Happy New Year

December 31st, 2010

My last written words of 2010! When you consider that I write 50-53 weekly columns a year, 8000-10,000 words each, this nears over half a million words per year! I wonder if that qualifies for being "prolific?" Probably more like crazy. So it's no wonder I've been mostly silent these last few weeks enjoying our holiday break. Yet the pressure builds like steam in a teapot. Allow me to explain:

Let’s imagine my head is the teapot. A bit fat one. As I collect photographs of new destinations, form ideas for tutorials, thoughts for musings, plans for reviews, carefully select the most useful/interesting news articles, and sort through readers submissions and questions the pressure builds and builds until the rather limited space is quite full and bursting at the seams When I can release this pressure on a weekly basis the pressure gets high, but never uncomfortable. But go 2-3 weeks without a creative release and I'm ready to explode!

The explosion this year will be intense as we take this site and our weekly column in new directions hopefully offering more and more to the interested reader. My primary focus is still on the beginning hobbyist, but over the last three years many of you "beginning hobbyists" have progressed into keen and/or advanced photographers. With this in mind I'll be introducing more advanced tutorials and more pointed software and equipment reviews with the goal of serving those who have advanced, while still directly supporting the ever growing ranks of beginner digital photographers.

A future tutorial involving saving high ISO images using CS5, layers, history brush, levels, and noise reduction

What can you do to help? Readers submissions and questions really help make the column more interesting. They answer questions many others have but might not have taken the time to ask, and the submissions share photographs others can expect from their like equipment and skills. This is huge. I'd love to see more Feature's, especially on destinations. Email me if you need help putting one together.

Equipment reviews have been the surprise draw of the year bringing more interest (hits per article) than any other area, and often all the other areas combined. People are understandably careful when
selecting equipment for purchase. With that said I don't get free equipment from manufacturers. I have to buy it. Most of my purchases support my profession on a professional level so there's not much more than the occasional point
and shoot compact purchase every year. So.. if you live locally (Bangkok) and have a new piece of gear, a camera, printer, laptop, mouse, keyboard, bag, anything at all.. and would like to see it reviewed and shared with the readers,
and don't mind loaning it to me for a few days, please email me and we'll make arrangements to give it a good review!

Starting next week, January 8th, we'll start back with our regular column and I'm already working on several articles including a leading edge computer build offering a very small footprint very powerful imaging workstation. You won't want to miss this one. The parts have just been delivered and I'll start assembly later today. Several readers are working up Feature Destinations which are always a lot of fun, we have a small queue (but not nearly enough) readers submissions and questions ready to go, and I've rested enough to have a small list of Musing topics to write about. There are also some software reviews in the works, image monitor reviews, and reviews on a super fast PCIe SSD (solid state disk) I'm excited about. It should be a great year!

Breadbox size luxury case to be used in our next computer build

Thank you for visiting with us and a special thank you to those who share through Readers Submissions and Questions! I'm looking forward to a Great New Year!

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

BkkSteve