About
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About the | longmile.net
thelongmile.net was born in 2006 after a whim, a fantasy about having my own site, however it evolved and developed, into the new showcase of my artwork and my life. It became my “Personal” website.
At first the site was Joomla based, and didn’t really give me the functionality I needed, since at the end of the day, it was a blog, with ridiculous permissions, rather than allowing me to do what I really wanted.
In 2007 the site got a complete rebuild, to include three content pages, and a new front page. The joomla component was deleted and thanks to Adobe Lightroom, the site got it’s first flash based galleries. Some might say it was one of the best versions of this site, partly I would agree, but at the end of the day it was a dog to update and fix. It never worked as it should for me.
The site later got a huge update to include new galleries in the form of piclens, and was much easier to update. It was the predecessor to this site. And people loved it. The site exploded in use, earning me hundreds of thousands of page views. But still people wanted more, and it was still a pain to update, not to mention adding a single image required a complete rebuild of the gallery. It wasn’t simple, or easy, and put me off a lot of work. By the end of 2008 I was almost six months behind on the tasklist, mainly because of the fact that rebuilding the gallery, was a one hour process to update, and another hour for uploading, not to mention re-coding certain things.
At the start of 2009, I launched a survey into just what people wanted from the site, which gave way to the site you see here. thelongmile.net 2009 V4.0 was born, this time, it was built on Wordpress foundations, though it has been hacked apart to suit my needs. Thankfully updating the galleries, can be done in a single click, and the whole process of doing anything on this site is now 100x faster and more efficiant.
To see the reasons why I chose wordpress, click on the FAQ link above
About thelongmile
Born in Cardiff in 1986, thelongmile was born into a city of culture, art and history. Cardiff is well known for it’s architecture, for the castles and of course, for being in Wales. Home of some of the greatest British countryside known. Despite all this, Mark resided to computers until about 14 when he started to travel around various parts of the world. It was here that he soon learned that he had a keen eye for photography, and soon set to work on learning just what he could do with a basic camera.
The bug hit, in January 2005 with a Cosina CT1G. That excellent little Russian camera served me well
for a few months, and so my art got slowly better and better. I eventually brought a Canon EOS 3000 with an extra telephoto lens. The added features of having a meter, allowed me to improve my
photography even further. Leading up to the present day, when I brought my Canon Eos 30D in May 2006.
Since then the Canon EOS 30D is my regular tool for all of my shots, be it night, day, landscape or portrait.With only a few accessories, tripods and lenses, I make it now a personal goal to get the best images possible from only a limited selection of optics. Proving that in some cases it really isn’t about the optics at all, it’s about the photo, and how well you can make it work for you.
Mark also includes Adobe Creative Suite 3, Vue Désprit, Aphophysis Fractal Flame Generator, Ultra Fractal 3 as well as Bryce into his digital workflow. Most of the images you see in the digital gallery are concept images, simply to see if they could be done with the skills Mark had at the time. Digital Art is the home of Marks artwork skills, and will always play a major part in the way Marks artwork is developed.
In August 2008 Mark became a Microsoft Certified Desktop Support Technician, paving the way for me to enter the IT world on a professional level. What this holds for his artwork, we don’t yet know, but we are certain it will allow him to develop further, and to create more interesting, and unique artwork for you to enjoy.
Tools Of The Trade
thelongmile uses a range of tools to create the artwork you see on this site.
Below is a list of the hardware and software that I use in my workflow.
Canon Eos 30D
Canon EF-S 18-55mm / 35-80mm / 80-200mm lenses
Hoya / B+W / Lee filters and polarisers
Manfrotto Tripods
Canon Flash Units
Adobe Creative Suite 3
Vue Désprit 6 Infinite
Apophysis 3D Fractal Flame
Ultra Fractal
HP Printers and Inks
Sandisk Ultra III Memory Cards
These are just some of the tools I use. And this list, will get updated as and when I introduce new tools
into my workflow. Any Suggestions? Click the email link below, and tell me!
