Audio Stig took over my living room last night!

We’ve now recorded five episodes of PhotoLegal and released four.  It’s been a successful enterprise beyond our wildest dreams, with over 1,000 downloads each time an episode is added.  We’re really very grateful to you, our listeners, for the support you’ve shown.

Now that our processes have settled down, we need to make some changes.  We hope these will improve your listening experience and access to information, although please feel free as ever to let us know in the comments below if this is not the case.  To help you cut through the waffle, I’ve signposted the changes in bold.

The first and most significant change is the production schedule.  Initially PhotoLegal was produced by me – the first two episodes took two days to hack about in a sound editing programme.  Phill helped out with episodes two and three, then did episode four all on his own as I was away in Indonesia.  We tried to get a weekend release after the Thursday night recording which meant in most cases working all day Friday and Saturday to get it ready.

Clearly this can’t continue because we both have jobs and this is just a side project.  However committed to it we are (and we still think it’s a topic that really needs an outlet so we’re happy to be involved), we have to rationalise this.  We’re also fortunate that Peter Filcek (otherwise known as ‘Audio Stig’), an ex sound engineer and keen photographer has joined us as our producer which takes a load off a little.  Peter has added a huge amount of professionalism to our sound quality which we hope you’ll hear in the next episode, although he does bring a lot of kit with him (see the picture above taken in my living room last night)!

From this episode (episode 5), PhotoLegal will continue to be recorded bi-weekly on a Thursday evening, but we will aim to release by the following Tuesday evening instead of over the weekend. We don’t think this will make a major difference to most of you, who from our stats appear to download during the week (and mostly on a Wednesday), but it will give us the extra time to get things right.

To clarify:

Episode 5 (US Special) will be released next Tuesday evening, 23 June 2008
Episode 6 (Retouching) will be released on Tuesday 7 July

We’re reaching the end of our intial run of planned episodes, and no doubt we’ll be meeting some time over the next week to plan the next few.  I know that an episode dealing with accounting is one we definitely plan to do, as is a special covering another country (eg: France or Germany), but please do let us know if there’s any particular topic you’d like us to cover.

Sadly, we’re becoming a victim of comment spam so the second major change is that we’re adding Captchas to the various points on the site where you can contribute. We ‘re sorry that the end result of this is to inconvenience you slightly when you’re adding your contribution which we value greatly, but this is one of those problems which always come with running a website these days.

In episode 4 we added a segment to the podcast to offer occasional reviews of products that are relevant to photographers.  I reviewed the Think Tank Airport Addicted 2.0 backpack which I took to Indonesia, and I’m shortly going to write up a full review which I’ll add to a new reviews section on the site. If you’re a manufacturer or distributor of a product and would like us to review it, please get in touch via the Contact Form.

We’re also going to re-jig the questions, to be more episode related. We’ll publish a list of upcoming topics, and you’ll be able to contribute a question for that episode.  Afterwards we’ll list the questions which were answered, so that if someone comes back later and is looking for the answer, they’ll know which episode to listen to.

Finally, we’ll be adding some polls to the site about relevant topics, such as one covered in our US special recorded last night.  The first poll will be published to coincide with the release of Episode 5.

It would be really interesting to know if you value the links to current relevant stories on external sites which we add to the front page of the website.  If this is useful, then we’ll continue doing it, but if no-one is using it then we might as well use the space (and the time to produce it) for something else!

Please do let us have your thoughts on all of the contents of this post below, and we’ll aim to continue producing content you enjoy, and tailor it to your use.

Thanks for listening, thanks for reading, and don’t forget to get episode 5 when it’s released next Tuesday evening!

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