My updated IFP website is 95% done… Built from scratch, I’m down to just a few design issues… like the ugly sidebar. Then I can move onto writing and posting about my photo efforts while making the occasional print. Less editorializing, more of the good stuff.
IFP WordPress website update created with OceanWP theme
This revised WordPress website was done entirely from within the framework of the OceanWP Theme. No monthly subscription, no AI and we could stay with our preferred website hosting service.
200+ images, now featured on the IFP Web Gallery
The IFP Web Galleries have been totally reorganized and have doubled in size. There is a little of everything there. Both analog and digital. Though all images are watermarked for copyright, as long as you don’t use them for commercial purposes, don’t crop out the watermark or use it to train AI, you are free to download and share them.
Regarding website content-
IFP as seen from an iPad…
Since this is a website about photography with an emphasis on art prints, almost all the images are from a landscape or horizontal perspective, not from a portrait or vertical perspective. So no attempt was made to optimize this website for cell phones, or Chrome, or Google. There are no videos, either. If you are on a tablet, no problem, or a laptop, even better. Unfortunately, those that access the internet exclusively via a cell phone are outside my target demographic.
If you experience any loading issues, glaring mistakes, punctuation issues or typos, please hit me back via the Contact Form in the side bar. It would be most appreciated.
FULL STOP! If you don’t want to read a rant about software by subscription only (‘Software as a Service’ – SaaS), ‘The Cloud’ (Infrastructure as a Service – IaaS) or AI, you might want to skip the rest. I get that. Just keep in mind, I’m old. I was here for the birth of the internet, before cell phones, before flat panel TVs, and before social media or blogs were a thing. I saw it all happen in ‘realtime’. Hell, I remember a time before color TV and the Beatles. You ever get to ride in a Corvair or 1963 1/2 Mustang?
A previous version of the IFP website
Stuff and Things
I really thought I could simply update the IFP website in a few weeks time, but NO. Website design tools have seriously changed since I last updated it, 9 years ago. Monthly subscriptions and AI now dominate the landscape.
The need to shield your digital content from hackers and thieves is real. Me First Mate is an admin on one of the website management forums so she knows the ‘ins and outs’ of blocking and trapping them. That was part of the motive for doing an update since those tools have evolved as well.
Or make content more accessible for those with disabilities. The new website tools address this issue too. Though there are limits as to how effective that can be for a website dedicated to photography.
Searching for a New Approach
My original, free-standing, fixed price application for Mac, ‘Artisteer’ is gone. If you work from a Windows PC, you can still D/L it for free, but they are no longer keeping it updated and are busy promoting one of the alternative ‘subscription-only’ solutions.
Screen Grab of Artisteer website
DuckDuckGo searches for a ‘free standing’ website-builder-application did not produce much. I was not looking for ‘free’ AI driven website builders, but they dominated the results. I think this is primarily due to the ‘Software as a Service’ business model being forced on us today.
We can thank Adobe for leading that subscription only versus free-standing App charge.
OceanWP for WordPress website design
After due consideration, ‘we’ chose the OceanWP theme/editor since it is available at a fixed, flat rate and can run from our own preferred website hosting service. Though I don’t consider it a particularly intuitive tool for building websites, it is extremely feature rich. Which means the learning curve was steep.
Another important point- Millions of businesses use OceanWP because it’s supported by so many third party developers. You can make it do pretty much anything you want. It is a tool capable of infinitesimal iterations.
OceanWP feature set as of Sept 2026
What about Adobe you ask?
If you buy into their marketing, they expect everyone to work from their ‘Cloud’, their proprietary infrastructure, their hard-drive ‘in the sky’. Why anyone trusts ‘any’ cloud to stay up 24/7/365 without fail, is beyond me. Yes, they have their own backup systems. I don’t trust those either. Especially in today’s political environment. StatusGator tracks this for those who are interested. A quote from their their website-
“There were 182 Adobe Creative Cloud outages since January 2025 which are summarized below, including incident details, duration, and resolution information.”
https://statusgator.com/services/adobe-creative-cloud/outage-history
A cloud is nothing more than a hard-drive or solid state media residing on some server, somewhere… Like the giant power and water guzzling server farms now dominating the US landscape. Do we really need all that?
Calling it a ‘cloud’ is simply a marketing ploy. Nothing more.
My first Raid Array for Firewire 800 and USB2
I have my own ‘cloud’ sitting on my desk… 2x 6TB hard-drives, configured as a ‘raid-one’ array, just for backup. SSD’s would have been faster, but way more expensive. A raid array may sound expensive until you do the math on some cloud subscription plan with that level of capacity. I’m on my third raid.
While researching info for this post, I came across this:
Three quotes from Wikipedia on the subject of ‘Software as a Service, or SaaS’:
“Unlike other software delivery models, SaaS separates “the possession and ownership of software from its use.” The use of SaaS began around 2000, and by 2023 was the main form of software application deployment.”
“Unlike traditional software, it is rarely possible to buy a perpetual license for a particular version of the software.”
“There are no specific software development practices that distinguish SaaS from other application development, although there is often a focus on frequent testing and releases.”
And a Wikipedia quote regarding ‘Infrastructure as a Service or IaaS’:
“Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is the most basic form of cloud computing, where infrastructure resources—such as physical computers—are not owned by the user but instead leased from a cloud provider.”
