About Me
My Dad was great snapper. With his trusty old Pentax Spotmatic (which passed on to me and still works) he took, literally thousands, of photographs when I was growing up. There's about 3,000 of his slides in the loft that I will get around to scanning some day. His enthusiasm for the hobby sparked mine.
I started borrowing his camera on outings and for events and snapped away. My Dad had a knack for very good candid photographs of people. I, however, always managed to capture people at exactly the wrong moment, ending up with a succession of "destroy that now" type photos. As time went by, I found my interest lay more in nature and landscape photography, both looking at those kinds of photos and trying to take them. By nature photos, I mean something with an animal in it. My definition might be a bit too restrictive but if it moves and it's not a human, it's a nature photo in the making. They can be notoriously difficult to take as the subject won't usually sit around waiting for you to compose your photograph and take it. Landscape photography is much easier and there are far more opportunities for taking such photographs, especially when away on vacation. Landscape photography also provides a good way of learning the fundamentals of photography which you can then apply to other photographic subjects. I've been taking photos for over 20 years now both with film cameras and, more recently, with digital cameras. I've always used the amateur photographer's workhorse - the Single Lens Reflex (SLR) camera because they can take interchangeable lenses, thereby increasing your photo opportunities. I've been a member of several camera clubs down through the years and won several club competitions and even had the occasional photograph published. But, by and large, what I've learned has been through trial and error and building on what I'd previously learned. These days, I've pretty much switched to digital, using my trusty Canon EOS Digital Rebel/300D (you can probably get good bargains now that it's being replaced) although I'll probably upgrade to a Canon Digital Rebel XT/350D or an EOS 20D - I haven't quite decided which yet as both are getting great reviews. Then again, there's the Nikon D70 (and now the D70s) which I could use my Nikon lenses with. I've grown accustomed to the ease of digital imaging, shooting off large numbers of images, without the worry of wasting film on bad shots, most of which can be deleted, freeing up the memory card for more photos. I also like the immediacy of being able to see results so I can correct any problems while I'm still at a location and make the most of the opportunities there. My only quibble with digital is the small size of the sensors. Even 8 Megapixels can't match a 4000ppi scan of a slide or negative. To match that resolution, you'd need a 21 Megapixel sensor! We're not there yet, but give it a couple of years! I have two other major interests - astronomy and cats and I've put websites together for both those interests. The Night Sky Observer is my astronomy website and has been on the internet for 8 years. Cat-oholics.com is the site I put together about cats late last year. I'm a computer programmer (or software engineer if you like high-faluttin' descriptions) and systems analyst by profession and besides doing that to pay the bills, I also write astronomy software in my spare time; recent titles are LunarPhase Pro for moon observers, JupSat Pro for anyone who observers the planet Jupiter and LunarPhase Lite which may be of some use to you as a photographer. I've published or been involved in publishing a number of society magazines down through the years and my current such venture is an online astronomy ezine called Photon. Somewhere amongst all that I also get out monthly newsletters for Great Landscape Photography and Cat-oholics.com! While my other two websites are hand-coded in HTML (using Notepad of all things!), this site was built using Site Build It! I'd heard great things about it and was finally recommended to use it by a friend who'd started building his own site through it. I was also curious as to how different and easier it would be to build a site using Site Build It!'s point and click interface. While, for me, it was a bit of an adjustment not being elbow-deep in HTML code, the tools provided are emimently simple and anyone (and I do mean anyone) who can click a mouse can build a website, and if you follow the Site Build It! philosophy, it'll make some money too! Here's a list of the various tools I've used in building this and my other websites. They may be of some use: Site Build It!Site Build It! provide a 10-step program that guides you through setting up a profitable website, one that's based on content rather than being all bells and whistles, so that it's useful to those who come visiting. It's what I used to build this site. As traffic increases, you can then start signing up with affiliate programs and making sales of items that relate to the subject of your website (they tell you how to go about all this). It's a point-and-click solution to building websites and handles all the intricacies of email forms and responders and newsletter signups and mailings. To find out more about Site Build It!, and how you can turn a passion, interest or hobby into a profitable website, click the links below. Each provides a different view of their approach: Or you can ckeck out The Complete Site Build It! Reference Center at my (new) Make Online Residual