Nikon D80 review added.

Managing Editor Hannah Thiem has written a Nikon D80 review for photo.net. Read it here:

Nikon D80 review.


Image by photo.net member Hannah Thiem

A sneak preview of the new image ordering feature.

Here is a little sneak preview of Photo.net's new "drag and drop" image re-ordering system for photo.net folders. This is a feature that we have all wanted for a long time. So say thanks to Patrick and Jin for putting it together.

The feature is not ready to go yet, it still has to be integrated with the live server and to be beta tested for bugs. But we're getting close.

First edition of the photo.net newsletter on it's way.

The first edition of the photo.net monthly newsletter should be arriving in user's inboxes shortly (if it hasn't already).

This is a new project for us and we hope that you find it informative and interesting. The purpose of the newsletter is to bring the best of photo.net to your inbox. It will inform you of new site content, draw attention to some talented photo.net members, and highlight some of the more interesting tips, events, photos, and information posted to the site every month. With thousands of new forum and gallery posts every day, it would be impossible to keep track of everything on photo.net. The newsletter is our way to try and help.

If you are the kind of person who spends hours a day on photo.net, there won't be a whole lot that is new in the newsletter, and you might choose to not receive it. The link in the newsletter itself is the best way to do this. Yes, we know that the link is not a "http://photo.net" formatted address. This is because we needed to use a mass-mailing provider in order to do a mailing this large. Otherwise we ran the risk of getting photo.net email tagged as spam by many of the email providers. That would be a large problem. In the future, we are aiming to have a "I wish to receive the newsletter" link that can accessed via the "my workspace" area on photo.net. But for the moment, the unsubscribe link in the email is the way to go, it will NOT cause you to get more spam.


Image by photo.net member Josh Root

October 2007 Featured Member: Wilson Tsoi

Wilson Tsoi, is a photographer living in the US northwest. Like the rest of us up here in the damp corner of the country, he braves the rain to get out and make images. Unlike the rest of us, he has an excellent eye and an uncanny knack for capturing a decisive moment in his sports images. The excitement and action of Wilson's sports photography is what first caught my eye. But he has also done wonderful travel and scenic photography across the world. He has been published in a various magazines and newspapers and placed highly in a number of photography contests.

"It's very difficult for me to pinpoint a single thing that I enjoy most about photographing sports. One that I can think of right away is the challenge in capturing decisive moments, particularly in team sports. I'm also quite fascinated by the human form in action. When a receiver and a cornerback go after a ball in the end zone, when a midfielder and a defender fight for a header, when a shortstop turns two, when a power forward rises for a dunk, to me, there is much beauty in the human form while these sports are being played. And to forever freeze that very moment in 1/1000 second, in focus, with the right depth-of-field, and compositionally pleasing, somehow it's a very rewarding feeling to me." -Wilson

Read More: October 2007 Featured Member


Image by photo.net member Wilson Tsoi

Photo.net sold to NameMedia Inc.

Photo.net has been acquired by NameMedia, Inc (www.namemedia.com). NameMedia is located in Waltham, MA and specializes in developing and managing large enthusiast community web sites. They currently operates a number of these community sites, including Davesgarden.com which is the largest and most active gardening community on the web. To be honest though, the only one of their websites that I was very familiar with when I first learned about them was geek.com, a leading tech-nerd gadget site. Davesgardens was a website much like photo.net that was created and built mostly by one person, and that grew to be a leader in it's topic area. I don't think you would find members of davesgardens.com expressing the opinion that the NameMedia purchase changed their site significanty.

The acquisition happened this past spring and is now being announced. I have enjoyed working with the folks at NameMedia during this period. They are good people and I am excited about the new opportunities that will emerge through their connection with photo.net. NameMedia is committed to preserving the things that have made photo.net a valued resource for photographers over the past 15 years. I have had an opportunity to witness this commitment over the past few months and believe it to be genuine. Most importantly, from my standpoint, is that the acquisition will give us the resources to tackle many of the functional improvements that the community has been requesting over the past few years.

As we all know, Photo.net's success has been the direct result of the tireless work by the team of moderators, editors, writers, and programmers that maintain and enhance the site. NameMedia recognizes this and has not changed the team of people working on the site, they are only adding more depth and resources.

If you're wondering what major modifications to expect, there won't be many. Photo.net will continue to be the best community on the web for serious photographers to share, learn, and grow in their craft. Over the coming months, new features will be added to the site, but all of those improvements will be aimed at the continued fulfillment of (or redirection towards) the site's photography education and community mission. In the near future, we will be launching a newsletter and blog to share items of interest with photo.net and to help keep the community better informed of new developments.

So, while there are some (in my opinion, overdue) improvements on the horizon, for the most part it will be business as usual at photo.net.

Google crawls all over us...

If you have been seeing some slowness on the site recently, it is likely being caused by a large indexing crawl that Google is doing.

Not fun, but important. Thanks for your patience.


Image by photo.net member Todd Laffler.

Forum post history now newest to oldest

Photo.net member Craig Gillette made a very good point in this thread about how user forum histories are displayed when all are listed (example).

At some point in the beginning days of photo.net the decision was made to display user forum post history with the oldest posts at the top and the newest at the bottom. That was fine for a while, but now almost a decade later, many of us have thousands of posts to look through. So it makes more sense to have the newest posts on the top. Thanks to Craig's suggestion and our programmer's quick work, that is how they will be displayed from now on.

Typical Thursday night backup slowness

Everyone should know this if they don't already, Thursday night is the time of the week that we backup the photo.net servers.

Expect things to run a little slower than usual.

The primary purpose of this blog

The whole point of the Photo.net News and Updates blog is to give photo.net users a place to turn when they see problems on the site. For example, say that a photo.net user notices that the thumbnail images in a gallery are loading very slowly, though the rest of the site appears to be working. In the past the likely response would be to:

• Post a complaint on whatever forum that user frequents the most (or more likely, the Casual Conversations forum).
• Post a complaint on the Site Feedback forum.
• Email forum moderators, site administrators, or the "contact photo.net" page.

All of these are fine methods of alerting us that something is wrong. The problem is that when 50 people all post or email the same thing, we have to spend a lot of time responding to those posts and emails. Time that we could be using to fix the problem. However, if after seeing the problem, that user had visited this blog and saw a post here that explained "One of the image servers failed this morning, we are working to get it replaced, " they would be aware of the problem and that a solution was coming. Fewer complaints that I have to deal with, less bad will towards the site, and a faster resolution to the problem.

Why not just create a photo.net forum for this purpose? Good question. The answer is that by hosting a blog in another "location", we can still communicate with the users in the case of planned (or unplanned) site downtime.