SORRY, NOW ALL SOLD As explained here, I'm having a bit of a clearout, and offering various bits and pieces of Sigma gear for sale at JAW-DROPPING prices.

Everything here is used, but in good condition and full working order. There are some minor marks, but nothing has been dropped or badly handled. If it was damaged, I wouldn't sell it, I'm just not that guy. Everything was bought new, by me, through official importers.

I'm located in Switzerland, which is not in the EU. For EU customers, I can easily send by (registered) Italian post - which is perfectly reliable, whatever prejudice may say. Otherwise I can send worldwide by Swiss parcel post or by DHL (but DHL is very expensive here for private customers). Within Switzerland, I will cover the cost. Otherwise, we can negotiate. From previous sales I have satisfied customers from USA to New Zealand and China.


All prices are given in Swiss Francs (CHF), which are more or less 1:1 EUR and USD. Rounding errors can be negotiated. I've tried to keep the prices fair, and low. Generally I would request payment on receipt of goods by PayPal.

Anyway, here's the stuff.

1. Sigma DP-2 Merrill

Sigma DP-2M with original packaging and accessories including 2 batteries, with following extras:

- Sigma lens shade
- Sigma VF-21 Optical Viewfinder
- JLM grip / baseplate (see review here)







Asking Price: CHF 400

2. Sigma DP-3 Merrill

Sigma DP-3M with original packaging (USA version, this was bought from B&H) and accessories including 2 batteries, with following extras:

- Sigma lens shade
- Voigtländer 75mm Optical Viewfinder perfectly adapted for DP3M







Asking Price: CHF 400

SPECIAL OFFER

Both cameras together, with a total of SIX Sigma BP41 batteries for CHF 700.

As explained here, I'm having a bit of a clearout, and offering various bits and pieces of Olympus gear for sale at AMAZING prices.

Everything here is used, but in good condition and full working order. There are some scuff marks, particularly on plastic lens shades, but these come from carrying stuff in bags. Nothing has been dropped or badly handled. If it was damaged, I wouldn't sell it, I'm just not that guy. Everything was bought new, by me, through official importers.

I'm located in Switzerland, which is not in the EU. For EU customers, I can easily send by (registered) Italian post - which is perfectly reliable, whatever prejudice may say. Otherwise I can send worldwide by Swiss parcel post or by DHL (but DHL is very expensive here for private customers). Within Switzerland, I will cover the cost. Otherwise, we can negotiate. From previous sales I have satisfied customers from USA to New Zealand and China.

All prices are given in Swiss Francs (CHF), which are more or less 1:1 EUR and USD. Rounding errors can be negotiated. I've tried to keep the prices fair, and low. Generally I would request payment on receipt of goods by PayPal.

Anyway, here's the stuff.

SOLD 1. Bundle - Olympus Four Thirds 50-200mm F2.8-3.5 SWD SOLD

with lens hood, caps, tripod collar, carrying case and the following extras:
- Olympus EC14 1.4x Teleconverter
- Olympus EC20 2x Teleconverter
- Olympus MMF2 Micro43 adapter (not shown in photo)





The asking price for this bundle is CHF 600.00

2. Olympus Four Thirds 12-60mm F2.8.4.0 SWD

This lens was serviced two years ago by Olympus to fix a broken lens hood mounting ring (a known issue with this lens), and hardly used since, so it is like new.

with lens hood, caps, soft bag.





The asking price for this lens is CHF 350.00

3. Olympus Micro Four Thirds 75mm f1.8 (black)

This is a truly fabulous lens, but it is primarily a portrait lens, and I don't really do portraits. Hence it is very little used.

with lens and body cap, and additional optional extra Olympus metal lens hood and alternative push-fit lens cap.





The asking price for this lens and extras is CHF 500.00

SOLD 3. Olympus Micro Four Thirds 12mm f2.0 (silver) SOLD

This is also a very good lens, but it gets very little use as generally for wide angle I use panoramic cameras, and if I need 12mm on Olympus I have a 12-40mm.

with lens and body cap, and additional optional extra Olympus metal lens hood.





The asking price for this lens and extras is CHF 350.00

Just managed to sneak this in in time! Thanks to whoever is still reading this stuff. Hopefully there will be a bit more activity next year - best wishes, wherever you are - David

Recently, for whatever reason, there has been a noticeable increase in the number of visitors here (UPDATE - this might have something to with it). This coincides with a major drop in my posting frequency, which is unfortunate. So I thought maybe I should explain.

Earlier this year, around April, I asked a person whose opinions I respect for some feedback on my website. The outcome wasn't the glowing praise I hoped for, and in particular the observation that "it's a bit stuck in time (2000 to be exact)" stung a bit.

So I decided to redesign it. And, of course, I bit off far more than I could chew. In theory it should take me two weeks or so to do a redesign, but in practice, I have about 6 hours a week from which I could take time to do it (and that 6 hours also includes photo editing, keeping my computer working, lounging in front of the TV, or generally collapsing on the couch after yet another fabulous 12 hours away at the "day" job). On top of that, the publishing software I use was urgently in need of upgrading to a newer version. Any upgrade of Expression Engine is a bloody nightmare, but this time practically every plug-in I use broke as well, so it took about 1 month elapsed time to sort that out.

I then realised that a long history of quick fixes and "improvements" to my existing code had made it unmaintainable. So that needed to be cleared up. One more month passed by.

