The Whole Story
Photomondiale.com began in the 1990s as photos.jpeek.com, a place where I could share my travel photos and stories with friends. (In those days of small email inboxes, a personal website was a better way to distribute photos.) Search engines picked up the site, and other people began to write with questions, suggestions, and requests to use the photos. Later, messages started to come from book, newspaper and magazine publishers who asked to use photos gratis or for a fee.
In 2005, around the time that Playboy magazine asked to publish one of my photos (not of a woman...), I realized that I could probably sell more if I made a site dedicated to photography and put more of my photos online. That's when photomondiale.com was born.
The name photomondiale came from the French words for world photography. Although I live in the US, I'm an international traveler who believes that a French name is just as valid as one in English. (I also very much enjoy traveling in France — although this site has many more photos of other places around the world.)
I planned to include other photographers' pictures of the world. But then photo-sharing websites like Flickr, and photographers' websites like PhotoShelter, came on the scene. By 2011, I decided to rename the site and make it my own.
This website still has its original purpose: sharing travel photos and stories, for free, with anyone who's interested. The Tours section has almost all of the original travelogues, and I'd like to add more. The tour photos aren't always my best; they're intended to help tell the stories. A second interface, the galleries, is under development. It's intended to show my best photos — in the style of most other photo sites.