Round 5 on the blog front

WordPress, we meet again. Every permutation of blog I’ve ever had ends up being spammed to death to the point where it becomes unbearable to operate. My last blog ran successfully for 3 years before being overrun with spambots linking every article to some wholesale dick pills website, or cheaper medical insurance or whatever else people absolutely 100% did not need to see. I remember once I logged in and had something like 200 comments pending approval. “Holy shit!” I thought, maybe something had gone viral before going viral was a thing. I was excited, man. It felt good to have something that had clicked… since then I have other stuff that’s ‘clicked’ but there’s a 50/50 split between being regarded as a hero or a villain… so I checked the comments, eager to see what the waking world had to make of it. Dick pills. As far as the eye could see. Rank upon rank of rankness. WordPress back in those days could only show 12 comments at a time so you’d select all, delete, rinse/repeat a few times but by the time you’d cleared everything away some more comments had been added by the same bots.

They weren’t seen. I’d made it impossible to comment without authorisation a while back but it was like whack-a-mole, trying to stay ahead of the random things popping up. That was 2 years ago. I logged in last week to see if it had died down and I had something like 9000 comments pending approval. It seemed prudent just to shoot the thing full of phenobarbital, wish it well, and put the thing to sleep.

Now we’re here. Let’s start again. This blog is mostly about photography. I’m pretty open with lighting, editing, direction, and whatever else comes into play when working as a photoguy. When I was starting out the only way to obtain actual information was to either buy someone’s tutorial DVD, attend a workshop, or otherwise pay a bunch of money to someone with no guarantee of useful information… not like I offer that guarantee here you understand, but at least you’re not paying for it. And since it was somewhat hard to find information and everyone was like some poker king keeping their cards close to a medallioned chest, I wanted to shed whatever light I could on whatever it is I do because maybe it’ll be relevant to someone, someday and it will also mean i can address the emails I frequently receive asking how a certain ‘look’ was achieved. So…

Maybe this’ll help.