Now, YLovePhoto helps you and can be transparently accessed through both addresses:

https://www.YLovePhoto.com/

http://www.YLovePhoto.com/

For most people, this will change nothing. For those who prefer to keep some of their browsing (a little more) discreet, it may help.

Useful reading: HTTPS Everywhere | Electronic Frontier Foundation

I’ll store there sets of links that I find on the web. I’ll try to make them appear in groups linked by an obvious common subject in the coming months (If I’m good enough at it and if you are interested enough).

I’ll start with a series (videos and posts) about depth of field, a topic central for any photographer.

Tell me what you think of it. I can’t wait to know.

I keep an eye on this, but it’s always a hard task to catch the hundreds of spam comments that arrive (obviously, most of them never reach visibility thanks to the automatization working in the background).

Then, we’ll probably see more about the Nikon D4, the Nikon D800, the Sony Alpha 77. And maybe some more.

If you see it appear but you prefer to keep the usual wide-size template, you just have to drop to the bottom of the page and change the “Mobile Theme” option .

And you will also notice that the little logo appears along with a list of other (smaller) icons to allow you to promote YLovePhoto on other significant sharing web sites.

What Google says about it:

How does +1 affect search results?

+1 helps people discover relevant content—a website, a Google search result, or an ad—from the people they already know and trust. Adding the +1 button to your pages lets users recommend your content, knowing that their friends and contacts will see their recommendation when it’s most relevant—in the context of Google search results.

When a signed-in Google user is searching, your Google search result snippet may be annotated with the names of the user’s connections who’ve +1’d your page. If none of a user’s connections has +1’d your page, your snippet may display the aggregate number of +1’s your page has received.

Good luck.

• Nikon D5100
• Canon EOS 600D & 1100D
• Sony SLT-A33 & A55
• Lumix G3
• Samsung NX11

Posts are no longer only sorted in categories or themes (shown just under the post title); They are also marked with stamps, labels, keywords or Tags which are now shown at the bottom of posts.

It is easy and give a wider choice of options to browse through the posts associated by a single interesting subject.

The logo shown at the top left will appear now on your iPhone/iPad.

Why not do this? Isn’t YLovePhoto the web site you love and adore and you MUST be able to easily visit any time in the future?

We are changing the server in order to avoid a possible risk of disk failure and to bring some needed additional performance.

We will try our best to ensure that this will be as invisible as possible, buy I apologize in advance for any inconvenience this may produce.

Celebrating the 1000th post on YLovePhoto (actually, the 2000th, since nearly all posts are written both in French and in English), I took a few minutes to check what were the 2010 posts that the readers of YLovePhoto preferred (actually the ones with the most visits).

• Download the Pentax K-x manual
• Photokina 2010: Where Canon goes?
• Nikon D800 instead of D700s?
• Official image samples for Pentax K-5
• Sony A77: Latest news rumors
• Sony presents its future A77 or A7xx
• Nikon D800: Possible features
• Photography, so many failures!
• Photokina: Expectations for Nikon
• Download the Canon EOS 60D user manual
• Photokina 2010: Sony reborn
• Pentax K-5 and Pentax KR

to my eyes, this is a wonderful panorama of what the readers of YLovePhoto are. All brands interest them, but they are definitely looking at the high-end gear, at the expert photography. The news are good, the difference between a rumor and data is understood, but they want all the best sources for their information.

You are enthusiastic photographers, attentive to the good gear, to drawing the best out of it and targeting an intelligent approach of photography. From here, it looks good and comforting to have such a fair readership to serve again in 2011.

It appears that our server has been victim of a hacking attempt. It was successful and forced the site down at least twice.

The server guys are working on it. This is probably solved now, but we will only be sure in a couple of days (if it works normally and we can confirm that the hacker is kept outside our protection doors).

Thank you for your patience in the mean time.

Starting right now, I open an experiment with a new feature for YLovePhoto. As you will quickly notice, there is now the possibility to add a star rating to all posts and pages on the web site. This should be quite easy to master (click on the star rating you want to give, 1 is bad, 5 is good).

I also included a thumbs-up / thumbs-down feature on the comments. This is even simpler.

Feel free to play with it from now on. But I admit that I was quite hesitant at first because I don’t know whether it will be abused or not (I don’t want to spend time banning people and such). So, it’s still in beta and we’ll see if it works.

Feel free to comment about this if you like it (or not) and if you think that it could be improved.

