It’s been 10 years. I registered the racphoto.com domain on October 25, 1999.

The site itself is much older as I started it while in graduate school at Virginia Tech and ran it off the personal storage I had on the servers there. I didn’t keep track of when the site first went live — which is a shame but who knew what was to come? — but at the latest it would have been 1996 and might have been a year or two earlier. To put that in context, Google didn’t launch until September of 1998.

But 1999 was the year the site grew up and got a real domain name. While the pictures have improved as I’ve improved as a photographer, the look of the site hasn’t changed much in the past decade. I still hand code the main site and while there are things I’d like to do to improve it, my focus has always been on keeping things simple to make it easier to maintain.

The blog is a relative newcomer and didn’t arrive until January 2006, starting off with a story of Templeton swallowing a sewing needle, and I certainly don’t hand code it and use WordPress instead.

This picture of Mount Moran at sunrise comes from 2006, taken from Oxbow Bend in Grand Teton National Park. Everybody, and I mean everybody, photographs the mountains from here. I’ve done it on a couple of different occasions, but I also enjoy photographing the southern part of the range where you can watch the sunrise in quiet solitude.