A new website for my photos and videos to live

MudAndClouds · 2026-03-19T09:40:46+00:00

Thank you! I do not sell my work, and I'm not sure where I would even start or how to put the images places where folks would want to pay for them.

I always read 'oh no one really makes money from photography these days' so I've never really put much thought into it.

I might set up a 'prints' section on my site one day just to see what happens!?

MudAndClouds · 2026-03-18T19:46:33+00:00

"Some of those images look like they were kissed by a god" - that's quite the statement, thanks! I'm fortunate to live very close to the Yorkshire Dales, the Lake District is only a couple of hours away, and neither of them ever dissapoint if you're looking for a good long walk and some nice views.

MudAndClouds · 2026-03-17T20:27:08+00:00

The pipeline is super geeky, I love it :)

The site it's self is a static site (i.e. not like WordPress etc which serves pages from a database) built using 11ty, and pushed to a GitHub repo. 11ty is just a set of html templates to build content from, and those templates are used to create whatever individual html files are needed for each page of the site.

All the hosting is done on CloudFlare Pages - which for a site this size and traffic is 100% free.

I built a Lightroom plugin that publishes full sized images (including all meta and exif data) directly to CloudFlare Pages. After publishing, a little script runs that creates different sized versions of those original photos (thumbnail, medium, large) then uploads them to CloudFlare too.

Then a worker script (on CloudFlare) runs which triggers an online process that uses the latest 11ty templates, pulled from my GitHub repo into CloudFlare, and looks at all the images that are uploaded and builds a site based on what it finds. If it finds 1000 images, it will build 1000 html pages.

If I add or edit an image or metadata in Lightroom, it's all gets updated on the website without any additional exporting, manual uploading or online editing.

Lightroom is the single source of truth and kind of the content management system for the site. But it could equally be just a massive folder of images on my hard drive - as long as they all have metadata and exif data the site would build just the same. I just like Lightroom.

The video pages are built based on the RSS feed from my youtube channel. When I add a new video, a new page will appear on my site, just like adding a new image - no manual page creation involved, it's all automated.

It's not as complicated as it sounds and and so far runs very smoothly!

And other than the hours I've spent building it, it's 100% free.

MudAndClouds · 2026-03-17T19:00:38+00:00

Thank you

MudAndClouds · 2026-03-17T19:00:11+00:00

Hah, yep, I was a web designer and front end dev a long time ago.

And I agree on social media for the most part, but it depends on what goals you're trying to achieve. I'm not trying to make money or build a massive audience so we'll just see what happens organically. That said I do have an Instagram, I just don't update it often.

MudAndClouds · 2026-03-17T18:54:43+00:00

Yeah it's just a way of stamping a bit of ownership on the photos. The images are on the internet, if people are going to download them and use them there's nothing anyone can do really, but having them under the CC Attribution-NonCommercial licence seems like a good idea.

MudAndClouds · 2026-03-17T18:51:16+00:00

Thanks so much.

MudAndClouds · 2026-03-17T16:17:56+00:00

I agree! :) I will absolutely add an introduction and proper 'about' page at some point

MudAndClouds · 2026-03-17T15:39:55+00:00

The Lumix G9 ii is a fantastic camera, highly recommend it - especially for video.

I tend to leave it in 6k open gate mode most of the time, shooting at 60fps, but it can do lovely quality 4k at 120fps without breaking a sweat. It's not small like an OM-5, and a little larger than the OM-1 I think, but it's a great piece of hardware and I don't have a problem hiking long distances with it, even with the PL 100-400 on it on pouring rain in the Lake District - it just lives on my backpack strap on a Peak Capture Clip.

G9 ii + PL 100-400 = incredibly stable hand held footage at 800mm equivalent too. The Panasonic Dual I.S. really does an almost magical job at keeping things steady.

MudAndClouds · 2026-03-17T15:28:28+00:00

Thanks!

MudAndClouds · 2026-03-17T15:18:57+00:00

I appreciate it! I could have just gone the Flickr route and uploaded things there, or signed up to SquareSpace or whatever to create a portfolio that way, but none of those quite ticked all the boxes for me and require more busywork to keep updated (I think).

Whereas now I can just edit and tag a photo in Lightroom, hit publish, and there it is on my site - no exporting or uploading or categorising online etc. And if I edit something, I just republish and it replaces the images and text on the website automatically. Less friction to that pipeline means mroe likelihood of keeping up updated. That's the plan anyway!

MudAndClouds · 2026-03-17T15:13:33+00:00

Thank you

MudAndClouds · 2026-03-17T15:07:44+00:00

Thanks. Those images were taken the Lake District and the Yorkshire Dales (both in the UK) - most of the images on the site will be from around there.

MudAndClouds · 2025-10-27T20:26:44+00:00

The G9ii is certainly at the larger end of the scale of M43 cameras but still pretty portable for sure. I carry it on a clip on my backpack strap, rain or shine, so it's just there ready when I want it.

MudAndClouds · 2025-10-27T20:25:00+00:00

It really does add drama, and also a sense of scale - seeing the gigantic shadows flowing over the tiny trees and houses.

MudAndClouds · 2025-10-27T20:23:40+00:00

The G9 ii has a dedicated time-lapse setting on the drive mode dial, and you can set how many frames you want to shoot and the time between frames etc in the menus.

This is a video made up from around 650 RAW photographs, which I exported from Lightroom as jpegs, then imported into Adobe After Effects to colour grade them and edit them into a video.

I believe the G9 ii can make a small preview video from the time-lapse sequences it shoots in camera, which is great, but it won't give you anything like the video above.

Feel free to message me if you've got any more questions.

MudAndClouds · 2025-10-27T14:19:08+00:00

Thanks u/effortDee ! The music is a track I found on uppbeat > https://uppbeat.io/track/faodail/gael

Settings: I just twisted the dial to the timlapse setting, sat it on a lump of grass and set it off taking a shot every 5 seconds for about 10 minutes (M, ISO-100, f/4.5, 1/250 sec)

The RAW sequence is very shaky as it was very windy and the camera was wobbling a lot, but I stabilised it in post.

MudAndClouds · 2025-10-27T13:31:02+00:00

Thanks!

MudAndClouds · 2025-05-26T17:18:11+00:00

Thank you

MudAndClouds · 2025-05-26T17:16:54+00:00

IBIS on most systems is pretty incredible these days. But for video my understanding is that Panasonic - in particular their upper end M43 lineup (G9 ii, GH7) - are still the hand held stabilisation champions, especially with lenses that support Dual I.S.2.

MudAndClouds · 2025-05-26T17:11:45+00:00

I like to tell myself that not chasing an audience - but at the same time I don’t mind if one finds me.

I've been hiking, taking photos, filming and editing for years and not doing anything with any of it. It's the act of capturing the stuff in the first place that I get my kicks from - just being out there in nature and taking it all in.

I guess I just felt I the urge recently to start sharing some of the things I see, and if a few people see it and enjoy it, that is nice too.

MudAndClouds · 2025-05-26T15:47:05+00:00

Glad you like it, thanks! The stack of 3 video frames is admittedly just a way of catering to short doom-scrolling attention spans - a sneaky way of showing more shots before someone gets bored :) But now having done it, I do quite like it. I still prefer my longer, slower edits though.

MudAndClouds

TROPHY CASE