If you’ve found your way to this site today, you’ve made your first step in leaving behind an old world called DLK COLLECTION and embarking on a new journey. After more than five years of blogging on the previous site, we’re happy to introduce an entirely new platform for the critical discussion of fine art photography. Since we’ve brought over every review, every picture, every post, and every comment from the old site, there will be much that will seem familiar to our regular readers. What’s different is that we now have the professional infrastructure to support that content, with better tools for finding what you’re interested in and a more up-to-date look and feel. While we expect you’ll want to jump in and start exploring right away, here are a few highlights of what’s new:

• New Design: As you can see, we have a new name, a new logo, a new color palette and a new set of graphic design elements. Many of the items that used to be found at the bottom of a single post or review (ratings, transit hub links, address details, show dates, etc.) have migrated up into a sidebar, hopefully making it easier to focus on the main content. Tables have been added to the auction posts to make parsing the statistical information faster, and slideshows have been added to the art fair roundups to make paging through all the highlights quicker. And the whole site has been reconsidered for the age of the tablet and smartphone, resizing itself to fill whatever space your device might offer.
• New Format: We’ve traded in the single, reverse chronological format of the blog and replaced it with content sections not unlike an online newspaper. Articles and reviews are divided into one of six sections: Galleries, Museums, Photobooks, Auctions, Art Fairs, and Opinions. Over time, we expect to expand the content in each section and to tailor the editorial focus of the segment to match its specific needs.
• New Tools: On the old site, the only navigation aid was the mile long index in the sidebar. Now we have a comprehensive Artist Index (with nearly 1300 artists/photographers included), as well as specialized pull down menus for galleries (nearly 700), museums, book publishers, auction houses, and art fairs in each section. And if all else fails, a handy full text search box is available at the top of every page.
• A Better Checklist: Our new Checklist is updated constantly, so you no longer have to wait for a weekly refresh. It’s now found right on the home page, as well as in its own section for easy smartphone bookmarking.
• Pictures, Pictures: For all those images that don’t make it into a review but find their way to Twitter, we’ve created a new section called Daybook to organize this stream of notable photography. In our itinerant wanderings and travels, we see lots of great photography and many of our unexpected highlights will end up here.
• Finally, A Weekly Email Newsletter: For those who aren’t able to visit the site for a daily dose of fine art photography, we’ve created an email newsletter with links to every post from the preceding week, ensuring that you don’t miss anything. Sign up using the icon at the top of the home page, or visit the Subscribe section at the bottom of the page for more details.

While we’ve made a lot of progress in building this new platform, porting all the old content over has been a daunting task. At this point, we’ve hand tuned the posts for all of 2012 and 2013, ensuring that all the ratings, links, and other information is now in the sidebars and the pictures are resized and in the right places. If you dig back into the archive further, you may find content that looks like it used to on the old site and doesn’t take advantage of all the new design elements we’ve added. Over the coming weeks, we’ll be tuning up these posts as well, so be patient with us if you find an article that looks a little off; all the content is still there and we’ll have these outliers looking sharp soon.

All of these tremendous changes wouldn’t have been possible without the help of Stacey Edelstein and Dalton Rooney of Raygun. Over the past several months, their hard work has enabled our wholesale transformation and their creativity and technical expertise have improved the site in countless ways. We simply can’t thank them enough for their contributions to what you see here today.

So enough with the preamble – you folks are smart enough to figure out what we’ve done. It’s the Fall season and things are jumping, so let’s get back to talking about photography.