I have been using products from the Turning Gate for quite a few years now. It all started with my need to project images at a very rare wedding shoot. I only did that shoot as a favour but it led me to changing my working practices from what I thought was best to something tailored by photographers for photographers.

I had a robust workflow but it fell short of offering me the capability of posting images and other content to anything other than a boring gallery. It was Lightroom that offered me the option to project images without loss of quality and also the thing that introduced me to the embryonic Web Publishing module.

I quickly adapted to and adopted the Lightroom workflow that enabled me to publish images to the web within 3 hours of a shoot ending, but it lacked an awful lot.

That is when I discovered Matthew Campagna’s Turning Gate products and I was a relatively early adopter buying into CE2. That morphed through several iterations to CE4 and then the Damascus moment when Backlight was launched. This was a real game changer divorcing the product from the clunky Lightroom interface into something managed outside of it with Lightroom being the publishing tool.

That was a little over a year ago and now we have Backlight 1.2.2 which is as mature a product as I have ever used from Matthew and Ben. I was lucky enough to take part in some user testing of the beta of this release. I enjoyed that especially as I am not a developer and God knows the patient people on the support forum can swear to that. Rod Barbee has the patience of a saint with his chasing the sun support that he offers as a moderator on the community forum.

I dare say if I had the time and the weather was inclement enough, I would sit down and seriously try to understand this stuff but honestly, my photography and parent site are built more or less straight out of the box with little or no fiddling.

I have been so busy of late with other developments, I am a Business Analyst by trade, that my creative side of the business has been lagging behind. I’m glad I’m back into the mode of shooting my large format projects and in some respects the inclement and unseasonal weather we are having has enabled me to focus on the rebuilding the sites wth Backlight. As soon as the tide has turned, the wind has dropped and the light is right I’ll be back off into the field knowing full well I can just rely on Backlight to let me publish my progress.

Anyone wanting to find out more about The Turning Gate can click on the logos in the footers of my sites or just click here The Turning Gate for Backlight products  

Many thanks to Matt, Ben, Rod and all the other advice from the community members for making my site work easily straight out of the box.