Squarespace. I did try them out for a while since it seems every photographer on YouTube is using them, but I was not impressed. I see the appeal, since their whole raison d’etre is to allow someone to build a website with relative ease.
I prefer self-hosted.
Like this blog, my photography website is hosted on AWS. Only it’s powered by Ghost, not WordPress. (And I’m still in the process of migrating this blog to Ghost.) And initially I used the Edge theme simply because it’s free and got me something quick. Later in 2024, though, I decided I needed something… better.
Enter Dope. Mostly.
I liked the look, feel, and functionality of it, but definitely did not like its limitations. But the theme is open source, so I set about making the customizations I wanted, upgrading some outdated components, and releasing the very enhanced theme under the name Blaire. Not really with the hope that others would take the theme and use it, but more so other theme writers can see what is possible.
And from my experience with that, I can pretty confidently say that writing a custom theme for a content management system is a great way to learn HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, along with how to work with the browser’s developer tools. With Ghost, you do also need to learn Handlebars.js, since that’s used for the placeholders and “helpers” for displaying the post, page, feeds, and the front page.
You probably expected me to say that photography helped me develop a better attention to detail or some platitude along those lines. And there are almost certainly programmers who also delve into photography who readily say that. And they’d be lying. Or, at the least, very heavily mistaken.
Being a photographer doesn’t mean you have a better attention to detail. And photography doesn’t allow you to develop a better attention to detail. It will allow you to develop a better attention to some detail, provided you’re editing and inspecting your photos. Which will give you a feeling that you have an overall better attention to detail, but only if you allow yourself to be deluded into thinking that.
It also doesn’t help you look at things all that different either. At least not automatically. You have to push yourself to do that. But you also don’t need to be a photographer or any kind of artist to do that.
What I can say, at least, is that without having been a photographer for the last 6 years, I likely wouldn’t have had reason to dive into making a custom theme for Ghost. And sure, for a while I didn’t, relying on the Edge theme for over two years until I decided I needed something better. Then found Dope and, while I liked the approach, I needed to overcome the limitations.
Which pushed me into new territory.