XtremeCamera

XtremeCamera is proud to announce that our Official, Photography Tips Newsletter has launched with the first issue, entitled “Getting The Most Our Of Your Sunset And Sunrise Photos”. It is available now as a PDF download for all members.

“We’re excited to finally get the newsletter off the ground” says Julia Barnes, Admin and Critique Administrator, who is also serving as the author (along with John Manzione), and the Editor of the Newsletter. “We hope to bring out a newsletter each week, but for now we would settle for monthly,” Ms Barnes continues.

The official How To Newsletter was originally planned to launch several months ago, but due to some major new upgrades to the base code of XtremeCamera, and also due to some restructuring of major personnel and administrative duties, the newsletter was push back to late July. “We almost didn’t make the July window” says John Manzione, site owner and CEO of Spinfuel, the parent company of XtremeCamera, “but we managed to pull it off just in time. Jules (Julia Barnes) has been a massive contributor to all things “XtremeCamera” and I think its safe to say that without her knowledge and commitment we wouldn’t be here today.” Mr. Manzione says.

XtremeCamera has recently changed its focus from that of a photo community to one of a photography-learning site. Offering professional, honest critiques that sometimes leans close to ‘brutal honestly’, the critiques on XtremeCamera has refocused the team of Admins toward a more disciplined approach to teaching any level of skilled photographer how to shoot better, how to learn more, and how to apply all their skills toward making better photographs. “The Internet is rife with horrible, almost offensive photographs made by people who think they are photographers but are, in the real world, point and shooters who wouldn’t know a good photograph if they were staring it”, says the ever-controversial Julia Barnes.

“Personally, I couldn’t take it anymore. Photography is a lost skill, a lost art. And I put the blame squarely on the shoulders of the big camera makers that are advertising their idiot-proof prosumer dSLR’s as tools that will make anyone a great photographer. It takes skill, commitment, a love of the photograph and all the ways in which to create what the minds eye sees. Camera makers that continue to add presets to their exposure settings as doing no one a favor.
Especially those that truly want to learn.” says Ms Barnes. “Program mode was the worst invention of the late 20th century. When you let the onboard computer make all the decisions all you are doing is essentially pointing the camera and clicking the shutter. How is that photography?”

Mr. Manzione says that with the launching of the Newsletter (available only to members) and the critiques, along with free photo classes for members, XtremeCamera aims to make a huge dent in the poor quality of online photography. “Someone has to do it, or in another 10 tens the professional level of photography will disappear. It happened in Web Development, it will happen to photography if someone doesn’t step in and point out all the lousy photography being posted on nearly every web site.”

Mr. Manzione says, “The Official Newsletter is available now, inside XtremeCamera. We placed a link to the PDF in the Control Panel, so all our members could easily locate it. We deleted all the names in our sign up page for the newsletter when we decided to take XtremeCamera to a private, paid membership. We will be distributing the newsletter is some fashion, for now it’s a downloadable PDF.” Mr. Manzione adds.

Cynthia Reynolds
XC PR
July 27th, 2008