December 2008:

December 16: Photo submissions for the December Monthly Photo contests have come to a close. There were only 3 photos submitted this month. So these three members have a great chance of becoming a winner. Plus their names are entered an addtional time into the Hunt Give-Away raffles.

The December Photo Contests Voting starts NOW!

Our website updates slowed down this month due to increased behind the scenes work. Both innoperable cameras have returned from repairs and the Powel camera is now back online!

Looks like the Valley Stand camera will be coming down to be relocated. This location doesn't get a good enough cell signal to keep our image refresh rates where we want them. This camera will be moving to an entirely new location on the other side of the state.

Texas Deer Cams should be making some HUGE announcements very soon. Along with that will come some more camera relocations. We trust you'll enjoy the new viewing opportuntities these new locations will provide.

The TDC website has reached 70,000 hits! Pretty amazing for a website that really went live in October. In November we served up over 7.5 MILLION pages! We are thrilled to have become so popular in such a short span of time. We have several things lined up for early next year and hope to skyrocket to even higher stats. Thanks for spreading the word.

This week's opinion poll: If you could deer hunt anywhere, where would it be?

December 2: Monthly Photo Contests have begun! This month's theme: Best Buck Photo. What constitutes the best buck photo? It's not up to us to say. Submit your photo and let the voting decide.

The TDC website has reached 55,000 hits! We are extremely happy that people find the site enjoyable and keep coming back for more. As always, we'd love to hear your comments. Please contact us.

The Valley Stand is now operational. The deer have already begun to get acclimated to the new feeder and camera setup. In fact, a doe and 6 point buck got within 30 yards of us while we were putting up the camera and tower.

Deer season was quite successful for us this year. Todd got a 10 point buck from the Hog Pen stand. He was a bit on the young side, but still a nice deer. Terry, sitting at the Back Windmill shot an 8 point with a symmetrical rack that wasn't lacking in mass. Gary also got a nice 8 point buck from the Crazy Lady stand. We also each shot a hog while at the ranch.

This week's opinion poll: What's the deciding factor in choosing to shoot a deer?

November 2008:

November 26: Texas Deer Cams is on the move!

We've taken down the Rock Hill camera. There just wasn't the deer population at that location that we'd anticipated, although there were plenty of hogs. The camera will be installed at our Motley County location at what we call the Valley Stand. It's located where many deer come onto the property from the river valley - hence the name.

We're also currently at the ranch for our 2008 deer season hunt. If you keep watch, you may see us on camera. Save an image and post it to the forum.

This week's opinion poll: What's the largest deer you've taken? Please participate

November 17: Texas Deer Cams is now listed on the Animal Cams website.

The gallery has been updated to include photos from Nov. 2nd until Nov. 8th.

The TDC website has reached 30,000 hits! We are regularly recieving close to 600 different visitors per day to the website. Thank you for spreading the word to your friends.

We will soon announce the first of our hunt give aways. All current paid memberships are automatically entered into the drawing. More info to come....

This week's opinion poll: Where do you regularly hunt? Please participate

November 10: Texas Deer Cams is excited to announce that Yearly Memberships are NOW AVAILABLE.Please see the Membership section for more information.

Monthly Photo Contests will start December 1st. This month we're giving away a Garmin eTrex Legend GPS. Don't forget to check back in and enter the photo contest. Good luck!

This week's opinion poll: Do you plan to join Texas Deer Cams? (now closed - thank you for your votes)

Texas Deer Cams was just awarded the Earth Cam's Top Ten Cams Award!

November 2: The 2008 rifle season has started. I hope all you first weekend hunters had good luck. Todd, Gary and I plan to hunt Thanksgiving weekend which is becoming a tradition for Todd and myself.

As you can see we've built out the rest of the site and are getting very close to opening up for memberships. We've implemented the ability to save images by adding a "Freeze Frame" button to the camera views. This was necessary because the camera views are not still images like on most sites, but are actually slow movies in a java application. This allows us the fastest frame rates we can get with our cellular camera connections, and still retain very high image quality.

Once we get the bugs out of the photo contest voting software and set up the store to sell memberships we should be open for business. Please stay tuned.

Until then... Happy Hunting!

October 2008:

Bow season has started! Uncle Moose shot a very nice 9 pt while feeding at the Camp House camera. For the complete story please read the Gallery post.

We purchased a new Panasonic camera to replace the defunct Sony. However we couldn't get it to allow remote connection through our router. We even stumped the Panasonic tech support guys. That entire camera setup has been taken back home and will be setup there until we get it working properly then it will return to the ranch. Yes, driving across Texas is fun.

Much work has been done both in the field and behind the scenes. All the camera setups have been tweaked with increased power generation and charge control, timers have been reprogrammed and new LED lights have been set up. Unfortunately our Sony camera died and had to be sent in for repairs.

As for server side, all the cameras have been switched over to our website and are operational most days. Two cameras keep failing to respond after reboots. We are thinking it's bandwidth related since the complete setups are just like the other cameras, yet if we log into the camera itself it's operational.

In DEER news the bucks are looking mighty healthy this year. Maxx is frequenting the Crazy Lady camera and has got a very wide rack this year. We've noticed the Camp House tends to have deer very late into the night. The are more hogs this year than we've seen before and we might have to take steps to control their population.

Work on the server side software continues. We can get the cameras to send us streamed images, but getting individual frames isn't working the way we'd like. If we use the streamed then we'll need to write an image parser that will cull the individual frames from the stream. Individual images are needed in order to send them thru the image scale routines and for submitting for the monthly contests.

We're also busy filling out the rest of the general site. The forums have been linked and most of the pages in all the sections have been built.

During this time we purchased our initial 6 cameras systems and installed them at our two West Texas Locations. Once the cameras were running we started developing our custom in-house webcam software. This software is designed to give us low overhead resulting in the largest images, highest quality, and fastest frame rates possible from remote cameras sending images thru cellular air cards.

Texas Deer Cams enters the planning stage. Terry and Todd meet for a week long brainstorming session. During which we plan our website content, how the photo contests will work and plan for giving away management buck hunts for deer hunting enthusiasts.

Texas Deer Cams is conceived. During a road trip from Texas to San Fransisco, Todd envisions his dream website - a place where deer hunting enthusiasts can gather to view deer, and share hunting stories. To make our site different we plan giveaways and contests which will make memberships a greater value to our members.