F295 Announcement

[Tom Persinger]

After a long period of very careful thought and consideration I wanted to you know that effective immediately I will begin an indefinite hiatus from F295, and in the not so distant future nearly all F295 activities will cease (most likely including the forum). F295 was (somewhat accidentally) founded in 2004 as a simple online forum style website that brought people from around the world together - a sort of social media before social media- and grew in ways I never imagined. Over the past 11 years I have been fortunate to meet a lot of terrific people, visit some wonderful places, and see a lot of really great work. The F295 symposia & seminar series brought, more people than I ever dreamed, physically together in one place to hear over 120 (roughly) unique lectures by some amazing artists, see some great exhibitions, and participate in a terrific workshop series that educated hundreds and hundreds of individuals (many of whom have gone on to create fantastic work, have terrific exhibitions, and pass skills along to their students). The amount of time, effort, and sacrifice put into F295 was great; perhaps too great. Many thanks to my wife Cindy and my sons Sam & Nate for their patience and sacrifice over the past 11 years -- I am forever in your debt. Thanks to those of you who have been a part of F295. You are a special group of artists/people and I am honored to have worked with you! Onward! (btw, if you're hiring let me know!)

This was cross posted to Facebook, so you may have seen it there first

Thanks again to all of you! What a terrific time we've had!

[Barry Kirsten]

Sad news, Tom. Thank you for your commitment to f/295 over those years, and I wish you and your family the best for the future. In my short time here I've come to love this place and visit at least twice a day. Photographically this place is unique, and I wonder if there's any way of saving it? Is it possible that a group of members might be able to take it over and keep it running? I think it's too valuable a resource to be allowed to sink. What do others think?

Once again, sad news, and thanks Tom.

[blindpig]

Totally agree with Barry.This is my favorite forum,am really going to miss it.
All the best Tom.
Don

[Isis]

This is sad, f295 was my entry into pinhole photography which to this date I still enjoy. Tom I thank you for the time you have put in and I will miss (my now infrequent) visits to the site. Hopefully the forum members will align elsewhere.

Shane

[earlj]

Can one or more of us take over?

[earlj]

I, too would like to save the forum, if it is possible. Tom - what would it take?

[Barry Kirsten]

I've been giving this a lot of thought. I imagine there would be costs involved in hosting the site and server maintenance etc, so I think a membership levy would be necessary and reasonable. Apart from that I don't know what's involved. Perhaps a learning experience for most of us.

[Ned.Lewis]

Tom, thanks for keeping this forum going for so many years. I'm sad to hear the news and I'm going to miss the forum and the people here.

...
Maintaining a forum like this is a lot of work... and really needs some dedicated attention. Unless some individual wants to step up with a pretty big time commitment, it would be difficult to transfer. Some of you probably know that some other forums are switching to other software, partly because of better spam/fake account/ and management tools. Moving a forum to new software is a big job... another possibility would be to make an archive copy of the f295 forums. They would no longer be interactive, but would remain visible. The camera building and other forums here contain a great wealth of information, it would be sad if they went dark.

[Elizabeth.King]

Sad news, Tom. I wish you well in what you do next. Through f295 I've learned how to make my own lenses, do gum bichromate, and Mordançage. The last is one of my favorite processes, too. For an entity with a semi-accidental start, f295 has done some pretty great things!

Running a forum does take some back end work that many don't know. I run a site with pretty low numbers of visitors, but with high numbers of attempted new memberships from spammers. I wouldn't want to take on a site with higher activity without solid help from more knowledgeable people (I know what I don't know and it's a lot). I don't know if APUG's next version with more hybrid integration might be able to take on maintenance of the archives of f295?

[dvoracek]

I guess my plan is to continue what I've been doing and fire up a blog and link to it from the pinhole page on Facebook. I'll probably get back in to Flickr too now that they've raised the data limit. However, neither of these has the sense of community of the forum. Thanks, Tom. What along strange trip it's been.