Earnings website which details some of the techniques I've used to make an income on the internet. Google AdsenseGoogle Adsense is a quick and simple way of monetizing your website. It won't make you millions, but if you implement it well, it will at least pay your hosting fees. How much you make on it depends on a number of factors - how many pages are on your website, how many visitors you get, the focus of your pages (which ties in to Site Build It!'s philosophy) whether the ads will get your visitors to click. That last factor is influenced by ad placement, colors, ad unit size, etc. And then you need to find out what works on your website and relicate that through all your other pages. Two ebooks I found invaluable in setting up Google ads across all my websites were What Google Never Told You About Making Money with AdSense! and Top Paying Words For AdSense. Using the techniques outlined in these two books tripled my Adsense revenue across all my websites. AWeberAs I metioned above, Site Build It! provide the tools for managing email forms, autoresponders and newsletter distribution. It's part of their package. But if you're with a hosting company that doesn't provide those facilities, what do you do? That's where AWeber comes in. This system provides autoresponders you can customize, like adding customer names into mails to personalize them. It's great for building automated emails that are sent out sequentially (like a 5 day course, and so on). You can also use it for sending out newsletters and taking subscriptions. I use AWeber for building subscriber lists for the newsletter on my Cat-oholics.com site, the ezine on my astronomy site and for building customer lists for my various software applications such as LunarPhase Pro. Instant Cover CreatorIf you've got an ebook to sell or a newsletter to promote, use Instant Cover Creator, a free tool, to create an appealing cover for it. The graphic for this site's newsletter The LensMan was created using it! Simple RSSLooking into creating an RSS feed some months back (rather then displaying one on my websites), I found I needed soemthing that would make creeting those feeds simple. Some of the packages around at the time seemed too expensive for what they offered, so I wrote my own software, called Simple RSS File Generator, to do the job (hey, I am a professional programmer after all!) This little piece of software has made it easy for me to create RSS feeds and edit them as necessary. All I then need to do is upload the created files to the server and put a link to them on my webpage. RSS consists of a headline, a link and some descriptive text. One thing I've found with syndicated blogs, for instance, is that because they use HTML to format the contents of posts, not all newsreaders will display the descriptive text (especially if the feed is syndicated directly into a webpage to build dynamic content) and all you get to see (or your readers get to see if it's your blog that's syndicated) is the headline. Now that's not much use if you're promoting something. Your readers will see a headline like "Annnouncing the release of SuperWidget" and all the text you spent time writing about what SuperWidgit is and does isn't seen and the reader moves on to the next thing that catches their eye. Yes, they can just click on the link, but that descriptive text is very important in making them want to click the link to find out more. My Simple RSS software creates RSS files where the descriptions always show up and I've found myself relying on it to do that job on more than one occassion. Express RSSOne limitation of Site Build It! is that it doesn't allow you to embed RSS feeds into webpages to create dynamic content pages (but it is coming from what they say). If you have a website with a hosting company that offers PHP, it's very easy to embed RSS feeds into your pages so you get auto-updating pages that the Search Engines love which, in turn, will increase your rankings with them. On foot of that, I bought a package called Express RSS which does let you create such pages in just a couple of minutes. Using RSS feeds, in just 5 minutes you can have hundreds of talented writers doing all the work to keep your website filled with the latest news, articles, and information, and it won't cost you a dime! Check out the news page at my astronomy website - it's dynamivall built from an RSS feed. All those links to various headlines lead to individual off-site pages. And, since I don't have to edit or update them, they don't cost me anything to maintain, but they do get Adsense clicks for me. If you click any of the headlines, you'll notice that across the top of the page is a banner containing a return link to my site, some Google Adsense ads (more opportunities for clicks) and a small banner ad at the right. I've written some code that puts this banner at the top of all outgoing links. It's a way to make those links pay for themselves. You'll find a similar banner appearing on the Photo News pages on this site and for other outgoing links. My sites now pay for themselves and even provide me with a residual income of a few hundred dollars a month. If I can do it, so can anyone! eProduct Recommendations: I've used the techniques outlined in both of these ebooks to implement the Google Adsense ads on my three websites, to understand the importance of keywords on webpages and, as a result, tripled the revenue I receive from those ads.
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