It is the right time to prepare your Christmas gifts and the coming new year with my photographic prints or my posters (or even the new year’s cards). And it will help me maintain the YLovePhoto web site. But, I want to extend this to a gift for you. You will be able to use the special code that will unlock a special magic voucher:

15% of discount
with the code:

Yves Roumazeilles – The catalog of photos and prints

As you can immediately see if you are a returning friend of YLovePhoto, we just changed our face for something more organized and to help visitors navigate easier. After nearly two years of existence, some would say that it was the right time for it. I admit I am happy to see the last weeks of efforts (in the middle of a deluge of good photography news) finally coming to fruition.

A strong emphasis has been put onto the categories to help people go more directly to the brand they are interested into.

The database of SLR features and reviews now goes to the top menu where it is more clearly organized by brand, too.

I hope that you will like it, but your comments (positive or negative) are welcome here.

Nota bene: The same work is being prepared for the French version of the web site during the weekend.

After some little cleaning and tidying, here are the places where social communication is centered around YLovePhoto and its readers:

• Flickr / YLovePhoto: a group to share photos and pictures; probably with some competitions coming in the future.
• Facebook / YLovePhoto: A page for the fans, the true fans!
• Twitter -> YLovePhoto_en: A way to always stay posted on the status of the English articles on www.YLovePhoto.com.

In the future, it should ease the exchanges between the YLovePhoto readers in an environment that is very photo-friendly and open to picture sharing. All ideas will be welcome of course.

Since it seems that a relative majority of the readers here are French-speaking, the language of most people in the group will clearly be French. Try and use French, if you can. However, we will not complain if you have not a perfect grammar and French is not your mother language (French people are supposed to try and do better).

If you cannot speak/read/write French, as a courtesy to all people, let’s try to split different conversations for French and English (or other languages). If it is really needed, I may open another group later. Let me know.

The basic rule here will be: Let’s be polite to the others. YLovePhoto already exists both in French and in English.

Some of you may be interesting in giving us some information leaks. It may seem that your privacy may be difficult to be kept in the process, but there are a few ways to protect it.

I can give you some information and some advice.

• I would not divulge the sources of my information if you merely ask me to keep it quiet.
• Use the contact form providing a wrong address (please, make it clear in the text).
• If you feel that this is not enough (or if the information you are providing would be really asking for additional protection), you can send email to Yves2006@YLovePhoto.com (just replace 2006 with this year, 2009 or 2010, to make it actual), without leaving traces by using one of the following services:
  • SendAnonymousEmail.net
  • CyberAtlantis
  • AnonymousSpeech
  • Anonymouse
• You can also send us paper mail. It may be very ‘old economy‘-like, but it’s quite safe to understand that I will not keep the document for more than a few hours. And it won’t allow to track you…
• You can also install a system enabling its users to communicate anonymously on the Internet, like TOR which will bring an additional level of security and anonymity, but at the price of a much higher complexity.

Feel free to use or adapt these advices. For my part, I will do my best to ensure that our exchanges will do you no harm.

All that being said, remember that I always prefer a well-known source (if not 100% identified) and I may chose not to publish some leaks when I do not feel sufficiently at ease with its origin and/or credibility.

You may be willing to test right now one of the two language versions of the YLovePhoto web site:

• PDF in English
• PDF en français

A technology developed and distributed by FiveFilters.org.

• English
• Français

I don’t intend to start doing simultaneous real-time translations into several languages at a time, but I thought that it would be intersting for some of our visitors not fully mastering those two native languages, to get access to automated translations provided by Google. They may not be perfect, but they may be helpful.

It’s easy to use, you just have to click in the lateral menus on the links beside the small round flags:

Or there is a small Google widget to offer an even wider choice of 35 languages:

Be sure to also cool down a little (this is good to start in a healthier state in a few weeks) and be patient with me.

A minor update to the YLovePhoto.com features. I now added a Tag feature to all posts. It works a little like ‘themes’ but is a little more flexible, of a finer grain.

One is not replacing the other, mind you. It’s simply a matter of offering you a few more options when tracking/following the news on YLovePhoto.

A list of the most common tags, currently used on the web site:

Thanks in advance.

PS: Other languages may be of interest too, but with a little less priority.

To stay fully up-to-date with the latest posts on YLovePhoto, there was already the RSS threads and the electronic mail. But some of you wanted to get even more flexibility. Who am I to deny you this right?

Today, you have the possibility to receive tweets for each update of the YLovePhoto.com web site. The twitter page is:

http://twitter.com/ylovephoto_en

I am quite sure that it will attract people who fell in love with this modern and quick way to be kept informed. Maybe some of those who do not know it yet will feel the need to check and discover Twitter, this web site and mean to post short messages (no more than 140 characters, a little like or mobile phone SMS messages) and to subscribe to the messages/tweets from other people.

YLovePhoto merely publishes short messages showing the title of each posted article followed by a hot link to reach it directly.

For example:

Join our followers