update

A short opportunity to highlight and thank our short list of sponsors.

Just a quick note to let everyone know that the original winner of the Lowepro Passport Sling did not respond to my message.  As is dictated in the rules, we will now select a random winner.  Once we get in touch with that winner, we will make a formal announcement.

It’s time for a new look, and we’re ready to roll out our new design. But we didn’t stop there. Oh no, there’s a lot of other benefits too.

Those of you who have been visiting the site every day may have noticed a few subtle changes over the last several days.  We have been preparing for some upgrades – a process that cannot be taken too lightly.  The biggest change that you’ll notice is that we are now using Disqus, a great add-on for our comment system that offers a number of different commenting and feedback options.  At your choice, you’ll be able to post using your profile from Blogger, Worry not, you’ll still be able to post annonymously and/or as a guest.  We also installed a caching system and made several tweaks to our default theme in an effort to speed up the load time of the site. We tested everything on our test servers, but we can’t possibly pinpoint every piece of  trouble.  So if you experience any issues, please contact me.

In the past week, we have been wrapping up 2009 and looking forward into 2010.  We’ve focused on small details and talked about looking back and reviewing our own works.  We’ve looking deep into the future and made some predictions.  But now it’s time to talk about our relationship with you – how Shutter Photo’s goals will (hopefully) make a happier experience for you.  If you remember, a few months back we took a survey (if you weren’t a part, worry not – we’ll be doing another one soon).  We took the results from that and are actively working to improve ourselves for your benefit.  With that, I’m going to jump right into our goals for 2010: More Reviews – We have already done several book reviews here at Shutter Photo.  We will continue to review books, of course.  Our book reviews have been some of our most popular articles.  But in addition to that, we are going to provide more product reviews – whatever we can get our hands on is fair game (hint – if you have connections, send us a message). More Articles for Point and Shoot (Pocket Camera) Users -  Many of our articles are targeted …

It has been a long time coming, but I am now ready to make the official announcement:  I have created a new portfolio to exhibit my work.  I will explain my thought process, but if you want to go right to my new portfolio, you can visit it now. For the time being, I’m going to continue to maintain the gallery that can be found here on Shutter Photo.  But I am working to phase that out.  The thing is, I started Shutter Photo as a place to share my work and thoughts.  But the site has evolved a bit more than I would’ve thought, and it has become more of an educational and discussion site.  That said, I no longer feel that it is appropriate to display my own work here, unless for the purpose of examples.  Instead, I would much rather display the works of the community, which is why I started the Shutter Photo on Flickr group (all are welcome to join). It is my goal to make Shutter Photo your site, not mine. With that said, I’d like to remind all of you that I am open to any suggestions.  If there is any specific feature …

I appologize, but I don’t know that I’ll be able to make a wisdom post this week.  I got a bit side-tracked on a number of other projects including the addition of the new Shutter Photo on Flickr feed (in the sidebar).  Since I was able to bring that to fruition, I don’t feel too guilty about missing a post. Okay, maybe I feel a little guilty. So I guess the take-away today is that I should really learn to better prioritize my projects.  I’ll have to file this lesson under planning.

I just wanted to warn you all, my faithful readers, that my site will experience some sparatic downtimes over the next several evenings.  We are upgrading the site and changing some configurations on the back end. My hope is that this won’t affect most of you.   Please note that these upgrades will not affect our RSS feed, our e-mail subscriptions or our regular content updates. As always, thanks for your patience while we upgrade.

I temporarily reverted back to the old theme because I found a few serious bugs specific to page navigation. I will resolve this later tonight. Sorry about the troubles and thanks for your patience.

Those of you who have visted here regularly will notice that I have a brand new site design.  After a year with the old design, I thought it was time for a change.  I’ve learned a few things, and with my newfound wisdom about blogging and web design, I have incorporated a few new features.  For starters, my home page now features a highlights section that provides you with a quick preview of all the latest posts and the most popular posts and all my latest photos.  When you’re not on the front page, that information smoothly slips to the sidebar.  The new design also gives me a cleaner site and a little more space in the posts area.  I hope you like the new design. Things yet to come.  There are a few areas of the site where I am still fixing some things.  The gallery, for example, is going to get completely overhauled with new categories and all.  That’s a huge undertaking, I’ve discovered, and I don’t really want to rush that. If you have any thoughts, suggestions or frustrations, please feel free to reply to this post.