Reviews

First shots on the D800

by Adam McLane on June 19, 2012 · 2 comments

A big day today as our long awaited camera finally arrived. The UPS man almost got a hug!

After fiddling with it around the house we decided to take a little walk around the neighborhood and see if there was anything interesting. Here’s a few of my first shots, all shot in RAW and processed a little bit with Nikon ViewNX 2. (Full jpegs on my Flickr page)

Obviously, I’m smitten with the new gear.

Even though I bought this camera to shoot video with, it’s really fun for taking pictures. I just wish I had better skills. 

Lessons, please? Anyone?

AF-S Nikkor 28mm lens test

by Adam McLane on June 16, 2012 · 0 comments

Today I bought the AF-S Nikkor 28mm lens over at George’s Camera Shop in North Park. While I bought this camera to use on my new D800, I figured I fire off a few test rounds with my trusty D60.

I shot these in JPEG and just touched up the color and contrast a bit in PhotoShop 5.1. Click on any of the images to see them in full size.

Notice how it’s in focus on Jackson’s right shoulder and completely out of focus by his left shoulder. Beastly.

I love how shard this picture is in focusing on Kristen’s face. At f/3.2 the bokeh effect is in full force by her necklace.

This was in full sunlight. Sharp focus on the flower. Ultimately, I would have liked to make the middle layer, the green leaves in the foreground, as blurry as the orange trees in the back. I think the D800 will allow me to do that when I drop it manually to f/1.8. (The D60 didn’t want to go there, no idea why.)

My dog hates having his picture taken. I was glad I got this shot. It’s crisp and clean in the shadows of my porch. Hoping to make that ridiculously sharp with the new camera.

I really thought this captured the contrast of light/dark well.

Didn’t touch this in PhotoShop at all. But I like how this turned out, great colors & sharpness.

Since I was testing sharpness I figured why not toss in a cactus?

We <3 6sync

by Adam McLane on September 3, 2011 · 1 comment

All of our web properties (and the few clients we host) are on 6sync hosting.

I have this theory about webhosts. Most of them suck. It’s like a trip to Home Depot… you just wander around looking for what you want and the people working there are hit or miss. I have lots of experience with the big ones. Godaddy, Bluehost, Hostgator, Network Solutions, Dreamhost… they are all 5 shades of the same color. (Of that bunch, I recommend and use Hostgator for blogger clients.)

Why do I like 6sync?

  • They specialize in VPS. [virtual private server] I don’t need (yet) a dedicated box. And most hosts really suck at VPS because they specialize in either shared hosting or dedicated hosting. And I’d really love cloud hosting but I really can’t afford that either.
  • They have great gear. I don’t know how these guys are financed, but they have great equipment.
  • They are personable. I actually like them. You actually get to know them as opposed to live chat operator Steve B. When I’ve had a problem I’ve been able to get my questions answered within minutes. (By comparison, on Thursday night I had an htaccess issue with a client site and didn’t get a response from MediaTemple for 7+ hours!)
  • They built their own user interface. The backend of most webhosting packages is typically ridiculously difficult. This one is almost too simple. When I login it gives me just what I want an not a lot else. But if I want to drill deeper, I can.
  • They are flexibile. I prefer to use WHM/cPanel for my hosting stuff. That’s not native to them, but I asked and they set it up within a couple hours. Try that at one of the big guys.
  • They are beginner-friendly. VPS is new to me. I’ve always either used shared hosting or managed dedicated hosting. Their team helped me with the learning curve whereas most hosts just brush you off with links to their help area.
  • They upgrade crazy fast. This past week I needed to level-up my hosting. They were able to recommend what I needed and make the changes without any downtime or waiting. Minutes, not hours. (Or days!)

What types of folks should use 6sync?

  • Small business who need more power and security than shared hosting but don’t really need or have the ability to manage dedicated hosting.
  • Small sites with ecommerce. (Don’t do that on shared hosting, period.)
  • Power bloggers. (When you get past 2-3k uniques per day, shared hosting isn’t going to cut it.)
  • Web entrepreneurs who want to expand and contract with the needs of their business.

I’m just getting started. What kind of hosting do you recommend? Go with Hostgator. I recommend the Baby plan. A bunch of my clients are on it and it’s fine for 99% of bloggers out there.

* Note: Links to hosting are affiliate links. I’m no affiliate whore. But if you are going to buy stuff I’m recommending, I’ll take the kickback. 

6sync VPS

by Adam McLane on December 4, 2010 · 5 comments

It’s hard to believe but completely true that I’ve built multiple online businesses but never used anything but shared hosting.

I chose to instead push my host, Bluehost, to hold to it’s sales pitch that my high CPU shared hosting account was truly unlimited web storage and unlimited bandwidth… even when I was running 20+ sites on a single account, one of which was a massive and thriving forum community.

This wasn’t without its pitfalls. There were times when my sites were so active that it shut down the server. More than once the SQL server crashed and had to be replaced. Many times my sites were hacked and infected with malware. And, increasingly, Bluehost began to experience unexplained and unapologetic downtime.

Putting the client first

When your own sites go down and your own customers are effected by a strategic choice you make, it’s one thing. But now that I’m beginning to host more McLane Creative projects as part of the services I provide, I felt it was important to make the move to something more professional.

So, over Thanksgiving weekend, I moved all of the projects I manage to my new host, 6sync.

As I did research there were several things I knew I was looking for:

  • Scalability: Most of the projects I host now are relatively small. But I want them to know that I’m ready to grow infinitely as their needs grow. To do that I needed a host who could allow me to simply click a button and move up to the next level of service.
  • Cloud-like: I looked at services like Amazon’s cloud server (too complicated) and Rackspace. (too expensive) In truth, my skill level isn’t quite there. But I wanted something that was created to act like a cloud service and even has potential to go that direction in the future.
  • Proud to offer VPS: I’m proud to upgrade to VPS… so I don’t want to try to get talked into a dedicated server and talked out of what I want. As I was researching it seemed pretty clear that most hosts bury their VPS services. Either they are a shared host who offers VPS as an upgrade. Or they are a dedicated host who offers VPS with hopes of an upcharge.
  • Ridiculous customer service: When I started with Bluehost back in 2005 they had excellent customer service. But as they grew from a few thousand clients to a few hundred thousand clients, their customer service absolutely tanked. I have a theory about web hosts… the bigger they get the more like Godaddy they become. And since Godaddy is the AT&T of the web hosting world… when a company becomes like that it is time to bounce.
  • A website that doesn’t feature a headset hottie: You’re an idiot if you think people who really know their stuff in web hosting sit around in business suits wearing headsets while answering customer calls. I know it’s a silly reason to not like a host. But when I go to the host’s site and it looks like a Windows desktop… I know that doesn’t fit the persona I’m looking for. I don’t want headset hotties. I want nerds who were probably up all night playing video games on two monitors while their third has the webhost dashboard up.

You’d be surprised how few hosts meet those common sense requirements.

But after a lot of looking around, and a timely message on Twitter, I discovered 6sync.

They had great prices, great customer service, weren’t ashamed about who they are, and aren’t ashamed to offer (and believe in) their VPS product.

Over Thanksgiving weekend I began the long process of setting up cPanel accounts for the various clients, migrating DNS, moving data, and testing all the domains to make sure everything was moved over correctly.

So far, so good.