Milestones, New Sponsor, 10 Astrophotos and a Giveaway!

This post is a bit of a “bitsa” as my grandma used to call a meal made up from various left-overs, and remains of almost emptied packets. I’ve found it extremely hard to motivate myself to post lately, possibly because of the crappy weather, maybe because I’ve been up too late watching anime. But I’ve got some good news, and a giveaway! So read on for more.

Stats Success

Recently I’ve achieved some significant milestones in my online endeavours:

New Advertiser

This week, a new advertiser signed up to support the site in one of the new smaller 4×4 grid of ad blocks I’ve made available at the top right of the blog.

Please welcome the Flickr Lister Photography Blog. I don’t know much about the site yet, but it looks like it’s just an ordinary blog, like mine, that is looking to get more visitors, and not some advertiser selling a product. I like this! It feels cool to be in a partnership with a fellow blogger. Make sure you check out Dave Adams’ Flickr Lister. He has some very nice photos there, and some very interesting HDR photos for sale on ImageKind.

If you’re interested in advertising yourself or your product here on the blog, you can secure one of the 125×125 blocks at the top right for just $10usd/month. Read more here: http://buysellads.com/buy/detail/620/.

Astrophotos by Phil Hart on DPS

Last week, I wrote my first post for DPS for a while, featuring the spectacular astrophotography of my good friend Phil Hart. The post was very popular and deservedly made it to the front page of Digg. If you missed it, make sure you go check it out, you won’t regret it, Phil’s photos are breathtaking.

Forum Giveaway

The new Learning Photography with Neil Creek Forum has got off to a good start, with 63 members so far, but everyone seems to be a bit shy. So far there are fewer posts than there are members, and the active community I was hoping for hasn’t appeared yet. So I’ve decided to help it along.

To encourage more active posting, I’m going to be giving away a free 20x30cm (8x12in) print of any photo from my collection to one lucky forum member (I wouldn’t want to speculate what the print is worth ;) ). I’m not completely sure how I’ll choose the winner yet, but I’m leaning towards a “raffle” type arrangement, where every post that contributes to the forum community by a member counts as a ticket in the draw. So the more useful posts you make, the better the chance you have of winning. This competition is open to anyone around the world, and I reserve the right to change how the winner will be determined at any time.

I should stress that only posts that contribute to the community will be counted as entries. “Me too” posts or anything that blatantly inflates ones post count just for the purposes of winning the prize will not count, and may lead to the banning of the offender. However any other kind of post, whether it be a question, one of your photos, a link to an interesting site, or even just a fun conversation between friends are all helpful to building the community.

So if you’ve signed up to the forum , but haven’t had much to say yet, get chatting! If you haven’t signed up yet, it’s not too late. I’ll start counting posts from Dec 1st, up until the end of the year. Who knows, if this turns out to be successful, I may even make this a monthly affair! So see you on the forum and good luck to all :)

One of the photos you may like to win as a print.