On behalf of the Mansurovs family, I would like to wish Happy Holidays to our readers and friends that celebrate! May peace, love, health, happiness and prosperity always follow you and your family! Thank you for keeping us constantly busy and motivated, inspiring us to do more. This site would not exist without your support.
Merry Christmas and a Happy New upcoming 2012 Year!
I have been receiving emails, requests on our Facebook Fan Page and plenty of comments on camera gear from our readers during the last couple of weeks. While I will be spending the next few weeks working on a full Nikon 1 V1 Review (see my mini-review here), along with Nikon 1 lenses and other camera + lens reviews, I would like to dedicate some of my time this week to answering questions related to photography gear from our readers. It is a holiday season and many are looking for suggestions on what cameras, lenses and other photo accessories to buy.
It has been a tough year for Nikon and besides a couple of good deals on some cheap lenses like Nikon 55-200mm / Nikon 55-300mm and on the new Nikon 1 system, we did not really see any significant discounts on Nikon gear this week, while Canon has just launched another lens and speedlite instant rebate program. This is very unfortunate for Nikon, because their sales have been severely impacted simply by short supply and unavailability of DSLRs, lenses and accessories. Popular cameras like Nikon D7000, D700 and D3s are nowhere to be found, while some lenses like Nikon 85mm f/1.4G have been hard to find for a while now…
If you have any gear-related questions, please feel free to post them here in the comments section below. I will do my best to respond to your question as soon as I can!
As you might have noticed, I have recently added a new option for email subscription to our blog via a widget on the right side of the page. It is different from the email subscription option shown in our “Subscription” page, where it is fully managed by the Google Feedburner platform. This one is managed by WordPress.com and it provides many options for subscribing to new posts and updates – you can choose to receive emails the moment I post something (unlike Google Feedburner that sends notifications once a day early in the morning) or you can schedule email updates as often as you would like (once a week, etc).
You can find the new subscription widget on the right side of the page as shown below:
Please let me know if you have any questions and happy holidays!
B&H Photo Video is hosting a Fall Color Photo Contest on Facebook, sponsored by Olympus. You have one week to upload your best fall photo and the public voting will begin on 18th of November, 2011. The prizes are great – Olympus E-P3 + 14-42mm lens for the 1st place, Olympus E-PL3 + 14-42mm lens for the 2nd place and Olympus E-PM1 + 14-42mm lens for the third place. Winners will be selected on November 28, 2011. The contest is open to adults of 18 years of age and older. US residents only.
Good luck!
Many of our readers have been emailing me about their inability to see the content of next pages in RSS feeds when a large review article is split into multiple pages. I struggled with this issue for a while and ended up changing the RSS feed to only display an excerpt rather than a full article, with a link to read the article just because of this. After I implemented this a couple of weeks ago, I received even more complaints from our readers, asking to get full posts in the RSS feed like before. Today, I am happy to announce that I found a solution to this problem and I was able to fix the multiple page RSS issue, so all of our subscribers will be receiving full posts over RSS/email, even when they are split into multiple pages.
If you have not yet subscribed to our site via email or RSS, please check out our Subscribe page to see all the options.
Everybody is talking about The Cloud – it is on television and radio, in magazines and newspapers, and has been flooding the Internet, presented as a revolutionary technology that will shape up the future. For most people, cloud computing means nothing, since the words “cloud” and “computing” sound very confusing and only make it seem like something overly geeky and out of reach. While the actual technology behind the cloud can be complex, the concept of cloud computing is actually quite simple to understand. In this article, I will explain cloud computing in very simple terms and talk about cloud storage for photographers – what it can offer to us now and in the future, and whether we should be taking advantage of it today.
Whether you backup your photographs to an external hard drive or a storage device, you should regularly back up your photographs to an offsite location as well. There are many cases when photographers foolishly assume that their data is safe just because somebody told them it is. No matter how redundant your storage is, there is always a threat of theft, misuse, various accidents and natural disasters that might cause data loss. Imagine losing everything you have worked on so far – all of your clients photographs, your portfolio images and your photo libraries you spent countless numbers editing and organizing. Are you prepared to lose it all? If you are not, then you should be evaluating a good backup strategy. I frequently get questions from our readers about backing up large photo libraries without breaking the bank. Some are thinking about investing in locally attached storage solutions from companies like QNAP and Drobo, while others are wondering about online backup solutions that seem to be getting more and more affordable every day. “What should I invest in now?” seems to be the question. Large locally attached backup storage solutions can get rather expensive to buy and maintain overtime. Is online storage a good alternative to local storage? I will try to answer this question shortly, but first, let me talk about cloud computing and explain what cloud storage technology is all about.
