This project is over!

After more than 500 posts,
nearly three years of frequent blogging
and more than a thousand photos published here,
Portraits of Australian Animals goes into history.

I will not delete it right now, but it will fall into deep hibernation for at least a year. I need to reconsider many things, decide how I would like to go on with photography and find a better way of assessing the good from the average photos. During the next 12 months I will post no more than 12 photos and I will start posting again after at least three months' break.

In the next few weeks I will do minor updates to the labels and reorganize some posts just to make them more search engine friendly.

Will I stop taking photos and spending every spare moment that I have outdoors?
Of course not.
But regular blogging has become too demanding and frequent abuse of the photographs has become really annoying. I know. 'If you want to keep your photos private, keep them away from the Internet'. The thing is that I don't want to keep them private. I wanted to share them with like-minded people, but unfortunately too many people with completely different values and agenda took advantage of this 'free' resource, and used it for purposes that I would have never approved.

A hobby is a hobby. I don't want to spend hours and hours tracking down these abusers or suing them. I've had enough of that with my design and animation work.
I have to move on, focus on other projects, maybe have another blog some day, where those same guys could steal and sell a drawing or two.

I had two main reasons for PoAA's existence.

• The first was to share photos, improve my photographic skills and get useful feed-back on this. It worked quite well.
• The second was to try and get more people know about the Kangaroo/Wallaby killing in Australia. I hoped to get Nature Blog Network involved into making the problem better known to the world. I did not get the support I'd hoped to get there and left the network.
• There was also a third reason - occasional thoughts on animation - which I abandoned quite early as I realized there was no place for it in a nature and photography blog. And animation, the good classic animation, is completely dead anyway, replaced by ugly, anti-aesthetic, inhumane CGI.

A big 'Thank you!' to all frequent visitors and followers of PoAA, to all my Best Blog Friends, who supported me with comments and encouragement throughout the years and best of luck to you all for the future!

A special 'Thank you!' to bloggers who helped promoting PoAA and displayed the PoAA button in their own blogs!

Take care!
Nickolay

ps. I'm leaving the comments below this post open, just in case you want to say something. Thank you for every word!

That was all, Folks!