I’m moving on to new pastures as a designer, and the stock photography website which I launched almost a year ago is now up for sale. Check out the auction or take a look at the sale website and let me know if it interests you!

Our Stock Works is a fully completed stock photography website which launched in 2006. It currently has over 8,000 photos, and 600+ contributors who have uploaded images and are registered on the website.

What are we selling?

The sale will give you all the rights to Our Stock Works, including:

> The domain names ourstockworks.com and ourstockworks.co.uk
> All database files
> All website (PHP and HTML) files
> All photographs (over 8000)

Please note that the photographs are not being sold to you - the rights to these remain the photographers, but you have the ability to market and sell them under the ‘Our Stock Works’ banner.

We have a hosting agreement with a provider which offers the technology required to run the website and 40GB disk space and 150GB bandwidth per month, for 43 (around $80) pounds per month. We recommend keeping this package as the website is designed to run on this server - but you can obviously move elsewhere if you wish.

The website uses PHP and MySQL, and an advanced knowledge of these is essential to take over and run the website.

Read more

That’s the lens cap from my lovely new 400d, in all it’s digital glory. It’s an absolutely stunning camera, and it feels so much more professional than my Sony. I’m looking forward to taking plenty of photos with it over the coming months and years!

My previous camera has served me incredibly well, and no doubt I’ve taken several thousand photos with it over the past two years. However time has come for a change. My photography skills have improved considerably over time and I’m much more interested in it as a hobby now. I’ve decided to upgrade to a Digital SLR for greater manual control, which should allow me to play and experiment much more with photography.

It was a choice between a Nikon d80, Canon EOS 350d, or EOS 400d. I would probably have gone for a Nikon d80 had it not been a little too far out of my price range, but the 400d seems like a fantastic camera (review. I picked one up with the standard 18-55mm lens off eBay today, and am thoroughly looking forward to having a play and getting used to it!

I’m looking forward to the flexibility of RAW, a much more advanced metering system and improved flash. Also the ability to purchase and add new lenses at a later date will give me a great deal more flexibility. All coupled with the ever-amazing Aperture for the perfect editing package. All change!

I love Christmas - it’s such a great time of year. It’s great to be back from University seeing family and friends. Everyone has finished work and school today for the festive weekend, and I’m ready to relax for a few days! I hope you all have a great Christmas period, and to celebrate I’ve linked up a few of my favourite Christmassy wallpapers for your desktop below:

Download at Deviant Art

Download at Deviant Art

There’s another couple too I still have from Christmas last year, which were offered by a site called Cubed Companies. They were great, but I can’t find them anywhere online this year. You can download them both in a zip below:

Download Zip

I take no credit for any of these - Just wanting to provide you with some great wallpapers to adorn your festive desktop!

Merry Christmas

Over the past year or so, I’ve really started to get into photography more than ever. With Our Stock Works, and a photographer as a business partner it just starts to rub off on you! After a few holidays and various photo shooting trips I feel I’m now in possession of a fairly decent set of shots.

I know I could go ahead and start posting them on this blog, but I’m not convinced that’s really the best way to do it. It would all start to get a little messy, and probably end up with my photo-posts either petering out, or hugely surpassing any text pieces I write. With that in mind, I think a photoblog may be in order. I’ve looked at a few different systems, but it does seem that PixelPost is very simple and easy to use. I didn’t want to stem for that straight away though - I like to shop around.

PHP Blogger doesn’t really fit the bill, as it just isn’t slick and graphical enough for me. It seems a little bit clunky, and just doesn’t have that contemporary look and feel. Pictorials also looked promising, but it looks a little messily coded and I don’t want to be running two Wordpress style systems on the one server - it’s overkill! Finally, Photostand. Well it just isn’t what I need - it really doesn’t cut it compared to PixelPost.

So after scouting the competition, I ended up deciding that my original find was probably best. I’ll be using PixelPost, but hopefully customising it a fair bit to ensure it fits with the look and feel of the main blog. I think it will be good to use the photoblog as a personal reference - it’ll document events, holidays, and travel in a visual sense. This should leave the main blog free for more insightful articles and writing. I’m going to get to work customising it, and uploading some photos - then I’ll get it promoted on here! Stay tuned.