To all the members who have signed up for the various Club & Supporter memberships since 1 May - Thank You! Your ongoing support is most appreciated.

I have decided to change things slightly and will only be offering the Club 250 & Club 500 memberships until the end of this month. They are very good value products if you are looking for freedom to host your best work on a web application application of your choice. 

Existing C250/C500 members will continue to enjoy all the benefits of these schemes for as long as they like, but on 1 June I will not be accepting any new members to those Clubs. Only the Club 1000, Supporters and Patrons memberships will be available from then, where image hosting will be on PhotoPost (you'll just be buying space for your galleries) or on your own website provided via the Club 1000 membership.

Remember, if you would like to ask me any questions about the memberships, just send me a mail or Skype me.

Hi folks,

First off I'd like to thank those of you who have so generously signed up for the Club and Supporter memberships. So far everything seems to be running smoothly, apart from a small hiccup with the ads - Club Members and Supporters shouldn't be seeing any ads on the forum pages now.

When you sign up for one of the products, please could you fill in your Nikongear user ID in the field next to the button. This just speeds up the process on my side because it means I don't have to go and search for it using your IP or email address (since some people visit the site from different computers it also obviates the possibility of assigning the wrong person your membership).

I think what I will have to do, just as soon as I get some feedback from my new friends at 2CO, is redesign the products pages so that there is only one form on a page, that way each user ID field can be validated and not left blank. The script I tried to use to validate them now doesn't work because there are four forms on the page and each field is using the same parameter name so it causes problems in computerville...

Some of you seem to be a little confused about the procedure behind the setting up of your server space, sub-domain and application. Let me elucidate (what cool word!):

For all Club and Supporters:
- When you sign up for any product you will get an email from 2CO thanking you for your purchase.
- I also receive an email from them advising me of the product sale.
- I immediately upgrade your Nikongear account to your new member group (or as soon as I can, since I am not awake 24 hours a day )
- For Club 250 and Club 500 purchasers I will send you an email asking you which software product you would like me to install on your server space for you.
- Once you tell me your chosen product I will set about installing it in its default format.
- I will then set up your sub-domain (yourname.nikongear.com) as well as your FTP account and email you details of that login. This can take a day or so.

For Club 1000 Members:
- If you have ordered Club 1000 membership I will send you an email asking you for your new chosen domain name (.com/.net/.org or .info).
- When you reply with a name (check availability on godaddy.com or enom.com) I will register it for you and set up your DNS.
- I will then send you an email giving details of your control panel login where you will be able to setup all sorts of wonderful things, including your email accounts.
- The process can take up to 4 days to complete as DNS has to propagate across the internet.

This is a full blown hosting solution and it runs on a completely seperate server to Nikongear.com.

Upgrades & Downgrades
If you are on any Club level and would like to upgrade or downgrade your membership you will need to contact me so that I can calculate a pro-rata refund of your original membership based on however long it has been running. Once that is done you can then go ahead and purchase any other membership in the usual way. 

Product Options
I will be adding these to the Club 250 and Club 500 products in the next day or so. These will be for you to select which product you want installed in your sub-domain upfront, or instead opt for pre-allocated space on the new PhotoPost application that will be installed this month. PhotoPost will be replacing Coppermine, so if you don't want the hassle of running your own application on a sub-domain, you can use the space on PhotoPost instead. It's a pretty cool application, see www.photopost.com for examples of sites using it.

There will be a couple of cheaper products added to the Supporters group soon. I will announce those just as soon as I nail them down.

Phew! Time for more beer... 

I discovered yesterday that many of the email notifications I send out are never being sent. This is because of an issue with the ISP only allowing 1500 emails to be sent each hour. Since we now have over 2000 members quite a sizeable chunk of the members are not getting any notices, particularly for the challenges. Apparently this issue will be addressed in version 2.0 of SMF where the emails will be staggered over a longer period, thus falling within the ISP's parameters. Obviously this doesn't help me now since SMF 2.0 is still in beta.

However, there are a huge number of people who registered but never post (988 of them to be precise), so I have decided to send email notices first to members who have made at least 1 post and then follow that up with the same mail to the members who don't post a little later on. Hopefully this will alleviate the problem of the mails being blocked at my own server!