Here is an oversimplified explanation of cloud computing. Imagine a large company that employs many contractors, ready and available to work for you any time you want them to. You can hire only one contractor if you are not busy, or you could hire many contractors at once during your peak season, without having to employ them on a permanent basis. Just like your electricity bill, your costs stay low when your business is slow and increase on demand automatically when you get busy, so you only pay for the contractors you actually use. The contractor that you release from work goes to work for somebody else, so his time is not wasted doing nothing. A single contractor could work on several jobs for you and other companies simultaneously and his employer takes care of him, making sure that other contractors help him out if he is overloaded. The company is happy, because it uses their staff efficiently through resource sharing and you as a customer is also happy, because you only pay for what you actually use. You do not know or care about how those contractors are employed, what their shifts and schedules are and how much the company is paying them. All you know is that they are available for you any time you need them at a flat rate. If the demand for contractors grows, the company that employs them can get many more on their payroll to match the demand. So if you are successful and your business expands very rapidly, the company will be able to provide enough resources to match your growth.
As you might have already noticed, our website has been significantly changed during the last two weeks. Just like I promised in my earlier post, the site has been completely reorganized and now only hosts photography-related content. All of Lola’s wedding and recipe content has been moved to Lola’s own website lola-elise.com and related content from this site has been redirected there.
The top navigation menu now includes Reviews with sub-menus to Lens Reviews and Camera Reviews, Photography Tips with sub-menus to Photography Tips for Beginners, Post-Processing Tips for Beginners and Flash Photography Tips, and the new Gear Guide. I have not yet had a chance to finish working on all new pages, but new and updated content will be added to the these pages very soon. The Gear Guide will be a new section with my recommendations for various photography needs and will have short reviews of photography equipment such as lenses, cameras, accessories, software, etc. I will be working on the Gear Guide during the next few weeks.
All categories on the sidebar have also been modified. I removed the previous categories that showed our photography work (and other personal stuff) and replaced them with new categories that primarily host photography articles and reviews. A new section called “current deals and rebates” has been added to the sidebar – I will post links to special deals and discounts there. The slider on the top of the page now features our articles and reviews, instead of Lola’s weddings. Other content is being added to the site, for the two mini-projects I am planning on launching within the next month or two.
As for Lola’s new site, it has a different design and layout than Mansurovs.com, allowing for larger photographs to showcase her work. Lola will be posting images from her photo shoots on lola-elise.com and will be cross-posting some of them here with tips on how she took photographs and then post-processed them in Ligthroom or Photoshop.
Here is a screenshot of her new website Lola-Elise.com:
I hope you like the new changes. Please let us know how you like these changes and please drop a comment about what you think of Lola’s new blog! Lola is still working on lola-elise.com and will be making a separate announcement on her blog very soon. I know she can’t wait to hear your feedback!
It has been over a week since I requested our readers to help us out in deciding the future our site. To be honest, I was surprised to see so many of our readers respond to my request. We received close to 60 comments and over a hundred emails with all kinds of suggestions and recommendations. In addition, we had approximately 400 people vote in our poll, so we got plenty of feedback overall. And I am not even counting our friends and Facebook fans that also shared their opinions on this important matter.
Before I talk about the website, I would like to thank everyone who responded to my request. I was planning to reply to every one of your comments and emails, but I would have to spend at least several days just doing that, so I hope you will forgive me :) From the bottom of our hearts, we would like to say big “Thank You” to our readers that care about what we do. When somebody tells me that our site is the source of their inspiration, I always say the same thing in return – readers like you are the source of our inspiration. We get so many positive emails and comments on a daily basis from all over the world, that I cannot manage to respond to them anymore. Please do not get mad if you did not get a reply from me or Lola! We do try hard to help everyone out and we do our best to respond to all inquiries. Sometimes it takes days, weeks or even months to catch up with all the communication.
