A few images from some areas with older dwellings in Tianhe district, Guangzhou, China.

The Feast of the Drunken Dragon is one of Macau's more unusual cultural occasions. It's an annual event where a group of locals parade around the city madly spewing alcohol while dancing about with wooden dragon statues. Clearly, Macau knows how to throw a party...

A portfolio website is something of a necessity for working photographers today. For many, dancing pixels have entirely supplanted the printed portfolios of yore while also functioning as online business cards and phonebook entries of sorts. A well-designed site should offer a solid venue for viewing work while also leveraging the inbound marketing opportunities the internet affords.

A number of firms offer custom and pre-packaged websites that balance the visual and technical needs of photographers with varying degrees of success, but none offer quite what I want at a price-point I can easily justify. Thus I've spent quite a great deal of time over the past few years working on designs of my own.

I've put together a number of ultimately ill-fated portfolio designs using static HTML, the Indexhibit CMS, Simpleviewer flash galleries, and a number of other tools. After using systems that were a bit over targeted or simplified for my tastes, I decided it was time to learn a CMS/CMF with more flexibility than I could possibly use. I settled on Drupal. Drupal isn't the simplest system - a clean install doesn't support image insertion without add-on modules, for instance - but it can be made to do just about anything.

My current website uses Drupal 6 with a number of add-on modules to get it to work the way I want. I find the end result attractive and fast to load while also conforming to search engine recommendations for code. Hopefully the availability of image alt-text and visible captions will make it equally attractive to search engine spiders and result in improved search rankings over time.

The website is easy to maintain and use; adding or replacing galleries and images is all done through a simple online interface and most aspects of the website can be changed without touching a line of code.

If you want to give Drupal a try, here are some of the things I've found useful in building my site. Drupal core is well documented on the Drupal website as are many modules, but others can be a bit troublesome to implement. Since I've managed to get everything below to work it must all be fairly user-friendly...

The Wedding of the Century. There’s something about this place that’s a bit uncanny; perhaps it's the tacky sets, the assembly line process, or just the way it exudes wedding industry ethos (rather absurd, if you ask me). Whatever the case, I find it an irresistible source of entertainment.