What?
Oceanlight.com is a natural history stock photography website that first appeared in 1998 as an exercise to learn what the world wide web and websites were, learn to write the HTML to bring a site into being, get it hosted and see if the world thought anything of it. Considerable thanks is owed to Mike Johnson, a good friend and skilled photographer with sublime images of pelagic animals and blue whales, who offered much early advice about the entire process. At the time, the only photos on Oceanlight.com that were of genuine interest were those of blue whales. Originally all the pages were static and created either by hand or via primitive tools such as NetObjects Fusion.
As inbound links to Oceanlight.com began to accumulate and the resultant traffic (mostly from AltaVista and later Google) built, more images were added to the site and publishers began to contact us to license them, usually for use in editorial books, magazines and news publications. It was realized that Oceanlight.com had become a defacto stock photography enterprise, and was actually one of the first of its kind for marine natural history images on the web. In mid-2002, armed with about 1000 images and a need to search through them by keywords (open vocabulary), simple category and hierarchical relationship (closed vocabulary), work with PHP and MySql was begun to create what has now become a powerful, well-indexed and comprehensive online image search feature. So powerful, in fact, that many of the subjects of which we have coverage now appear quite high in the Google rankings by virtue of the dynamic search engine we developed. For example, do a Google on “kelp forest photo“, “Guadalupe Island“, “blue whale photos” or “Carcharodon carcharias photos“; as of January 2005 (and October 2007), these all show up in the top 3 Google results, some of them via Gygis.com, an ancillary site of ours that it nevertheless driven with the same PHP/MySql/search engine.
The past few years have brought an acceleration to the whole process of making photos, getting them on the web and in front of photo researchers and publishers, and licensing them. We are adding roughly 4000 new images to the library each year, using digital cameras such as the Canon EOS-1Ds Mark II, EOS-1D Mark II N and 5D, with lenses like the 500 f/4, 300 f/2.8, 70-200 f/2.8 and 24-70 f/2.8 (all killers). The image search, keywording and categorization aspects of the Oceanlight.com photo library are now highly automated and need little further work, but the addition of textual content is an area still in need of streamlining. For this reason, we have adopted the technology of the online weblogging crowd to address the issue of content management. Currently, WordPress is the server-side software we use for this purpose.
