Nikongear.com is a subscription based website for photographers using Nikons, or any other brand of camera and is run by Dallas Dahms who is based in South Africa.

As a registered member you will be able to participate fully in the open boards, but your access to the specialist and certain other discussion boards will be restricted until you purchase one of our reasonably priced subscriptions ($18 for 6 months or $75 for life). The restricted boards are shown with [square brackets] in the various forum indices. If you'd like to buy a subscription please head over here. We automatically promote any member with 500 or more posts to Life membership, so if you participate regularly we do see the value in that.

Nikongear.com is unlike many other free photography forums. You will find that the average age of the members here is much higher than most others which has resulted in a level of decorum that is well above that of seen on other sites. As a result the arrogance and baiting typically found on open sites is practically non-existent here. Moderation is also very minimal.

We are not aiming to be the biggest Nikon site online, only the best.

Quick links:

History of Nikongear.com
Types of photographers here
Critique
Code of conduct
Photo hosting
Nudes section
Articles & editorial submissions
The Pic Of The Week
The Chairman's Challenge
Advertising on Nikongear.com
Membership Badges
Deleting your membership
Supporting the site financially

History
Nikongear was founded by Dallas Dahms in September of 2005. Originally intended as a site for collecting information on all things Nikon, the birth of the forum in April 2006 saw the site take on a new life and direction. Nowadays the forum makes up most of the content you will find on this site. Whilst the name implies that we are Nikon-centric, it doesn't mean that we don't permit participation by any members who are using other cameras and formats. We encourage anybody using any type of camera to post photos and participate in our discussions.

Types of photographers here

There are all sorts of photographers here. We have professional photographers here who provide valuable input, from critique to gear information, to post processing techniques. There are also some semi-pro folks who help out, as well as the purely amateur folks who do photography for fun and who want to learn.

Critique
We strongly encourage critical feedback on any images posted here as opposed to the typical "attaboy" and "great shot" responses you are likely to find on many other sites. All images posted to these boards are open for constructive criticism. Please don't post your photos if you are only looking for praise.

Code of Conduct
We have a Code Of Conduct that we expect all our members to abide by. You'll find the code HERE.

Photo Hosting
One of the advantages of being a member here is that we offer image hosting space to all members. You'll get 5MB of space on our gallery just for being a member and 1GB for storage if you buy a subscription. Subscribers can also add "on-the-fly" attachments anywhere within their posts, which makes sharing your shots a lot easier.

Nudes
We have a specialist area for nude photography. We expect that members will only post tasteful and artistic imagery to this section and not anything pornographic in nature. We reserve the right to remove any imagery that we feel does not fit with the spirit of this section.

Features & Editorial Contributions
Nikongear/Fotozones has been set up in such a way that when we find great posts made by the members we move them into special "featured" boards within each zone. This gives the great stuff more prominence on the site so that our readers can find it easily. We have a committee of volunteers who look for these kinds of posts and move them when necessary.

The POTW (pic of the week)
Every week we honour a photograph that is posted to our image gallery on the forum. This job is done by our POTW sub-committee. Each member nominates a photo and one of the members chooses from those nominated. This image is displayed as one of the sidebar widgets on all the Nikongear.com pages. Any member of the site may nominate an eligible photo (posted for discussion in the week before we chose the POTW) by sending a link and their motivation for nominating it to any member of the committee.

The Chairman’s Challenge
Since inception we have regularly run photography challenges for all members to participate in. The theme for the challenge is set by the winner of the previous challenge. Read the sticky in the Challenges board for more information on how this works.

Advertising / Advertisers
The objective of this website is not to generate revenue from advertising, but rather from ongoing paid memberships. However we do have a limited number of ad slots available for advertisers who would like to talk to our membership. There are a number of ways we can do this, via our newsletters, in-between our forum posts, on our email notifications, etc. If you are interested in advertising here please email admin@nikongear.com.

Membership Badges

You will notice certain members have blue badges below their names on the forum. Here is a brief explanation of each badge:


Administrator: this level of user runs the site and deals with any issues relating to operations.


Staff: these are made up of moderators, mentors and other volunteers who are empowered to deal with any disputes or quarrels between members either globally or on a specific board.


Pic Of The Week Committee member: as described, these members help to find the best images posted on Nikongear.com.


Life Member: these members have been fortunate enough to obtain life time membership to the site. We run promotions for these types of memberships from time to time, so look out for them.


Subscriber: as mentioned above, subscribers are entitled to full access to our site, which includes being able to use the PM system, post classified ads, send other members emails (if they have allowed that) and of course add attachments to posts. There are many other permissions that are applied to this level of member.


Project Morpheus contributor: these members made a financial contribution over and above their subscription to help us migrate from our own software platform to the new Invision platform we are using. If it wasn't for the generosity of this group we would not be able to bring your the site as it is now.


Safarian: these members have participated on an official Nikongear.com safari to Southern Africa. If you would like a testimonial from any of these members about our safaris please pop them an email and they can tell you what to expect.

Deleting Your Membership
If you would like to have your account deleted please send an email to admin@nikongear.com. This may take a couple of days to process. Please note that our policy on account deletion is that we will delete your membership but any posts you have made to our boards will remain in our archives.

Supporting us financially
We appreciate all assistance with the financial needs of the site, so if you have benefited from being a member please consider making a donation, buying a subscription or using any of the links found on our site when purchasing gear.

Contacting Nikongear.com

Site owner & administrator: dallas@nikongear.com

Moderators: support@nikongear.com

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This document may be updated and refined from time to time without notice. If you are unsure of anything covered here just use the admin@nikongear.com email address to get in touch with the admins of the site.

Last updated on 10 March 2011.