By now, you are probably wondering if we’ve made a decision or not. We have, and it is largely influenced by your feedback. My original plan was to move all photography-related articles and reviews to a different domain like nikon-photography.com and keep mansurovs.com as our “business site”. Interestingly, most votes (47%) supported this idea, while votes for keeping the site the way it is, or moving it to a different domain were split almost even. Those who left comments and wrote emails, however, largely disagreed with my idea and suggested to keep the name “mansurovs” in the domain, because that’s how people recognize us (branding) and changing it would be a mistake. Many of you agreed that keeping the wedding, recipes and other non-photography content in a different location is a good idea and both Lola and I support that – keeping everything the way it is is very confusing in terms of navigation. I thought of perhaps changing the site layout, but there is no easy way to integrate that content with our photography articles and reviews.
After reading through all comments and emails, I realized that my idea to use nikon-photography.com was not only limiting our work to a single brand, but also making it sound more like yet another commercial “photo tips” site – definitely NOT something I want to do. At this point I have no plans to commercialize our site and I certainly do not want to clutter it with advertisements and all sorts of links to external websites. We do get inquiries from advertising agencies and photography stores, but I have been declining their offers. Again, I want to keep the site clean. Both Lola and I enjoy sharing our knowledge and posting articles and reviews, and we both do it in our free time, which is why the site does not get updated very often (which hopefully will change soon).
Without further ado, let me go over the current plan:
Once again, thank you so much for your feedback! I will be making some heavy changes to the site within the next few weeks, so stay tuned!
Lola and I have been putting a lot of thought into optimizing the browsing experience of our website and with some feedback from our customers and friends, we concluded that we have to make a few major changes. When I purchased the “mansurovs.com” domain five years ago, I had no intentions of writing photography-related articles or gear reviews. As I started doing the latter, our website popularity went off the roof in several years and we now have a big group of loyal readers that we are very thankful to have.
Our problem today has to do with the way the site is organized, or to put it correctly “disorganized”. The main page is where we post photography tips and reviews, while Lola has her two sub-sites “Recipes” and “Weddings” – all under our “mansurovs.com” main domain (I removed the “Technology” section because I have no time to maintain it). This is presenting multiple problems:
So, instead of putting all kinds of irrelevant stuff into one big site, Lola and I have been thinking about separating photography articles and reviews from the website to a separate domain. I happen to own a domain called “nikon-photography.com” (nothing there yet), which I purchased a while ago. What if we were to move all photography-related stuff there? That way, we keep “mansurovs.com” for the business side of things (that’s where Lola and I would keep our portfolio and a separate blog for current and future clients) and all photography-related work + reviews would be permanently moved to “nikon-photography.com”.
Why Nikon-Photography.com? Because I love Nikon and want to continue writing reviews and articles related to Nikon, plus our website is all about photography. Does this mean I won’t be publishing Canon/Sony/Sigma, etc reviews? No, in fact I do want to expand to other brands in the future. I just could not find any other domains that were good and relatively short. Perhaps the domain should not have any brand name in it… I looked at many other domain combinations to no avail. If you have a good suggestion for a domain name, please let me know! If you make a suggestion, please first find out if the domain is available…you can look up available domains via Godaddy.com.
Now this obviously means we would be making some massive changes to the site and people would have to be redirected to the new domain, which also means that we would take a huge hit as far as search engine rankings are concerned. But at the same time, I want to make this right once, so that I do not have to do it again in the future.
What do you guys think? Do you think this would be a good move? Do you want to visit our site and only see photography-relevant content there? Now this does not mean you won’t be seeing Lola’s or my pictures – we will still be posting them. But posting them with information and tips on how we took them. We will not be just posting images to showcase our work.
Please let us know what you think – your opinion is invaluable to us.
P.S. Don’t forget to vote below!
Should we move photography articles to a new domain?
Total Voters: 431
Loading ...Due to non-stop travel and my hectic schedule this summer, in addition to finishing up some articles and reviews, I have not been able to announce the winner of the last contest from B&H. First, I was holding off on the contest winner announcement, because we still had one last workshop to run. But due to various circumstances, the workshop had to be cancelled and I never had the chance to do it again. Therefore, I decided to go ahead and announce the winner. So here we go.
And the winner is… (drums rolling) comment #44, which happens to be Sally Clark (sallycphotography.com). Congratulations Sally, you won a $250 gift card from B&H. I will be contacting you via email for your contact information. Your $250 gift card will be sent to you by mail directly from B&H! By the way, I love your infant pictures – you have a great talent. The girl with glasses on the front page of your site is adorable!
We will soon host another giveaway, so stay tuned! Off to writing my long overdue Nikon D5100 review.