This ‘compute solution’ might work for multinational corporations, large institutions or governments, but it definitely marginalizes the individual creator with limited capital, those who may oppose their ambitions, or those who may not have 24/7/365 access to the internet. It also explains why governments in Europe have been busy cancelling their ‘compute’ contracts with those outside their own borders. Sovereignty matters. Independence matters. Redundancy matters.
Political power in the hands of transnational corporations
Without formal oversight, a business model predicated on software distributed only via a ‘Cloud’ ‘they’ control (SaaS + IaaS), runs the risk of arbitrary manipulation. A situation where they can dictate policy regarding how and who may access it. This is a type of political power they should never have access to. Yes, there are security concerns, but that is the extent with which they may operate ‘independently’.
Corporations are not your friend.
Most American Corps are no longer driven by the interests of the consumer, but by their desire to maximize returns to the board and stockholders.
It’s also what is driving this huge push by American TechnoBros to build out all these ridiculous Mega-Data-Farms. This firmly puts a handful of ultra-rich elitists in full control of any and all infrastructure that depends on ‘compute’ to function. Which is kind of like, ALL INFRASTRUCTURE.
I think ‘entropy’ will be SaaS /IaaS worst enemy since ‘redundancy’ has been thrown out the window for the sake of absolute control. The problem with that is, it usually results in a complete meltdown. Not something that can be restored in short order. At least as it relates to the USA where environmental considerations have been stripped from the economic equation. But what about Europe, or Asia, or China which has its own ‘compute’ solutions? Their approach to all of this is much more ‘consumer’ centric.
Those at the top of this closed-loop digital food-chain talk a lot about ‘economy of scale’, but those savings are never passed down. Costs remain the same no matter what, or go up if they think they can force the issue since they operate from the position of just a few monopolies. They have no competition as mergers and buyouts rule the day.
And all those Mega-Data-Farms they have managed to erect to this point? They will all need to be updated every 5 or 6 years, just to stay current with evolving chip architecture. Can they really afford that since they used hundreds of billions of borrowed U$D to build what they have now? There are limits to their self-serving, aberrant behavior.
Last but not, least, there is the issue of how governments can access ‘your data’ as it relates to SaaS/IaaS. Wikipedia made this point about the US:
“In the United States, constitutional search warrant laws do not protect all forms of dynamically stored SaaS data. The result is that governments may be able to request data from SaaS providers without the owner’s consent.”
I know this much, I’ll continue to work from my aging Mac computers and the software ‘I own’ for as long as I can. The corporate ‘Cloud’ be damned.
Now how do I get my hands on a laptop running HarmonyOS, in english? I’m too old to learn Chinese.
Having to access the Net to get work done is just wrong. That should have never become a ‘thing’. For me, this is about personal autonomy over corporate driven mandates. We should be empowering the creative individual, not turning us all into corporate bots churning out generative AI slop. There is nothing ‘authentic’ about any of that.
Regarding AI slop
Searches for ‘AI free’ WordPress solutions produced very sparse results as well. Most searches only sent back more AI generated webpages. As far as I can discern, there is no AI at the core of OceanWP. You can add it, but it’s optional.
Electric sheep, an AI Generated image courtesy of Wikipedia.
An even bigger AI concern? The US Supreme Court declared in a recent decision that AI generated images cannot be copyrighted. Read that again. The implications of that decision is staggering.
Here is what Wikipedia had to say about the US Supreme Court decision:
“In August 2023, the US Supreme Court ruled that AI art is ineligible for copyright due to failure to meet human authorship. In March 2026, it declined to hear a case over whether AI-generated art can be subject to copyright.”
Think of this as settled US law.
Screen grab of FB popup, AI content statement, August 2026
My one subscription, Photoshop
To be clear, I do have a monthly subscription to Photoshop since it still supports duotone/tri-tone/quad-tone, color channel generation, though support for PMS color values will cost you extra. To add insult to injury, I cannot open any of those older Adobe/PMS/Duotone files. As mentioned elsewhere, I’ve been using Photoshop (PS V3.0 on a Mac IIci running OS 7.2) for eons. At this point I do absolutely no image editing from Photoshop. All of my work is now processed through Affinity Photo II. It will open most PS files, just not the ‘duotone’ files.
Pantone Duotone Guide for Photoshop, circa 1998
So that’s the extent of my relationship with Adobe… currently at $15 a month. It was $10. As of this post, new signups pay $23 a month (if you do a little digging you might find it at a discount). When my license goes up again and it will, I see a future without them.
Is it any wonder why so many of us long-time Photoshop users switched to apps like Affinity Photo (or just ‘Affinity’ as of this post)? The current version of Affinity requires a user to ‘activate’ the AI enhancement features separately. I’ll never do that, but you could.
And that is that
From my perspective, website design and the digital tools needed to create them have seriously devolved over the last 10 years. Honestly, if I cannot buy what I need outright, I don’t want it. I demand authority over the content and images I create. There can be no compromise on this point.
I think that’s why some photographers, some creatives have moved back to shooting film… in order to maintain authority over what they do. Maybe in 10 years, I’ll come back to this with an update. Maybe.
Very nice website…
I hope to see more.