Putting together my photo essay proved to be a very different experience than I expected. Using WordPress under such restrictions was actually very annoying. I have used WordPress for my own web design purposes (both personal and business) and one really needs to have control of all of the options I think in order for it to be truly useful. For example, in my final essay draft review, one of the things that I needed to add to my images were text rollovers. However, it is actually impossible to add rollovers in WordPress without modifying the HTML code in the file headers and we don’t have access to the file headers in this type of WordPress installation. Therefore, my project is lacking a large amount of impact. I thought about just adding duplicates of the images with the 2nd image having the text on top, but after viewing a draft of this nature, it seemed too repetitive.
Other than the somewhat restrictive nature of the WordPress installation itself, I found my essay to come together somewhat naturally after my first draft review. Intensity of the photos developed quite easily as I added words to my images. I still don’t exactly know if I made the best choice in the way that I added my text, but I made my choice and now we’ll see how it is perceived.
Moving the informational text from the beginning of the essay to the end I think has a very good effect on the entire piece. Having worked on these photos for an entire semester, it seemed obvious to me that the work was about homelessness in the Common, but reviewing it, Anne made me realize that the way the essay starts out is with pigeon’s as the apparent subject and people don’t make their entrance until a few photos in. This will hopefully be a shock to the viewer and the text at the end will then serve to educate the viewers of the true purpose of the work.
Overall, I am happy with the order and selection of photos, but I do wish that I could have made the arrows all line up in the same place and have a consistent photo dimension.