Look how long it’s been since I posted!
I’m repentant. Truly. I’ve been most busy, but that’s little excuse.
Look how long it’s been since I posted!
I’m repentant. Truly. I’ve been most busy, but that’s little excuse.
I counted up the number of people who are waiting on me for photos.
The number is embarassingly high.
Slow, steady progress *is* being made, though that might not be visible to the outside world. I anticipate this week finishing off one, perhaps even two, of my backlog entries, at which point I will dance the happy dance, then go heads-down back to work.
I should never have gotten so far ahead in the photos, though of course one hates to pass up any opportunity to shoot.
But post-processing takes time, and attention, and labor, and persistence. And the reality is, I don’t have the time for this I once did.
There’s no question that I’ll be doing fewer shows, and far fewer shoots, this coming year. Even if Ian (or anyone else) wants to pay me to do so, I’d have to think long and hard before letting a pastime that I enjoy so much become a “job” again.
It damn near ruined photography for me, last time I did.
In the meantime, I appreciate everyone who’s been so patient with me so far, particularly Tim and Pete, who have publication deadlines to deal with.
Those who *haven’t* been *quite* as patient should consider that distractions can actually *slow* the process considerably.
I’ve been getting a lot of feelers for trackback spam lately, so I’ve installed Kitten’s Spaminator plug-in.
So far it’s working a treat.
Long-term, though, I think we need to respond to spammers at their source: their customers.
I can think of lots of ways to do this, such as respond-bots that pollute their databases with random (but sane) values.
“You bet I want to learn more about CAS1NO VIAAAAGRA CIAILS ROLLEX”, the ‘bot would say when it got a spam, “gonna go to your site to buy me some of that hot stock before it ‘explodes tomorrow’– just as soon as I pick a random value from the known-invalid credit card list!”
Wouldn’t that be great, if the identity thieves paid good money to the spammers for a list of marks, only to find that most of the identities were completely bogus bot-spawn?
Or even better: specially-crafted values being back-tracked by the authorities?
Shots from one of Florida’s longest-running shows, the 27th annual Gainesville competition, are up on the site; and with that the season is over. whew!
I was in a blur for most of the show from pain and medication (inner ear), but managed to get a couple of decent shots. Enjoy.
I updated the Perl and PHP engines for the site, and that broke practically everything.
At this point I’ve got a lot of it back up, including all the 2006 show shots, most of the individual shots, the Perl-based site search and several ancillary functions.
I still have the modeling shots, mini-shoots, and stock photos to do, and I haven’t been able to figure out the problem in the contest schedule yet. So I’ll be looking for hidden problems for a while.
Thanks for being patient.
Got most of the public site fixed, including the Atlantis memorial site and the contest search page— the global variables I had been using had been disabled for security by the update. Still have work to do on some of the maintenance pages, but I think we’re back in business.
Just noticed that the mail page function hasn’t been working for some time. Seems to be up again. Sorry about that.
Shots from the 2006 All South competition are up on the site. Even managed to fit in a mini-shoot with Tammy Jones after prejudging; she was planning to compete but couldn’t because she’d won the show last year. I’ll get those up as soon as I can but they’re at the end of the long long list of Things I Still Need To Do Right Away.
And what a day for a motorcycle ride!
Anyway, enjoy.
Sheesh, that took a while. Variations in lighting across a stage are absolute murder on shot consistency. Another big show, great work by promoter Chris Eaddy, and finally finally FINALLY I can work on the other backlogs.
Did a quick shoot with Debbie Barnes, looking great for an upcoming show; ran into Ellen Woodley, prepping for the same upcoming show– we may be able to sneak in a quick shoot right before or right after. Saw Belle Turell in the audience, too, looking good after her performance at the North Americans, but her attention was elsewhere.
Anyway, the shots from October 7th’s Southeastern Classic show in Orlando are up on the site. Enjoy.