second anniversary – Ming Thein

Pick your analogy: organic growth in a semi-structured, harmonious way, or deeper down the rabbit hole we go…

Mingthein.com celebrates its second birthday today. There’s not a lot to say other than a huge thank you; without the support of my readers, students, clients and customers, I’d probably have packed it in way back when. In the last two years, we’ve had:

780 articles
1.9 million words of content
36,000 comments
3,800 published images
9.5 million visitors to the main site, and 17.5 million to my flickr page
13,700+ accepted images in the reader pool, filtered down from >100,000 with >1,400 active members
Somewhere around 6,500 Facebook followers
165 email school students
21 workshops, with another 3 planned (one space each for Melbourne and Havana)
I’ve lost count of the number of emails; my guess would be somewhere around 120,000?
Two dead keyboards

Suffice to say it’s a much, much larger community than I ever expected; sometimes I’m overwhelmed by it all. I’ve come to realise that my opinion is taken very seriously by a lot of people; perhaps too seriously by some. That’s a good thing and a bad thing, and I never take that responsibility lightly – especially if any of the findings are thoughts run contrary to expectation or common sense. I have always been and will always continue to be independent; even in the highly unlikely event that some camera company throws large sums of money my way. There’s no point doing otherwise: I, and this site, have always been about the images first and foremost, with everything else taking a secondary – but still important – back set. In any case, there’s plenty more to come as long as I can keep up with feeding the bear. Cheers to you all! MT

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Places left for 2014 Making Outstanding Images Workshops: Havana and London – click here for more information and to book!

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Visit the Teaching Store to up your photographic game – including workshop and Photoshop Workflow videos and the customized Email School of Photography; or go mobile with the Photography Compendium for iPad. You can also get your gear from B&H and Amazon. Prices are the same as normal, however a small portion of your purchase value is referred back to me. Thanks!

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