The last few months have been challenging here at DIMi.

Just before Easter my father-in-law died. It was not unexpected to me, having seen a number of people pass, but other members of the family were not prepared. As you could imagine, it was very disruptive to everything. DIMi suffered, given that we work from a home office, plus my attention was not really there.

Over the following months things have settled down a lot and a lot of photography has been happening. But as anyone who has been through someone like this will know, depression and grief go hand in hand, and there have certainly been times when we have had little energy to do much.

Despite all this we’ve got some great things underway at DIMi. In February DIMi became the most popular Australian photography website among Australians and since then we have risen up the US photography site rankings to be in reach of some of the long established big names. We have started our ImageMaker Tips on a challenging bi-daily initial schedule and these are proving very popular. The emails from readers are flowing in and it is obvious that more and more photographers are trusting our reviews and enjoying the advice on our sites.

There is a lot of background work going on. We are working on individual RSS feeds not only for the ImageMaker Tips but for other key topic areas, such as cameras, photography and press releases, and a major effort is underway to add newsletters to DIMi. More news on this soon. And of course there is the general maintenance to do. Server changes at our hosting service took the gallery of digitalimagemakerworld.com down and we are still working hard to get it back. It has been this which has held up the competition announcements recently.

Several new initiatives should be rolling out by the end of June. The first of these is dimagemaker.net, a huge gallery site that will offer free galleries to photographers and digital artists producing strong work. The second is a companion site to dimagemaker.com called animagemaker.com, which will allow us to expand into analogue photography coverage and a major effort to profile photographers producing stunning work, whether on film or digital.

All the above would already in place had there not been the personal stresses of recent months. But then maybe things needed to go slower.