For those of you who didn't get the message about the Club Memberships yesterday, please have a look here: http://nikongear.com/smf/index.php?topic=9627.0

Also, the current challenge is underway and entries will close on 8 May. The standard of entries for this challenge is pretty high this time, so please come and have a look if you haven't already done so.

Hope to see you soon!

Hey folks,

There was a lot of behind the scenes goings-on, jumping though hoops, scanning of legal documents and so on, but I finally got Nikongear.com approved for e-commerce by 2CO.com on the due date! The Club Memberships are now available for anyone who would not only like to support the site, but also receive something useful in return. The Club 1000 Memberships are effectively your own website with a brand new international domain name of your choice pointing to your space, whereas the 250 & 500 act like your own website, but you will run on a sub-domain of Nikongear (eg. yourname.nikongear.com).

You can use the space to manage your own online gallery, blog or do whatever you want within legal bounds. One of the new boards that you will have access to on nikongear is a "webmaster" support board where I will gladly help out with sharing information on how to administer your own website, especially if you choose to use WordPress as I have done on www.dallasdahms.com. Getting your space organised will not only be a fun learning experience but you'll also start to benefit in other ways if you are thinking about making photography a business.

If you aren't into webmastery but would still like to support the site there is a once-off membership available to purchase. This will upgrade any existing Nikongear account to Supporter Status and give you 100MB of exhibit space managed by Nikongear to show off your best photos.

Just on that "exhibit" note I will be replacing the currently disabled Coppermine gallery with PhotoPost and renaming the area from PHOTOS to EXHIBITS. PhotoPost is used by plenty of other websites and because it is a proprietary application I believe it will be a lot more secure than Coppermine. It also offers some very cool functionality and is properly integrated with the forum. Good news for those of you using the Coppermine system is that according to PhotoPost support I will be able to import all your Coppermine photos and albums to the new system. Obviously this isn't going to happen overnight, so please bear with me while I get that system integrated with the existing site. I am hoping to finalise it all before the end of May.

Also on the horizon is the long awaited "official" Nikongear apparel. Look forward to being able to get your torso into an "uberkool" Nikongear T-shirt, an equally cool cap and some other easily mailable items. These items will also appear in the new "Contribute" section and can also be bought via 2CO.

Well that's it from me. I think I'll go and have a beer now...

I have had a few requests to update new items in the Gearlist, so I have included all the exotic manual focus fisheye lenses as well as the 28mm f/1.4 ASP. As these fisheyes are mostly quite rare I have not designated them as being AI or not, so the gearlist entries apply to all incarnations of each model. Please feel free to share your images taken with these lenses in each thread.

The purpose of these threads is to build up as much information as possible on each item so that future users of these Nikon lenses will have a good idea of what they are getting into based on the experiences of other users.

I will be adding more lenses soon.

A couple of hours early, but I thought I better get this done before the power goes out at 18h00 local time (again!).

Please visit this thread: http://nikongear.com/smf/index.php?topic=9425.0 and cast your vote for the entry that best exemplifies the theme "Emotions: with a twist". Voting will close on Sunday at about 14h00 GMT and the new chairman will become known. If you are winner please email or PM me your theme ASAP so we can get the next one going on Monday.

Good luck!

My personal website that was running Coppermine was hacked today, along with many other Coppermine users. It also caused a problem with my WordPress installation, so until the Coppermine developers can figure out what has happened I have switched off Coppermine gallery here on Nikongear to prevent problems occurring here. I will advise what's going on as soon as I know more.

Damn hackers! 

I have added 5 manual focus lenses to the Gear List on the LENSES page. These are:

35mm f/2 AIS
45mm f/2.8 AIS
50mm f/1.2 AIS
50mm f/1.4 AIS
50mm f/1.8 AIS

If you have used any of these lenses you can let other Nikon enthusiasts know how you got on with them by posting about your experiences in the appropriate Gear Experiences topic.

More lenses will be added soon. If there is anything in particular that you would like to have added, please drop me a PM.