The ‘Budget’ Wedding Photographer
Jan 24th
Recently a small debate broke out on a few sites and I wanted to offer up my opinion from the side it seems a small majority really dislike. It was a discussion about how professional photographers can offer a $500 wedding package, and honestly it’s simple. First let me start by saying that I agree if people are giving an 8 hour wedding, a proof book, albums and prints for $500 then yes, that is a great injustice to the entire photography community. There are a ton of external factors here that determine the price of photography, for some reason there is this illusion that photography has to be extremely expensive, and can’t be had on a budget it seems this cry is coming from the elitist crowd, but nothing could be further from the truth.
They assume that if you’re getting photographs for $500, than automatically the photographs are total shit, they take no factors in to consideration, they don’t take how many hours, what they get, nothing, they automatically assume you’re service is crap. The reason for this is that they are threatened by your very existence. They’ll spread lies and smear your service every chance they get, that’s why I always recommend placing your photographs in an online gallery, so clients can decide if your service is worth it. More >
Must have wordpress free blogging plugins in 2010
Jan 21st
Wordpress is an awesome open source blogging platform that’s released under the GPL so it’s free for use for anyone. Wordpress can be made into a powerful CMS as well as a simple blog like mine here, so today’s post is going to be about the best “Blogging” plugins for wordpress in 2010 and beyond. Some will help you tie social media into the mix, and some will help with your SEO and increase usability.
Launching a community for photographers
Jan 16th
After I sold my last online community a few months ago, I swore to myself to never, ever launch another one. Apparently I’ve failed, and started a community about photography. We welcome all sorts of photographers of any skill level, no matter what gear they have, or how much they know and try to make them feel welcome while learning about photography. It’s probably not going to be anything great because like always, I have a lack of time to promote the community properly, which was a reason for selling them to begin with.
Any way, if you want to check out the newest Photography forums on the internet, visit Aperture Photography Forums, register and learn about all the wonderful aspects of photography.
How To Dominate Beezid And Make Thousands Per Month!
Dec 25th
In case you’ve been in a cave the last month, Beezid is a new penny auction site that works fairly simply. You purchase “Bids” and then use these “Bids” to try to win an item. Every time an item is “bid” on it raises in price by one penny then resets the timer by 10, 20, 30, or 45 seconds. If you win an auction for $6.50 you than pay just $6.50 for the item. If you can sneak in, bid one time on an item and get out then you’ll make a small fourtune on items. In the last 7 days, I spent a total of $27 for bids at Beezid to get me started, and I’ve got items worth over $2,500 from them by sneaking in and making the last bid. It’s all about the timing and being patient. More >
How to serve parallel downloads from cPanel servers
Dec 20th
In my other post, we setup Parallel Downloads to Optimize vBulletin 4. But since then I’ve had a few emails asking to cover only cpanel and more indepth of what exactly severing parallel downloads helps the page load. To understand parallel downloads is relatively simple, web sites have grown in size and complexity including numerous style sheets, javascript files, and images. Each file must be downloaded at some point, and each time they are a request is sent to your server. In the old days web servers couldn’t handle sending everything at once, and thats when browsers stepped in to help out. Browsers are hard coded to only download 2 requests at a time, for example if you have 100 files that need downloaded the browser will make 50 sequential requests to the server to get them, BAM BAM BAM BAM over and over again. This leads to a lot of over head and latency issues. They limited the 2 file limit per hostname (example.com) More >
vBulletin 4 optimized .htaccess
Dec 18th
This .htaccess will optimize your server and increase your page load scores (higher score is a good thing). This will set the images to expire after a certain amount of time as well as numerous other optimization tricks for your server. These set the expires headers for images, and set some cache-control headers as well. Place this at the very top of your .htaccess file, remember to back up and test first.
How to serve parallel hostnames for vBulletin Optimize vBulletin 4
Dec 18th
Most modern browsers default to two simultaneous threads per hostname. This leads to overhead and latency as the browser will only grab two objects at a time. One of the biggest pitfalls of vBulletin (especially 4.0) is the amount of graphics and javascript served from the same hostname. Setting up parallel hostnames is fairly simple and I’ll outline the steps on a cPanel installation and vBulletin 4.0 stylevars system. The entire process doesn’t take more than 15 minutes even for novice users, and you can easily do more to further optimize your vBulletin.
Printing from Lightroom using templates
Dec 11th
Adobe Lightroom is a fantastic piece of software, and for anyone living in a cave the last few years, you should go over to Adobe and check it out. Lightroom manages your galleries, and lets your develop, create slideshows, show, format for the web, and print all from one program. It’s sorta like a light weight photoshop for those who like to take a more hands on approach with the settings for your prints. More >
Does long tail search (SEO) produce only garbage hits for forums?
Dec 10th
I am sitting here pondering if this trendy buzz topic produces anything of actual use or importance that will actually contribute to a web site. To me, long tail is garbage and I’ll explain why shortly. If you don’t know what I’m referring to when I speak of “Long Tail SEO” or “Long Tail Search”, it’s basically any search phrase thats more than 3-4 words long. The long tail is a way to target a broader niche or audience as people start to search for longer and longer phrases in search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. More >
Family Photo Restorations
Dec 3rd
Here are some scanned images from my mothers attic that I’ve attempted to restore and fix up for archiving purposes. There were literally thousands of images up there so I’ve got a lot of work ahead to get them all, but here are some completed ones for now. More >