Then I could start thinking about how to redesign the site. So, I tried looking at a few other sites for inspiration. Not much luck there - the vast majority of photographer's web sites are boring as hell, with exactly the same layouts, "clever" off-the-peg galleries with all the bells and whistles, which do all they can to ruin the viewing experience, and very, very little to encourage return visits. The quality of the photography is irrelevant at this point. I did look at a few website services, bot the only ones that passed even basic requirements for me were Squarespace and Koken, and both those have showstoppers. Woken is one I'm watching for the future, though.

I've also been told that there isn't enough focus here on my photography. Well, ok, good point. So I'm trying to address this in three ways: 1 - improve the accessibility and presentation of existing content, 2 - improve my curation, 3 - introduce a completely new channel for more ephemeral collections, called "Photo Diary". Oh, and put some emphasis on my very short list of publications. Unfortunately all of that is a lot of work.

So, now, at the start of October, I have more or less completed the structure, and I'm working on the graphic design. Below is a snapshot of what the new front page looks like, right now. I've no idea if it will stay that way, or if it will ever come to light. So that's why I've been quiet recently.



Anyway, it's only photography. And barely that, really.

(Crosspost - the majority of my small RSS feed subscriber community do not subscribe to my TEOH channel)

I recently received my annual web hosting invoice for this site. This, together with domain name registration, costs me around £100 per annum. And, by the way, if you’re looking for a reliable independent web hosting service with excellent technical support, full features and non-USA hosting, I can safely recommend Meirhosting.

The reminder that all this costs money as well as time gives me cause to reflect on why I’m doing it. My data on Google Analytics makes quite depressing reading: I get very low traffic, my most popular posts are the few dedicated to gear, and the least popular are those talking about photography and photographers in general. Earlier this year, the stats were trending upwards. Now they’ve slumped.

Lies, damn lies, and statistics. According to Google’s monthly view, of the 40-odd visitors I get daily, 75% are new. So they don’t come back :-(

AWStats shows a similar story - the levels are pretty flat.

I’ve maintained a website since around 1996. I registered the snowhenge domain in 2001, I think, and the earliest version of snowhenge.net went live in or before August 2001, according to the Wayback machine. I added blogging through MovableType in mid 2003. My first post was made at 04:32 PM on 17th July 2003. Apart from a pause of a few months in 2007 when I transitioned to Expression Engine, and switched hosting, I’ve been adding material fairly constantly. So far there are 673 blog posts. There have been several design overhauls and refreshes, but the current look has been around for 4 or 5 years. The photographic content has changed over time, as I tried to improve presentation and focus, and the non-photographic stuff has dwindled to very little. The one constant in all of this, though, has been the flatlining statistics.

The Grey Period: snowhenge.net in early 2003

My original motives for having a web site included a large part of experimentation with web technologies, which fed into my various “day jobs”. This is now gone, my day job has no need for such frippery. So it is now essentially a platform for publishing and talking about photography, and the arcana surrounding photography. The question is, then, is it working? At present the answer has to be no. There’s very little conversation, although what there is tends to be of above average quality, and statistics on my galleries show little interest from the outside world.

So why so little traffic? A number of reasons spring to mind: the content is uninteresting, I’m not an engaging writer (or photographer), it’s all too self-serving, it’s all too idiosyncratic or weird, the presentation is poor. Or, also, I have no reach, I don’t publicise the site well, my search engine optimisation doesn’t work, I don’t network enough. Or the site performance is bad and the navigation is confusing. Or the Disqus comment platform is unpopular and puts people off. Probably a combination of all of these factors means that the site fails to get noticed in the vast ocean of similar voices clamouring for attention on the web.

So what next? Should I just call it a day? It would be a shame, after close to 20 years of uninterrupted web presence, then again you could say after 20 years of failure I should have got the message. I could run a survey to see what my audience thinks, but there’s a bit of a snag in that plan. And then again, I’m not even sure I could keep up with things if I started getting a lot of feedback.

It’s clear that one criticism could be that the site is too generalist, that is has a split personality. This is true enough, but it’s not accidental. It reflects my personality: I’m not just interested in photography - far from it - and not even in one particular field of photography. Personally I find that photographer “portfolio” sites get boring pretty quickly, however good the photographer is. I like to understand some of what makes the artist tick, not just photographers, but writers, musicians too. And I’m interested in science, and in much else. So the somewhat “warts and all” approach is me basically trying to create the type of website that I’d enjoy visiting. Seems I’m in a minority! One reason I axxed my Facebook page is that I was feeling increasingly uncomfortable about the wide cross-section of “friends” I had: I felt that by posting stuff on say, Antarctic science, I was letting down people who followed me as a landscape photographer.

The ultimate goal of snowhenge.net is to promote my photography. That isn’t working, and the years are ticking by. My feeling at the moment is that I’ll give it another year, and seriously put some effort into improving traffic. I don’t hope for thousands of visitors - I’m happy if just one person gets some benefit from an article I post - but I don’t want to carry on shouting into the void. So in the coming weeks I need to settle on some realistic expectations and measurable objectives, and work out a plan for achieving them. If trends start to improve, fine. Otherwise, in one year it will be time to call it a day.

This is the point where, ironically, I ask for feedback. It would be great to get any opinions, suggestions thoughts, advice on all of this, but also just to let me know that you’re reading my writings and getting some sort of value out of it.  There are many blogs which I read frequently, but never comment on. Maybe it’s a similar story here.

Hey, maybe the problem is that all my posts are too long ?