About Subscriptions on PassionforPixels.com and what it means for Members

PassionforPixels.com started off as a small yahoo group many years ago and through the benevolence of The Melbourne Camera Club and the original person administering PassionforPixels.com evolved into a Premier Australian/International website and essentially an online Camera Club.  It is unique, in that the members freely share their own passion for photography with new members and more established ones as well.  But as time moves on so do the costs of running sites like PassionforPixels.com so the site has now moved to a subscription based membership.

What does this mean to current or prospective members ?

This subscription means that the site will start to generate an income to ensure sustainability of the site, provide resources to the owner/administrator to continue to develop the site back to where it was to ensure that the needs of photography members are meet in a timely manner.  For your subscription, currently at $30 Australian you will be provided with some gallery space, currently set to 50 Megabytes, to use and show your own images in albums, something that has never been provided on PassionforPixels.com before.  You will also have access to the competitions area to submit for judging by local and international judges and commenting back on the success or failures of your image.  This leads to education of members with their photography, through resources that might not otherwise be available to them, though isolation, location or lack of resources that streamline areas like larger cities have usually in abundance.  It will also mean that the site will in the future be able to provide awards to members for those competitions that have otherwise just been a pat on the back.

This year has seen new competitions for the first time, Landscape, Portrait and Creative ones and have lead to a lot of interest by current members.  Although off to a slightly rocky start in the begging's which is normal for processes to fine tune themselves, the Creative Competition was quickly sponsored by Wacom Asia with 6 x 8 Intuos3 Tablets as the winning prize, and I expect that this will continue next year as well.  We have also been sponsored for the Landscape, Portrait and Photographer of the Year with cash prizes as well, which as far as I know is a first for this site.  The usual Image of the year award will continue to be sponsored as well and into the future too which I thank Andy Cross for as without his assistance this wouldn't be possible.

Another benefit to subscription will be the ability to access the "For Sale Forum" of the site which means that only subscribed members will be able to start a new thread advertising items for sale.  Other members will still be able to post in the threads but if they are not subscribed members then they will not be able to advertise in that forum.  This is to ensure that members who are really assisting with educating other members of the site to enhance their own education is part of the site, and they are not just there to sell their gear and do nothing else on the site.

Hosting accounts will be a further enhanced subscription but will only be made available to long standing members who are active in all aspects of the PassionforPixels.com website.

Further benefits to the subscription will be made as the site is brought back to normal, currently the information is being converted and brought back into the new sites software.