I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday season. I was fortunate enough to have the last week off work. And it's been great.

I just wanted to update you all on the Best of 2004 photoblogs. I have currently received almost 120 submissions. And I must admit I am in awe of all the wonderful images you folks have sent in so far. I'm currently separting everything into months determined by posting dates. And will be posting everything up in the coming days.

I really hoped to have this up already, but I promise you it will be worth the wait.

If you haven't submitted yours it's not too late.

The premise is to showcase what you feel is your Best work of the year. This could be determined by personal favorites or simply the photo the recieved the most comments on your photoblog. This is not a competition and I hope in the process you will find some new and amazing photoblogs that you have never visited before.

Here is the details

1) It must be a photo that was taken this calendar year and posted this calendar year on your blog.

2) Choosing your "Best photo" is totally your choice, whether it be a personal favorite or a photo that recieved the most comments on your site over the year.

3) Only one submission per person.

I will need the following information for your submission.

a)  your photo.  Please no larger than 700 pixels in width.
b) a brief description of why you choose this photo.
c) the name of your site
d) The date your originally posted this image as well as the permalink to that post.

All submissions can be sent to photojunkie@gmail.com with the subject line "Best of 2004"

Lastly I'd like to thank each and everyone of you for making this such a wonderful online community. I have learned so much from you all over the past year. I'd also like to thank Brandon for his continued work on photoblogs.org, it's a tremendous undertaking.

I'd like to wish you all a Happy New Year. Play safe tonight and keep warm. Happy clicking in 2005.

All the best

Rannie

Thank you Brandon and Ashleigh for all of your efforts to develop photoblogs.org into the best photography town square on the web.  Best wishes for 2005.

The tsunami is an unprecedented disaster and will require billions of dollars to assist the victims in rebuilding their lives. I urge all photobloggers to spread the word about donating whatever they can to help these unfortunate people. No donation -- or mention -- is too small or meaningless.

For our part, Marshall Sokoloff donated some of his wonderful prints to us from his extraordinary Three Sisters gallery, and we are going to donate all the proceeds from the sale of these prints to the American Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund to aid tsunami victims. If you or someone you know is in the market for some beautiful images, please check these out.  Thank you.

The New Year is almost upon us, and you know what that means
– resolutions. In this month’s issue of Popular Photography, there is a section
listing some people's photography resolutions for the year 2005. Here are some of mine:

• Take a photography class.
• Save up for a dSLR and film scanner.
• Get more comfortable with darkrooms, digital and
  traditional.
• Carry a camera EVERYWHERE I go.

What are your photography resolutions for 2005?

Rod

I'm not sure how many people here are working photographers, but this has been somewhat of a breakthrough year for me as I try to support myself with photography.  I've had the opportunity to photograph a few celebrities, including Moby, Michael Chang, and tons of not-so-well-known-in-America European DJs. 

But recently, I had a chance of a lifetime by spending some time with Mike Tyson.  I photographed him with a few other celebrities such as Dennis Haysbert (the president on the show '24') and as seen in the photo, legendary boxer Roberto Duran.  It was definitely a test of one's patience to photograph Tyson as he is not one of the nicer people I've met.  But there's still a strange sense of greatness that lingers around him, particularly the way people throw themselves at him in hopes of getting a few words in.  I literally had to stay out of his way except for a few posed shots with him and Duran, whom he regards as his favorite boxer.

Has anyone here photographed a celebrity and had to deal with the huge egos that go with them?  It was definitely a learning experience for me as a photographer.

I'm sure we've all faced some kind of moral dilemma while we're out taking photos, and I'd love to hear some of your stories, thoughts, opinions, etc.

This is something I've been wanting to bring up for quite a while, ever since this happened. The whole idea popped up again from my recent trip to Las Vegas. I constantly found myself in moral situations while shooting. I found a man who had just lost thousandths of dollars and was crying his soul out; many prostitutes getting picked up; a maid who was on her fourth job in the last two weeks... and so forth. I wanted to take photos but the only word that kept coming into my mind was exploitation.

So again... your stories, thoughts, opinions, etc. on photo moral dilemmas.

I've got an art show at a local coffee shop this summer. I'm not only looking for ideas/inspiration, but also cheap (online) printers.

I've been kicking around a few ideas. My girlfriend's uncle prints billboards for a living, and is willing to make me a 8x10 foot print on vinyl. I realize the resolution of this print will be rather horrible, but depending on the content of the shot, this could be rather neat.

I've also thought of making my own books to display on walls near the tables.

