My unhappiness with my website provider had grown ever since it was taken over by an outfit specializing in wedding mementos.  Of course, the new owners assured us innocent client-lambs that the quality its website services would not slip, but would, rather, reach new heights.  They announced a plan to create new templates that would benefit us in ways that the existing ones never did.

At the same time, for some mysterious reason, the images on my site began suffering from cases of the jaggies, visible pixelation at the edges of objects and in human flesh tones.  The Tech Support people denied that what I saw happening was happening.  Not only did that “nonexistent” problem never get solved, but it got harder and harder to get responses from tech support to any of my questions or pleas for help with the trial version of the new templates.  In addition, the wonder-templates were plagued with problems.

Finally, an immediate circumstance made it critical that I show my art off to better advantage.  So I fled the broken pixels and promises.  After researching other website providers, I packed my domain name and moved to PhotoShelter.  So far, I’ve been delighted with almost everything about it:  its templates’ many features, its speedy and useful tech support replies, its online help files — and, most of all, the great leap upward in the resolution and size at which my images are now displayed.  So I hope that you’ll feel moved to explore my new site, at the same URL as my old one:  www.lawrenceruss.com .

If you do, you’ll find that for the first time, I’m displaying in public a portfolio (in two parts) of my oldest, longest-running photography project, comprised of images taken at Devil’s Glen in Weston, Connecticut.  The place is a kind of sacred site for me, despite its name (though the name’s not irrelevant to my feelings about it or to some of my experiences there).  I’ve exhibited a number of my photographs from the Glen.  “The Power That Builds in Solitude,” for instance, accompanies the July 20, 2011 post (“Summoning the Genie’s Power – Part 1” of this blog, was published as a Merit-Award winner in COLOR Magazine, was selected for juried exhibitions in Oregon and Vermont, and has been written about as part of an “ideal bachelor pad” — not the way I ever saw it, but there it is — in an online design mag called HOUZZ.  Until I launched my new PhotoShelter site, however, I’d never shown a group, much less a portfolio, of images from the project, as I have here:  in “God and Nature in Devil’s Glen, Parts 1 and 2” in the PLACE AND PRESENCE collection tabbed on my site’s home page.

Yes, I know I’ve laid out more territory on the current site than anyone is likely to explore in one visit, but I hope that you’ll get lost in it for a while, and that you’ll want to return to it more than once for further adventures in various kinds of forests.