Choosing a name for your website, your online identity, the thing you'll need to say to people all the time is very important. Ideally, you should choose a name that is short, unique, easy to remember and easy to spell. A good domain should be unambiguous, for example, stationary.com and stationery.com sound the same when spoken, but have very different meanings when written. It also helps to avoid ambiguity with numbers and characters that look or sound similar.

So, my own choice of maniacalrobot.co.uk was the obvious choice! yeah, maybe not. It fails on pretty much every point, but at least it's unique. To handle my online identity, I've been using GSuite, allowing me to easily use this for emails too. Trying to spell this to people is virtually impossible, and trying to type it usually requires 2 attempts.

A simple solution to having long domain names is to simply register a shorter form that you can use, and that automatically redirects to your full address. For me, http://m7r4.uk will automatically redirect to the full http://maniacalrobot.co.uk, and using GSuote, you can add this as an alias to receive your emails on too. But why m7r4.uk? This compresses the complicated words from the full domain into a nice simple letter + number + letter + number. It's easy to say, and easy to spell, and nice and short. ManiacalRobot.co.uk is an M followed by 7 characters, then an R followed by 4 characters, and instead of using the full .co.uk, I simply chose .uk. It's a simple naming scheme that can easily be applied to any domain and makes spelling to people in person a lot easier.

2019 has been a great year for my photography. I started the year by upgrading from my EOS-M, which has served me very well, to an EOS-M5. Apart from the improvement in image quality and resolution, 18 megapixels to 24 megapixels, the extra manual controls have made using the camera much more natural, and the boost in image quality was so big, that I quite quickly decided to add some new lenses to make the most of all those new megapixels. I'm quite a frugal buyer, so I wanted to maximise performance for the best possible cost. Up until now, I've been using wide-angle zooms and standard primes, so I went all in and got a 70-200 F4 L, the base 'L' lens in the 70-200 range, but the image quality on a tripod is simply excellent. In addition to this, I also purchased a second hand 24-105 F4 L IS, the 'kit' lens from Canons pro camera bodies. For the price, this is also an excellent lens, sharp and versatile, but on the negative side, heavy and prone to chromatic aberration, but nothing that can't be fixed in post-processing.

New kit aside, this year also marked a return to simply going out with a tripod and taking my time to compose landscapes. Recently, most of my photography has been from walking and holidays. It's been quite satisfying to just take my time without any pressures or time contraints.

The year started with a Holiday to Lisbon. A beautiful city with lots to see and do. The weather was great, and complimented the fantastic food. This was a quick shot taken by the MAAT museum on the waterfront. It was a warm afternoon, lots of people enjoying the sunshine, and maybe a drink, by the water.

The boardwalks at Thursley National Nature Reserve provide the next location. It's a great spot for capturing evening light, the windswept trees and grasses providing some great subjects. This is a location that I will need to return to, as I suspect these scenes will look great with different weather conditions.

When I upgraded my primary camera from the EOS-M to the EOS-M5, I converted the EOS-M into an infrared camera by removing the builtin IR cut filter. This requires dismantling the camera, and removing a tiny glass filter that sits in front of the imaging sensor. Once this is done, the camera is now capturing visible light and Infrared light, which in normal use just adds a pink hue to images, but when combined with an IR filter, i use a R72, on really bright days, you can capture Infrared photographs. As leaves and grass reflect IR light more than other surfaces, IR photographs take on an ethereal look.

These last three photos are all long exposure images from Prague during a trip to the Christmas markets. Prague is a beautiful city, but it is also a very busy city. Using long exposures can help to blur out the numbers of people, and combined with exposure bracketing for HDR processing, allows for details to be retained in the shadows, without blowing out the street lights.