Things I'm interested in looking into:
1) Somehow plastering my photo onto 3D objects (bowls? sculptures? frames?)
2) Getting my photo printed right on a thick (1 inch?) posterboard type-material and glossed over. (I've seen this done before, but I don't know who does it.)
3) Getting prints made on cloth.

I'm not sure if these are even plausible ideas; they're just considerations I've been making.

Does anyone have any additional information/ideas? I want to make a large impression.

Any help/advice would be MUCH appreciated.

Thanks for your time/consideration.
Tanner Woodford

"thumbnails in RSS feeds are a must. I mean, what the hell's the use of having an RSS feed for a PHOTOblog if it doesn't give you any idea of what the new photos look like?"

After I read this comment by MattB on the last post, I decided that I must revisit a problem I had previously abandoned - how to have thumbnail images show up in rss feeds and still block hotlinking using .htaccess

To explain:
An Apache web server allows you to block requests to images from referring domains other than your own (ie. people linking directly to your image on your server from their webpage on another server) using a file called .htaccess with the following lines:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://my-domain.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.my-domain.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(gif|GIF|jpg|JPG)$ - [F]

However, this also blocks rss readers from being able to view the images in your feeds.

This is where I got stuck the last time and I decided it was better to keep blocking the hotlinkers (not that it was a major problem - it was the principle of the thing) than include thumbnails in my rss feeds. But with the growing popularity of rss, the fact that my feeds didn't have thumbnails kept nagging at me and I finally found the energy to attack the problem again. This time I came up with a solution that works for me:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://my-domain.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.my-domain.com/.*$ [NC]
#this is the new line:
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !.*tn.jpg$ [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(gif|GIF|jpg|JPG)$ - [F]

This works because all my thumbnail image names are in the format '***tn.jpg' - you would need to find be a common unique pattern through your thumbnail naming to use this technique.

I'm posting this here because it took me a good couple of hours of googling and trial and error to work it out and I wanted to share my discovery (& I'm so proud of my new little thumbnail-inclusive feeds!]). I hope I haven't been too confusing in my explanation (I'm not great at the whole words-sentences thing) and it may be of help to some of you.

The recent post from Joe Cunningham about the Ten Links section on his site really got me thinking. Mainly, it got me thinking about how a person could use del.icio.us to create such a list. In fact, it looks like Heather Champ is doing just that for the "Fabulous Elsewhere" section on her homepage.

Now, this really got me to thinking...  If we all did something similar using del.icio.us, we could create our own collaborative feed of noteworthy photoblog posts.

Here is what I propose...

1. We all get accounts on del.icio.us and familiarize ourselves with how it works and what it does.  (I'm sure many of us have already completed this step.)
2. We all start bookmarking our favorite photoblog posts using del.icio.us.
3. We all follow the same tagging method as we bookmark these posts.  I suggest that we use the tag: "photoblog-posts".  So... every time we add a bookmark to an interesting photoblog post, we make sure to tag it with photoblog-posts.  This part is very important, because this is what puts all our bookmarks in the same RSS feed.
4. We check the photoblog-posts feed to see what people are bookmarking: http://del.icio.us/tag/photoblog-posts
5. Eventually, once this thing gains enough momentum we can check the popular version of the feed to see what's "hot" right now. http://del.icio.us/popular/photoblog-posts
6. You can add any of these feeds to your favorite RSS reader.
7. I will eventually integrate these feeds directly into Photoblogs.org, so that a larger audience can see what's being bookmarked.
8. Also, you can add your own feed to your own photoblog (like Heather did) to show everyone what you're into at the moment.

I'm very excited about this idea, and I'm sure it can work if enough of us participate.  The end result is that we will create a deeper view into the countless number of amazing photoblog posts that occur every day and are so often overlooked.

We'll eventually want to explain and document this idea a little better using the wiki.  In the meantime, though, let me know what you think.

I'll be checking the photoblog-posts feed for updates!

I've been attempting a full CSS layout for my photoblog and have a big, big problem. I sometimes post multiple images and display them next to each other horizontally (like Tracey, except in a much smaller scale). When trying to rebuild I discovered that while <table width=" ... nowrap> will force all your images to sit next to each other, hence creating a horizontal scrollbar, CSS doesn't quite do that. My images are now traditionally on top of each other when there are multiple images.

In Internet Explorer, putting align="left" in your <img> tag will solve the problem, but it still looks horrible in standards-compliant browsers like Firefox. A technically expert friend and I are puzzled over this.

Maybe if we can't solve it I'll abandon this cause and use tables again. In the meantime, does anyone have some remedies? If you'd like to view the layout and CSS just drop an email: jazzzmin at gmail.com