Camera Selection is the second instalment of my “Photography Workflow” series, looking at different models of cameras and looking at some of the basic’s of choosing a camera.

“The first thing to consider when thinking about photography is what sort of camera will I need for what I want to photograph? I personally own a Nikon D60, why did I buy an entry level camera?...”

I’ve begun work on a series of articles under the name of “Photography Workflow” where I’ll talk through various photography techniques and photo-manipulation techniques and provide step by step guides along the way, I’ve started the series with just a basic short introduction:

“When we talk about photography workflow what do we actually mean? some of us may think I point the camera, I click the button and the camera takes care of the rest, well to some degree this is true, but how many photograph's do you take that you are truly 100% happy with? If you are anything like me...

Today I’ve noticed an error in the way the website builds it’s links within the RSS feed, and I’ve been working on rectifying that issue, I believe I’ve rectified the issue, if you do get any “404 Page Not Found” errors please email me: andrew.youll@mil-air.co.uk

I’ve spent the evening working on improving website loading times, and have implemented GZip and Deflate support on the entire site, and it is reducing general load times by up to 45% on average, so hopefully the website is a bit more Dial-Up friendly now. If anyone has any issues with load times on the site please leave a comment or sent me an email, and I’ll try and work through the issues.

Both problems around the Forum and the Blogs are now rectified, the blogs are working as expected so I think it was either an intermittent fault with our data-fetching system or a fault with the blogging system we use. On the forum front, the categories are now correctly setup, after some playing with the Database as the AJAX frontend is still not working for category management.

Also in the forum we’ve implemented Community-Moderation meaning you can vote up or vote down discussion based on your opinion / views of that persons comment within the forum.

Okay, today and yesterday I spent a fair amount of time working on the Forum which up until now has lived inside a HTML iFrame which wasn’t the cleanest of solutions to integrate a forum into the site, and as such I’ve now changed the forum from phpBB to VanillaBB which I’ve managed to fully integrate into the site now.

On a hopefully unrelated note, the blogs seem to be playing up at the moment, the integrated website frontend doesn’t seem to be communicating with the remote backend of system, hopefully my playing the forum hasn’t caused this but I am investigated the issue at the moment, and hopefully within the next 24hrs all will be well again.

I’ve spent a few hours working with automating the iPhone/iPod Touch gallery and have now got a working system, utilising JavaScript; on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, etc you will see the Flash based gallery, and with an iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad you will see the JavaScript based gallery. I will be working over the next few days at updating the JavaScript gallery appearance so it matches the website better.

I’ve added a calendar for USA Air Shows for 2010 to the website, it’s not complete at the moment but it does take us up to the end of April 2010.

Right I’ve done a bit of work on the RAF Air Traffic Control Frequencies page, primarily building it through Google Maps opposed to a raw *.kml datafile, this will lead to two things, quicker load times as the data is held on the google systems rather than it being loaded by google from our servers, and will also lead to easier updating in future.

I’ve put together an online store for Mil-Air using printfection.com as a back end, all prices are in USD but they do ship worldwide, I’m hoping to increase the selection of products as we go along introducing new designs but for the moment, it’s only the Mil-Air logo on the products. Click here to go to our store.

I’ve started setting up blogs for both myself and James, there maybe a bugs in the system at the moment as it’s the integration into the website that is taking more time than I originally thought. So hopefully we’ll be able to update you more regular via the blogs when we’re out and about.

I appologise about the delay in posting, but having a few teething problems with a few things in my new home at the moment, but as promised I’ve re-published James’ article talking about the A Nations Aviation in One that was originally published by Airscene UK in 2007:

"Fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada; a place that has forty million visitors every year, and last November that number was increased by the additional draw to Nellis Air Force Base for 'Aviation Nation', a celebration of the sixtieth anniversary of the formation of the independent United States Air Force. It was 18 September 1947 when Harry Truman signed the document that freed the Air Force from the clutches of the Army.”