Archive for April, 2008

The last occasion of the portrait photography class has arrived. Martin Szipal, our instructor is lively and energetic. And he shares the secret: “I’ve taken an annual 125.000mg vitamin C throughout 14 year. Today I take 30 vitamin pills every morning and evening. Look at my hands. Do these hands look like ones of an 80-year-old? No. It’s because of the antioxidants I take.”

A kind of and exam session is announced, however not a serious one, since the class does not give any certificate.

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As part of the Blog Statistics Project I would like to share some bits of the traffic statistics of Photonovice.net. This chunk of the project is about the most popular posts. I don’t check this section of my stats regularly, so seeing the top performing articles was somewhat surprising for me. Listing the top 5 contents for the whole life of the blog shows this:

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I’ve just upgraded my Wordpress blog engine from version 2.3.3 to 2.5.

I used to be a techy or even a geek some time ago with Linux and some computer programming knowledge, but my hands were shaking – just like Pumpkin Pie wrote about it – when doing the upgrade.
I was scared of losing my blog.

I installed and upgraded Wordpress previously only with Fantatico DeLuxe which is an extremely easy way of doing such things. Since my hosting provider decided – according to some rumors – not refreshing Fantastico any more, I decided to do my upgrade manually.

It was not complicated at all and everything went quite smoothly. But don’t worry, I will not write about the technical details here – hey this is photography related blog, or what.

I rather ask you to do me a favour: please let me know if you find anything malfunctioning on my blog.

Thanks a lot.

This was the 7th session of the 8 of the portrait photography class conducted by Martin Szipal.

“When I see a photo in a magazine I do not look at the model’s face. Models are young and beautiful. Shooting their faces is easy, that doesn’t tell too much about the photographer. I check the hands and feet on the photos. If those are crippled then the photo was not made by a real photographer.”

We went through photos Martin made for us as illustrations on how to pose a hand in ways that are perceived as good looking and natural. Unfortunately I cannot share those picture due to copyright restrictions. You should be in the class for those.
But briefly: fingers are to be closed in most of the cases and the hand or hands should be held to form some geometric shapes. I know it sounds strange, but on his photos those hands looked really nice. One finger can be apart from the others occasionally.
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I’ve just noticed that dpreview.com has a complete review on Nikon’s full frame flagship camera. It’s not that I’m planning to buy D3 in the near future. It’s only my normal geeky interest. I googled around and collected a few reviews too. See them below:

• Nikon D3 review on Digital Photography Review by Simon Joison and Phil Askey
  professional and thorough and detailed material to a level that you can refer to it if you happen to lose the user manual
• Bjørn Rørslett’s D3 review
  I’m sure you read his lens reviews regularly. This review is similar in quality, details and personal opinions with a neat table of categories of application, some high ISO showcasing and some FX and DX comparison.
• James Russell’s review on Luminous Landscape
  a professional’s opinion after shooting more than 7000 frames throughout 8 days
• Moose Peterson’s user report on Nikon D3
  an other big name sharing even his settings of the camera
• Ken Rockwell’s review in Ken Rockwell’s style

Now this is the second chunk of our Project on Blog Statistics. As mentioned earlier bloggers are probably checking their page view/visitor statistics regularly. The professionals are supposedly doing that with specific and well defined objectives trying to identify what “sells” better, what the trends are, while amateurs maybe only with pure excitement seeing that their article was read even from Japan.

Today I would like to invite you – my fellow photography related blogger or photography sharing enthusiast – to participate in sharing an other piece of your numbers: what was “selling” the best last year? Which were your most popular of your articles or images and why? Which ones were read or watched the most or which ones fired the most vivid discussion? I’m surely interested in the possible reasons too and whether your discovery of the high number of visitors led you to change the way of your writing or taking pictures.

All you need to do is writing a blog article on your statistics related findings linking back to this project page and submitting your entry in the form below.

The project will be open for roughly three weeks closing on the 9^th of May and I’m going to publish the results linking to your blog or pictures on the 14^th of May.

Update on May 10, 2008: this project has been closed. We are not accepting more submissions.